Please let me know if you don’t have access to any articles/books I’ve got cards disclosed from and I’ll send you the full text! If you need any of my speech docs, please let me know and i’ll send ’em your way
*Note: My cites are not working all time so I will osource everything but if you need full text please let me know!
Pronouns: he/him
9/24/21
MARAPR - DA - Peace journalism
Tournament: TFA State | Round: 3 | Opponent: La Vernia RB | Judge: Michael Roets Peace Journalism prioritizes advocacy of peace over journalistic objectivity and is key to conflict prevention. De Michelis 18, Silvia. Silvia De Michelis is a PhD student in Peace Studies and International Development, University of Bradford, UK. “Peace Journalism in Theory and Practice.” E-International Relations, 23 Dec. 2018, https://www.e-ir.info/2018/12/23/peace-journalism-in-theory-and-practice/. GHS-AA This subject is constantly debated, especially in relation to the most frequent critique against peace journalism which considers it as a form of advocacy towards a particular cause: that of peace, in breach of the principle of journalistic objectivity. As a counter-argument to this critique, Christian et al.’s theory of the media proves useful to explain why peace journalism is needed and how it can be operationalised. Within the practice of journalism, they inscribe ‘the social responsibility tradition’, which “retains freedom as the basic principle for organizing public communication, including the media” (Christian, Glasser, McQuail, Nordenstreng and White, 2009: 24), and legitimises the promotion of certain moral givens within the public discourse, such as the protection of air, water and the environment for the future existence of the human race and other living beings. These moral obligations are, in fact, generally accepted within most advanced societies. Within the field of peace journalism ‘peace’ – intended as an end – and ‘nonviolence’ – intended as a means or practice – are considered as both the organizing principles of news-making and the fundamental moral givens all societies should aim towards, nationally and globally, in line with the view expressed by Christian et al. (ibid.). It is for this reason that peace journalism can be approached as an evolving profession as well as an analytical model for scholarly research of media representations (or mis-representations). It constitutes a medium for exploring the aspects and dynamics of physical, cultural, and structural violence, exploration that is considered vital for the orientation of knowledge and production of actions, which are needed to build more peaceful societies. Inscribed into news-making are the selectivity and framing of news. In the field of journalism studies “to frame is to select some aspect of a perceived reality and make them more salient in a communicating text, in such a way as to promote a particular problem definition, causal interpretation, moral evaluation, and/or treatment recommendation” (Entman, 1993: 51). Therefore, according to peace journalism scholars (Lynch, 2014; Seaga Shaw, Lynch and Hackett, 2011; Keeble, Tulloch and Zollmann, 2010; Lynch and Galtung, 2010; Dente Ross and Tehranian, 2009; Shinar and Kempf, 2007; Lynch and McGoldrick, 2005), nonviolent initiatives need to be reported to foster peaceful solutions of conflict and de-saturate the collective imaginary from the sustained belief that violence and war are the only viable responses to it. Peace scholar John Lederach states in this regard that: “There are people who have a vision for peace, emerging often from their own experience of conflict and pain” which are often unheard “because they do not represent official power … or because they are written off as biased” (1997: 94). The traditional conceptualisation of journalism considers the world as a set of ready-made facts, whose building up process and meaning are often ignored, or excessively simplified. Instead, within the field of foreign intervention for example, a critical examination of the dominant interpretation of what journalists observe should be reported in a way that takes into consideration the implementation of nonviolent practices for the solution of conflicts. With regards to war reporting, Paul Mason reports in The Guardian: We are besieged now by images of the dead in conflict, usually published by people who believe it will either deter killing, expose the perpetrators or illustrate war’s futility and brutality. It is an old illusion …. Many Germans in the 1920s and 30s came to believe, despite the horrific photos, that the war had embodied the noblest and most exhilarating aspects of human life; and that warfare represented the ultimate in technological modernity and moral freedom. This remains a more dangerous myth than the idea that war is harmless, fun or heroic (2014: 5). In Practice: The Case of Libya Since the start of the 21st century, Western powers have been entrenched in a series of foreign interventions – Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya to name but a few – that are politically motivated and considered necessary to pursue the democratic aspirations of the most powerful states that hold a permanent status within the UN Security Council. The politics of foreign interventionism has been hugely debated with regards to Libya, and even more strongly, Syria. For the purpose of this article, I will limit to espouse why the 2011 intervention in Libya can be regarded as an interesting case to further promote peace journalism as an analytical tool for conflict reporting and for questioning the necessity and effectiveness of military force whilst reporting accurately. In December 2010, turmoil in Tunisia and Egypt gave rise to the Arab Spring that extended across 2011. These events were regarded by Western powers with mixed feelings of excitement – because of their promise to substitute dictatorship with democracy – and fear – because of their unpredictability (Jenkins, 2015). Moreover, after the fiasco in Rwanda, Iraq and Afghanistan, the international community needed to implement a more refined foreign policy doctrine to regulate cases of gross human rights violations in failed or failing states. To fulfil this, the ‘Responsibility to Protect’ doctrine (ICISS, 2001), usually abbreviated to R2P, was specifically invoked by UN Secretary Ban Ki-Moon (2011) in the context of the civil uprising in Libya. In fact, in the aftermath of the starting of the civil unrest in Libya, UN Security Council approved resolution 1970 (S/RES/1970, 2011) on 26th February 2011, condemning the lethal force used by Gaddafi against protesters in Benghazi. This resolution was followed by resolution 1973 (S/RES/1973, 2011), which authorised “all necessary means” to protect civilians only 20 days later. With the latter resolution, the UN Security Council imposed a no-fly zone over Libya led by NATO. The NATO operation was called ‘Odyssey Dawn’ and the result of it was the bombing and killing of thousands of civilians. The operation in Libya is a very interesting case study for observing the role journalism plays in conflict reporting as well as the role that peace journalism can play in contributing to reinforce a type of narrative that doesn’t promote military actions with humanitarian purposes. In fact, the official document that established the R2P doctrine acknowledges the role that the media play in heightening public awareness over conflicts worldwide. The phrasing of the document specifies, indeed: The media have a particularly important role in conflict prevention, in particular in alerting policy makers – and the public opinion that influences them – to the catastrophic consequences that so often flow from no action being taken. More immediate and more graphic stories will always tend to take precedence, but there is much more that can and should be done to … prod decision makers into appropriate action (ICISS, 2011: 26). However, the R2P report further states: Proper conduct of an appropriate public information campaign is not only critical to maintaining public support for an intervention but also to maintaining the cohesion of the coalition (ICISS, 2001: 64). In so doing, the ICISS report entrusts public information – the media, which should rest on the principle of objectivity and impartiality – with a supportive mandate directed at benefitting the coalition that reflects the UN Security Council composition, a political body acting through military actions and, therefore, a directly involved part of the conflict. It’s in the opinion of who writes that the apparent irreconcilability between the paradigms through which the media should operate – objectivity and impartiality – and the wording of the ICISS designates public information with propagandistic features. Moreover, being military means so predominantly used by the international community in cases of ‘humanitarian intervention’, the narrative produced by the media will necessarily be supportive of the paradigm ‘peace through violent means’. In this configuration, little space is left to the production of narratives at the mainstream level that reinforce a discourse oriented at the search for ‘peace through nonviolent means’. Peace Journalism has empirically promoted peace and decreased conflict. Brastic, Vladimir, and Lisa Schirch 07. “Why and When to Use the Media for Conflict Prevention and Peacebuilding.” European Centre for Conflict Prevention, Dec. 2007, https://www.sfcg.org/articles/media_for_conflict_prevention.pdf. The media shape what we see and hear about conflict. The perspectives of those who run the media shape stories that are covered. Journalists have opinions and beliefs based on their experiences. Media owners have economic interests; they want to sell their stories and programs to a public who will buy their newspapers