Free transit 2AC stuff

AT Biopower The current politics of disposability are the modern manifestation of biopolitical control. Our lower and middle classes are the bare life which has been rendered disposable by the growing totalitarianism in America This is the same political structure as the concentration camps of nazi germany Giroux, 6 - Professor at McMaster University in the English and Cultural Studies Department
(Henry A., Reading Hurricane Katrina: Race, Class, and the Biopolitics of Disposability, College Literature 33.3, Project Muse)

Biopolitical commitments to "let die" by abandoning citizens appear increasingly credible in light of the growing authoritarianism in the United States under the Bush administration (Giroux 2005). Henry A. Giroux 181 Given
the Bush administration's use of illegal wiretaps, the holding of "detainees" illegally and indefinitely in prisons such as Guantanamo, the disappearance, kidnapping, and torture of alleged terrorists, and the ongoing suspension of civil liberties in the United States, Agamben's theory of biopolitics rightly alerts us to the dangers of a government in which the state of emergency becomes the fundamental structure of control over populations. While Agamben's claim that the concentration camp (as opposed to Foucault s panopticon) is now the model for constitutional states captures the contrariness of biopolitical commitments that have less to do with preserving life than with reproducing violence and death, its totalitarian logic is too narrow and fails in the end to recognize that the threat of violence, bare life, and death is not the only form of biopower in contemporary life The dialectics of life and death, visibility and invisibility, and privilege and lack in social existence that now constitute the biopolitics of modernity have to be under stood in terms of their complexities, specificities, and diverse social formations. For instance, the diverse ways in which the current articulation of biopower in the United States works to render some

, any viable rendering of contemporary biopolitics must address more specifically how biopower attempts not just to
groups disposable and to privilege others within a permanent state of emergency need to be specified. Indeed produce and control life in general, as Hardt and Negri insist, or to reduce all inhabitants of the increasing militarized state to the dystopian space of the "death camp," as Agamben argues, but also to privilege some lives over others. The ongoing

tragedy of pain and suffering wrought by the Bush administration's response to Hurricane Katrina reveals a biopolitical agenda in which the logic of disposability and the politics of death are inscribed differently in the order of contemporary power structured largely around wretched and broad-based racial and class
inequalities. I want to further this position by arguing that neoliberalism, privatiza tion, and militarism have become the dominant biopolitics of the mid-twen tieth-century social state and that the coupling of a market fundamentalism and contemporary forms of subjugation of life to the power of capital accu mulation, violence, and disposability, especially under the Bush administra tion, has produced a new and dangerous version of biopolitics. While the murder of Emmett Till suggests that a biopolitics structured around the inter section of race and class inequalities, on the one hand, and state violence, on the other, has long existed, the new version of biopolitics adds a distinctive ly different and more dangerous register . The new biopolitics not only includes state-sanctioned violence but also relegates entire populations to spaces of invisibility and disposability. As William DiFazio points out, "the state has been so weakened over decades of privatization that it . . . increase 182 College Literature 33.3 [Summer 2006] ingly fails to provide health care, housing, retirement benefits and education to a massive percentage of its population" (2006, 87). While the social con tract has been suspended in varying degrees since the 1970s, under the Bush Administration it has been virtually abandoned. Under such circumstances, the state no longer feels obligated to take measures that prevent hardship, suffering, and death. The state no longer protects its own disadvantaged citizens?they are already seen as dead within a transnational economic and political framework. Specific populations now occupy a globalized space of ruthless politics in which the categories of "citizen" and "democratic repre sentation," once integral to national politics, are no longer recognized. In the past, people who were marginalized by class and race could at least expect a modicum of support from the government, either because of the persistence of a drastically reduced social contract or because they still had some value as part of a reserve army of unemployed labour. That is no longer true. This new form of biopolitics is conditioned by a permanent state of class and racial exception in which "vast populations are subject to conditions of life conferring upon them the status of living dead" (Mbembe 2003, 40), largely invisible in the global media, or, when disruptively present, defined as redun dant, pathological, and dangerous. Within this wasteland of death and dispos ability, whole populations are relegated to what Zygmunt Bauman calls "social homelessness" (2004, 13). While the rich and middle classes in the United States maintain lifestyles produced through vast inequalities of symbolic and material capital, the "free market" provides neither social protection and security nor hope to those who are poor, sick, elderly, and margin alized by race and class. Given the increasing perilous state of the

those who are poor and dispossessed in America, it is crucial to reexamine how biopower functions within global neoliberalism and the simultaneous rise of security states organized around cultural (and racial) homogeneity. This task is made all the more urgent by the destruction, politics, and death that followed Hurricane Katrina.

