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Cybersecurity Advantage

1NC – Cybersecurity

Cyberattacks fail – Multiple warrants – empirics, no escalation, reliance on humans

It’s impossible to prevent a cyberattack and no lashout will occur

Chivvis and Dion-Schwarz 17 (Christopher Chivvis – Associate Director, International Security and Defense Policy Center; Senior Political Scientist, Cynthia Dion-Schwarz – Manager, Cyber and Data Sciences Programs (NSRD); Senior Scientist; Article; 3/30/17; RAND; “Why It's So Hard to Stop a Cyberattack — and Even Harder to Fight Back”; https://www.rand.org/blog/2017/03/why-its-so-hard-to-stop-a-cyberattack-and-even-harder.html; accessed 7/10/17) [DS]

Imagine that the United States is hit by a cyberattack that takes down much of the U.S. financial infrastructure for several days. Internet sites of major banks are malfunctioning. ATMs are not working. Banks' internal accounting systems are going haywire. Millions of people are affected. The first question that policymakers might debate is whether such an attack deserves a military response. But several problems immediately arise. First, would the U.S. government—and specifically the National Security Agency—know for certain who had conducted the attack? Without being able to attribute the attack, or if there were some uncertainty about who was responsible, it would be very hard to strike back. Unlike conventional attacks, cyberattacks can be difficult to attribute with precision to specific actors. In the event of a major cyberattack, pressure to respond would be immediate—and probably intense. But if a country strikes back and the forensics are erroneous, then the retaliation will have unnecessarily and inadvertently started a war. Russia's alleged meddling in the 2016 U.S. presidential elections has brought the issue of cyberwar again to the top of the news, but the possibilities it raises are only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the role of cyber operations in modern warfare. Most—although not all—analysts agree that cyber will be a key domain in the conflicts of the future. Exactly how cyber will impact these future conflicts, however, is hard to say with any certainty. Cyber weapons are not like missiles or tanks; because their initial impact is in the information domain, their effects are much harder to judge. Even in cases where an attack is linked to one specific country—say, Russia—it could be hard to know for sure whether it was directed by the Russian government. This is because governments like the Russian government appear to rely heavily on third parties to develop their cyber weapons and conduct their attacks. This offers them many benefits—deniability being one of them—but it also offers them less control over what their cyber warriors actually do—creating a so called “principle agent problem.” In other words, an attack that originates from within the Russian cyber world might be the work of the Kremlin—or it might not. This further complicates the choice of response. Sometimes, the culprit will be clear, of course. But in these cases, the question is how, specifically, to respond. Some advisors might push for a cyber counter-attack that inflicts equal damage on the guilty party. But this isn't always possible. If the perpetrator is a party like North Korea, then there is no equivalent financial system to target. But should the United States instead use conventional military weapons like a cruise missile, perhaps on Pyongyang's cyber training facilities? A strike like that would clearly risk serious escalation of the conflict. It might be seen as disproportionate if the U.S. financial system had recovered in the interim with relatively minimal real damage. Imagine, however, that the attack is against the U.S. power grid or oil and gas infrastructure. This kind of attack could easily have military consequences if it were extensive. The U.S. military has backup power generation capability as well as stocks of fuel reserves, but these stores are not infinite. If such an attack on U.S. infrastructure has military consequences, the case for a cyber retaliation—or even a Tomahawk cruise missile strike—starts looking a lot stronger. Even if the U.S. power grid were seriously affected by a cyberattack, however, and the United States knew with a high degree of confidence who the guilty party was, there would be reasons for caution—especially if the attack was an isolated incident and there were no other signs of aggression or malign intent. This is because cyberattacks can have unanticipated consequences. With any military strike, collateral damage is always possible, but with most conventional attacks, methods of assessing and avoiding collateral damage are well-developed, and based on well-established physics principles and observational experience. But cyber weapons don't operate like missiles or tanks. They attack the underlying network or computer systems. The possibility of unexpected effects in the cyber world is much greater. For example, a cyberattack on an electrical grid might be intended to knock out the lights in a specific location, but end up affecting a whole region's energy supply. The world saw this potential with the Stuxnet worm: Apparently intended for a very specific, isolated network (an Iranian control system), the worm was discovered precisely because it spread beyond its intended target into other related networked systems. Stuxnet did not attack other control systems, but only because the designers programmed in a self-destruct date. If the designers had been less cautious, its effects would have been much more widespread. Therefore, before targeting a cruise missile at that (hypothetical) cyber hub in Pyongyang, the U.S. president would want to have at least some knowledge of both the intentions of the attacker and the consequences (including secondary effects) of the response—otherwise the United States might be starting a war by accident. But a desperate foreign leader might miscalculate that he can get away with a surreptitious attack on U.S. infrastructure for exactly these reasons—and that in and of itself is cause for concern. This is why context will make a big difference. It's relatively easy to assess the damage done by an attack on America's infrastructure, but less easy to assess the intent of that attack. If the U.S. power grid is seriously disrupted by a cyberattack during an ongoing war with a known aggressor it will be much easier to strike back—with kinetic (i.e. physical) force or with cyber weapons—simply because it will be easy to assume the attack was intentional. Alternatively, a fearful foreign leader might lash out at the United States if she or he fears the United States is on the verge of conducting a devastating cyberattack. The hostility might come in the form of a massive, pre-emptive cyberattack, a conventional attack, or in the extreme, even a nuclear salvo. Since the ability to mount cyberattacks depends on keeping targeted vulnerabilities secret, both sides may fear that their adversaries possess capabilities that have far-reaching destructive potential—even when they don't. This fear in turn could increase the tendency toward pre-emptive action and hence escalation. Cyber adds new and significant uncertainty to warfare, making it difficult both to deter and respond. It will take time and a great deal more research and analysis before the problem is fully understood.

Non-unique – China has already performed thousands of cyberattacks on the US

Cyber isn’t key to democracy – voting machines already don’t use the internet for this very reason. Their card is in the context of Israel.

Education Not Sufficient — money in politics outweighs.