or watch their programs. Increasing corporate control over media in some countries also plays a role in controlling the types of stories that get covered and the way stories get framed. Media owners and professionals decide what they think the public or some target audience wants to see and hear. A common journalist principle is this: “If it bleeds, it leads.” That means violent conflict will be headline news, not news of cross-cultural dialogue and understanding. The media mostly covers conflict, not peacebuilding. This tendency to cover conflict and violence distorts reality and leads many people to think that conflict is pervasive and peace is abnormal. Several studies confirm that the impact of the media on conflict is greater than the impact of the media on conflict prevention and peacebuilding.1 Peace journalism scholar Gadi Wolfsfeld notes there is a “fundamental contradiction between the nature of a peace process and news values, the media often play a destructive role in attempts at making peace.”2 Those who run the media tend to favor four values: immediacy, drama, simplicity and ethnocentrism. These values make it difficult to use the media for peace. The chart below, adapted from Wolfsfeld’s work, illustrates the tendency for these values to favor violence rather than peace. The media use the four values identified in the chart to decide what to cover as news, and what makes for entertainment. While many media professionals hold these values, they are likely to be in direct relation to the values of the public at large. The media are, in fact, running a business and as such, need to create a ‘product’ that will sell to customers who share these values. It is important for conflict prevention and peacebuilding practitioners to understand these values and the dynamics of media decision-making on covering ‘peace’ news and entertainment. However, it does not preclude peace practitioners from utilizing the media to promote their own values. Indeed, the media can play very positive roles in conflict prevention and peacebuilding. The media play a wide range of roles in our lives. Some of these roles are constructive and some are destructive. Recognizing the diversity within media professionals is a first step in critically analyzing how best to use the media to support conflict prevention and peacebuilding. Media as Information Provider and Interpreter The media provide people with important information about their environment (e.g. political, cultural, social issues) and respond to more imminent problems (weather, traffic, natural catastrophes, etc.). At least in part, people make decisions about whether to dress for warm or cold, choose political leaders to vote for in elections, and judge other groups in society based on the media. The media interpret events beyond our physical realm and help us make sense of them. With the improvement of technologies and the advancement of new media such as the internet, media plays an increasingly more prominent role in our daily communication and entertainment. For example, the Otpor Movement, developed in 1998 by Serbian students, responded to new restrictions on academic and media freedom with a highly unconventional movement called Otpor (‘resistance’ in Serbian). Otpor developed their own grassroots media campaign to provide information and inspiration to all who resisted the Milosevic government.3 Media as Watchdog The media sometimes acts as a third party ‘watchdog’ who provide feedback to the public on local problems. Media can bring hidden stories out into the public. Investigative reports can surface public problems. For example, a US journalist uncovered and exposed a veteran’s hospital that was dilapidated, rat-infested, and uncaring.4 This highlighted a problem of how US soldiers are treated before and after their time in the US military. In Sierra Leone, a video depicting the serious impacts and extent of sexual violence has instigated discussion on the impact of the civil war in that country. The film, titled Operation Fine Girl: Rape Used as a Weapon of War in Sierra, was produced by human rights activists with the international non-governmental organization WITNESS.5 The film demonstrates how media productions can play an important complementary role alongside other post conflict reconciliation processes to promote awareness of critical social issues and bring them into the public arena so they can be addressed. Media as Gatekeeper The media can also act as a gatekeeper who sets agendas, filters issues and tries to maintain a balance of views. Media like to portray themselves as ‘balanced and fair,’ even when they privately seek to promote a particular ideological set of ideas and limit the public’s exposure to a wide array of information. In 2006, a cartoonist in Denmark created international conflict with his message about Islam. The global tensions prompted extensive analysis on how and when media professionals should act as a gatekeeper to prevent certain expressions that could be deemed humiliating or offensive to some groups. Media as Policymaker The media has influence on policymakers, particularly as they think about how to prevent and respond to violent conflict. The media is also a tool of policymakers to get across their message. Some theorists even claim that CNN has taken over policymaking - at least in humanitarian disaster situations. Images on CNN of genocide, famine, and violence force policymakers to intervene militarily to stop death, even if they do not think it is in the best interest of their country to adopt this policy. In Bosnia, for example, the media played a very important role in motivating the public to press their policymakers to intervene to stop the aggression.6 Media as Diplomat Sometimes the media is used to cover diplomatic initiatives and send messages back and forth between sides of a conflict. While policymakers usually prefer secret negotiations, sometimes there are no direct channels of communication. If one side wants to test reactions to a negotiation proposal, they may send signals and messages to other groups through the media. At times, the news media will invite leaders of opposing groups or nations onto a TV or radio program to talk with each other. The media may help to create bridges among enemies and build confidence needed to open negotiations.7 For example, an American television show Nightline regularly invites two or more people from different sides of a public policy issue to be on the show and dialogue with each other. The host, Ted Koppel, makes a point of trying to find common ground between the two sides. Media as Peace Promotor Media events can be used at the beginning of negotiations to build confidence, facilitate negotiations or break diplomatic deadlocks to create a climate conducive to negotiation. Media events such as press releases, rock concerts, or radio programs can celebrate peace agreements and negotiations. The media events may help to promote and mobilize public support for agreements. For example, in Burundi, Studio Ijambo is attempting to harness the power of radio for constructive purposes. Beginning in 1995, Search for Common Ground set up Studio Ijambo with a team of twenty Hutu and Tutsi journalists to promote dialogue, peace, and reconciliation. Studio Ijambo produces approximately one hundred radio programs per month to create a steady campaign to promote peace.8 Multiple conflict scenarios around the world that peace journalism can prevent. Gonzalez 19. Marvin. The study is an unclassified strategic assessment of how trends will look like in the future for policy analtysts “Global Trends.” Near Future: Tensions Are Rising, Office of the Director of National Intelligence, 2019, www.dni.gov/index.php/global-trends/near-future. GHS-AA An Increasingly Assertive China and Russia. Beijing and Moscow will seek to lock in temporary competitive advantages and to right what they charge are historical wrongs before economic and demographic headwinds further slow their material progress and the West regains its footing. Both China and Russia maintain worldviews in which they are rightfully dominant in their regions and able to shape regional politics and economics to suit their security and material interests. Both have moved aggressively in recent years to exert greater influence in their regions, to contest the US geopolitically, and to force Washington to accept exclusionary regional spheres of influence—a situation that the United States has historically opposed. For example, China views the continuing presence of the US Navy in the Western Pacific, the centrality of US alliances in the region, and US protection of Taiwan as outdated and representative of the continuation of China’s “100 years of humiliation.” Recent Sino-Russian cooperation has been tactical, however, and is likely to return to competition if Beijing jeopardizes Russian interests in Central Asia and as Beijing enjoys more options for cheap energy supply beyond Russia. Moreover, it is not clear whether there is a mutually acceptable border between what China and Russia consider their natural spheres of influence. Meanwhile, India’s growing economic power and profile in the region will further complicate these calculations, as New Delhi navigates relations with Beijing, Moscow, and Washington to protect its own expanding interests. Russian assertiveness will harden anti-Russian views in the Baltics and other parts of Europe, escalating the risk of conflict. Russia will seek, and sometimes feign, international cooperation, while openly challenging norms and rules it perceives as counter to its interests and providing support for leaders of fellow “managed democracies” that encourage resistance to American policies and preferences. Moscow has little stake in the rules of the global economy