AT Cap K No Link: Extend our Schein 11 card from the 1AC that specifically mentions building anti capitalist coalitions. By actually doing the plan we solve better for capitalism than the alternative because it is an actual policy action that will create coalitions to fight harms in the status quo such as capitalism. Perm: Do plan while embracing the philosophy of the critique. The two philosophies here are essentially synonymous and there is no reason both cannot be done. We do not attempt to solve for the corrupt economy the cap K demonizes, we cure it. We do not cede to elites, we prevent them from gaining power. The perm is the best solution above just doing the aff. Alt Bad: Attempting to embrace philosophies with no actual action will create no change. The kritik cannot hope to solve its own impacts. This is a perm alt double bind. Either the alt is strong enough to overcome any implications the aff makes that violate the kritik of which there are very little, or the alt cannot even solve the impacts of the kritik.
AT States CP

50 State Fiat Bad

50 state fiat is illegitimate 1. Reciprocity the counterplans fiat isnt reciprocal to Usfg action 2. Its not real world no policymaker can choose between federal action and the 50 states acting in unison theres no literature about the counterplan, and its anti-educational 3. Ground the counterplan does the plans mandates, and theres no reason its critical to neg ground 4. Running the private counterplan or DAs to federal action solves their offense 5. This is a voting issue teams will use the states counterplan as a generic crutch if judges let them get away with it voting against it forces teams to develop more case-specific strategies, which is better for topic education

Perm: Do the plan. All Transportation plans must be implemented at 3 levels. Federal, state, and local. That is normal means. So the neg merely cuts out part of the process. The perm still solves the Cps net bens because it still involves the states, just not solely them as the states cannot solve all of the aff which brings me to the next point. Solvency deficit: Both advantages critique current policy for transportation as being racist and neoliberal. These are due to states which implement more transportation policies at present. AND
State actions and the logic behind the CP are inherently racist

Stanford Journal of Civil Rights & Civil Liberties 6

(Aug 2006, "Arizona's Proposition 200 and the Supremacy of Federal Law: Elements of Law, Politics, and Faith" http://www.heinonline.org/HOL/Page?collection=journals&handle=hein.journals/stjcrcl2&id=307)
Though not a major problem given the political legitimacy and responsiveness of state government vis-a-vis the federal government, I do pause here to flag one civic concern: the

legacy of oppression and discrimination that particular minority

communities associate with their state governments has not yet, unfortunately, been relegated to the annals of ancient history. Not only do segregationist policies, denial of the franchise, and ruthless state-sponsored violence come to mind for many poor black southerners when they think about their relationship to the state government; they may also have salient memories of King v. Smith types of intrusive, humiliating home
visits related directly to welfare administration. n167 In light of PRWORA's abandonment of federal welfare entitlements, the oppressive and discriminatory policies and attitudes of the 1950s and 1960s, which had been reined in by the federal protections afforded by way of Goldberg and King, may potentially be revived. Indeed,

institutional racism at the state and local level is alarmingly enduring . Professor Cashin, for one, devotes

considerable attention to how states profoundly discriminate against their African-American welfare populations. n168 And another, Professor Susan Gooden, presents a particularly salient case study of Virginia welfare services. In her study, she documents and contrasts state administrators' disparaging and ungenerous treatment of black welfare recipients with their treatment of similarly situated white clients who were always given first notice of new jobs, offered the "newest" work clothes, and given access to automobiles. n169 Understanding discrimination is not just an academic exercise, but also a visceral part of the welfare experience. The

civic harms associated with returning power to the states cannot be disregarded as historically contingent. Such harms persist today.

AND

States CP wont solve because of suburban biased- the government can be the only actor.

