ac - Cosmopolitanism nc - t-emech t-reduce climate change da china cp 1ar - undercovered all nr - extended t-emech (no response) then cpda 2ar - weighed case
JW Patterson
3
Opponent: Harvard-Westlake IC | Judge: Lawson Hudson
AC - Covid NC - T medicines CC da pender 1ar - covid Nr - pender 2ar - case ow
JW Patterson
6
Opponent: Isidore Newman EE | Judge: Nobra, Amanda
1ac kant 1nc interps and tt 1ar metaethic comply conflict 1nr tried to beat back theory 2ar weigh
Yale
6
Opponent: Harison JC | Judge: Sophia Ploucha
AC - Racial Cap NC - Cap 1ar - rc is racism nc - rc is cap 2ar - racial cap
Yale
3
Opponent: McDowell JJ | Judge: Kate Phillipo
1ac - rawls pol equality 1nc - utilcp 1ar all 1nr all 2ar all
To modify or delete round reports, edit the associated round.
Cites
Entry
Date
1 - Disclosure - New
Tournament: Yale | Round: 2 | Opponent: Valley RT | Judge: Allison Aldridge Interp: The affirmative must disclose the plan text and advantage area if they break new. V:They didn’t--see screenshot
Standards –
Clash – having no idea what the debate will be about makes being neg impossible – the aff gets plan text choice and infinite prep to craft the most strategic case. No disclosure makes this impossible to overcome b/c it means the neg only gets 4 mins of prep to answer a strategy that they had a full month for. they’ll say generics, but their model of debate means the neg has no time to cut an update to their generics specific to the AFF and we’ll lose every debate.
2. Discourages tricks – plan text disclosure discourages cheap shot aff’s. If the aff isn’t inherent or easily defeated by 20 minutes of research, the case should lose. The neg is entitled to some research time to make sure the AFF is inherent, topical, and controversial. Otherwise bad AFF’s can win on purely surprise factor, which is a bad model b/c it encourages finding the most fringe surprising case possible instead of a well researched and defensible aff.
Vote on substantive engagement: otherwise we’re speaking without debating and there’s nothing to separate us from dueling oratory. It also creates the most valuable long-term skills since we need to learn how to defend our beliefs in any context, like politics.
Drop the debater on new affs: Their lack of disclosure makes substance irreparable b/c our entire argument is that we did not have a basis to engage the aff to begin with.
Competing interps since reasonability invites arbitrary judge intervention based on preference rather than argumentation and encourages a race to the bottom in which debaters exploit a judge’s tolerance for questionable argumentation.
9/18/21
1 - No 1AR theory
Tournament: Yale | Round: 2 | Opponent: Valley RT | Judge: Allison Aldridge Interpretation: Debaters may not justify 1ar theory is dtd, no rvi, competing interps, no 2n theory paradigm issues , and it’s the highest layer Violation: its all in the underview Standard:
Infinite Abuse - their norm justifies the affirmative auto winning every round since they can read infinite risk free 1AR shells with DTD and Competing interp. And since I don’t have 2n paradigm issues I can’t contest it. Even if I uplayer I can’t win since your shell is the highest layer. Answering the argument doesn’t solve because you can read infinite of these paradigm issues in the 1ac making it impossible. Norming is an independent voter since justifying the value of debate necessarily justifies the norms of the activity being good in order for debate to be valuable.
The standard is maximizing expected well-being. Prefer it:
~2~ Util is a lexical pre-requisite to any other framework-threats to bodily security and life preclude the ability for moral actors to effectively utilize and act upon other moral theories since they are in a constant state of crisis that inhibit the ideal moral conditions which other theories presuppose – so, util comes first and my offense outweighs theirs under their own framework.
~3~ Pleasure and pain are the starting point for moral reasoning—they're our most baseline desires and the only things that explain the intrinsic value of objects or actions
Moen 16, Ole Martin (PhD, Research Fellow in Philosophy at University of Oslo). "An Argument for Hedonism." Journal of Value Inquiry 50.2 (2016): 267. Let us start by observing, empirically, that a widely shared judgment about intrinsic AND notion of legal standing will outstrip the power relations that ground Pettit's theory.
~5~ Ethical frameworks must be theoretically legitimate. Any standard is an interpretation of the words of the resolution-thus framework is functionally a topicality argument about how to define the terms of the resolution. My framework interprets ought as maximizing happiness. Prefer this definition:
~A~ Ground: Both debaters are guaranteed access to ground to engage under util – ie Aff gets plans and advantages, while Neg gets disads and counterplans. Additionally, anything can function as a util impact as long as an external benefit is articulated, so all your offense applies. Other frameworks deny 1 side the ability to engage the other on both the impact and link level. Their framework is exclusive – setcol literature is aff-biased and kills engagement which link turns their discourse offense.
~6~ Extinction outweighs
Pummer 15 ~Theron, Junior Research Fellow in Philosophy at St. Anne's College, University of Oxford. "Moral Agreement on Saving the World" Practical Ethics, University of Oxford. May 18, 2015~ AT There appears to be lot of disagreement in moral philosophy. Whether these many apparent AND be acting very wrongly." (From chapter 36 of On What Matters)
The standard is maximizing expected well-being. Prefer it:
~1~ Util is a lexical pre-requisite to any other framework-threats to bodily security and life preclude the ability for moral actors to effectively utilize and act upon other moral theories since they are in a constant state of crisis that inhibit the ideal moral conditions which other theories presuppose – so, util comes first and my offense outweighs theirs under their own framework.
~2~ Ethical frameworks must be theoretically legitimate.
~A~ Ground: Both debaters are guaranteed access to ground to engage under util – ie Aff gets plans and advantages, while Neg gets disads and counterplans. Additionally, anything can function as a util impact as long as an external benefit is articulated, so all your offense applies. Other frameworks deny 1 side the ability to engage the other on both the impact and link level. Their framework is exclusive – setcol literature is aff-biased and kills engagement which link turns their discourse offense.
~3~ Extinction outweighs
Pummer 15 ~Theron, Junior Research Fellow in Philosophy at St. Anne's College, University of Oxford. "Moral Agreement on Saving the World" Practical Ethics, University of Oxford. May 18, 2015~ AT There appears to be lot of disagreement in moral philosophy. Whether these many apparent AND be acting very wrongly." (From chapter 36 of On What Matters)
~4~ Util is a prereq to cosmopolitanism – to achieve the community we must prevent death and extinction – the best measure to do that is through util
10/9/21
SO - Abolish WTO CP
Tournament: JW Patterson | Round: 6 | Opponent: Isidore Newman EE | Judge: Nobra, Amanda Text: The World Trade Organization ought to be abolished. The United States ought to independently and without influence from international government reduce IP protection for COVID-19 Hawley, senator, JD Yale, 20 (Josh, 5-5, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/05/opinion/hawley-abolish-wto-china.html) The coronavirus emergency is not only a public health crisis. With 30 million Americans unemployed, it is also an economic crisis. And it has exposed a hard truth about the modern global economy: it weakens American workers and has empowered China’s rise. That must change. The global economic system as we know it is a relic; it requires reform, top to bottom. We should begin with one of its leading institutions, the World Trade Organization. We should abolish it. Eliminating the WTO ends U.S. global hegemony Bello, PhD, 2000 (Walden, Sociology @ Stanford, https://users.ox.ac.uk/~magd1352/ecologist/Should20WTO20be20abolished.pdf) The idea that the world needs the World Trade Organisation (WTO) is one of the biggest lies of our time. The WTO came about, in 1995, mainly because it was in the interest of the US and its corporations. The European Union, Japan and especially the developing countries were mostly ambivalent about the idea; it was the US which drove it on. Why? Because though the US, back in 1948, blocked the formation of an International Trade Organisation (ITO), believing that, at that time, the interests of its corporations would not be served by such a global body, it had changed its mind by the 1990s. Now it wanted an international trade body. Why? Because its global economic dominance was threatened. The flexible GATT (General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade) system, which preceded the WTO, had allowed the emergence of Europe and East Asia as competing industrial centres that threatened US dominance even in many high-tech industries. Under GATT’s system of global agricultural trade, Europe had emerged as a formidable agricultural power even as Third World governments concerned with preserving their agriculture and rural societies limited the penetration of their markets by US agricultural products. In other words, before the WTO, global trade was growing by leaps and bounds, but countries were using trade policy to industrialise and adapt to the growth of trade so that their economies would be enhanced by global trade and not be marginalised by it. That was a problem, from the US point of view. And that was why the US needed the WTO. The essence of the WTO is seen in three of its central agreements: the Agreement on Trade Related Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPs), the Agreement on Agriculture (AOA), and the Agreement on Trade Related Investment Measures (TRIMs). The purpose of TRIPs is not to promote free trade but to enhance monopoly power. One cannot quarrel with the fact that innovators should have preferential access to the benefits that flow from their innovation for a period of time. TRIPs, however, goes beyond this to institutionalise a monopoly for high-tech corporate innovators, most of them from the North. Among other things, TRIPs provides a generalised minimum patent protection of 20 years; institutes draconian border regulations against products judged to be violating intellectual property rights; and – contrary to the judicial principle of presuming innocence until proven guilty – places the burden of proof on the presumed violator of process patents. What TRIPs does is reinforce the monopolistic or oligopolistic position of US high tech firms such as Microsoft and Intel. It makes industrialisation by imitation or industrialisation via loose conditions of technology transfer – a strategy employed by the US, Germany, Japan, and South Korea during the early phases of their industrialisation – all but impossible. It enables the technological leader, in this case the US, to greatly influence the pace of technological and industrial development in the rest of the world.