and can be counted on to take actions that weaken US and European institutional advantages. Moscow will test NATO and European resolve, seeking to undermine Western credibility; it will try to exploit splits between Europe’s north and south and east and west, and to drive a wedge between the United States and the EU. Similarly, Moscow will become more active in the Middle East and those parts of the world in which it believes it can check US influence. Finally, Russia will remain committed to nuclear weapons as a deterrent and as a counter to stronger conventional military forces, as well as its ticket to superpower status. Russian military doctrine purportedly includes the limited use of nuclear weapons in a situation where Russia’s vital interests are at stake to “deescalate” a conflict by demonstrating that continued conventional conflict risks escalating the crisis to a large scale nuclear exchange. In Northeast Asia, growing tensions around the Korean Peninsula are likely, with the possibility of serious confrontation in the coming years. Kim Jong Un is consolidating his grip on power through a combination of patronage and terror and is doubling down on his nuclear and missile programs, developing long-range missiles that may soon threaten the continental United States. Beijing, Seoul, Tokyo, and Washington have a common incentive to manage security risks in Northeast Asia, but a history of warfare and occupation along with current mutual distrust makes cooperation difficult. Continued North Korean provocations, including additional nuclear and missile tests, might worsen stability in the region and prompt neighboring countries to take actions, sometimes unilaterally, to protect their security interests. Kim is determined to secure international recognition of the North as a nucleararmed state, for the purposes of security, prestige, and political legitimacy. Unlike his father and grandfather, he has signaled little interest in participating in talks on denuclearization. He codified the North’s nuclear status in the party constitution in 2012 and reaffirmed it during the Party Congress in 2016. Beijing faces a continuing strategic conundrum about the North. Pyongyang’s behavior both undermines China’s claim that the US military presence in the region is anachronistic and demonstrates Beijing’s lack of influence—or perhaps lack of political will to exert influence—over its neighbor and client. North Korean behavior leads to tightening US alliances, more assertive behavior by US allies, and, on occasion, greater cooperation between those allies themselves—and may lead to a shift in Beijing’s approach to North Korea over time. The decisions before Seoul and Tokyo are significant as well, with both focused intently on maintaining the US security umbrella while improving their own security capabilities. Middle East and North Africa. Virtually all of the region’s trends are going in the wrong direction. Continuing conflict and absence of political and economic reform threatens poverty reduction, the region’s one recent bright spot. Resource dependence and foreign assistance has propped up elites even as it fostered popular dependence on the state by inhibiting markets, employment, and human capital. With oil prices unlikely to recover to levels of the oil boom, most governments will have to limit cash payments and subsidies. Meanwhile, social media has provided new tools for publics to vent frustration. Conservative religious groups— including Muslim Brotherhood affiliates and Shia movements—and ethnically-based organizations like those centered on Kurdish identity are poised to be primary alternatives to ineffective governments in the region. Such groups typically provide social services better than the state and their politics resonate with publics who are generally more conservative and religious than the region’s political and economic elites. Outlook: Left unchecked, current trends will further fragment the region. The influence of extremist Islamist groups is likely to expand, reducing the tolerance for and presence of minorities, setting the stage for additional migration flows. Risks of instability in Arab states such as Egypt, and possibly Saudi Arabia, could tempt rulers to impose control through force—an impulse at odds with countertrends like technology’s empowerment of individuals, freer information flows, and poverty reduction. Alternatively, transition to democracy could provide an attractive model, if it delivers greater stability and inclusive prosperity. Progress on poverty reduction, education, and women’s empowerment in some parts of the region provides momentum for tapping into the growing number of young people that will be coming of working age. Geopolitically, growing humanitarian crises and regional conflict in the Middle East and North Africa will threaten to further undermine the credibility of international dispute resolution and human rights norms. Perceptions in the region’s capitals that Washington is unreliable have invited competition from Russia, and possibly China, and hedging by Arab states regarding US commitments. These perceptions stem from unenforced redlines in Syria, withheld support for Mubarak and other Arab incumbents in 2011, an alleged tilt toward Iran and away from traditional Sunni allies and Israel, and a sense of neglect because of the US rebalance to Asia. Meanwhile, Iran, Israel, and perhaps Turkey are likely to grow in power and influence relative to other states in the region but will remain at odds with each other. Iran’s growing power, nuclear capabilities and aggressive behavior will continue to be a concern for Israel and Gulf Arab states. The sectarian nature of Iranian and Saudi regional competition, which promotes inflammatory rhetoric and allegations of heresy throughout the region, heightens these concerns. Sub-Saharan Africa. Democratic practices have expanded, civil society groups have proliferated, and public demand for better governance has become more urgent. Still, many African states continue to struggle with “big man” rule, patronage politics, and ethnic favoritism. Many leaders remain focused on political survival rather than reform—with some defying term limits. Global economic headwinds also threaten progress by keeping commodity prices low and foreign investment weak. Even some countries that have made progress toward democracy remain fragile and prone to violence accompanying elections. Tensions between Christian and Muslim groups could escalate into conflict. Outlook: During the next five years, growing African populations will become more youthful, urban, mobile, and networked, and better educated—and more demanding of a voice. Rapid urbanization will stress infrastructure and increase visibility of elite corruption— fueling public frustration with services or opportunities. Some 75 to 250 million Africans will experience severe water stress, likely leading to mass migration. Nonetheless, Africa will remain a zone of experimentation by governments, corporations, NGOs and individuals seeking to advance development. The progress of the past two decades—including an expanded middle class, increasingly vibrant civil society, and the spread of democratic institutions—suggests upside potential. South Asia. India will be the world’s fastest growing economy during the next five years as China’s economy cools and growth elsewhere sputters, but internal tensions over inequality and religion will complicate its expansion. New Delhi, however, will continue to offer smaller South Asian countries a stake in India’s economic growth through development assistance and increased connectivity to India’s economy, contributing to India’s broader effort to assert its role as the predominant regional power. Violent extremism, terrorism, and instability will continue to hang over Afghanistan, Pakistan, and the region’s fragile communal relations. The threat of terrorism, from Lashkar-e-Tayyiba (LET), Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), and al-Qa‘ida and its affiliates—as well as ISIL’s expansion and sympathy for associated ideology—will remain prominent in the region. Competition for jobs, coupled with discrimination against minorities, may contribute to radicalization of the region’s youth, especially given abnormal sex ratios favoring males in several countries. Outlook: The quality of India’s development will depend on addressing widespread poor public health, sanitation, and infrastructure conditions. The rate of malnourished children, for example, is higher in India than in Sub-Saharan Africa. Populism and sectarianism will intensify if Bangladesh, India, and Pakistan fail to provide employment and education for growing urban populations and officials continue to govern principally through identity politics. Human health, food security, infrastructure, and livelihoods will deteriorate from pollution, earthquakes and the effects of climate change, including shifting monsoon patterns and increasing glacier melt. South Asia’s openness to the private sector, community groups, and NGOs, however, should position it well for an era of empowered individuals, especially if governments curb their support for chauvinistic groups that divide societies. In South Asia, Pakistan will feel compelled to address India’s economic and conventional military capabilities through asymmetric means. Pakistan will seek to enhance its nuclear deterrent against India by expanding its nuclear arsenal and delivery means, including pursuing “battlefield nuclear weapons” and sea-based options. India, by contrast, will focus its attention on both Islamabad and Beijing— seeking military partnerships with Europe, Japan, the United States, and others—to boost its conventional capabilities while striving for escalation dominance vis-a-vis Pakistan.