Paige 15 — Mark Paige, Assistant Professor of Educational Leadership at the University of Massachusetts-Dartmouth, holds a Ph.D. in Educational Leadership and Policy Analysis and a J.D. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, 2015 (“Realizing Educational Rights,” Journal of Law and Education, Volume 44, Issue 2, Spring, Available Online to Subscribing Institutions via ProQuest)

Finally, the book omits an essential reference regarding the influence of money on the democratic process. An educated, engaged citizenry are necessary to a vibrant democracy. However, because of the disproportionate influence of money on the political system, it is insufficient.9 Those who have more money have more influence, notwithstanding their individual education. Thus, an adequate or equal education may be a hollow victory, unless larger political reform occurs.

Impact is non-unique – massive defunding of environmental protection programs is happening now, democracy can’t stop big oil.

No Impact -

1. No US-China war – their card is in the context of fears, not an actual attack

1AC Lindsay ’15 - Jon R. Lindsay 15: an assistant research scientist with the University of California Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation and assistant adjunct professor at the UC San Diego School of International Relations and Pacific Studies, (Tai Ming Cheung is the director of the University of California Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation. Derek S. Reveron is a professor of national security affairs and the EMC Informationist Chair at the U.S. Naval War College) 04/12/2015, “Will China and America Clash in Cyberspace?,” http://nationalinterest.org/feature/will-china-america-clash-cyberspace-12607?page=show

While it might not be possible to completely eliminate cyberthreats through norms or formal agreements, we should be able to avoid making them worse through ignorance. Both the U.S. military and the Chinese PLA assume that cyberspace is a highly offensive, asymmetric, and unstable domain of conflict, yet the history of minor irritants and tolerable abuses experienced thus far suggest that restraint and limited effectiveness is the norm. Bad assumptions are dangerous in international relations, so both states should work to dispel illusions about catastrophic cyber attacks. “More transparency will strengthen China-U.S. relations,” former U.S. Secretary of Defense Charles Hagel observed, adding: “Greater openness about cyber reduces the risk that misunderstanding and misperception could lead to miscalculation.” The worries over cybersecurity should not risk the mutual value both countries derive from an open and innovative cyberspace.

2. 3. No impact to econ decline

Robert Jervis 11, Professor in the Department of Political Science and School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University, December 2011, “Force in Our Times,” Survival, Vol. 25, No. 4, p. 403-425

Even if war is still seen as evil, the security community could be dissolved if severe conflicts of interest were to arise. Could the more peaceful world generate new interests that would bring the members of the community into sharp disputes? 45 A zero-sum sense of status would be one example, perhaps linked to a steep rise in nationalism. More likely would be a worsening of the current economic difficulties, which could itself produce greater nationalism, undermine democracy and bring back old-fashioned beggar-my-neighbor economic policies. While these dangers are real, it is hard to believe that the conflicts could be great enough to lead the members of the community to contemplate fighting each other. It is not so much that economic interdependence has proceeded to the point where it could not be reversed – states that were more internally interdependent than anything seen internationally have fought bloody civil wars. Rather it is that even if the more extreme versions of free trade and economic liberalism become discredited, it is hard to see how without building on a preexisting high level of political conflict leaders and mass opinion would come to believe that their countries could prosper by impoverishing or even attacking others. Is it possible that problems will not only become severe, but that people will entertain the thought that they have to be solved by war? While a pessimist could note that this argument does not appear as outlandish as it did before the financial crisis, an optimist could reply (correctly, in my view) that the very fact that we have seen such a sharp economic down-turn without anyone suggesting that force of arms is the solution shows that even if bad times bring about greater economic conflict, it will not make war thinkable.

4. Enough warming is inevitable to trigger all of their impacts – we cite the best studies

Longley 16 (Robert, 26 years in municipal government in both Texas and California, two of the largest economies and territories in the world, About.com’s expert on US Government since 1997. “Global Warming Inevitable this Century, NSF Study Finds”, 7/11/16. https://www.thoughtco.com/global-warming-inevitable-this-century-3322005, 7/19/17)//JM

Despite worldwide efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, global warming and ever greater rises in sea levels are inevitable during by 2100, according to research conducted by a team of climate model scientists at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder, Colorado. Indeed, say the researchers, whose work was funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF), globally averaged surface air temperatures would still rise one degree Fahrenheit (about a half degree Celsius) by the year 2100, even if no more greenhouse gases were added to the atmosphere. And the resulting transfer of heat into the oceans would cause global sea levels to rise another 4 inches (11 centimeters) from thermal expansion alone. The dire predictions come from the papers, The Climate Change Commitment, by T. M. L. Wigley, and How Much More Global Warming and Sea Level Rise?, by Gerald A. Meehlm et al, as published in the March 17, 2005, edition of Science magazine. “This study is another in a series that employs increasingly sophisticated simulation techniques to understand the complex interactions of the Earth,” says Cliff Jacobs of NSF’s atmospheric sciences division in a press release. “These studies often yield results that are not revealed by simpler approaches and highlight unintended consequences of external factors interacting with Earth’s natural systems.” TOO LITTLE, TOO LATE TO CUT OFF THE WARMING ENGINE “Many people don’t realize we are committed right now to a significant amount of global warming and sea level rise because of the greenhouse gases we have already put into the atmosphere,” says lead author Jerry Meehl. “Even if we stabilize greenhouse gas concentrations, the climate will continue to warm, and there will be proportionately even more sea level rise." "The longer we wait, the more climate change we are committed to in the future.” The half-degree temperature rise predicted by the NCAR modelers is similar to what was actually observed by the end of the 20th century, but the projected sea level rise is more than twice the 3-inch (5-centimeter) rise that was observed then. Moreover, these forecasts do not take into account any fresh water from melting ice sheets and glaciers, which could at least double the sea-level rise caused by thermal expansion alone. The models also predict a weakening of the North Atlantic thermohaline circulation, which currently warms Europe by transporting heat from the tropics. Even so, Europe heats up along with the rest of the planet because of the overwhelming effect of greenhouse gases. Though the study finds signs that the temperature rise will level off some 100 years after the greenhouse gases stabilize, it also finds that ocean waters will continue to warm and expand beyond then, causing global sea level to rise unabated. According to the report, the inevitability of climate change results from thermal inertia, mainly from the oceans, and the long lifetime of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. Thermal inertia refers to the process by which water heats and cools more slowly than air because it is denser than air. The studies are the first to quantify future “committed” climate change using coupled global 3-dimensional climate models. Coupled models link major components of Earth's climate in ways that allow them to interact with each other. Meehl and his NCAR colleagues ran the same scenario a number of times and averaged the results to create ensemble simulations from each of two global climate models. Then they compared the results from each model. The scientists also compared possible climate scenarios in the two models during the 21st century in which greenhouse gases continue to build in the atmosphere at low, moderate, or high rates. The worst-case scenario projects an average temperature rise of 6.3 °F (3.5 °C) and sea level rise from thermal expansion of 12 inches (30 centimeters) by 2100. All scenarios analyzed in the study will be assessed by international teams of scientists for the next report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, due out in 2007.