Primacy causes endless war, terror, authoritarianism, prolif, and Russia-China aggression. Ashford, PhD, 19 (Emma, PoliSci@UVA, Fellow@CATO, Power and Pragmatism: Reforming American Foreign Policy for the 21st Century, in New Voices in Grand Strategy, 4, CNAS) Humility is a virtue. Yet in the last quarter century, American policymakers have been far more likely to embrace the notion of America as the “indispensable nation,” responsible for protecting allies, promoting democracy and human rights, tamping down conflicts, and generally managing global affairs. Compare this ideal to the U.S. track record – endless Middle Eastern wars, the rise of ISIS, global democratic backsliding, a revanchist Russia, resurgent China, and a world reeling from the election of President Donald Trump – and this label seems instead the height of hubris. Many of the failures of U.S. foreign policy speak for themselves. As the daily drumbeat of bad news attests, interventions in Iraq and Libya were not victories for human rights or democracy, but rather massively destabilizing for the Middle East as a whole. Afghanistan – despite initial military successes – has become a quagmire, highlighting the futility of nation- building. Other failures of America’s grand strategy are less visible, but no less damaging. NATO expansion into Eastern Europe helped to reignite hostility between Russia and the West. Worse, it has diluted the alliance’s defensive capacity and its democratic character. And even as the war on terror fades from public view, it remains as open-ended as ever: Today, the United States is at war in seven countries and engaged in “combating terrorism’ in more than 80.1 To put it bluntly: America’s strategy since the end of the Cold War – whether it is called primacy or liberal internationalism – may not be a total failure, but it has not been successful either. Many have tried to place blame for these poor outcomes.2 But recrimination is less important than understanding why America’s strategy has failed so badly and avoiding these mistakes in future. Much of the explanation is the natural outcome of changing constraints. Iraq and Libya should not be viewed as regrettable anomalies, but rather the logical outcome of unipolarity and America’s liberal internationalist inclination to solve every global problem. It’s also a reliance on flawed assumptions – that what is good for America is always good for the world, for example. Support for dangerous sovereignty-undermining norms adds to the problem; just look at the Responsibility to Protect (R2P), which has proved not to protect populations or stabilize fragile states, but to provoke chaos, encourage nuclear proliferation, and undermine the international institutions. Perhaps, if nothing else had changed, a form of watered-down liberal internationalism that foreswore interventionism and drew back from the war on terror might have been possible.3 But international politics are undergoing a period of profound transformation, from unipolarity to regional or even global multipolarity. Primacy – and the consistent drumbeat of calls in Washington to do more, always and everywhere – is neither sustainable nor prudent. Nor can we fall back on warmed-over Cold War–era strategies better suited to an era of bipolar superpower competition. Empirics confirm the WTO causes conflict --- it limits options for states to take action against others, which escalates tensions by cutting off avenues for bargaining and conflict resolution Chatagnier and Lim 16 J. Tyson Chatagnier and Haeyong Lim, Professors of Political Science at the University of Houston, “Does the WTO Exacerbate International Conflict?” Texas Triangle. 2016. http://texastriangle.weebly.com/uploads/2/5/2/4/25249202/chatagnier_lim_wto_conflict.pdf
While there has been significant empirical work on issue linkage in other areas (e.g., Davis 2004; Long and Leeds 2006; Poast 2012, 2013), there is relatively little work on the pacifying effect of issue linkage (but see Wiegand 2009). One reason might be that coding is quite demanding, and that, unlike formal alliances or trade deals, international agreements over conflict are rarely well documented.1 Nonetheless, the theoretical literature suggests that there should be a negative relationship between the ability to link issues together and the likelihood of dyadic conflict. We provide an indirect test of this hypothesis below. The GATT and the WTO In the wake of the devastation of two world wars, American and European governments looked for ways to bring about peace and prosperity in the international system. Amid fears that the destabilization of the Great Depression had been precipitated by protectionist trade policies, leaders sought to establish an institution that could facilitate trade liberalization and end trade wars. To 1This may be why Wiegand’s study—which is qualitative in nature—is one of the few that attempts to examine issue linkage directly. 5 this end, in 1947, they created the GATT. The GATT was a multilateral agreement between states (23, initially, but more than 100 by the time it was subsumed by the WTO) to reduce tariffs and other trade barriers substantially and to eliminate preferential treatment among signatories. The institution provided states with a set of agreed-upon rules, as well as a forum for negotiation, facilitating cooperation among members. When one member state believed that another was in violation of the agreement, it could invoke provisions in Articles XXII and XXIII of the agreement that called for consultation and dispute settlement. While this allowed parties to form an investigative panel to assess and resolve the dispute, Zangl (2008) points out three major obstacles to settlement: panel composition was determined by the disputants (Jackson 1997); panel reports were the result of political negotiation, rather than legal decisions (Zangl 2008); and both empanelment (Hudec 1993) and sanctions (Rosendorff 2005) required unanimous approval, meaning that the defendant ultimately held veto power. Such a system is ultimately predicated on compromise and the negotiation of self-enforcing agreements. Under GATT, aggrieved parties had no recourse but to persuade violators to alter their behavior. With the establishment of the WTO, the aforementioned problems—along with a host of other issues—were resolved. The dispute settlement mechanism (DSM) under the WTO is highly legalized, with independent judicial bodies that are charged with rendering verdicts and authorizing sanctions (Goldstein and Martin 2000; Rosendorff 2005). Under the present system, complainants have significantly increased power, and they are no longer restricted to negotiating in order to convince defendants to comply with the rules.2 For this reason, it should be unsurprising that compliance has generally increased following the judicialization of the institution (Jackson 1997; Zangl 2008). The move from the GATT framework to the WTO undoubtedly deepened the institutionalization of the trade agreement, binding its member states more tightly. Kant’s (2007 1795) idea of a “federation of free states” dealt primarily with the imposition of law and order upon the anarchic international system. By increasing the institution’s degree of legalization, the trade organization 2Of course, negotiation still occurs within the WTO DSM. However, disputants do so in the shadow of the panel, significantly increasing the complainant’s bargaining leverage (Poletti, De Bièvre and Chatagnier 2015). 6 brought itself closer to the Kantian ideal.3 Indeed, while the GATT satisfies only the second and fourth roles of an IGO listed above (to some extent), the WTO quite clearly fulfills all four. From this perspective, we would expect the more heavily-institutionalized WTO to reduce conflict among member states to a greater degree than its predecessor. Hypothesis 1. The establishment of the WTO reduced the instances of militarized conflict among member states. At the same time, the increase in the organization’s power has limited the actions of the constituent actors. WTO members are required to behave in a non-discriminatory manner and to abide by agreed-upon standards. Failure to comply with these rules can lead to sanctions. While many of these behaviors were prohibited under the GATT as well, the much more credible threat of punishment likely reduces a state’s economic toolkit to a greater degree. If the U.S. believes, for example, that Chinese currency manipulation is adversely affecting trade, it cannot retaliate with tariffs or import quotas without a favorable ruling from the DSM. To do otherwise would be to invite sanctions against itself. Moreover, states are stripped of a range of options that could “sweeten the deal” in negotiations. A state that attempted to offer favorable terms of trade in exchange for concessions on a different dimension would be unable to do so without offering the same terms to all other trading partners; a state that offered to rein in a trade violation would have no leverage as the opponent could appeal to the DSM to have the trade-distorting measure removed. Thus, states are left with fewer options for issue-linkage in bargaining scenarios, which suggests an opposing hypothesis. Interdependence doesn’t solve war – prefer studies at the multilateral not just dyadic level – competitive dynamics outweigh conflict dampening incentives. Chatagnier and Kavakli 17 – (2017, J. Tyson, PhD in Political Science, Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Houston, and Kerim Can, PhD in Political Science, assistant professor at the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at Sabanci University in Turkey, “From Economic Competition to Military Combat: Export Similarity and International Conflict,” Journal of Conflict Resolution, Vol 61, Issue 7, 2017)