3/11/22
MARAPR - K - Afropessimism
Tournament: TFA State | Round: 1 | Opponent: Dulles VN | Judge: Jack Quisenberry Anti-blackness is libidinal—so-called emancipatory movements rely on a position of coherence which desires the absolute dereliction of blackness Wilderson 02 Frank Wilderson- The Prison Slave as Hegemony's (Silent) Scandal-Presented at imprisoned Intellectuals Conference Brown University, April 13th 2002
The 1AC and any perm forecloses the possibility of radical questioning about the ethicality of civil society by structurally adjusting the black body through the “political action” that ceases to be “inclusive” – the aff’s starting point places the black body upon a psychologically traumatic, dielectric state of abandonment that forecloses black liberation – if we win that their scholarship produces this structural violence that is an independent reason to vote negative Wilderson ‘10 (Frank B Wilderson III- Professor at UC irvine- Red, White and Black- p. 8-10) I have little interest in assailing political conservatives. Nor is my ar- gument wedded to the disciplinary needs of political science, or even sociology, where injury must be established, first, as White supremacist event, from which one then embarks on a demonstration of intent, or racism; and, if one is lucky, or foolish, enough, a solution is proposed. If the position of the Black is, as I argue, a paradigmatic impossibility in the Western Hemisphere, indeed, in the world, in other words, if a Black is the very antithesis of a Human subject, as imagined by Marxism and psy- choanalysis, then his or her paradigmatic exile is not simply a function of repressive practices on the part of institutions (as political science and sociology would have it). This banishment from the Human fold is to be found most profoundly in the emancipatory meditations of Black people's staunchest "allies," and in some of the most "radical" films. Here—not in restrictive policy, unjust legislation, police brutality, or conservative scholarship—is where the Settler/Master's sinews are most resilient. The polemic animating this research stems from (1) my reading of Native and Black American meta-commentaries on Indian and Black subject positions written over the past twenty-three years and ( 2 ) a sense of how much that work appears out of joint with intellectual protocols and political ethics which underwrite political praxis and socially engaged popular cinema in this epoch of multiculturalism and globalization. The sense of abandonment I experience when I read the meta-commentaries on Red positionality (by theorists such as Leslie Silko, Ward Churchill, Taiaiake Alfred, Vine Deloria Jr., and Haunani-Kay Trask) and the meta-commentaries on Black positionality (by theorists such as David Marriott, Saidiya Hartman, Ronald Judy, Hortense Spillers, Orlando Patterson, and Achille Mbembe) against the deluge of multicultural positivity is overwhelming. One suddenly realizes that, though the semantic field on which subjec- tivity is imagined has expanded phenomenally through the protocols of multiculturalism and globalization theory, Blackness and an unflinching articulation of Redness are more unimaginable and illegible within this expanded semantic field than they were during the height of the F B I ' S repressive Counterintelligence Program ( C O I N T E L P R O ) . On the seman- tic field on which the new protocols are possible, Indigenism can indeed lO become partially legible through a programmatics of structural adjust- ment (as fits our globalized era). In other words, for the Indians' subject position to be legible, their positive registers of lost or threatened cultural identity must be foregrounded, when in point of fact the antagonistic register of dispossession that Indians "possess" is a position in relation to a socius structured by genocide. As Churchill points out, everyone from Armenians to Jews have been subjected to genocide, but the Indigenous position is one for which genocide is a constitutive element, not merely an historical event, without which Indians would not, paradoxically, "exist." 9 Regarding the Black position, some might ask why, after claims suc- cessfully made on the state by the Civil Rights Movement, do I insist on positing an operational analytic for cinema, film studies, and political theory that appears to be a dichotomous and essentialist pairing of Masters and Slaves? In other words, why should we think of today's Blacks in the United States as Slaves and everyone else (with the exception of Indians) as Masters? One could answer these questions by demonstrat- ing how nothing remotely approaching claims successfully made on the state has come to pass. In other words, the election of a Black president aside, police brutality, mass incarceration, segregated and substandard schools and housing, astronomical rates of H I V infection, and the threat of being turned away en masse at the polls still constitute the lived expe- rience of Black life. But such empirically based rejoinders would lead us in the wrong direction; we would find ourselves on "solid" ground, which would only mystify, rather than clarify, the question. We would be forced to appeal to "facts," the "historical record," and empirical markers of stasis and change, all of which could be turned on their head with more of the same. Underlying such a downward spiral into sociology, political sci- ence, history, and public policy debates would be the very rubric that I am calling into question: the grammar of suffering known as exploitation and alienation, the assumptive logic whereby subjective dispossession is arrived at in the calculations between those who sell labor power and those who acquire it. The Black qua the worker. Orlando Patterson has already dispelled this faulty ontological grammar in Slavery and Social Death, where he demonstrates how and why work, or forced labor, is not a constituent element of slavery. Once the "solid" plank of "work" is removed from slavery, then the conceptually coherent notion of "claims against the state"—the proposition that the state and civil society are elastic enough to even contemplate the possibility of an emancipatory project for the Black position—disintegrates into thin air. The imaginary of the state and civil society is parasitic on the Middle Passage. Put an- other way, No slave, no world. And, in addition, as Patterson argues, no slave is in the world. If, as an ontological position, that is, as a grammar of suffering, the Slave is not a laborer but an anti-Human, a position against which Hu- manity establishes, maintains, and renews its coherence, its corporeal in- tegrity; if the Slave is, to borrow from Patterson, generally dishonored, perpetually open to gratuitous violence, and void of kinship structure, that is, having no relations that need be recognized, a being outside of re- lationality, then our analysis cannot be approached through the rubric of gains or reversals in struggles with the state and civil society, not unless and until the interlocutor first explains how the Slave is of the world. The onus is not on one who posits the Master/Slave dichotomy but on the one who argues there is a distinction between Slaveness and Blackness. How, when, and where did such a split occur? The woman at the gates of Columbia University awaits an answer. Thus, the role of the ballot is to vote for the person who best diagnoses the reality that produces the phenomenon of anti-blackness – if I win their starting point is flawed, they don’t get to weigh their affirmative.