Grengs 4. "The abandoned social goals of public transit in the neoliberal city of the USA" in City 9.1
(April 2004) pp 51-66. http://communitylearningpartnership.org/share/docs/Grengs.Abandoned_Social_Goals_of_Public_Tran sit.pdf Joe Grengss research focuses on transportation planning and how metropolitan urban form contributes to uneven economic development and social disparities.Ph.D., City and Regional Planning,

Cornell University (2002) MURP, Master's Degree in Urban and Regional Planning, University of Minnesota, Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs (1997) Bachelor of Civil Engineering, University of Minnesota, Institute of Technology (1985) ALG
Finally, regional

politics are disproportionately biased in favour of suburban interests, undermining participation in democratic decision making. The Intermodal Surface Transportation Efficiency Act of 1991 (ISTEA) required that a wider range of factors be considered, including social equity. The law shifts
unprecedented funding discretion to local levels of government, increasing the transparency of political decisions. It introduced stronger public participation rules. And it

shifted power away from state departments of transportation toward metropolitan planning organizations (Dittmar, 1995). ISTEA undermined traditional political attachments and introduced openings in a decision-making process that was previously dominated by state transportation engineers. The openings have elevated non-traditional political interests to new prominence in planning and have redistributed federal transportation resources among a much broader range of constituents. To illustrate the rise of new constituencies following ISTEA, consider that annual federal funds for bicycle projects soared by
nearly 800%, steadily increasing each year from $30 million in 1990 to $260 million in 1997 (Surface Transportation Policy Project, 1998). Examples of a broadened range of constituents after ISTEA include environmentalists who fund new air quality programmes through the highway trust fund, preservationists who save precious landmarks with federal support and community activists who revitalize neighbourhoods with transportation enhancement projects. Unfortunately, not all interest groups are equally capable of adjusting to new political openings. So although ISTEA would appear on the surface to benefit vulnerable households, this new reliance on a more open bargaining process may disproportionately burden inner-city bus riders. Voter turnout is significantly lower in central cities. Many

residents of high-poverty neighbourhoods, furthermore, are deprived of any political participation by their social isolation. And metropolitan planning organizations (MPOs)the agencies that allocate millions of dollars of transportation fundstend to underrepresent central city interests (Lewis and Sprague, 1997, p. 12). By successfully promoting a broader distribution of
transportation resources, these welcome revisions in federal policy may be distorting participation and thus intensifying the damaging trends that threaten to deprive low-income people from good job access over the long term.

Also extend Dombroski 5 card from the solvency of the 1AC. It specifically mentions how legislative funding, and only it, is key to stopping these harms. The only thing the CP can hope to solve is the net benefits which do not outweigh the affs impacts. You can extend Hofmeyr evidence from the 1AC that the ideas and logic of the aff are prerequisites to the points the neg is bringing up, and that our impacts are of greater importance and magnitude. AND States lack the necessary capacity and planning and fight over investment The Economist 11 (04/28, America's transport infrastructure: Life in the slow lane, http://www.economist.com/node/18620944)

Formula-determined block grants to states are, at least, designed to leave important decisions to local authorities. But the formulas used to allocate the money shape infrastructure planning in a remarkably block-headed manner. Cost-benefit studies are almost entirely lacking. Federal guidelines for new construction tend to reflect politics rather than anything else. States tend to use federal money as a substitute for local spending, rather than to supplement or leverage it. The Government Accountability Office estimates that substitution has risen substantially since the 1980s, and increases particularly when states get into budget difficulties. From

1998 to 2002, a period during

which economic fortunes were generally deteriorating, state and local transport investment

declined by 4% while federal

investment rose by 40%. State and local shrinkage is almost certainly worse now. States can make bad planners . Big metropolitan areasChicago, New York and Washington among themoften sprawl across state lines. State governments frequently bicker over how (and how much) to invest. Facing tight budget constraints, New
Jerseys Republican governor, Chris Christie,

recently scuttled a large project to expand the railway network

into New York City. New Jersey commuter trains share a 100-year-old tunnel with Amtrak, a major bottleneck. Mr Christies decision was widely criticised for short-sightedness; but New Jersey faced cost overruns that in a better system should have been shared with other potential beneficiaries all along the north-eastern corridor. Regional planning could help to avoid problems like this.