International trade has long been thought to facilitate peace among nations (Kant 1795 1970). A voluntary exchange of goods that leaves both parties better off inherently raises the value of each side to the other, increasing the cost of conflict. The belief that economic interaction can ignite a positive dynamic of cooperation and reduce conflictual behavior is so intuitive and widespread that some political pundits have even heralded free trade as the path to world peace (see, e.g., Griswold 1998; Boudreaux 2006).The conventional wisdom within the international relations literature (e.g., Oneal and Russett 1997; Gartzke, Li, and Boehmer 2003; Polachek and Xiang 2010) reinforces these claims, having found consistent empirical (and theoretical) links between trade and peace. At the same time, however, there is certainly evidence that trade can exacerbate rivalry and conflict between states. Throughout history, states have fought their competitors for advantage (i.e., access to inputs and markets) in the global marketplace. For instance, in his authoritative account of the Anglo-German rivalry before World War I, Kennedy (1980, 464) concludes that “the most profound cause of the conflict, surely, was economic”. More specifically, the cause was “the detectable increase in Anglo-German trade rivalry since Bismarck’s time as the latter country steadily became more competitive.” Moreover, while modern empirical international relations research has largely come down on the side of the neoliberals, it has not been monolithic. Indeed, numerous studies by Barbieri (1996, 2002) have demonstrated that increased trade actually has the potential to aggravate tensions between states. These inconsistencies in both the historical and analytical records raise questions about the simplicity of the link between trade and conflict. Additionally, the vast majority of previous work considers only the bilateral effects of trade, neglecting the way in which trade between two actors can affect a third. We remedy this oversight by analyzing the effects of trade competition, arguing that the tension produced by export competition can be an important source of international conflict. More specifically, we highlight that economic actors who face foreign competition have an incentive to use military power to gain an advantage in international markets. These domestic actors can use their economic power to influence their nation’s political elites and increase the likelihood that economic conflict erupts into war. We support this theoretical argument with several well-established historical cases including the seventeenth-century Dutch-English commercial rivalry, the pre-World War I Anglo-German rivalry, and the 1990 invasion of Kuwait by Iraq. Our argument suggests that, although trade can have a pacifying direct effect at the dyadic level, it also has strong indirect effects, which can be conflict aggravating. We test this argument using commodity-level trade data from 1962 to 2000. We measure each country pair’s portfolio similarity along nearly 1,300 commodity categories and test the effect of this variable on several indicators of international conflict. Our results strongly support our claim that countries that produce and export similar goods are significantly more likely to fight, even taking into account their bilateral trade. These findings are robust to several checks on model specification as well as alternative explanations. We also show that our findings are not driven by oil or other strategic resources and that they hold for both raw and manufactured goods. In light of these results, we are confident that we have identified a significant and practically important cause of war.
10/10/21
SO - Abolish WTO CP
Tournament: JW Patterson | Round: 6 | Opponent: Isidore Newman EE | Judge: Nobra, Amanda Text: The World Trade Organization ought to be abolished. The United States ought to independently and without influence from international government reduce IP protection for COVID-19 Hawley, senator, JD Yale, 20 (Josh, 5-5, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/05/opinion/hawley-abolish-wto-china.html) The coronavirus emergency is not only a public health crisis. With 30 million Americans unemployed, it is also an economic crisis. And it has exposed a hard truth about the modern global economy: it weakens American workers and has empowered China’s rise. That must change. The global economic system as we know it is a relic; it requires reform, top to bottom. We should begin with one of its leading institutions, the World Trade Organization. We should abolish it. Eliminating the WTO ends U.S. global hegemony Bello, PhD, 2000 (Walden, Sociology @ Stanford, https://users.ox.ac.uk/~magd1352/ecologist/Should20WTO20be20abolished.pdf) The idea that the world needs the World Trade Organisation (WTO) is one of the biggest lies of our time. The WTO came about, in 1995, mainly because it was in the interest of the US and its corporations. The European Union, Japan and especially the developing countries were mostly ambivalent about the idea; it was the US which drove it on. Why? Because though the US, back in 1948, blocked the formation of an International Trade Organisation (ITO), believing that, at that time, the interests of its corporations would not be served by such a global body, it had changed its mind by the 1990s. Now it wanted an international trade body. Why? Because its global economic dominance was threatened. The flexible GATT (General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade) system, which preceded the WTO, had allowed the emergence of Europe and East Asia as competing industrial centres that threatened US dominance even in many high-tech industries. Under GATT’s system of global agricultural trade, Europe had emerged as a formidable agricultural power even as Third World governments concerned with preserving their agriculture and rural societies limited the penetration of their markets by US agricultural products. In other words, before the WTO, global trade was growing by leaps and bounds, but countries were using trade policy to industrialise and adapt to the growth of trade so that their economies would be enhanced by global trade and not be marginalised by it. That was a problem, from the US point of view. And that was why the US needed the WTO. The essence of the WTO is seen in three of its central agreements: the Agreement on Trade Related Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPs), the Agreement on Agriculture (AOA), and the Agreement on Trade Related Investment Measures (TRIMs). The purpose of TRIPs is not to promote free trade but to enhance monopoly power. One cannot quarrel with the fact that innovators should have preferential access to the benefits that flow from their innovation for a period of time. TRIPs, however, goes beyond this to institutionalise a monopoly for high-tech corporate innovators, most of them from the North. Among other things, TRIPs provides a generalised minimum patent protection of 20 years; institutes draconian border regulations against products judged to be violating intellectual property rights; and – contrary to the judicial principle of presuming innocence until proven guilty – places the burden of proof on the presumed violator of process patents. What TRIPs does is reinforce the monopolistic or oligopolistic position of US high tech firms such as Microsoft and Intel. It makes industrialisation by imitation or industrialisation via loose conditions of technology transfer – a strategy employed by the US, Germany, Japan, and South Korea during the early phases of their industrialisation – all but impossible. It enables the technological leader, in this case the US, to greatly influence the pace of technological and industrial development in the rest of the world.