3/11/22
NOVDEC - DA - Econ
Tournament: The Longhorn Classic | Round: 2 | Opponent: St Marys Hall RS | Judge: Angelo Gaunichaux Economic growth is occurring but at risk of stalling. Khanna, Aryan, and Eswar Prasad 10-10. Aryan Khanna is a student at Cornell University and an editor at Brookings Institute. Eswar Prasad is a senior fellow at Brookings Institute. “October 2021 Update to TIGER: The Global Economic Recovery Is in Danger of Stalling.” Brookings, 10 Oct. 2021, https://www.brookings.edu/research/october-2021-update-to-tiger-the-global-economic-recovery-is-in-danger-of-stalling/. GHS-AA The world economy’s sharp snapback from the short-lived but deep COVID-19 recession appears in danger of stalling. The latest update of the Brookings-Financial Times Tracking Indexes for the Global Economic Recovery (TIGER) shows growth momentum weakening across the world, particularly in the two major engines of global growth—the U.S. and China. Amid persistent concerns about the impact of Delta and newer variants of the coronavirus, supply-side constraints are tightening and rising inflation is becoming a significant restraint on policy support that could keep growth on track. The spike in energy prices is emblematic of the problems created by supply disruptions that could eventually hurt aggregate demand, particularly if central banks are forced to take more aggressive actions to contain inflation. In many countries, particularly the emerging markets and low-income economies, the 2020 recession continues to have scarring effects on GDP and employment. The U.S. economy is at a difficult juncture, with uneven readings about the strength of both domestic demand and the labor market coming against the background of rising inflationary pressures. While an unemployment rate below 5 percent and labor shortages in some sectors signal labor market tightness, overall job growth has been muted in recent months. Consumer demand has remained strong, but erosions in business and consumer confidence could spell a softening of domestic demand. The two major spending bills before Congress are well-intentioned in their aims of raising long-term productivity but would boost demand and put further upward pressure on inflation in the short run. This, along with rising inflation expectations, could force the Fed’s hand and at a minimum lead to more aggressive tapering. Strikes result in less productivity and economic downturn Mlungisi 20, Tenza. Senior Lecturer, University of KwaZulu-Natal “THE EFFECTS OF VIOLENT STRIKES ON THE ECONOMY OF A DEVELOPING COUNTRY: A CASE OF SOUTH AFRICA.” Obiter, vol. 41, no. 3, 2020, pp. 519–37, http://www.scielo.org.za/pdf/obiter/v41n3/04.pdf. GHS-AA SUMMARY The issue of violent and lengthy strikes has been a feature of South Africa’s industrial relations for a while now. There are no mechanisms in place to curb violent strikes even though their effects are visible in all corners of the Republic. Violent and lengthy strikes have devastating effects on the economy, cause injury to members of the community and non-striking workers, and more particularly poverty as employers would retrench workers if their businesses do not make profit as a result of prolonged non-production. In the mining sector where strikes are a common feature, it has been reported that employers have lost billions of rands through lengthy and violent strikes. The article acknowledges the developments brought about by amendments in the Labour Relations Act, which appears to be short of addressing the situation. The article proposes that if interest arbitration can be introduced into the Labour Relations Act, the situation may change for the better as employers and unions will be compelled to resolve their dispute(s) within a short space of time. It further submits that a strike should be allowed to proceed only if it is lawful and does not involve violence. In addition, the Labour Court should be empowered to intervene in instances where violence has developed and force the parties to arbitration. 1 INTRODUCTION Economic growth is one of the most important pillars of a state. Most developing states put in place measures that enhance or speed-up the economic growth of their countries. It is believed that if the economy of a country is stable, the lives of the people improve with available resources being shared among the country’s inhabitants or citizens. However, it becomes difficult when the growth of the economy is hampered by the exercise of one or more of the constitutionally entrenched rights such as the right to strike. 1 Strikes in South Africa are becoming more common, and this affects businesses, employees and their families, and eventually, the economy. It becomes more dangerous for the economy and society at large if strikes are accompanied by violence causing damage to property and injury to people. The duration of strikes poses a problem for the economy of a developing country like South Africa. South Africa is rich in mineral resources, the world’s largest producer of platinum and chrome, the secondlargest producer of zirconium and the third-largest exporter of coal. It also has the largest economy in Africa, both in terms of industrial capacity and gross domestic product (GDP).2 However, these economic advantages have been affected by protracted and violent strikes.3 For example, in the platinum industries, labour stoppages since 2012 have cost the sector approximately R18 billion lost in revenue and 900 000 oz in lost output. The five-monthlong strike in early 2014 at Impala Platinum Mine amounted to a loss of about R400 million a day in revenue.4 The question that this article attempts to address is how violent strikes and their duration affect the growth of the economy in a developing country like South Africa. It also addresses the question of whether there is a need to change the policies regulating industrial action in South Africa to make them more favourable to economic growth. Despite global interconnectedness, empirics prove that economic decline causes global war. Liu 18 Qian, writer for World Economic Forum, The next Economic Crisis Could Cause a Global Conflict. Here’s Why | World Economic Forum. https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2018/11/the-next-economic-crisis-could-cause-a-global-conflict-heres-why. Accessed 26 Oct. 2019. ghs-az The response to the 2008 economic crisis has relied far too much on monetary stimulus, in the form of quantitative easing and near-zero (or even negative) interest rates, and included far too little structural reform. This means that the next crisis could come soon – and pave the way for a large-scale military conflict. The next economic crisis is closer than you think. But what you should really worry about is what comes after: in the current social, political, and technological landscape, a prolonged economic crisis, combined with rising income inequality, could well escalate into a major global military conflict. The 2008-09 global financial crisis almost bankrupted governments and caused systemic collapse. Policymakers managed to pull the global economy back from the brink, using massive monetary stimulus, including quantitative easing and near-zero (or even negative) interest rates. But monetary stimulus is like an adrenaline shot to jump-start an arrested heart; it can revive the patient, but it does nothing to cure the disease. Treating a sick economy requires structural reforms, which can cover everything from financial and labor markets to tax systems, fertility patterns, and education policies. Policymakers have utterly failed to pursue such reforms, despite promising to do so. Instead, they have remained preoccupied with politics. From Italy to Germany, forming and sustaining governments now seems to take more time than actual governing. And Greece, for example, has relied on money from international creditors to keep its head (barely) above water, rather than genuinely reforming its pension system or improving its business environment. The lack of structural reform has meant that the unprecedented excess liquidity that central banks injected into their economies was not allocated to its most efficient uses. Instead, it raised global asset prices to levels even higher than those prevailing before 2008. In the United States, housing prices are now 8 higher than they were at the peak of the property bubble in 2006, according to the property website Zillow. The price-to-earnings (CAPE) ratio, which measures whether stock-market prices are within a reasonable range, is now higher than it was both in 2008 and at the start of the Great Depression in 1929. As monetary tightening reveals the vulnerabilities in the real economy, the collapse of asset-price bubbles will trigger another economic crisis – one that could be even more severe than the last, because we have built up a tolerance to our strongest macroeconomic medications. A decade of regular adrenaline shots, in the form of ultra-low interest rates and unconventional monetary policies, has severely depleted their power to stabilize and stimulate the economy. If history is any guide, the consequences of this mistake could extend far beyond the economy. According to Harvard’s Benjamin Friedman, prolonged periods of economic distress have been characterized also by public antipathy toward minority groups or foreign countries – attitudes that can help to fuel unrest, terrorism, or even war. For example, during the Great Depression, US President Herbert Hoover signed the 1930 Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act, intended to protect American workers and farmers from foreign competition. In the subsequent five years, global trade shrank by two-thirds. Within a decade, World War II had begun. To be sure, WWII, like World War I, was caused by a multitude of factors; there is no standard path to war. But there is reason to believe that high levels of inequality can play a significant role in stoking conflict. According to research by the economist Thomas Piketty, a spike in income inequality is often followed by a great crisis. Income inequality then declines for a while, before rising again, until a new peak – and a new disaster. Though causality has yet to be proven, given the limited number of data points, this correlation should not be taken lightly, especially with wealth and income inequality at historically high levels. This is all the more worrying in view of the numerous other factors stoking social unrest and diplomatic tension, including technological disruption, a record-breaking migration crisis, anxiety over globalization, political polarization, and rising nationalism. All are symptoms of failed policies that could turn out to be trigger points for a future crisis. Voters have good reason to be frustrated, but the emotionally appealing populists to whom they are increasingly giving their support are offering ill-advised solutions that will only make matters worse. For example, despite the world’s unprecedented interconnectedness, multilateralism is increasingly being eschewed, as countries – most notably, Donald Trump’s US – pursue unilateral, isolationist policies. Meanwhile, proxy wars are raging in Syria and Yemen. Against this background, we must take seriously the possibility that the next economic crisis could lead to a large-scale military confrontation. By the logic of the political scientist Samuel Huntington , considering such a scenario could help us avoid it, because it would force us to take action. In this case, the key will be for policymakers to pursue the structural reforms that they have long promised, while replacing finger-pointing and antagonism with a sensible and respectful global dialogue. The alternative may well be global conflagration.