AT Elections DA

Negative advertising used in American electoral politics is a method of depoliticization demobilizing citizens from electoral politics, public, and civic life

McChesney and Nichols 12 (Robert W., American professor at the University of Illinois at UrbanaChampaign; Gutgsell Endowed Professor in the Department of Communication, John, American journalist and author; Washington correspondent for The Nation and associate editor of The Capital Times, April, The Bull Market Monthly Review Volume 63, Number 11 TM) There is one crucial area where political advertising differs sharply from commercial advertising , and it is here that the blood boils for the likes of Ogilvy and Spero. This is negative advertising, where the purpose of the advertising is to attack and denigrate the competition. In a commercial marketplace such advertising is of little value;
although there can be some benefit in rare instances to devoting a campaign to attacking a major competitor, in general it is a waste of time.

The point of commercial advertising is to protect and promote sales for the advertisers product, and ultimately increase profitability. There are no bonus points for simply decreasing a competitors sales, and in fact it might just take consumers away from the product category altogether, which would be counterproductive. So it is unlikely there will ever be an ad produced by Coors (or a front group bankrolled by Coors) to the effect that rumors have it employees at the Budweiser plant sometimes may urinate into the vats. Not so with political advertising. Negative advertising can be tremendously effective, a smashing over-the-top boffo success, even if it does not generate a single new voter for the candidate (or supportive independent group) placing the ad. If it simply takes voters leaning toward the opponent and makes them less likely to vote for the opponent, maybe not vote at all, that is a victory. After all the point is to get the most votes and if you lower the number for the opponent, that has the same effect as increasing your own total. Moreover negative advertising can have the delicious side effect of forcing an opponent to respond to charges, no matter how spurious. Negative advertising can amplify
spectacularly the classic political move captured by the story of the politician who told his campaign manager to start a rumor that his opponent was a child molester. But he isnt a child molester, is he? responded the aide. Of course not, said the candidate, but I want to hear him deny it. For these reasons negative ads have been a significant percentage of TV political ads since records have been kept, and have gradually increased in prominence to where they now account for a majority of all TV political ads.39 The most comprehensive research to date

concludes that between 2000 and 2008 the overall percentage of TV political ads that were negative increased from 50 percent to 60 percent.40 And 2008 is already beginning to look like a tea party at the summer home of the Marquess of Queensbury. The