Primacy causes endless war, terror, authoritarianism, prolif, and Russia-China aggression. Ashford, PhD, 19 (Emma, PoliSci@UVA, Fellow@CATO, Power and Pragmatism: Reforming American Foreign Policy for the 21st Century, in New Voices in Grand Strategy, 4, CNAS) Humility is a virtue. Yet in the last quarter century, American policymakers have been far more likely to embrace the notion of America as the “indispensable nation,” responsible for protecting allies, promoting democracy and human rights, tamping down conflicts, and generally managing global affairs. Compare this ideal to the U.S. track record – endless Middle Eastern wars, the rise of ISIS, global democratic backsliding, a revanchist Russia, resurgent China, and a world reeling from the election of President Donald Trump – and this label seems instead the height of hubris. Many of the failures of U.S. foreign policy speak for themselves. As the daily drumbeat of bad news attests, interventions in Iraq and Libya were not victories for human rights or democracy, but rather massively destabilizing for the Middle East as a whole. Afghanistan – despite initial military successes – has become a quagmire, highlighting the futility of nation- building. Other failures of America’s grand strategy are less visible, but no less damaging. NATO expansion into Eastern Europe helped to reignite hostility between Russia and the West. Worse, it has diluted the alliance’s defensive capacity and its democratic character. And even as the war on terror fades from public view, it remains as open-ended as ever: Today, the United States is at war in seven countries and engaged in “combating terrorism’ in more than 80.1 To put it bluntly: America’s strategy since the end of the Cold War – whether it is called primacy or liberal internationalism – may not be a total failure, but it has not been successful either. Many have tried to place blame for these poor outcomes.2 But recrimination is less important than understanding why America’s strategy has failed so badly and avoiding these mistakes in future. Much of the explanation is the natural outcome of changing constraints. Iraq and Libya should not be viewed as regrettable anomalies, but rather the logical outcome of unipolarity and America’s liberal internationalist inclination to solve every global problem. It’s also a reliance on flawed assumptions – that what is good for America is always good for the world, for example. Support for dangerous sovereignty-undermining norms adds to the problem; just look at the Responsibility to Protect (R2P), which has proved not to protect populations or stabilize fragile states, but to provoke chaos, encourage nuclear proliferation, and undermine the international institutions. Perhaps, if nothing else had changed, a form of watered-down liberal internationalism that foreswore interventionism and drew back from the war on terror might have been possible.3 But international politics are undergoing a period of profound transformation, from unipolarity to regional or even global multipolarity. Primacy – and the consistent drumbeat of calls in Washington to do more, always and everywhere – is neither sustainable nor prudent. Nor can we fall back on warmed-over Cold War–era strategies better suited to an era of bipolar superpower competition. Empirics confirm the WTO causes conflict --- it limits options for states to take action against others, which escalates tensions by cutting off avenues for bargaining and conflict resolution Chatagnier and Lim 16 J. Tyson Chatagnier and Haeyong Lim, Professors of Political Science at the University of Houston, “Does the WTO Exacerbate International Conflict?” Texas Triangle. 2016. http://texastriangle.weebly.com/uploads/2/5/2/4/25249202/chatagnier_lim_wto_conflict.pdf
While there has been significant empirical work on issue linkage in other areas (e.g., Davis 2004; Long and Leeds 2006; Poast 2012, 2013), there is relatively little work on the pacifying effect of issue linkage (but see Wiegand 2009). One reason might be that coding is quite demanding, and that, unlike formal alliances or trade deals, international agreements over conflict are rarely well documented.1 Nonetheless, the theoretical literature suggests that there should be a negative relationship between the ability to link issues together and the likelihood of dyadic conflict. We provide an indirect test of this hypothesis below. The GATT and the WTO In the wake of the devastation of two world wars, American and European governments looked for ways to bring about peace and prosperity in the international system. Amid fears that the destabilization of the Great Depression had been precipitated by protectionist trade policies, leaders sought to establish an institution that could facilitate trade liberalization and end trade wars. To 1This may be why Wiegand’s study—which is qualitative in nature—is one of the few that attempts to examine issue linkage directly. 5 this end, in 1947, they created the GATT. The GATT was a multilateral agreement between states (23, initially, but more than 100 by the time it was subsumed by the WTO) to reduce tariffs and other trade barriers substantially and to eliminate preferential treatment among signatories. The institution provided states with a set of agreed-upon rules, as well as a forum for negotiation, facilitating cooperation among members. When one member state believed that another was in violation of the agreement, it could invoke provisions in Articles XXII and XXIII of the agreement that called for consultation and dispute settlement. While this allowed parties to form an investigative panel to assess and resolve the dispute, Zangl (2008) points out three major obstacles to settlement: panel composition was determined by the disputants (Jackson 1997); panel reports were the result of political negotiation, rather than legal decisions (Zangl 2008); and both empanelment (Hudec 1993) and sanctions (Rosendorff 2005) required unanimous approval, meaning that the defendant ultimately held veto power. Such a system is ultimately predicated on compromise and the negotiation of self-enforcing agreements. Under GATT, aggrieved parties had no recourse but to persuade violators to alter their behavior. With the establishment of the WTO, the aforementioned problems—along with a host of other issues—were resolved. The dispute settlement mechanism (DSM) under the WTO is highly legalized, with independent judicial bodies that are charged with rendering verdicts and authorizing sanctions (Goldstein and Martin 2000; Rosendorff 2005). Under the present system, complainants have significantly increased power, and they are no longer restricted to negotiating in order to convince defendants to comply with the rules.2 For this reason, it should be unsurprising that compliance has generally increased following the judicialization of the institution (Jackson 1997; Zangl 2008). The move from the GATT framework to the WTO undoubtedly deepened the institutionalization of the trade agreement, binding its member states more tightly. Kant’s (2007 1795) idea of a “federation of free states” dealt primarily with the imposition of law and order upon the anarchic international system. By increasing the institution’s degree of legalization, the trade organization 2Of course, negotiation still occurs within the WTO DSM. However, disputants do so in the shadow of the panel, significantly increasing the complainant’s bargaining leverage (Poletti, De Bièvre and Chatagnier 2015). 6 brought itself closer to the Kantian ideal.3 Indeed, while the GATT satisfies only the second and fourth roles of an IGO listed above (to some extent), the WTO quite clearly fulfills all four. From this perspective, we would expect the more heavily-institutionalized WTO to reduce conflict among member states to a greater degree than its predecessor. Hypothesis 1. The establishment of the WTO reduced the instances of militarized conflict among member states. At the same time, the increase in the organization’s power has limited the actions of the constituent actors. WTO members are required to behave in a non-discriminatory manner and to abide by agreed-upon standards. Failure to comply with these rules can lead to sanctions. While many of these behaviors were prohibited under the GATT as well, the much more credible threat of punishment likely reduces a state’s economic toolkit to a greater degree. If the U.S. believes, for example, that Chinese currency manipulation is adversely affecting trade, it cannot retaliate with tariffs or import quotas without a favorable ruling from the DSM. To do otherwise would be to invite sanctions against itself. Moreover, states are stripped of a range of options that could “sweeten the deal” in negotiations. A state that attempted to offer favorable terms of trade in exchange for concessions on a different dimension would be unable to do so without offering the same terms to all other trading partners; a state that offered to rein in a trade violation would have no leverage as the opponent could appeal to the DSM to have the trade-distorting measure removed. Thus, states are left with fewer options for issue-linkage in bargaining scenarios, which suggests an opposing hypothesis. Interdependence doesn’t solve war – prefer studies at the multilateral not just dyadic level – competitive dynamics outweigh conflict dampening incentives. Chatagnier and Kavakli 17 – (2017, J. Tyson, PhD in Political Science, Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Houston, and Kerim Can, PhD in Political Science, assistant professor at the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at Sabanci University in Turkey, “From Economic Competition to Military Combat: Export Similarity and International Conflict,” Journal of Conflict Resolution, Vol 61, Issue 7, 2017)
International trade has long been thought to facilitate peace among nations (Kant 1795 1970). A voluntary exchange of goods that leaves both parties better off inherently raises the value of each side to the other, increasing the cost of conflict. The belief that economic interaction can ignite a positive dynamic of cooperation and reduce conflictual behavior is so intuitive and widespread that some political pundits have even heralded free trade as the path to world peace (see, e.g., Griswold 1998; Boudreaux 2006).The conventional wisdom within the international relations literature (e.g., Oneal and Russett 1997; Gartzke, Li, and Boehmer 2003; Polachek and Xiang 2010) reinforces these claims, having found consistent empirical (and theoretical) links between trade and peace. At the same time, however, there is certainly evidence that trade can exacerbate rivalry and conflict between states. Throughout history, states have fought their competitors for advantage (i.e., access to inputs and markets) in the global marketplace. For instance, in his authoritative account of the Anglo-German rivalry before World War I, Kennedy (1980, 464) concludes that “the most profound cause of the conflict, surely, was economic”. More specifically, the cause was “the detectable increase in Anglo-German trade rivalry since Bismarck’s time as the latter country steadily became more competitive.” Moreover, while modern empirical international relations research has largely come down on the side of the neoliberals, it has not been monolithic. Indeed, numerous studies by Barbieri (1996, 2002) have demonstrated that increased trade actually has the potential to aggravate tensions between states. These inconsistencies in both the historical and analytical records raise questions about the simplicity of the link between trade and conflict. Additionally, the vast majority of previous work considers only the bilateral effects of trade, neglecting the way in which trade between two actors can affect a third. We remedy this oversight by analyzing the effects of trade competition, arguing that the tension produced by export competition can be an important source of international conflict. More specifically, we highlight that economic actors who face foreign competition have an incentive to use military power to gain an advantage in international markets. These domestic actors can use their economic power to influence their nation’s political elites and increase the likelihood that economic conflict erupts into war. We support this theoretical argument with several well-established historical cases including the seventeenth-century Dutch-English commercial rivalry, the pre-World War I Anglo-German rivalry, and the 1990 invasion of Kuwait by Iraq. Our argument suggests that, although trade can have a pacifying direct effect at the dyadic level, it also has strong indirect effects, which can be conflict aggravating. We test this argument using commodity-level trade data from 1962 to 2000. We measure each country pair’s portfolio similarity along nearly 1,300 commodity categories and test the effect of this variable on several indicators of international conflict. Our results strongly support our claim that countries that produce and export similar goods are significantly more likely to fight, even taking into account their bilateral trade. These findings are robust to several checks on model specification as well as alternative explanations. We also show that our findings are not driven by oil or other strategic resources and that they hold for both raw and manufactured goods. In light of these results, we are confident that we have identified a significant and practically important cause of war.