12/5/21
NOVDEC - DA - Police Strikes
Tournament: The Longhorn Classic | Round: 2 | Opponent: St Marys Hall RS | Judge: Angelo Gaunichaux Police strikes embolden police power and prevent reform Grim 20, Andrew. Andrew Grim, a Ph.D. candidate in history at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, is at work on a dissertation on anti-police brutality activism in post-WWII Newark. “What Is the ‘Blue Flu’ and How Has It Increased Police Power?” The Washington Post, 1 July 2020, https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2020/07/01/what-is-blue-flu-how-has-it-increased-police-power/. GHS-AA What is the “blue flu,” and why might it strike New York City police? This weekend, officers from the New York City Police Department are rumored to be planning a walkout to protest calls to defund the police. This builds on a similar tactic used by police in Atlanta less than a month ago. On June 16, Fulton County District Attorney, Paul L. Howard Jr. announced that Garrett Rolfe, the Atlanta police officer who fatally shot Rayshard Brooks, would face charges of felony murder and aggravated assault. That night, scores of Atlanta Police Department officers caught the “blue flu,” calling out sick en masse to protest the charges against Rolfe. Such walkouts constitute, in effect, illegal strikes — laws in all 50 states prohibit police strikes. Yet, there is nothing new about the blue flu. It is a strategy long employed by police unions and rank-and-file officers during contract negotiations, disputes over reforms and, like in Atlanta, in response to disciplinary action against individual officers. The intent is to dramatize police disputes with municipal government and rally the citizenry to their side. But the result of such protests matter deeply as we consider police reform today. Historically, blue flu strikes have helped expand police power, ultimately limiting the ability of city governments to reform, constrain or conduct oversight over the police. They allow the police to leverage public fear of crime to extract concessions from municipalities. This became clear in Detroit more than 50 years ago. In June 1967, tensions arose between Detroit Mayor Jerome Cavanagh and the Detroit Police Officers Association (DPOA), which represented the city’s 3,300 patrol officers. The two were at odds primarily over police demands for a pay increase. Cavanagh showed no signs of caving to the DPOA’s demands and had, in fact, proposed to cut the police department’s budget. On June 15, the DPOA escalated the dispute with a walkout: 323 officers called in sick. The number grew over the next several days as the blue flu spread, reaching a height of 800 absences on June 17. In tandem with the walkout, the DPOA launched a fearmongering media campaign to win over the public. They took out ads in local newspapers warning Detroit residents, “How does it feel to be held up? Stick around and find out!” This campaign took place at a time of rising urban crime rates and uprisings, and only a month before the 1967 Detroit riot, making it especially potent. The DPOA understood this climate and used it to its advantage. With locals already afraid of crime and displeased at Cavanagh’s failure to rein it in, they would be more likely to demand the return of the police than to demand retribution against officers for an illegal strike. The DPOA’s strategy paid off. The walkout left Detroit Police Commissioner Ray Girardin feeling “practically helpless.” “I couldn’t force them to work,” he later told The Washington Post. Rather than risk public ire by allowing the blue flu to continue, Cavanagh relented. Ultimately, the DPOA got the raises it sought, making Detroit officers the highest paid in the nation. This was far from the end of the fight between Cavanagh and the DPOA. In the ensuing months and years, they continued to tussle over wages, pensions, the budget, the integration of squad cars and the hiring of black officers. The threat of another blue flu loomed over all these disputes, helping the union to win many of them. And Detroit was not an outlier. Throughout the 1960s, ’70s and ’80s, the blue flu was a ubiquitous and highly effective tactic in Baltimore, Memphis, New Orleans, Chicago, Newark, New York and many other cities. In most cases, as author Kristian Williams writes, “When faced with a walkout or slowdown, the authorities usually decided that the pragmatic need to get the cops back to work trumped the city government’s long term interest in diminishing the rank and file’s power.” But each time a city relented to this pressure, they ceded more and more power to police unions, which would turn to the strategy repeatedly to defend officers’ interests — particularly when it came to efforts to address systemic racism in police policies and practices. In 1970, black residents of Pittsburgh’s North Side neighborhood raised an outcry over the “hostile sadistic treatment” they experienced at the hands of white police officers. They lobbied Mayor Peter F. Flaherty to assign more black officers to their neighborhood. The mayor agreed, transferring several white officers out of the North Side and replacing them with black officers. While residents cheered this decision, white officers and the Fraternal Order of Police (FOP), which represented them, were furious. They slammed the transfer as “discrimination” against whites. About 425 of the Pittsburgh Police Department’s 1,600 police officers called out sick in protest. Notably, black police officers broke with their white colleagues and refused to join the walkout. They praised the transfer as a “long overdue action” and viewed the walkout as a betrayal of officers’ oath to protect the public. Nonetheless, the tactic paid off. After several days, Flaherty caved to the “open revolt” of white officers, agreeing to halt the transfers and instead submit the dispute to binding arbitration between the city and the police union. Black officers, though, continued to speak out against their union’s support of racist practices, and many of them later resigned from the union in protest. Similar scenarios played out in Detroit, Chicago and other cities in the 1960s and ’70s, as white officers continually staged walkouts to preserve the segregated status quo in their departments. These blue flu strikes amounted to an authoritarian power grab by police officers bent on avoiding oversight, rejecting reforms and shoring up their own authority. In the aftermath of the 1967 Detroit walkout, a police commissioner’s aide strongly criticized the police union’s strong-arm tactics, saying “it smacks of a police state.” The clash left one newspaper editor wondering, “Who’s the Boss of the Detroit Police?” But in the “law and order” climate of the late 1960s, such criticism did not resonate enough to stir a groundswell of public opinion against the blue flu. And police unions dismissed critics by arguing that officers had “no alternative” but to engage in walkouts to get city officials to make concessions. Police power and lack of accountability leads to over policing in minority neighborhoods Greenhouse 20, Steven. Steven Greenhouse was a reporter at the New York Times for thirty-one years; he covered labor and workplace matters there for nineteen. He is the author of “Beaten Down, Worked Up: The Past, Present, and Future of American Labor.” “How Police Unions Enable and Conceal Abuses of Power.” The New Yorker, 18 June 2020, https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/how-police-union-power-helped-increase-abuses. GHS-AA A 2018 University of Oxford study of the hundred largest American cities found that the extent of protections in police contracts was directly and positively correlated with police violence and other abuses against citizens. A 2019 University of Chicago study found that extending collective-bargaining rights to Florida sheriffs’ deputies led to a forty per cent statewide increase in cases of violent misconduct—translating to nearly twelve additional such incidents annually. In a forthcoming study, Rob Gillezeau, a professor and researcher, concluded that, from the nineteen-fifties to the nineteen-eighties, the ability of police to collectively bargain led to a substantial rise in police killings of civilians, with a greater impact on people of color. “With the caveat that this is very early work,” Gillezeau wrote on Twitter, on May 30th, “it looks like collective bargaining rights are being used to protect the ability of officers to discriminate in the disproportionate use of force against the non-white population.” Other studies revealed that many existing mechanisms for disciplining police are toothless. WBEZ, a Chicago radio station, found that, between 2007 and 2015, Chicago’s Independent Police Review Authority investigated four hundred shootings by police and deemed the officers justified in all but two incidents. Since 2012, when Minneapolis replaced its civilian review board with an Office of Police Conduct Review, the public has filed more than twenty-six hundred misconduct complaints, yet only twelve resulted in a police officer being punished. The most severe penalty: a forty-hour suspension. When the St. Paul Pioneer Press reviewed appeals involving terminations from 2014 to 2019, it discovered that arbitrators ruled in favor of the discharged police and corrections officers and ordered them reinstated forty-six per cent of the time. (Non-law-enforcement workers were reinstated at a similar rate.) For those demanding more accountability, a large obstacle is that disciplinary actions are often overturned if an arbitrator finds that the penalty the department meted out is tougher than it was in a similar, previous case—no matter if the penalty in the previous case seemed far too lenient. To critics, all of this highlights that the disciplinary process for law enforcement is woefully broken, and that police unions have far too much power. They contend that robust protections, including qualified immunity, give many police officers a sense of impunity—an attitude exemplified by Derek Chauvin keeping his knee on George Floyd’s neck for nearly nine minutes, even as onlookers pleaded with him to stop. “We’re at a place where something has to change, so that police collective bargaining no longer contributes to police violence,” Benjamin Sachs, a labor-law professor at Harvard, told me. Sachs said that bargaining on “matters of discipline, especially related to the use of force, has insulated police officers from accountability, and that predictably can increase the problem.” Over policing leads to more anti-black violence and a greater number of black people shot by white police officers. Mock 19, Brentin. Brentin Mock covers national politics for Colorlines. He previously served as lead reporter for Voting Rights Watch 2012, covering the challenges presented by new voter ID laws, suppression of voter registration drives and other attempts to limit electoral power of people of color. Brentin is also a