percentage and amount of negative attack ads in 2010 was unprecedented and will increase sharply again in 2012 for a simple reason: the new independent groups formed with anonymous money following Citizens Unitedunencumbered by identification with candidate, party or even funding sourcedevote their resources primarily to negative attack ads.41 If political advertising is effective, negative political advertising can be especially effective.
Obviously, it needs to be deployed with tactical and strategic considerations and there is always an element of risk that it could backfire.42 Even then, research from the 2008 primary campaigns suggests that negative ads that are widely regarded in exit polls as having been unfair can still be effective, and candidates can still get the votes of the people regarding their ads as unfair. Such advertising can sow doubt in peoples guts, and that can determine how a person votes.43 So it is not clear how damaging an unfair negative ad campaign can be to a campaign. The ones that are usually cited, like Jack Conways accusation in Kentuckys 2010 U.S. Senate race that Rand Paul had acted weirdly when he was a college student, are done by candidates who are almost hopelessly behind in the polls and are akin to a Hail Mary pass. But when done smartly and when fueled by piles of cash it can drive the talking points in a campaign like nothing else. When one thinks of the election-changing political ads in recent American history, they have usually been negative and more often than not entirely bogus. In Wisconsin, the 1986 U.S. Senate race provided a chilling example. Democratic challenger Ed Garvey had a solid lead over incumbent Republican Senator Robert Kasten two weeks out from election day. Kasten then ran a series of TV ads charging Garvey with embezzling money from his days as head of the National Football League Players Association. Garvey was low on money and there were no available TV spots, so he could not effectively respondalthough the news media emphasized the charges were unproven, and probably bogus. Garvey lost the election by a hair, and shortly thereafter Kastens campaign apologized for the misleading and inaccurate ads. But Kasten, not Garvey, went to Washington for a six-year term. Probably the most famous example came two years later in the 1988 presidential race between Democrat Michael Dukakis, the Governor of Massachusetts, and then-Vice President George H. W. Bush. In late summer Dukakis held a seventeen-point lead and was doing especially well with women voters and traditional Democrats. Under the aegis of Lee Atwater along with his staff that included Roger Ailes, the Republicans test-marketed attack ad ideas with a focus group of Reagan Democrats i.e. traditional white working-class Democrats who could be pried away if the discussion got away from economics and core government programs like Social Security and Medicare. The research hit the mother lode when Atwater saw how negatively the focus group responded to the story of how Governor Dukakis had provided a weekend furlough to Willie Horton, a black man who jumped his furlough and went on to rape a white woman. Atwater boasted, By the time this election is over, Willie Horton will be a household name.44 The only question, remarked Ailes during the campaign, is whether we depict Willie Horton with a knife in his hand or without it.45 Willie Horton did indeed become a household name.46 It is unclear how decisive the Willie Horton TV ad was to sandbagging the Dukakis campaign, but by all accounts it played an important role. What is also noteworthy is that the story about Dukakis was entirely decontextualized. The story conveyed nothing distinct about Dukakis that would have bearing on his conduct as President, and the policies he would have pursued. What came through was a scary black guy was raping white women and Dukakis seemed to be his unapologetic wingman; it was directly out of Rosser Reeves playbook, and it worked. (Shortly before the forty-year-old Atwater, an amateur blues musician from South Carolina, died of brain cancer in 1991, he is reported to have apologized for the Horton ad, and the racist flames it so triumphantly stoked.) The most recent example comes in the 2004 presidential race between Senator John Kerry and President George W. Bush. Kerry held a lead over Bush in the polls coming out of the conventions. Kerry made a big deal out of his record as a decorated soldier in Vietnam, and campaigned with his band of brothers, the term for his fellow Vietnam veterans. The contrast with Bush, who had ducked military combat in the Vietnam era, was expected to work to Kerrys advantage. Then a shadowy independent groupSwift Boat Veterans for Truthran a series of TV ads asserting that Kerry was actually a coward who had betrayed his brothers while in Vietnam. The ads were bogus, and repudiated by the likes of Senator John McCain, but the issue became the hot topic of the campaign for weeks. The Kerry campaign was staggered by the charges and eventually lost a nail-biter in November. For Republicans a swift boat was a very good thing, columnist Robert Novak stated about the 2004 election. It kept John Kerry from being president.47 Defenders of negative TV political advertising acknowledge it has a seamy underside. Their response, however, is that the solution is to return fire with fire. Responding to ads with ads, Glenn Richardson writes, is perhaps the most appropriate redress to distorted charges.48 Any ad from one candidate or party can always be countered with an ad by the opposing candidate or party, Travis Ridout and Michael Franz state, adding that This is a particular strength of television compared with other forms of campaigning.49 Advertising provides a visible and relatively effective way to respond to attacks, another team of researchers led by Franz argues. For every thirty-second distortion, there can be a thirty-second clarification; every accusation can be met, every charge responded to in an effective, efficient way. They chastise John Kerry for failing to respond to the swift boat attack ads immediately and with full fire, much as others criticized Dukakis for failing to answer the Willie Horton charges in 1988.50 Franz and his colleagues, to their credit, acknowledge that the amount of money it would take to respond to attack ads has become more than a little daunting, but they appear reluctant to follow this through to what would be uncomfortable conclusions. It allows those with the most money to set the agenda for the campaign with bogus and/or irrelevant negative charges and forces the opponent to respond with their own gobs of money, or let the charges appear legitimate. Psychological

research indicates that there is a great advantage to playing offense, not defense, and to be the first to levy charges against the opponent.51 By this logic, the offended party would be wise to shoot first and force the other candidate to respond to their negative ad blitz. Even principled