10/10/21
SO - Emech
Tournament: Yale | Round: 2 | Opponent: Valley RT | Judge: Allison Aldridge Interpretation – the Affirmative must present a delineated enforcement mechanism for the Plan. To clarify they must state in in their speech - There is no normal means since terms are negotiated contextually among member states. WTO "Whose WTO is it anyway?" https://www.wto.org/english/thewto_e/whatis_e/tif_e/org1_e.htmElmer When WTO rules impose disciplines on countries’ policies, that is the outcome of negotiations among WTO members. The rules are enforced by the members themselves under agreed procedures that they negotiated, including the possibility of trade sanctions. But those sanctions are imposed by member countries, and authorized by the membership as a whole. This is quite different from other agencies whose bureaucracies can, for example, influence a country’s policy by threatening to withhold credit. Violation: “through the states” doesn’t cut it Standards:
Shiftiness- They can redefine the 1AC’s enforcement mechanism in the 1AR which allows them to recontextualize their enforcement mechanism to wriggle out of DA’s since all DA links are predicated on type of enforcement i.e. sanctions bad das, domestic politics das off of backlash, information research sharing da if they put monetary punishments, or trade das. 2. Real World - Policy makers will always specify how the mandates of the plan should be endorsed. It also means zero solvency, absent spec, states can circumvent the Aff’s policy since there is no delineated way to enforce the affirmative which means there’s no way to actualize any of their solvency arguments. ESpec isn’t regressive or arbitrary- it’s an active part of the WTO is central to any advocacy about international IP law since the only uniqueness of a reduction of IP protections is how effective its enforcement is. Paradigm: 1NC theory first - 1 Abuse was self-inflicted- They started the chain of abuse and forced me down this strategy 2 Norming- We have more speeches to norm over whether it’s a good idea since the shell was read earlier.
Fairness – Debate is a competitive activity governed by rules. You can’t evaluate who did better debating if the round is structurally skewed, so fairness is a gateway to substantive debate. DTD – Time spent on theory cant be compensated for, the 1nc was already skewed, and its key to deterring abuse. Prefer Competing interps -
reasonability is arbitrary and invites judge intervention. 2. it Causes a race to the bottom where debaters push the limit as to how reasonably abusive, they can be. No RVI’s -
Chills some debaters from reading theory against abusive postions. 2. incentivizes theory baiting where you can just bait theory to win
Strong IP protection spurs innovation by encouraging risk-taking and incentivizing knowledge sharing — prefer statistical analysis of multiple studies
Ezell and Cory 19 ~Stephen Ezell, vice president and global innovation policy @ ITIF, BS Georgetown School of Foreign Service. Nigel Cory, associate director covering trade policy @ ITIF, MA public policy @ Georgetown. "The Way Forward for Intellectual Property Internationally," Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, 4-25-2019, accessed 8-25-2021, https://itif.org/publications/2019/04/25/way-forward-intellectual-property-internationally~~ HWIC IPRs Strengthen Innovation Intellectual property rights power innovation. For instance, analyzing the AND for foreign direct investment which in turn also leads to economic growth."56
Biopharmaceutical innovation is key to prevent future pandemics and bioterror
Marjanovic and Feijao 20 ~Sonja Marjanovic Ph.D., Judge Business School, University of Cambridge. Carolina Feijao, Ph.D. in biochemistry, University of Cambridge; M.Sc. in quantitative biology, Imperial College London; B.Sc. in biology, University of Lisbon. "How to Best Enable Pharma Innovation Beyond the COVID-19 Crisis," RAND Corporation, 05-2020, accessed 8-8-2021, https://www.rand.org/pubs/perspectives/PEA407-1.html~~ HWIC As key actors in the healthcare innovation landscape, pharmaceutical and life sciences companies have AND such public health threats to an even greater extent under improved innovation conditions.
That causes extinction, which outweighs.
Millett and Snyder-Beattie '17. Millett, Ph.D., Senior Research Fellow, Future of Humanity Institute, University of Oxford; and Snyder-Beattie, M.S., Director of Research, Future of Humanity Institute, University of Oxford. 08-01-2017. "Existential Risk and Cost-Effective Biosecurity," Health Security, 15(4), PubMed In the decades to come, advanced bioweapons could threaten human existence. Although the AND and Japan using plague to cause an epidemic in China during WWII.27
Counterplan Text - Resolved: The member nations of the World Trade Organization ought to
eliminate intellectual property protections for medicines except for orphan drugs.
prioritize distribution of orphan drugs to the Global South.
Orphan drug legislation is specifically key to stimulate research into rare diseases
Horganet. al 20 D, Moss B, Boccia S, Genuardi M, Gajewski M, Capurso G, Fenaux P, Gulbis B, Pellegrini M, Mañú Pereira M, M, Gutiérrez Valle V, Gutiérrez Ibarluzea I, Kent A, Cattaneo I, Jagielska B, Belina I, Tumiene B, Ward A, Papaluca M: Time for Change? The Why, What and How of Promoting Innovation to Tackle Rare Diseases – Is It Time to Update the EU's Orphan Regulation? And if so, What Should be Changed? Biomed Hub 2020;5:1-11. doi: 10.1159/000509272 https://www.karger.com/Article/Fulltext/509272~~#sid The European Union's (EU) Regulation (EC) No. 141/2000 AND was developed explicitly to support efforts in this field of innovation ~12~.
Orphan diseases require time intensive care and affect millions.
Lancet 19 ~Lancet, 2-1-2019, accessed on 9-6-2021, The Lancet Diabetes and Endocrinology, "Spotlight on rare diseases", https://www.thelancet.com/journals/landia/article/PIIS2213-8587(19)30006-3/fulltext~~//sid Feb 28 is Rare Disease Day, the theme of which this year is " AND present in adulthood and children surviving rare diseases eventually transition to adult care.
Rare diseases disproportionately affect people of color
Text: The People's Republic of China should offer Chinese developed vaccines and medical technology related to COVID-19 to the world for free.
The CP massively ramps up Chinese "vaccine diplomacy" which solves the case
Juecheng and Yuwei 8-13-21 (Zhao and Hu, https://www.globaltimes.cn/page/202108/1231387.shtml) One of China's most valued contributions to the global fair accessibility to COVID-19 AND production, boosting fair distribution, and licensing local production in more countries.
Successful vaccine diplomacy is key to overall Chinese Soft Power
Huang, PhD, 3-11-21 (YANZHONG HUANG is Senior Fellow for Global Health at the Council on Foreign Relations, a Professor at Seton Hall University's School of Diplomacy and International Relations, and Director of the school's Center for Global Health Studies. https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/china/2021-03-11/vaccine-diplomacy-paying-china ) Vaccines have had a place in diplomacy since the Cold War era. The country AND . In reality, Chinese vaccines are often priced higher than $10.
Chinese leadership solves extinction.
Shen Yamei 18, Deputy Director and Associate Research Fellow of Department for American Studies, China Institute of International Studies, 1-9-2018, "Probing into the "Chinese Solution" for the Transformation of Global Governance," CAIFC, http://www.caifc.org.cn/en/content.aspx?id=4491 As the world is in a period of great development, transformation and adjustment, AND , refugees, climate change and public hygiene by debt forgiveness and assistance.
That means the Aff has to annul IP protections in their entirety, they can't just modify it.
2~ Violation – They "delay enforcement" which is a modification, not a complete annulment
3~ Standards –
a~ Neg Ground – Core Neg Generics like Innovation and Biotech Heg are predicated on scope of effect – minor modifications in how long a patent lasts for or what it effects allows the 1AR to minimize our links to zero which destroys being Neg on a Topic w/ very little Generic Ground.
b~ Limits – Allowing Affs to make patent modifications explodes Aff ground by three-fold because for all four intellectual property protections for every medicine MULTIPLIED by different time modifications, different scope modifications which makes predictable preparation and in-depth clash impossible.
3
Climate Patents and Innovation high now and solving Warming but patent waivers set a dangerous precedent for appropriations - the mere threat is sufficient is enough to kill investment.
Brand 5-26, Melissa. "Trips Ip Waiver Could Establish Dangerous Precedent for Climate Change and Other Biotech Sectors." IPWatchdog.com | Patents and Patent Law, 26 May 2021, www.ipwatchdog.com/2021/05/26/trips-ip-waiver-establish-dangerous-precedent-climate-change-biotech-sectors/id=133964/. sid The biotech industry is making remarkable advances towards climate change solutions, and it is AND is unlikely they will continue to invest at the current and required levels.
Climate change destroys the world.
Specktor 19 ~Brandon writes about the science of everyday life for Live Science, and previously for Reader's Digest magazine, where he served as an editor for five years~ 6-4-2019, "Human Civilization Will Crumble by 2050 If We Don't Stop Climate Change Now, New Paper Claims," livescience, https://www.livescience.com/65633-climate-change-dooms-humans-by-2050.html Justin The current climate crisis, they say, is larger and more complex than any AND and perhaps "the end of human global civilization as we know it."