contributor for Demos’ blog PolicyShop, where he covers voting rights and civil rights; and also a blogger for Grist.org, where he writes about environmental justice. You can read some of his other work at Next American City, Facing South, The Root, In These Times, American Prospect and The Washington Post. “What New Research Says About Race and Police Shootings.” CityLab, 6 Aug. 2019, https://www.citylab.com/equity/2019/08/police-officer-shootings-gun-violence-racial-bias-crime-data/595528/ GHS-AA In the U.S., African Americans are 2.5 times more likely to be killed by police than white people. For black women, the rate is 1.4 times more likely. That’s according to a new study conducted by Frank Edwards, of Rutgers University’s School of Criminal Justice, Hedwig Lee, of Washington University in St. Louis’s Department of Sociology, and Michael Esposito, of the University of Michigan’s Institute for Social Research. The researchers used verified data on police killings from 2013 to 2018 compiled by the website Fatal Encounters, created by Nevada-based journalist D. Brian Burghart. Under their models, they found that roughly 1-in-1,000 black boys and men will be killed by police in their lifetime. For white boys and men, the rate is 39 out of 100,000. In fact, people of color in general were found more likely to be killed by police than their white counterparts. The study was published on Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, or PNAS, a journal that recently drew controversy for publishing another study on police killing disparities. That study, led by Michigan State University psychology professor Joseph Cesario, published on July 22, found that violent crime rates and the racial demographics of a given location are better indicators for determining a police killing victim’s race. As Cesario explained in a press release: Many people ask whether black or white citizens are more likely to be shot and why. If you live in a county that has a lot of white people committing crimes, white people are more likely to be shot. If you live in a county that has a lot of black people committing crimes, black people are more likely to be shot. The two studies are just the latest salvos in a long-running debate over whether police violence towards African Americans is better explained because of racial prejudice or because black people are really violent enough to justify extra police force. The Cesario study, with its focus on crime rates, seems to fall in the latter camp. Both rely on media-generated police shootings data—Cesario’s uses databases produced by The Washington Post and The Guardian. Several academics have challenged Cesario’s methodology, namely his decision to “sidestep the benchmark” of using population to calculate racial disparity. It has been questioned whether using population is an appropriate benchmark in these kinds of analyses: Critics of this technique believe that population-benchmarking is flawed because it assumes black and white people have an equal likelihood of encountering police. (An example of population-benchmarking is, as Cesario’s study explains, stating: “26 of civilians killed by police shootings in 2015 were Black even though Black civilians comprise only 12 of the U.S. population. According to this 12 benchmark, more Black civilians are fatally shot than we would expect, indicating disparity.”) The problem with this, as Princeton professor Jonathan Mummolo, explained on Twitter, is that it still rests on the assumption that black and white officers encounter black civilians in equal numbers, or in even temperaments—which they don’t.
12/5/21
NOVDEC - K - Afropessimism
Tournament: Glenbrooks Speech and Debate Tournament | Round: 4 | Opponent: Marlborough WR | Judge: Vishan Chaudhary Anti-blackness is libidinal—so-called emancipatory movements rely on a position of coherence which desires the absolute dereliction of blackness Wilderson 02 Frank Wilderson- The Prison Slave as Hegemony's (Silent) Scandal-Presented at imprisoned Intellectuals Conference Brown University, April 13th 2002
The 1AC and any perm forecloses the possibility of radical questioning about the ethicality of civil society by structurally adjusting the black body through the “political action” that ceases to be “inclusive” – the aff’s starting point places the black body upon a psychologically traumatic, dielectric state of abandonment that forecloses black liberation – if we win that their scholarship produces this structural violence that is an independent reason to vote negative Wilderson ‘10 (Frank B Wilderson III- Professor at UC irvine- Red, White and Black- p. 8-10) I have little interest in assailing political conservatives. Nor is my ar- gument wedded to the disciplinary needs of political science, or even sociology, where injury must be established, first, as White supremacist event, from which one then embarks on a demonstration of intent, or racism; and, if one is lucky, or foolish, enough, a solution is proposed. If the position of the Black is, as I argue, a paradigmatic impossibility in the Western Hemisphere, indeed, in the world, in other words, if a Black is the very antithesis of a Human subject, as imagined by Marxism and psy- choanalysis, then his or her paradigmatic exile is not simply a function of repressive practices on the part of institutions (as political science and sociology would have it). This banishment from the Human fold is to be found most profoundly in the emancipatory meditations of Black people's staunchest "allies," and in some of the most "radical" films. Here—not in restrictive policy, unjust legislation, police brutality, or conservative scholarship—is where the Settler/Master's sinews are most resilient. The polemic animating this research stems from (1) my reading of Native and Black American meta-commentaries on Indian and Black subject positions written over the past twenty-three years and ( 2 ) a sense of how much that work appears out of joint with intellectual protocols and political ethics which underwrite political praxis and socially engaged popular cinema in this epoch of multiculturalism and globalization. The sense of abandonment I experience when I read the meta-commentaries on Red positionality (by theorists such as Leslie Silko, Ward Churchill, Taiaiake Alfred, Vine Deloria Jr., and Haunani-Kay Trask) and the meta-commentaries on Black positionality (by theorists such as David Marriott, Saidiya Hartman, Ronald Judy, Hortense Spillers, Orlando Patterson, and Achille Mbembe) against the deluge of multicultural positivity is overwhelming. One suddenly realizes that, though the semantic field on which subjec- tivity is imagined has expanded phenomenally through the protocols of multiculturalism and globalization theory, Blackness and an unflinching articulation of Redness are more unimaginable and illegible within this expanded semantic field than they were during the height of the F B I ' S repressive Counterintelligence Program ( C O I N T E L P R O ) . On the seman- tic field on which the new protocols are possible, Indigenism can indeed lO become partially legible through a programmatics of structural adjust- ment (as fits our globalized era). In other words, for the Indians' subject position to be legible, their positive registers of lost or threatened cultural identity must be foregrounded, when in point of fact the antagonistic register of dispossession that Indians "possess" is a position in relation to a socius structured by genocide. As Churchill points out, everyone from Armenians to Jews have been subjected to genocide, but the Indigenous position is one for which genocide is a constitutive element, not merely an historical event, without which Indians would not, paradoxically, "exist." 9 Regarding the Black position, some might ask why, after claims suc- cessfully made on the state by the Civil Rights Movement, do I insist on positing an operational analytic for cinema, film studies, and political theory that appears to be a dichotomous and essentialist pairing of Masters and Slaves? In other words, why should we think of today's Blacks in the United States as Slaves and everyone else (with the exception of Indians) as Masters? One could answer these questions by demonstrat- ing how nothing remotely approaching claims successfully made on the state has come to pass. In other words, the election of a Black president aside, police brutality, mass incarceration, segregated and substandard schools and housing, astronomical rates of H I V infection, and the threat of being turned away en masse at the polls still constitute the lived expe- rience of Black life. But such empirically based rejoinders would lead us in the wrong direction; we would find ourselves on "solid" ground, which would only mystify, rather than clarify, the question. We would be forced to appeal to "facts," the "historical record," and empirical markers of stasis and change, all of which could be turned on their head with more of the same. Underlying such a downward spiral into sociology, political sci- ence, history, and public policy debates would be the very rubric that I am calling into question: the grammar of suffering known as exploitation and alienation, the assumptive logic whereby subjective dispossession is arrived at in the calculations between those who sell labor power and those who acquire it. The Black qua the worker. Orlando Patterson has already dispelled this faulty ontological grammar in Slavery and Social Death, where he demonstrates how and why work, or forced labor, is not a constituent element of slavery. Once the "solid" plank of "work" is removed from slavery, then the conceptually coherent notion of "claims against the state"—the proposition that the state and civil society are elastic enough to even contemplate the possibility of an emancipatory project for the Black position—disintegrates into thin air. The imaginary of the state and civil society is parasitic on the Middle Passage. Put an- other way, No slave, no world. And, in addition, as Patterson argues, no slave is in the world. If, as an ontological position, that is, as a grammar of suffering, the Slave is not a laborer but an anti-Human, a position against which Hu- manity establishes, maintains, and renews its coherence, its corporeal in- tegrity; if the Slave is, to borrow from Patterson, generally dishonored, perpetually open to gratuitous violence, and void of kinship structure, that is, having no relations that need be recognized, a being outside of re- lationality, then our analysis cannot be approached through the rubric of gains or reversals in struggles with the state and civil society, not unless and until the interlocutor first explains how the Slave is of the world. The onus is not on one who posits the Master/Slave dichotomy but on the one who argues there is a distinction between Slaveness and Blackness. How, when, and where did such a split occur? The woman at the gates of Columbia University awaits an answer.