Extend: No Attacks

Damaging cyber-attacks are rare

Lewis 13 James Andrew Lewis October 10, 2013 Washington Post, 10-10-2013, "Truly damaging cyberattacks are rare," https://www.washingtonpost.com/postlive/truly-damaging-cyberattacks-are-rare/2013/10/09/ae628656-2d00-11e3-b139-029811dbb57f_story.html?utm_term=.a4159c6cf656

Anyone with a computer and an Internet connection can launch a cyber “attack,” even though the skills and tools needed to do real damage are still in short supply. The Internet was not built to be secure and will not become secure anytime soon. Networks are vulnerable. This explains why cyber-espionage and fraud are so easy. Economies depend on the Internet and a growing number of services and devices — factories, electric power plants, airplanes, cars — are connected to it, making it an irresistible target. Crash the computers that run these systems and things stop. Power grids, financial networks, communications, public utilities and transportation systems are all targets for cyberattacks. But truly destructive attacks are hard to pull off. Cyberattacks can disrupt data and services to sow confusion, cripple networks and computers (including those embedded in weapons systems) and in some instances, destroy machinery. The risks are real, but easily exaggerated, as when a group of defense advisers intoned in a recent report that cyberattacks have “potential consequences similar in some ways to the nuclear threat of the Cold War.” Just as early air-power enthusiasts ascribed miraculous qualities to air attacks, expecting them to produce intolerable destruction and rapid victory, the discussion of cyberattacks too easily veers into the realm of science fiction, what one senior Navy officer calls “fairy dust.” Sprinkle a little cyber fairy dust on your military problem and it will disappear. There is no fairy dust when it comes to offensive cyber-capabilities. In the movies, a hacker types wildly on a laptop for a few seconds and turns off a city’s lights. In fact, a serious attack can take months to plan, probing the target network and developing code tailored to damage, disrupt or destroy. Attacks have several stages: conducting reconnaissance to identify the target’s vulnerabilities, breaking in, delivering the software “payload” and then “triggering” it — all without being detected. The most damaging cyberattacks — such as Stuxnet, which destroyed centrifuges used by the Iranian nuclear program — are still a high art. Only the United States, Britain, China, Russia and Israel possess the necessary skills, but many others want them. Offensive cyber-capabilities provide real military advantage. This is why most leading military powers are developing them. Publicly available information shows 46 countries with military cyber-programs, and 12 countries acknowledging offensive cyber-capabilities in 2012 (up from four in 2011). Other countries have military programs but don’t admit to them. Unlike the United States, most countries say very little about their military doctrine. Most of them blend war-fighting and covert action in their cyber-war planning. Each nation’s plans for offensive cyber-operations reflect their different military strategies. The Russians combine political action with cyber-strikes on command networks and critical infrastructure to cripple opponents at the start of conflict. The Chinese focus on quickly disabling U.S. military systems and have systematically hacked into just about every weapon related to U.S. plans for an “Air-Sea Battle” in Asia. Iran will attack energy infrastructure and considers cyber a way to score against a distant and once-invulnerable foe. North Korea’s attacks are driven by its internal politics and dislike of the South. There have been only a handful of true cyberattacks. Russia and China are hyperactive in cyber-espionage, but are cautious about offensive use and avoid actions that could trigger a violent response. Iran and North Korea are more aggressive and are improving their cyber-capabilities. Iran attacked Saudi Aramco, destroying data on 30,000 hard drives. North Korea did something similar to South Korean banks. The worry is that either country will miscalculate in its use of cyberattacks and stumble into a larger conflict

Extend: No Lashout

Cyberattack do not constitute war – empirically disproven

Rid 13 (Thomas, Professor of Security Studies in the Department of War Studies, Faculty of Social Science and Public Policy King’s College in London, “Cyberwar and Peace”, Foreign Affairs, 11/5/17, Online: http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2012/02/27/cyberwar?page=full, 7/11, DTS)