10/9/21
SO - T Covid Medicines
Tournament: JW Patterson | Round: 3 | Opponent: Harvard-Westlake IC | Judge: Lawson Hudson ====Interp – the affirmative must defend a reduction of IP on a medicine. ====
===="medicines" treat or cure, whereas vaccines prevent – o/w on specificity since it's about the COVID vaccine==== Vecchio 7/22 (Christopher Vecchio, ~CFA, Senior Strategist,~, 7-22-2021, "Delta Variant Concerns Won't Cripple Markets, US Economy", DailyFX, accessed: 8-9-2021, https://www.dailyfx.com/forex/video/daily_news_report/2021/07/22/market-minutes-delta-variant-concerns-wont-cripple-markets-us-economy.html) ajs Let's stick to the facts. The COVID-19 vaccines are not medicines, AND bulletproof, they dramatically increase the odds of surviving an adverse event.s
Violation – their advantage area is about vaccines which means either a. they solve nothing and vote neg on presumption because vaccines aren't "COVID-19 medicines" or b. they violate
Negate –
1~ Limits – expanding the topic to preventative treatment or medical interventions allows anything from surgery to mosquito repellent to prevent malaria. Destroys core generics like innovation which are exclusive to disease curing – core of the topic is about proprietary information.
Voters:
Drop the debater – they have a 7-6 rebuttal advantage and the 2ar to make args I can't respond to,
Use competing interps reasonability invites arbitrary judge intervention since we don't know your bs meter,
No RVIs –illogical – you shouldn't win for being fair – it's a litmus test for engaging in substance,
Comes first – indicts the 1ac – any potential neg abuse was caused by aff abuse
10/9/21
SO - TT
Tournament: Yale | Round: 2 | Opponent: Valley RT | Judge: Allison Aldridge The role of the ballot is to determine whether the resolution is a true or false statement –
anything else moots 7 minutes of the nc – their framing collapses since you must say it is true that a world is better than another before you adopt it. They justify substantive skews since there will always be a more correct side of the issue but we compensate for flaws in the lit. Scalar methods like comparison increases intervention – the persuasion of certain DA or advantages sway decisions – T/F binary is descriptive and technical. Negate because either the aff is true meaning its bad for us to clash w/ it because it turns us into Fake News people OR it’s not and it’s a lie that you can’t vote on for ethics no 1ar arguments bc they require intervention to evaluate them against the nc a priori's 1st – even worlds framing requires ethics that begin from a priori principles like reason or pleasure so we control the internal link to functional debates. Truth Testing comes before theory because it questions the validity of theory and your ability to test its true which means it’s a procedural framing question of what arguments should look like. The ballot says vote aff or neg based on a topic – five dictionaries define to negate as to deny the truth of and affirm as to prove true so it's constitutive and jurisdictional. I denied the truth of the resolution by disagreeing with the aff which means I've met my burden.
Negate – 1 member is “a part or organ of the body, especially a limb” but an organ can’t have obligations 2 of is to “expressing an age” but the rez doesn’t delineate a length of time 3 the is “denoting a disease or affliction” but the WTO isn’t a disease 4 to is to “expressing motion in the direction of (a particular location)” but the rez doesn’t have a location 5 reduce is to “(of a person) lose weight, typically by dieting” but IP doesn’t have a body to lose weight. 6 for is “in place of” but medicines aren’t replacing IP. 7 medicine is “(especially among some North American Indian peoples) a spell, charm, or fetish believed to have healing, protective, or other power” but you can’t have IP for a spell.
8 Good Samaritan Paradox -- affirming negates because in order to say you want to fix x problem, that assumes x problem exists in the first place, thus eliminating nukes presupposes nukes exist which means negation is a prior question 9 Zeno’s Paradox – motion is impossible, because moving half way causes half more and half more which is infinitely regressive and means elimination of arsenals is logically impossible
10 The holographic principle is the most reasonable conclusion Stromberg 15Joseph Stromberg- “Some physicists believe we're living in a giant hologram — and it's not that far-fetched” https://www.vox.com/2015/6/29/8847863/holographic-principle-universe-theory-physics Vox. June 29th 2015 War Room Debate AI Some physicists actually believe that the universe we live in might be a hologram. The idea isn't that the universe is some sort of fake simulation out of The Matrix, but rather that even though we appear to live in a three-dimensional universe, it might only have two dimensions. It's called the holographic principle. The thinking goes like this: Some distant two-dimensional surface contains all the data needed to fully describe our world — and much like in a hologram, this data is projected to appear in three dimensions. Like the characters on a TV screen, we live on a flat surface that happens to look like it has depth. It might sound absurd. But when physicists assume it's true in their calculations, all sorts of big physics problems — such as the nature of black holes and the reconciling of gravity and quantum mechanics — become much simpler to solve. In short, the laws of physics seem to make more sense when written in two dimensions than in three. "It's not considered some wild speculation among most theoretical physicists," says Leonard Susskind, the Stanford physicist who first formally defined the idea decades ago. "It's become a working, everyday tool to solve problems in physics." But there's an important distinction to be made here. There's no direct evidence that our universe actually is a two-dimensional hologram. These calculations aren't the same as a mathematical proof. Rather, they're intriguing suggestions that our universe could be a hologram. And as of yet, not all physicists believe we have a good way of testing the idea experimentally. 11 Paradox of tolerance- to be completely open to the aff we must exclude perspectives that wouldn’t be open to the aff which means it’s impossible to have complete tolerance for an idea since that tolerance relies on excluding a perspective. 12 Decision Making Paradox- in order to decide to do the affirmative we need a decision-making procedure to enact it, vote for it, and to determine it is a good decision. But to chose a decision-making procedure requires another meta level decision making procedure leading to infinite regress since every decision requires another decision to chose how to make a decision.
Permissibility Negates A aff has burden of proof and any eeason they’re wrong negates
B you believe statements are false until proven true which is why you don’t believe in things like simulations and demons
Reject 1ar Theory and independent voting issues as reasons to reject the team, the 1ar by JD cannot have overview responses because it allows them to avoid line by line engagement, must concede truth testing so we learn the value of debating truth and falsity and come to an objective conclusion a. 7 - 6 time skew means they have a structural advantage b. No 3nr, so 2ar gets to weigh however they want c. Judges are more likely to by 2a arguments as they are the last speech d. Too many theory flows make it impossible to test the aff e. You get a 2-1 speech advantage f. We only get 2 speeches of new arguments to deliberate over your shell which isn’t enough time g. there’s no such thing as infinite abuse as NC only has 7 minutes h. 1ar theory is used as a strategic advantage Even if you don’t buy reject it-it’s a reason why its’ drop the arg and reasonability
Evaluate the debate after the 1NC and before the 1ar to limit judge intervention and so we can all do our homework. Evaluating after the 1nc means after my speech you look at your flow and extend all of my arguments because there’s no response so you assume they’re true and vote on the dropped truth testing + definitions bc they prove the aff is incoherent or on log con bc the aff wont happen or theory because it means they were abusive and you need to drop the debater .