politicians are under enormous competitive pressure to succumb to a manipulative politics of unreason, Bruce Ackerman writes. After all, if your opponents will batter you with hot-button sound bites, it wont do your principle much good if you lose the election. The only good defense is a sound-bite offense!52 In our view, that is more than a minor drawback to an otherwise functional democratic election system. It is absurd, and disastrous. It is eerily close to embracing the mutual assured destruction of nuclear war games. It is American electoral politics. And, tragically, that is not the worst aspect of negative political advertising. What is most striking about negative television political advertising is that it accentuates the tendency toward depoliticization. It extends and enhances the problem of citizen apathy that is a recurring problem in an inegalitarian society and aggravated in a society with a fixed two-party system. It logically follows from the clear purpose of negative advertising: to turn prospective voters off from the candidates they are most likely to support. Depoliticization is an eminently rational, if ultimately self-defeating, response to the asininity of a political universe where negative political advertising is the lingua franca. The trailblazing experimental research of Stephen Ansolabehere and Shanto Iyengar has been invaluable in this regard. They demonstrate that the main consequence of negative ads is that it demobilizes citizens and turns them off from electoral politics, if not public and civic life altogether. As Ansolabehere and Iyengar put it, the demobilizing impact of negative advertising has been a well-kept secret, and a tacit assumption among political consultants. The trend is toward a political implosion of apathy and withdrawal.53 Even those scholars who otherwise defend TV political advertising acknowledge that the research establishes that exposure to negativity is likely to increase cynicism, especially among nonpartisans .54

The only way to stop this depolitization of the public and give them individual power is through the aff. It not only brides gaps between ethnic groups and the rich and the poor, but stops elite control of transportation and politics.

Its politically irrelevant not perceived as key issue, no significant jobs perception and Obama cant spin it

Freemark, 12
Yonah Freemark is an independent researcher currently working in France on comparative urban development as part of a Gordon Grand Fellowship from Yale University, from which he graduated in May 2008 with a BA in architecture. He writes about transportation and land use issues for The Transport Politic and The Infrastructurist, 1/25, http://www.thetransportpolitic.com/2012/01/25/on-infrastructure-hopes-forprogress-this-year-look-glum/

In the context of the presidential race, Mr. Obamas decision not to continue his previously strong advocacy of more and more transportation funding suggests that the campaign sees the issue as politically irrelevant. If the Administration made an effort last year to convince Americans of the importance of improving infrastructure, there seems to have been fewer positive results in terms of popular perceptions than hoped for . Perhaps the rebuffs from Republican governors on high-speed rail took their toll; perhaps the few recovery projects that entered construction were not visible enough (or at least their federal funding was not obvious enough ); perhaps the truth of the matter is that people truly care more about issues like unemployment and health care than they do for public transit and roads.

Voters dont care not high priority

Pew, 11 (Pew Research Center, 1/20, http://www.people-press.org/2011/01/20/about-the-surveys/)

Improving the nations roads, bridges, and transportation does not rank as a particularly high priority for Democrats, Republicans or independents. Still, Democrats are more likely to see this as important (41% top priority vs. 30% of
independents, 26% of Republicans. This is the case for dealing with obesity as well.

<Insert Impact defense/turn> AND Aff Outweighs: AT Topicality: We meet: A. Counter Interpretation: B. Reasons to prefer: Topics such as racism are key to debate and are always put in the back seat and pretended to not exist. News flash, it does exist, thats what the aff shows and solves. The negs interpretation is bad because it is merely another tool for elites to exclude talking about something they want to be ignorant to. Our interpretation is the only way to break down those barriers and have an educational debate about the most important issues. Also this was obviously ran as a time suck, dont punish the aff for something the neg probably wont go for. C. Counter Standards: 1. No ground loss Mass transit still links to all of your DAs and CPs. The advantages we employ merely shift the debate to a non-contemporary area that is still educational and still links to the arguments. 2. Lit base checks there are plenty of critical mass transit files. They were made and camp and are nothing new. Its not the affs fault if you werent prepared to debate it. 3. limits the aff does not limit the debate. The neg limits the debate to topics that cant involve racism or criticizing of elites. This is shown in that they ran this T, and simply wanted to exclude these ideas which are important to debate.

D. Prefer reasonability: If the aff is reasonably topical we should be able to debate our aff. This is key to having educational debates about the actual topic and not semantics. Also, with competing interpretations the neg can always shift the goal post to make sure our aff is always outside the negs world of topical affs. E. Topicality is not a voter for fairness and education