Many commentators fail to grapple with a basic question: What counts as warfare? Carl von Clausewitz, the nineteenthcentury Prussian military theorist, still offers the most concise answer to that question. Clausewitz identified three main criteria that any aggressive or defensive action must meet in order to qualify as an act of war. First, and most simply, all acts of war are violent or potentially violent. Second, an act of war is always instrumental: physical violence or the threat of force is a means to compel the enemy to accept the attacker’s will. Finally, to qualify as an act of war, an attack must have some kind of political goal or intention. For that reason, acts of war must be attributable to one side at some point during a confrontation. No known cyberattack has met all three of those criteria; indeed, very few have met even one. Consider three incidents that today’s Cassandras frequently point to as evidence that warfare has entered a new era. The first of these, a massive pipeline explosion in the Soviet Union in June 1982, would count as the most violent cyberattack to date—if it actually happened. According to a 2004 book by Thomas Reed, who was serving as a staffer on the U.S. National Security Council at the time of the alleged incident, a covert U.S. operation used rigged software to engineer a massive explosion in the Urengoy-SurgutChelyabinsk pipeline, which connected Siberian natural gas fields to Europe. Reed claims that the cia managed to insert malicious code into the software that controlled the pipeline’s pumps and valves. The rigged valves supposedly resulted in an explosion that, according to Reed, the U.S. Air Force rated at three kilotons, equivalent to the force of a small nuclear device. But aside from Reed’s account, there is hardly any evidence to prove that any such thing happened, and plenty of reasons to doubt that it did. After Reed published his book, Vasily Pchelintsev, who was reportedly the kgb head of the region when the explosion was supposed to have taken place, denied the story. He surmised that Reed might have been referring to a harmless explosion that happened not in June but on a warm April day that year, caused by pipes shifting in the thawing ground of the tundra. Moreover, no Soviet media reports from 1982 confirm that Reed’s explosion took place, although the Soviet media regularly reported on accidents and pipeline explosions at the time. What’s more, given the technologies available to the United States at that time, it would have been very difficult to hide malicious software of the kind Reed describes from its Soviet users. Another incident often related by promoters of the concept of cyberwar occurred in Estonia in 2007. After Estonian authorities decided to move a Soviet-era memorial to Russian soldiers who died in World War II from the center of Tallinn to the city’s outskirts, outraged Russian-speaking Estonians launched violent riots that threatened to paralyze the city. The riots were accompanied by cyber-assaults, which began as crude disruptions but became more sophisticated after a few days, culminating in a “denial of service” attack. Hackers hijacked up to 85,000 computers and used them to overwhelm 58 Estonian websites, including that of the country’s largest bank, which the attacks rendered useless for a few hours. Estonia’s defense minister and the country’s top diplomat pointed their fingers at the Kremlin, but they were unable to muster any evidence. For its part, the Russian government denied any involvement. In the wake of the incident, Estonia’s prime minister, Andrus Ansip, likened the attack to an act of war. “What’s the difference between a blockade of harbors or airports of sovereign states and the blockade of government institutions and newspaper websites?” he asked. It was a rhetorical question, but the answer is important: unlike a naval blockade, the disruption of websites is not violent—indeed, not even potentially violent. The choice of targets also seemed unconnected No known cyberattack has met Clausewitz’s definition of an act of war. Thomas Rid 80 foreign affairs to the presumed tactical objective of forcing the government to reverse its decision on the memorial. And unlike a naval blockade, the attacks remained anonymous, without political backing, and thus unattributable. A year later, a third major event entered the cyber-Cassandras’ repertoire. In August 2008, the Georgian army attacked separatists in the province of South Ossetia. Russia backed the separatists and responded militarily. The prior month, in what might have been the first time that an independent cyberattack was launched in coordination with a conventional military operation, unknown attackers had begun a campaign of cyber-sabotage, defacing prominent Georgian websites, including those of the country’s national bank and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and launching denial-of-service attacks against the websites of Georgia’s parliament, its largest commercial bank, and Georgian news outlets. The Georgian government blamed the Kremlin, just as the Estonians had done. But Russia again denied sponsoring the attacks, and a nato investigation later found “no conclusive proof” of who had carried them out. The attack set off increasingly familiar alarm bells within American media and the U.S. national security establishment. “The July attack may have been a dress rehearsal for an all-out cyberwar,” an article in The New York Times declared. Richard Clarke, a former White House cybersecurity czar, warned that the worst was yet to come: the Georgian attack did not “begin to reveal what the Russian military and intelligence agencies could do if they were truly on the attack in cyberspace.” Yet the actual effects of these nonviolent events were quite mild. The main damage they caused was to the Georgian government’s ability to communicate internationally, thus preventing it from getting out its message at a critical moment. But even if the attackers intended this effect, it proved short-lived: within four days after military confrontations had begun in earnest, the Georgian Foreign Ministry had set up an account on Google’s blog-hosting service. This move helped the government keep open a channel to the public and the news media. What the Internet took away, the Internet returned.

Extend: Democracy Fails

Citizens United outweighs — Chomsky agrees.

Chomsky 10 — Noam Chomsky, Professor Emeritus at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the National Academy of Sciences, and the American Philosophical Society, holds a Ph.D. in Linguistics from the University of Pennsylvania, 2010 (“The Corporate Takeover of U.S. Democracy,” In These Times, February 3^rd, Available Online at http://inthesetimes.com/article/5502/the_corporate_takeover_of_u.s._democracy/, Accessed 07-14-2017)

Jan. 21, 2010, will go down as a dark day in the history of U.S. democracy, and its decline.

On that day the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the government may not ban corporations from political spending on elections–a decision that profoundly affects government policy, both domestic and international.

The decision heralds even further corporate takeover of the U.S. political system.

To the editors of The New York Times, the ruling “strikes at the heart of democracy” by having “paved the way for corporations to use their vast treasuries to overwhelm elections and intimidate elected officials into doing their bidding.”

The court was split, 5-4, with the four reactionary judges (misleadingly called “conservative”) joined by Justice Anthony M. Kennedy. Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. selected a case that could easily have been settled on narrow grounds and maneuvered the court into using it to push through a far-reaching decision that overturns a century of precedents restricting corporate contributions to federal campaigns.

Now corporate managers can in effect buy elections directly, bypassing more complex indirect means. It is well-known that corporate contributions, sometimes packaged in complex ways, can tip the balance in elections, hence driving policy. The court has just handed much more power to the small sector of the population that dominates the economy.

Political economist Thomas Ferguson’s “investment theory of politics” is a very successful predictor of government policy over a long period. The theory interprets elections as occasions on which segments of private sector power coalesce to invest to control the state.

The Jan. 21 decision only reinforces the means to undermine functioning democracy.

The background is enlightening. In his dissent, Justice John Paul Stevens acknowledged that “we have long since held that corporations are covered by the First Amendment”–the constitutional guarantee of free speech, which would include support for political candidates.

In the early 20th century, legal theorists and courts implemented the court’s 1886 decision that corporations–these “collectivist legal entities”–have the same rights as persons of flesh and blood.

This attack on classical liberalism was sharply condemned by the vanishing breed of conservatives. Christopher G. Tiedeman described the principle as “a menace to the liberty of the individual, and to the stability of the American states as popular governments.”