9/18/21
SO - WTO Bad DA
Tournament: JW Patterson | Round: 6 | Opponent: Isidore Newman EE | Judge: Nobra, Amanda COVID vaccine debate will kill the WTO, but the aff reverses that instability. Meyer 6-18-21 (David, Senior Writer, https://fortune.com/2021/06/18/wto-covid-vaccines-patents-waiver-south-africa-trips/) The World Trade Organization knows all about crises. Former U.S. President Donald Trump threw a wrench into its core function of resolving trade disputes—a blocker that President Joe Biden has not yet removed—and there is widespread dissatisfaction over the fairness of the global trade rulebook. The 164-country organization, under the fresh leadership of Nigeria's Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, has a lot to fix. However, one crisis is more pressing than the others: the battle over COVID-19 vaccines, and whether the protection of their patents and other intellectual property should be temporarily lifted to boost production and end the pandemic sooner rather than later. According to some of those pushing for the waiver—which was originally proposed last year by India and South Africa—the WTO's future rests on what happens next. "The credibility of the WTO will depend on its ability to find a meaningful outcome on this issue that truly ramps-up and diversifies production," says Xolelwa Mlumbi-Peter, South Africa's ambassador to the WTO. "Final nail in the coffin" The Geneva-based WTO isn't an organization with power, as such—it's a framework within which countries make big decisions about trade, generally by consensus. It's supposed to be the forum where disputes get settled, because all its members have signed up to the same rules. And one of its most important rulebooks is the Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights, or TRIPS, which sprang to life alongside the WTO in 1995. The WTO's founding agreement allows for rules to be waived in exceptional circumstances, and indeed this has happened before: its members agreed in 2003 to waive TRIPS obligations that were blocking the importation of cheap, generic drugs into developing countries that lack manufacturing capacity. (That waiver was effectively made permanent in 2017.) Consensus is the key here. Although the failure to reach consensus on a waiver could be overcome with a 75 supermajority vote by the WTO's membership, this would be an unprecedented and seismic event. In the case of the COVID-19 vaccine IP waiver, it would mean standing up to the European Union, and Germany in particular, as well as countries such as Canada and the U.K.—the U.S. recently flipped from opposing the idea of a waiver to supporting it, as did France. It's a dispute between countries, but the result will be on the WTO as a whole, say waiver advocates. "If, in the face of one of humanity's greatest challenges in a century, the WTO functionally becomes an obstacle as in contrast to part of the solution, I think it could be the final nail in the coffin" for the organization, says Lori Wallach, the founder of Public Citizen's Global Trade Watch, a U.S. campaigning group that focuses on the WTO and trade agreements. "If the TRIPS waiver is successful, and people see the WTO as being part of the solution—saving lives and livelihoods—it could create goodwill and momentum to address what are still daunting structural problems." Those problems are legion. Reform needs Top of the list is the WTO's Appellate Body, which hears appeals in members' trade disputes. It's a pivotal part of the international trade system, but Trump—incensed at decisions taken against the U.S. —blocked appointments to its seven-strong panel as judges retired. The body became completely paralyzed at the end of 2019, when two judges' terms ended and the panel no longer had the three-judge quorum it needs to rule on appeals. Anyone who hoped the advent of the Biden administration would change matters was disappointed earlier this year when the U.S. rejected a European proposal to fill the vacancies. "The United States continues to have systemic concerns with the appellate body," it said. "As members know, the United States has raised and explained its systemic concerns for more than 16 years and across multiple U.S. administrations." At her confirmation hearing in February, current U.S. Trade Representative Katherine Tai reiterated those concerns—she said the appellate body had "overstepped its authority and erred in interpreting WTO agreements in a number of cases, to the detriment of the United States and other WTO members," and accused it of dragging its heels in settling disputes. "Reforms are needed to ensure that the underlying causes of such problems do not resurface," Tai said. "While the U.S. has been engaging with the WTO it hasn't indicated it would move quickly on allowing appointments to the Appellate Body," says Bryan Mercurio, an economic-law professor at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, who opposes the vaccine waiver. "This is not a good sign. In terms of WTO governance, it's a much more important step than supporting negotiations on an intellectual property waiver." It's not just the U.S. that wants to see reform at the WTO. In a major policy document published in February, the EU said negotiations had failed to modernize the organization's rules, the dispute-resolution system was broken, the monitoring of countries' trade policies was ineffective, and—crucially—"the trade relationship between the U.S. and China, two of the three largest WTO members, is currently largely managed outside WTO disciplines." China is one of the key problems here. It became a WTO member in 2001 but, although this entailed significant liberalization of the Chinese economy, it did not become a full market economy. As the European Commission put it in February: "The level at which China has opened its markets does not correspond to its weight in the global economy, and the state continues to exert a decisive influence on China's economic environment with consequent competitive distortions that cannot be sufficiently addressed by current WTO rules." "China is operating from what it sees as a position of strength, so it will not be bullied into agreeing to changes which it sees as not in its interests," says Mercurio. China is at loggerheads with the U.S., the EU and others over numerous trade-related issues. Its rivals don't like its policy of demanding that Chinese citizens' data is stored on Chinese soil, nor do they approve of how foreign investors often have to partner with Chinese firms to access the country's market, in a way that leads to the transfer of technological knowhow. They also oppose China's industrial subsidies. Mercurio thinks China may agree to reforms on some of these issues, particularly regarding subsidies, but "only if it is offered something in return." All these problems won't go away if the WTO manages to come up with a TRIPS waiver for COVID-19 vaccines and medical supplies, Wallach concedes. "But," she adds, "the will and the good faith to tackle these challenges is increased enormously if the WTO has the experience of being part of the solution, not just an obstacle." Wallach points to a statement released earlier this month by Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) trade ministers, which called for urgent discussions on the waiver. "The WTO must demonstrate that global trade rules can help address the human catastrophe of the COVID-19 pandemic and facilitate the recovery," the statement read in its section about WTO reform. Okonjo-Iweala's role The WTO's new director general, whose route to the top was unblocked in early 2021 with the demise of the Trump administration, is certainly keen to fix the problems that contributed to the early departure of her predecessor, Brazil's Robert Azevedo. "We must act now to get all our ambassadors to the table to negotiate a text" on the issue of an IP waiver for COVID vaccines, Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, director general of the World Trade Organization, has said. Dursun Aydemir—Anadolu/Bloomberg/Getty Images Earlier this week, when the U.S. and EU agreed a five-year ceasefire in a long-running dispute over Boeing and Airbus aircraft subsidies, Okonjo-Iweala tweeted: "With political will, we can solve even the most intractable problems." However, Mercurio is skeptical about her stewardship having much of an effect on the WTO's reform process. "Upon taking over she stated it was time for delegations to speak to each other and not simply past each other, but at the recent General Counsel meeting delegations simply read prepared statements in what some have described as the worst meeting ever," he says. "On the other hand, Ngozi is very much someone who will actively seek solutions to problems, and in this way different to her predecessor. If the role of mediator is welcomed, she could have an impact not in starting discussions but in getting deals over the finish line." A spokesperson for the WTO Secretariat declined to offer comment on Mlumbi-Peter and Wallach's suggestions that the organization's credibility rests on the vaccine patent waiver issue, but pointed to a May speech in which Okonjo-Iweala said the WTO could help tackle vaccine supply chain monitoring and transparency, helping manufacturers scale up production, and creating a more geographically diversified manufacturing base. In her speech, the WTO chief also said members "must address issues related to technology transfer, knowhow and intellectual property," including the waiver proposal. "We must act now to get all our ambassadors to the table to negotiate a text," she said. The 1AC evidence isolates that each of the problems they mention aren’t solely caused by IP, but rather expressions of the overarching system of capitalism – thus collapsing the whole system is key. WTO collapse solves extinction Hilary 15 John Hilary 2015 “Want to know how to really tackle climate change? Pull the plug on the World Trade Organisation” http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/want-to-know-how-to-really-tackle-climate-change-pull-the-plug-on-the-world-trade-organisation-a6774391.html (Executive Director, War on Want)Elmer Yet this grandiose plan soon fell victim to its own ambition. The WTO’s first summit after the launch of the Doha Round collapsed in acrimonious failure. The next was marked by pitched battles in the streets of Hong Kong as riot police fought Asian farmers desperately trying to save their livelihoods from the WTO’s free trade agenda. The WTO slipped into a coma. Government ministers must decide this week whether to turn off its life support. The answer is surely yes. It was the WTO’s poisonous cocktail of trade expansion and market deregulation that led to the economic crisis of 2008. Years of export-led growth resulted in a crisis of overproduction that could only be sustained with mountains of debt. The parallel deregulation of financial services meant that this debt soon turned out to be toxic, and the world’s banking system went into freefall. Nor is the WTO fit for purpose on ecological grounds. If last week’s climate talks in Paris taught us anything, it is that we must rethink the model of ever-expanding production and consumption in order to avoid planetary meltdown. Global capitalism may need limitless expansion in order to survive, but the planet is already at the very limits of what it can take. The choice is ours. Worst of all, it is the WTO’s ideology of unrestricted trade and corporate domination that lies behind all the bilateral trade deals that are proliferating at the moment, including the infamous Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP). We need a radically different model of regulated trade and controlled investment if we are to have any chance of breaking the cycle of economic and ecological crisis. For the planet to survive, the WTO must die.