Morton Horwitz writes in his standard legal history that the concept of corporate personhood evolved alongside the shift of power from shareholders to managers, and finally to the doctrine that “the powers of the board of directors “are identical with the powers of the corporation.” In later years, corporate rights were expanded far beyond those of persons, notably by the mislabeled “free trade agreements.” Under these agreements, for example, if General Motors establishes a plant in Mexico, it can demand to be treated just like a Mexican business (“national treatment”)–quite unlike a Mexican of flesh and blood who might seek “national treatment” in New York, or even minimal human rights.

A century ago, Woodrow Wilson, then an academic, described an America in which “comparatively small groups of men,” corporate managers, “wield a power and control over the wealth and the business operations of the country,” becoming “rivals of the government itself.”

In reality, these “small groups” increasingly have become government’s masters. The Roberts court gives them even greater scope.

The Jan. 21 decision came three days after another victory for wealth and power: the election of Republican candidate Scott Brown to replace the late Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, the “liberal lion” of Massachusetts. Brown’s election was depicted as a “populist upsurge” against the liberal elitists who run the government.

The voting data reveal a rather different story.

High turnouts in the wealthy suburbs, and low ones in largely Democratic urban areas, helped elect Brown. “Fifty-five percent of Republican voters said they were `very interested’ in the election,” The Wall St. Journal/NBC poll reported, “compared with 38 percent of Democrats.”

So the results were indeed an uprising against President Obama’s policies: For the wealthy, he was not doing enough to enrich them further, while for the poorer sectors, he was doing too much to achieve that end.

The popular anger is quite understandable, given that the banks are thriving, thanks to bailouts, while unemployment has risen to 10 percent.

In manufacturing, one in six is out of work–unemployment at the level of the Great Depression. With the increasing financialization of the economy and the hollowing out of productive industry, prospects are bleak for recovering the kinds of jobs that were lost.

Brown presented himself as the 41st vote against healthcare–that is, the vote that could undermine majority rule in the U.S. Senate.

It is true that Obama’s healthcare program was a factor in the Massachusetts election. The headlines are correct when they report that the public is turning against the program.

The poll figures explain why: The bill does not go far enough. The Wall St. Journal/NBC poll found that a majority of voters disapprove of the handling of healthcare both by the Republicans and by Obama.

These figures align with recent nationwide polls. The public option was favored by 56 percent of those polled, and the Medicare buy-in at age 55 by 64 percent; both programs were abandoned.

Eighty-five percent believe that the government should have the right to negotiate drug prices, as in other countries; Obama guaranteed Big Pharma that he would not pursue that option.

Large majorities favor cost-cutting, which makes good sense: U.S. per capita costs for healthcare are about twice those of other industrial countries, and health outcomes are at the low end.

But cost-cutting cannot be seriously undertaken when largesse is showered on the drug companies, and healthcare is in the hands of virtually unregulated private insurers–a costly system peculiar to the U.S.

The Jan. 21 decision raises significant new barriers to overcoming the serious crisis of healthcare, or to addressing such critical issues as the looming environmental and energy crises. The gap between public opinion and public policy looms larger. And the damage to American democracy can hardly be overestimated.

Citizens United ruins democracy by cementing corporate control.

Sanders 12 — Bernie Senders, Member of the United States Senate (I-VT), 2012 (“We must stop this corporate takeover of American democracy,” The Guardian, January 20^th, Available Online at https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/cifamerica/2012/jan/20/us-constitution-and-civil-liberties-us-supreme-court, Accessed 07-14-2017)

The corporate barbarians are through the gate of American democracy. Not satisfied with their all-pervasive influence on our culture, economy and legislative processes, they want more. They want it all.

Two years ago, the United States supreme court betrayed our Constitution and those who fought to ensure that its protections are enjoyed equally by all persons regardless of religion, race or gender by engaging in an unabashed power-grab on behalf of corporate America. In its now infamous decision in the Citizens United case, five justices declared that corporations must be treated as if they are actual people under the Constitution when it comes to spending money to influence our elections, allowing them for the first time to draw on the corporate checkbook – in any amount and at any time – to run ads explicitly for or against specific candidates.

What's next … a corporate right to vote?

Don't laugh. Just this month, the Republican National Committee filed an amicus brief in a US appeals court contending that the natural extension of the Citizens United rationale is that the century-old ban on corporate contributions directly to candidates and political parties is similarly unconstitutional. They want corporations to be able to sponsor candidates and parties directly while claiming with a straight face this would not result in any sort of corruption. And while, this month, they take no issue with corporations being subject to the existing contribution limits, anyone paying attention knows that eliminating such caps will be corporate America's next prize in its brazen ambition for absolute control over our elections.

The US Constitution has served us very well, but when the supreme court says, for purposes of the first amendment, that corporations are people, that writing checks from the company's bank account is constitutionally-protected speech and that attempts by the federal government and states to impose reasonable restrictions on campaign ads are unconstitutional, our democracy is in grave danger.

I am a proud sponsor of a number of bills that would respond to Citizens United and begin to get a handle on the problem. But something more needs to be done – something more fundamental and indisputable, something that cannot be turned on its head by a rightwing supreme court.

That is why I have introduced a resolution in the Senate (introduced by Representative Ted Deutch in the House) calling for an amendment to the US Constitution that says simply and straightforwardly what everyone – except five members of the United States supreme court – understands: corporations are not people with constitutional rights equal to flesh-and-blood human beings. Corporations are subject to regulation by the people. Corporations may not make campaign contributions – the law of the land for the last century – or dump unlimited sums of money into our elections. And Congress and states have broad power to regulate all election spending.

I did not introduce this lightly. In fact, I have never sought to amend the Constitution before. The US Constitution is an extraordinary document that, in my view, should not be amended often. In light of the supreme court's Citizens United decision, however, I see no alternative. The ruling has radically changed the nature of our democracy. It has further tilted the balance of power toward the rich and the powerful at a time when the wealthiest people in this country have never had it so good.