10/10/21
SO - WTO Bad DA
Tournament: JW Patterson | Round: 6 | Opponent: Isidore Newman EE | Judge: Nobra, Amanda COVID vaccine debate will kill the WTO, but the aff reverses that instability. Meyer 6-18-21 (David, Senior Writer, https://fortune.com/2021/06/18/wto-covid-vaccines-patents-waiver-south-africa-trips/) The World Trade Organization knows all about crises. Former U.S. President Donald Trump threw a wrench into its core function of resolving trade disputes—a blocker that President Joe Biden has not yet removed—and there is widespread dissatisfaction over the fairness of the global trade rulebook. The 164-country organization, under the fresh leadership of Nigeria's Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, has a lot to fix. However, one crisis is more pressing than the others: the battle over COVID-19 vaccines, and whether the protection of their patents and other intellectual property should be temporarily lifted to boost production and end the pandemic sooner rather than later. According to some of those pushing for the waiver—which was originally proposed last year by India and South Africa—the WTO's future rests on what happens next. "The credibility of the WTO will depend on its ability to find a meaningful outcome on this issue that truly ramps-up and diversifies production," says Xolelwa Mlumbi-Peter, South Africa's ambassador to the WTO. "Final nail in the coffin" The Geneva-based WTO isn't an organization with power, as such—it's a framework within which countries make big decisions about trade, generally by consensus. It's supposed to be the forum where disputes get settled, because all its members have signed up to the same rules. And one of its most important rulebooks is the Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights, or TRIPS, which sprang to life alongside the WTO in 1995. The WTO's founding agreement allows for rules to be waived in exceptional circumstances, and indeed this has happened before: its members agreed in 2003 to waive TRIPS obligations that were blocking the importation of cheap, generic drugs into developing countries that lack manufacturing capacity. (That waiver was effectively made permanent in 2017.) Consensus is the key here. Although the failure to reach consensus on a waiver could be overcome with a 75 supermajority vote by the WTO's membership, this would be an unprecedented and seismic event. In the case of the COVID-19 vaccine IP waiver, it would mean standing up to the European Union, and Germany in particular, as well as countries such as Canada and the U.K.—the U.S. recently flipped from opposing the idea of a waiver to supporting it, as did France. It's a dispute between countries, but the result will be on the WTO as a whole, say waiver advocates. "If, in the face of one of humanity's greatest challenges in a century, the WTO functionally becomes an obstacle as in contrast to part of the solution, I think it could be the final nail in the coffin" for the organization, says Lori Wallach, the founder of Public Citizen's Global Trade Watch, a U.S. campaigning group that focuses on the WTO and trade agreements. "If the TRIPS waiver is successful, and people see the WTO as being part of the solution—saving lives and livelihoods—it could create goodwill and momentum to address what are still daunting structural problems." Those problems are legion. Reform needs Top of the list is the WTO's Appellate Body, which hears appeals in members' trade disputes. It's a pivotal part of the international trade system, but Trump—incensed at decisions taken against the U.S. —blocked appointments to its seven-strong panel as judges retired. The body became completely paralyzed at the end of 2019, when two judges' terms ended and the panel no longer had the three-judge quorum it needs to rule on appeals. Anyone who hoped the advent of the Biden administration would change matters was disappointed earlier this year when the U.S. rejected a European proposal to fill the vacancies. "The United States continues to have systemic concerns with the appellate body," it said. "As members know, the United States has raised and explained its systemic concerns for more than 16 years and across multiple U.S. administrations." At her confirmation hearing in February, current U.S. Trade Representative Katherine Tai reiterated those concerns—she said the appellate body had "overstepped its authority and erred in interpreting WTO agreements in a number of cases, to the detriment of the United States and other WTO members," and accused it of dragging its heels in settling disputes. "Reforms are needed to ensure that the underlying causes of such problems do not resurface," Tai said. "While the U.S. has been engaging with the WTO it hasn't indicated it would move quickly on allowing appointments to the Appellate Body," says Bryan Mercurio, an economic-law professor at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, who opposes the vaccine waiver. "This is not a good sign. In terms of WTO governance, it's a much more important step than supporting negotiations on an intellectual property waiver." It's not just the U.S. that wants to see reform at the WTO. In a major policy document published in February, the EU said negotiations had failed to modernize the organization's rules, the dispute-resolution system was broken, the monitoring of countries' trade policies was ineffective, and—crucially—"the trade relationship between the U.S. and China, two of the three largest WTO members, is currently largely managed outside WTO disciplines." China is one of the key problems here. It became a WTO member in 2001 but, although this entailed significant liberalization of the Chinese economy, it did not become a full market economy. As the European Commission put it in February: "The level at which China has opened its markets does not correspond to its weight in the global economy, and the state continues to exert a decisive influence on China's economic environment with consequent competitive distortions that cannot be sufficiently addressed by current WTO rules." "China is operating from what it sees as a position of strength, so it will not be bullied into agreeing to changes which it sees as not in its interests," says Mercurio. China is at loggerheads with the U.S., the EU and others over numerous trade-related issues. Its rivals don't like its policy of demanding that Chinese citizens' data is stored on Chinese soil, nor do they approve of how foreign investors often have to partner with Chinese firms to access the country's market, in a way that leads to the transfer of technological knowhow. They also oppose China's industrial subsidies. Mercurio thinks China may agree to reforms on some of these issues, particularly regarding subsidies, but "only if it is offered something in return." All these problems won't go away if the WTO manages to come up with a TRIPS waiver for COVID-19 vaccines and medical supplies, Wallach concedes. "But," she adds, "the will and the good faith to tackle these challenges is increased enormously if the WTO has the experience of being part of the solution, not just an obstacle." Wallach points to a statement released earlier this month by Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) trade ministers, which called for urgent discussions on the waiver. "The WTO must demonstrate that global trade rules can help address the human catastrophe of the COVID-19 pandemic and facilitate the recovery," the statement read in its section about WTO reform. Okonjo-Iweala's role The WTO's new director general, whose route to the top was unblocked in early 2021 with the demise of the Trump administration, is certainly keen to fix the problems that contributed to the early departure of her predecessor, Brazil's Robert Azevedo. "We must act now to get all our ambassadors to the table to negotiate a text" on the issue of an IP waiver for COVID vaccines, Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, director general of the World Trade Organization, has said. Dursun Aydemir—Anadolu/Bloomberg/Getty Images Earlier this week, when the U.S. and EU agreed a five-year ceasefire in a long-running dispute over Boeing and Airbus aircraft subsidies, Okonjo-Iweala tweeted: "With political will, we can solve even the most intractable problems." However, Mercurio is skeptical about her stewardship having much of an effect on the WTO's reform process. "Upon taking over she stated it was time for delegations to speak to each other and not simply past each other, but at the recent General Counsel meeting delegations simply read prepared statements in what some have described as the worst meeting ever," he says. "On the other hand, Ngozi is very much someone who will actively seek solutions to problems, and in this way different to her predecessor. If the role of mediator is welcomed, she could have an impact not in starting discussions but in getting deals over the finish line." A spokesperson for the WTO Secretariat declined to offer comment on Mlumbi-Peter and Wallach's suggestions that the organization's credibility rests on the vaccine patent waiver issue, but pointed to a May speech in which Okonjo-Iweala said the WTO could help tackle vaccine supply chain monitoring and transparency, helping manufacturers scale up production, and creating a more geographically diversified manufacturing base. In her speech, the WTO chief also said members "must address issues related to technology transfer, knowhow and intellectual property," including the waiver proposal. "We must act now to get all our ambassadors to the table to negotiate a text," she said. The 1AC evidence isolates that each of the problems they mention aren’t solely caused by IP, but rather expressions of the overarching system of capitalism – thus collapsing the whole system is key. WTO collapse solves extinction Hilary 15 John Hilary 2015 “Want to know how to really tackle climate change? Pull the plug on the World Trade Organisation” http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/want-to-know-how-to-really-tackle-climate-change-pull-the-plug-on-the-world-trade-organisation-a6774391.html (Executive Director, War on Want)Elmer Yet this grandiose plan soon fell victim to its own ambition. The WTO’s first summit after the launch of the Doha Round collapsed in acrimonious failure. The next was marked by pitched battles in the streets of Hong Kong as riot police fought Asian farmers desperately trying to save their livelihoods from the WTO’s free trade agenda. The WTO slipped into a coma. Government ministers must decide this week whether to turn off its life support. The answer is surely yes. It was the WTO’s poisonous cocktail of trade expansion and market deregulation that led to the economic crisis of 2008. Years of export-led growth resulted in a crisis of overproduction that could only be sustained with mountains of debt. The parallel deregulation of financial services meant that this debt soon turned out to be toxic, and the world’s banking system went into freefall. Nor is the WTO fit for purpose on ecological grounds. If last week’s climate talks in Paris taught us anything, it is that we must rethink the model of ever-expanding production and consumption in order to avoid planetary meltdown. Global capitalism may need limitless expansion in order to survive, but the planet is already at the very limits of what it can take. The choice is ours. Worst of all, it is the WTO’s ideology of unrestricted trade and corporate domination that lies behind all the bilateral trade deals that are proliferating at the moment, including the infamous Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP). We need a radically different model of regulated trade and controlled investment if we are to have any chance of breaking the cycle of economic and ecological crisis. For the planet to survive, the WTO must die.
The 1AC evidence isolates that each of the problems they mention aren't solely caused by IP, but rather expressions of the overarching system of capitalism – thus collapsing the whole system is key.