At a time when corporations have more than $2tn in cash in their bank accounts, make record-breaking profits and swarm Washington with their lobbyists 24 hours a day, seven days a week, for the highest court in the land to suggest that there is just not enough corporate "speech" in our system defies the bounds of reason and sanity. The ruling already has led to plans, for example, by industrialist brothers David and Charles Koch to steer more than $200m – potentially much more – to conservative groups ahead of election day 2012. Karl Rove has similar designs.

Does anybody really believe that that is what American democracy is supposed to be about?

I believe that the Citizens United decision will go down as one of the worst in our country's history – and one that demands an amendment to our Constitution in order to restore sovereign power to the people, as our nation's founders intended.

If we do not reverse it and the culture of corporate dominance over our elections that it has exacerbated, there will be no end to the impact that corporate interests have on our campaigns and our democracy.

Extend: No US-China War

Extend: No Impact to Econ Decline

No impact to economic decline – prefer new data

Daniel Drezner 14, IR prof at Tufts, The System Worked: Global Economic Governance during the Great Recession, World Politics, Volume 66. Number 1, January 2014, pp. 123-164

The final significant outcome addresses a dog that hasn't barked: the effect of the Great Recession on cross-border conflict and violence. During the initial stages of the crisis, multiple analysts asserted that the financial crisis would lead states to increase their use of force as a tool for staying in power.42 They voiced genuine concern that the global economic downturn would lead to an increase in conflict—whether through greater internal repression, diversionary wars, arms races, or a ratcheting up of great power conflict. Violence in the Middle East, border disputes in the South China Sea, and even the disruptions of the Occupy movement fueled impressions of a surge in global public disorder. The aggregate data suggest otherwise, however. The Institute for Economics and Peace has concluded that "the average level of peacefulness in 2012 is approximately the same as it was in 2007."43 Interstate violence in particular has declined since the start of the financial crisis, as have military expenditures in most sampled countries. Other studies confirm that the Great Recession has not triggered any increase in violent conflict, as Lotta Themner and Peter Wallensteen conclude: "[T]he pattern is one of relative stability when we consider the trend for the past five years."44 The secular decline in violence that started with the end of the Cold War has not been reversed. Rogers Brubaker observes that "the crisis has not to date generated the surge in protectionist nationalism or ethnic exclusion that might have been expected."43

No impact

Barnett 9 (Thomas, Senior Strategic Researcher – Naval War College, “The New Rules: Security Remains Stable Amid Financial Crisis”, Asset Protection Network, 8-25, http://www.aprodex.com/the-new-rules--security-remains-stable-amid-financial-crisis-398-bl.aspx)

When the global financial crisis struck roughly a year ago, the blogosphere was ablaze with all sorts of scary predictions of, and commentary regarding, ensuing conflict and wars -- a rerun of the Great Depression leading to world war, as it were. Now, as global economic news brightens and recovery -- surprisingly led by China and emerging markets -- is the talk of the day, it's interesting to look back over the past year and realize how globalization's first truly worldwide recession has had virtually no impact whatsoever on the international security landscape. None of the more than three-dozen ongoing conflicts listed by GlobalSecurity.org can be clearly attributed to the global recession. Indeed, the last new entry (civil conflict between Hamas and Fatah in the Palestine) predates the economic crisis by a year, and three quarters of the chronic struggles began in the last century. Ditto for the 15 low-intensity conflicts listed by Wikipedia (where the latest entry is the Mexican "drug war" begun in 2006). Certainly, the Russia-Georgia conflict last August was specifically timed, but by most accounts the opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympics was the most important external trigger (followed by the U.S. presidential campaign) for that sudden spike in an almost two-decade long struggle between Georgia and its two breakaway regions. Looking over the various databases, then, we see a most familiar picture: the usual mix of civil conflicts, insurgencies, and liberation-themed terrorist movements. Besides the recent Russia-Georgia dust-up, the only two potential state-on-state wars (North v. South Korea, Israel v. Iran) are both tied to one side acquiring a nuclear weapon capacity -- a process wholly unrelated to global economic trends. And with the United States effectively tied down by its two ongoing major interventions (Iraq and Afghanistan-bleeding-into-Pakistan), our involvement elsewhere around the planet has been quite modest, both leading up to and following the onset of the economic crisis: e.g., the usual counter-drug efforts in Latin America, the usual military exercises with allies across Asia, mixing it up with pirates off Somalia's coast). Everywhere else we find serious instability we pretty much let it burn, occasionally pressing the Chinese -- unsuccessfully -- to do something. Our new Africa Command, for example, hasn't led us to anything beyond advising and training local forces. So, to sum up: No significant uptick in mass violence or unrest (remember the smattering of urban riots last year in places like Greece, Moldova and Latvia?); The usual frequency maintained in civil conflicts (in all the usual places); Not a single state-on-state war directly caused (and no great-power-on-great-power crises even triggered); No great improvement or disruption in great-power cooperation regarding the emergence of new nuclear powers (despite all that diplomacy); A modest scaling back of international policing efforts by the system's acknowledged Leviathan power (inevitable given the strain); and No serious efforts by any rising great power to challenge that Leviathan or supplant its role. (The worst things we can cite are Moscow's occasional deployments of strategic assets to the Western hemisphere and its weak efforts to outbid the United States on basing rights in Kyrgyzstan; but the best include China and India stepping up their aid and investments in Afghanistan and Iraq.) Sure, we've finally seen global defense spending surpass the previous world record set in the late 1980s, but even that's likely to wane given the stress on public budgets created by all this unprecedented "stimulus" spending. If anything, the friendly cooperation on such stimulus packaging was the most notable great-power dynamic caused by the crisis. Can we say that the world has suffered a distinct shift to political radicalism as a result of the economic crisis? Indeed, no. The world's major economies remain governed by center-left or center-right political factions that remain decidedly friendly to both markets and trade. In the short run, there were attempts across the board to insulate economies from immediate damage (in effect, as much protectionism as allowed under current trade rules), but there was no great slide into "trade wars." Instead, the World Trade Organization is functioning as it was designed to function, and regional efforts toward free-trade agreements have not slowed. Can we say Islamic radicalism was inflamed by the economic crisis? If it was, that shift was clearly overwhelmed by the Islamic world's growing disenchantment with the brutality displayed by violent extremist groups such as al-Qaida. And looking forward, austere economic times are just as likely to breed connecting evangelicalism as disconnecting fundamentalism. At the end of the day, the economic crisis did not prove to be sufficiently frightening to provoke major economies into establishing global regulatory schemes, even as it has sparked a spirited -- and much needed, as I argued last week -- discussion of the continuing viability of the U.S. dollar as the world's primary reserve currency. Naturally, plenty of experts and pundits have attached great significance to this debate, seeing in it the beginning of "economic warfare" and the like between "fading" America and "rising" China. And yet, in a world of globally integrated production chains and interconnected financial markets, such "diverging interests" hardly constitute signposts for wars up ahead. Frankly, I don't welcome a world in which America's fiscal profligacy goes undisciplined, so bring it on -- please! Add it all up and it's fair to say that this global financial crisis has proven the great resilience of America's post-World War II international liberal trade order. Do I expect to read any analyses along those lines in the blogosphere any time soon? Absolutely not. I expect the fantastic fear-mongering to proceed apace. That's what the Internet is for.

Extend: Warming Inev

Warming is inevitable – it’s a global issue, not one that can be solved through the US only

Johnston 17 - Ian Johnston, Environment and science correspondent at The Independent, 2017("Avoiding dangerous global warming no longer 'feasible', top economist warns", Independent, 1-11-2017, Available Online from http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/deadly-global-warming-is-inevitable-due-to-inaction-feasible-rhetoric-climate-change-fight-paris-a7521111.html, Accessed on 7-4-2017)//BM

The world can no longer avoid dangerous global warming because countries have done little to tackle the problem apart from spout “rhetoric”, a leading economist has warned. Professor William Nordhaus, of Yale University in the US, said it was no longer practicably feasible to keep the level of warming to within two degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, the point at which climatologists believe the world will start to experience particularly dangerous climate change. This would see devastating storms, droughts, deadly heat waves and floods all become significantly more common, making some areas of the planet increasingly difficult for humans to inhabit. The US military, among others, has expressed concern about the security implications of the mass movements of people that such scenarios would likely bring about. Professor Nordhaus, a noted expert on the economics of climate change, wrote in a paper called Projections and Uncertainties About Climate Change in an Era of Minimal Climate Policies: “The international target for climate change with a limit of 2C appears to be infeasible with reasonably accessible technologies. “And this is the case even with very stringent and unrealistically ambitious abatement strategies. “This is so because of the inertia of the climate system, of rapid projected economic growth in the near term, and of revisions in several elements of the model. “A target of 2.5C is technically feasible but would require extreme virtually universal global policy measures.” He said in all the world only the European Union had introduced major policies designed to reduce global warming – but was scathing about what those would actually achieve. “Notwithstanding what may be called ‘The Rhetoric of Nations’, there has been little progress in taking strong policy measures,” Professor Nordhaus wrote. “For example, of the six largest countries or regions, only the EU has implemented national climate policies, and the policies of the EU today are very modest.

Climate policies do nothing to stop the impact of climate change—its inevitable

Zycher 15—Benjamin, U.S. News Contributor, 7-16-2015, "The Inconvenient Truth About Climate Policy," US News & World Report, https://www.usnews.com/opinion/economic-intelligence/2015/07/16/climate-change-policy-wont-change-global-temperatures

Climate change is a manmade crisis, and so the need to implement sharp reductions in greenhouse gas emissions is paramount. That summarizes the constant drumbeat of conventional wisdom, which raises an interesting question: If the Obama administration's Climate Action Plan – a 17 percent reduction in U.S. greenhouse gas emissions by 2020 – were to be implemented immediately, what temperature reduction would that yield by the year 2100? The answer: 15 one-thousandths of a degree. Yes, you read that correctly. The effect would be too small even to be measured, let alone to affect sea levels and cyclones and all the rest. That number, by the way, is not some screwy calculation from the back of an envelope. It comes from the Environmental Protection Agency's own climate model, not that the EPA has ever admitted this publicly, obviously because it is embarrassing. That is why the EPA's benefit/cost "analysis" of its Clean Power Plan and the other components of its climate policy assumes a deeply dubious array of "co-benefits" in the form of particulate reductions and other impacts that are simply invented out of whole cloth or that already are counted as justifications for other regulatory policies. Without such machinations, the Climate Action Plan would collapse as a regulatory framework, because it is all cost and no benefit. Literally. But let us ignore that. Maybe the U.S. acting alone cannot do much, but cooperation at the international level would be meaningful. That is the advertised rationale for the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change, which has been holding meetings, traveling on jets and feasting at upscale restaurants for 25 years, the forthcoming climax of which will be the 21st "Conference of the Parties" in Paris in December. Let's assume that the agreement between the U.S. and China that was announced last November will be implemented fully, even though the Chinese effectively disavowed it almost immediately, and did so smack dab in the middle of the 20th Conference of the Parties in Lima, Peru. That agreement calls for an additional 10 percent reduction by the U.S. by 2025, with no actual reduction by the Chinese; this additional cut in U.S. emissions gets us another temperature reduction of one one-hundredth of a degree. But let's not stop there. Let's use our imagination and assume that China reduces its emissions by 20 percent by 2030. That gets us two tenths of a degree. Throw in a 30 percent reduction by Europe and Japan and the rest of the industrialized world, also by 2030. That's another two tenths of a degree, for a grand total of 0.425 degrees, under a "climate sensitivity" (loosely, the effectiveness of greenhouse gas reductions) assumption 50 percent greater than that adopted by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in its latest assessment report. Is an effect that small worth 1 percent of global GDP, or roughly $600 billion to $750 billion per year, inflicted disproportionately upon the world's poor? But, you say, isn't there a looming crisis? Aren't the effects of increasing greenhouse gas concentrations already observable and serious? That is the argument heard constantly. But what is the actual evidence on climate trends published by government agencies, by research bodies funded by government agencies and in the peer-reviewed literature? Answer: The temperature record is ambiguous, as is the correlation of greenhouse gas concentrations and the rate of sea-level increases. The Arctic and Antarctic sea ice covers do not differ by a statistically significant amount from the respective 1981-2010 averages. The Arctic ice cover is near the bottom, but within, the relevant range, and the Antarctic ice cover is near the top, and exceeds in some months, the relevant range. Tornado counts and intensities are in a long-term decline. The frequency and accumulated energy of tropical cyclones are near their lowest levels since satellite measurements began in the early 1970s. U.S. wildfires are not correlated with the temperature record or with increases in greenhouse gas concentrations. The Palmer Drought Severity Index shows no trend since 1895. Over the last century, flooding in the U.S. has not been correlated with increased greenhouse gas concentrations. World per capita food production has increased and undernourishment has decreased, both more-or-less monotonically, since 1993.

AT: Democratic Peace Theory

Democratic Peace Theory Wrong — doesn’t prevent war.

Larison 12 — Daniel Larison, Senior Editor at The American Conservative, holds a Ph.D. in History from the University of Chicago, 2012 (“Democratic Peace Theory Is False,” The American Conservative, April 17^th, Available Online at http://www.theamericanconservative.com/larison/democratic-peace-theory-is-false/, Accessed 08-11-2013)

Rojas’ claim depends entirely on the meaning of “genuine democracy.” Even though there are numerous examples of wars between states with universal male suffrage and elected governments (including that little dust-up known as WWI), the states in question probably don’t qualify as “genuine” democracies and so can’t be used as counter-examples. Regardless, democratic peace theory draws broad conclusions from a short period in modern history with very few cases before the 20th century. The core of democratic peace theory as I understand it is that democratic governments are more accountable to their populations, and because the people will bear the costs of the war they are going to be less willing to support a war policy. This supposedly keeps democratic states from waging wars against one another because of the built-in electoral and institutional checks on government power. One small problem with this is that it is rubbish. Democracies in antiquity fought against one another. Political equality and voting do not abolish conflicts of interest between competing states. Democratic peace theory doesn’t account for the effects of nationalist and imperialist ideologies on the way democratic nations think about war. Democratic nations that have professional armies to do the fighting for them are often enthusiastic about overseas wars. The Conservative-Unionist government that waged the South African War (against two states with elected governments, I might add) enjoyed great popular support and won a huge majority in the “Khaki” election that followed. As long as it goes well and doesn’t have too many costs, war can be quite popular, and even if the war is costly it may still be popular if it is fought for nationalist reasons that appeal to a majority of the public. If the public is whipped into thinking that there is an intolerable foreign threat or if they believe that their country can gain something at relatively low cost by going to war, the type of government they have really is irrelevant. Unless a democratic public believes that a military conflict will go badly for their military, they may be ready to welcome the outbreak of a war that they expect to win. Setting aside the flaws and failures of U.S.-led democracy promotion for a moment, the idea that reducing the number of non-democracies makes war less likely is just fantasy. Clashing interests between states aren’t going away, and the more democratic states there are in the world the more likely it is that two or more of them will eventually fight one another.

Democratic peace theory is methodologically and empirically bankrupt — democracies aren’t inherently peaceful.

Layne 7 — Christopher Layne, University Distinguished Professor, Robert M. Gates Chair in National Security, and Professor of International Affairs at the Bush School of Government and Public Service at Texas A&M University, Research Fellow with the Center on Peace and Liberty at The Independent Institute, holds a Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of California-Berkeley, 2007 (“Liberal Ideology and U.S. Grand Strategy,” The Peace of Illusions: American Grand Strategy from 1940 to the Present, Published by Cornell University Press, ISBN 0801474116, p. 121-122)

As a theory of international politics, the democratic peace theory carries little weight.20 It rests on dubious grounds methodologically.21 More importantly, it is not valid empirically. Democratic states have gone to war with other democracies, and in crises democracies are just as prone to making military threats against other democracies as they are against nondemocracies.22 However, democratic peace theory has a lot of clout in policymaking because it plays to the Wilsonian predispositions of U.S. strategists and provides the United States a handy pretext for intervening in the internal affairs of regimes it considers troublemakers. Thus, far from being a theory of peace, democratic peace theory causes the United States to act like a "crusader state."23 America's crusader mentality springs directly from liberalism's intolerance of competing ideologies and the concomitant belief that—merely by existing—nondemocratic states threaten America's security and the safety of liberalism at home. According to Wilsonian precepts, the best way to deal [end page 121] with such states is to use American power to bring about regime change.24 The belief that the United States can only be safe in a world of liberal democracies creates real, and often otherwise avoidable, friction between the United States and nondemocratic states.

Democratic peace theory lacks historical or theoretical grounding.

Schwartz and Skinner 2 — Thomas Schwartz, Professor of Political Science at University of California-Los Angeles, and Kiron K. Skinner, Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Assistant Professor of History and Political Science at Carnegie Mellon University, 2002 (“The myth of the democratic peace,” Orbis, Volume 46, Issue 1, Winter, Available Online to Subscribing Institutions via ScienceDirect)

Here we show that neither the historical record nor the theoretical arguments advanced for the purpose provide any support for democratic pacifism. It does not matter how high or low one sets the bar of democracy. Set it high enough to avoid major exceptions and you find few, if any, democracies until the Cold War era. Then there were no wars between them, of course. But that fact is better explained by NATO and bipolarity than by any shared form of government. Worse, the peace among the high-bar democracies of that era was part of a larger pacific pattern: peace among all nations of the First and Second Worlds. As for theoretical arguments, those we have seen rest on implausible premises.

Why, then, is the belief that democracies are mutually pacific so widespread and fervent? The explanation rests on an old American tendency to slip and slide unawares between two uses of the word “democracy”: as an objective description of regimes, and as a term of praise—a label to distinguish friend from foe. Because a democracy (term of praise) can do no wrong—or so the thinking seems to run—at least one side in any war cannot be a democracy (regime description). There lies the source of much potential mischief in foreign policy.

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