11/21/21
NOVDEC - NC - Util
Tournament: The Longhorn Classic | Round: 2 | Opponent: St Marys Hall RS | Judge: Angelo Gaunichaux I negate resolved I value morality because a more desirable world is one that is more moral.
Governmental actors must be utilitarian, acknowledging that some policies will inevitably benefit some and harm others. Professor Woller in 1997, - (Gary Professor of Public Management, Brigham Young University “An Overview by Gary Woller” A Forum on the Role of Environmental Ethics, pg. 10) GHSGB Appeals to a priori moral principles, such as environmental preservation, also often fail to acknowledge that public policies inevitably entail trade-offs among competing values. Thus since policymakers cannot justify inherent value conflicts to the public in any philosophical sense, and since public only general guidance to ethical dilemmas in public affairs and do not themselves suggest appropriate public policies, and at worst, they create a regimen of regulatory unreasonableness while failing to adequately address the problem or actually making it worse. For example, a moral obligation to preserve the environment by no means implies the best way, or any way for that matter, to do so, just as there is no a priori reason to believe that any policy that claims to preserve the environment will actually do so. Any number of policies might work, and others, although seemingly consistent with the moral principle, will fail utterly. That deontological principles are an inadequate basis for environmental policy is evident in the rather significant irony that most forms of deontologically based environmental laws and regulations tend to be implemented in a very utilitarian manner by street-level enforcement officials. Moreover, ignoring the relevant costs and benefits of environmental policy and their attendant incentive structures can, as alluded to above, actually work at cross purposes to environmental preservation. (There exists an extensive literature on this aspect of regulatory enforcement and the often perverse out- comes of regulatory policy. See, for example, Ackerman, 1981; Bartrip and Fenn, 1983; Hawkins, 1983, 1984; Hawkins and Thomas, 1984.) Even the most die-hard preservationist/deontologist would, I believe, be troubled by this outcome. The above points are perhaps best expressed by Richard Flathman, The number of values typically involved in public policy decisions, the broad categories which must be employed and above all, the scope and complexity of the consequences to be anticipated militate against reasoning so conclusively that they generate an imperative to institute a specific policy. It is seldom the case that only one policy will meet the criteria of the public interest (1958, p. 12). It therefore follows that in a democracy, policymakers have an ethical duty to establish a plausible link between policy alternatives and the problems they address, and the public must be reasonably assured that a policy will actually do something about an existing problem; this requires the means-end language and methodology of utilitarian ethics. Good intentions, lofty rhetoric, and moral piety are an insufficient, though perhaps at times a necessary, basis for public policy in a democracy
Additionally, policy makers face moral uncertainty when making decisions since they are unsure of the ethical implications that their policy will have on each individual – as a result, they must make decisions that benefit the most people.
Thus, my value criterion is maximizing expected well-being.
12/5/21
NOVDEC - PIC - Police
Tournament: Glenbrooks Speech and Debate Tournament | Round: 6 | Opponent: Houston Memorial DX | Judge: Akshay Manglik Text: A just government ought to recognize an unconditional right of workers to strike, except in the case of police officers. Police strikes embolden police power and prevent reform Grim 20, Andrew. Andrew Grim, a Ph.D. candidate in history at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, is at work on a dissertation on anti-police brutality activism in post-WWII Newark. “What Is the ‘Blue Flu’ and How Has It Increased Police Power?” The Washington Post, 1 July 2020, https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2020/07/01/what-is-blue-flu-how-has-it-increased-police-power/. GHS-AA What is the “blue flu,” and why might it strike New York City police? This weekend, officers from the New York City Police Department are rumored to be planning a walkout to protest calls to defund the police. This builds on a similar tactic used by police in Atlanta less than a month ago. On June 16, Fulton County District Attorney, Paul L. Howard Jr. announced that Garrett Rolfe, the Atlanta police officer who fatally shot Rayshard Brooks, would face charges of felony murder and aggravated assault. That night, scores of Atlanta Police Department officers caught the “blue flu,” calling out sick en masse to protest the charges against Rolfe. Such walkouts constitute, in effect, illegal strikes — laws in all 50 states prohibit police strikes. Yet, there is nothing new about the blue flu. It is a strategy long employed by police unions and rank-and-file officers during contract negotiations, disputes over reforms and, like in Atlanta, in response to disciplinary action against individual officers. The intent is to dramatize police disputes with municipal government and rally the citizenry to their side. But the result of such protests matter deeply as we consider police reform today. Historically, blue flu strikes have helped expand police power, ultimately limiting the ability of city governments to reform, constrain or conduct oversight over the police. They allow the police to leverage public fear of crime to extract concessions from municipalities. This became clear in Detroit more than 50 years ago. In June 1967, tensions arose between Detroit Mayor Jerome Cavanagh and the Detroit Police Officers Association (DPOA), which represented the city’s 3,300 patrol officers. The two were at odds primarily over police demands for a pay increase. Cavanagh showed no signs of caving to the DPOA’s demands and had, in fact, proposed to cut the police department’s budget. On June 15, the DPOA escalated the dispute with a walkout: 323 officers called in sick. The number grew over the next several days as the blue flu spread, reaching a height of 800 absences on June 17. In tandem with the walkout, the DPOA launched a fearmongering media campaign to win over the public. They took out ads in local newspapers warning Detroit residents, “How does it feel to be held up? Stick around and find out!” This campaign took place at a time of rising urban crime rates and uprisings, and only a month before the 1967 Detroit riot, making it especially potent. The DPOA understood this climate and used it to its advantage. With locals already afraid of crime and displeased at Cavanagh’s failure to rein it in, they would be more likely to demand the return of the police than to demand retribution against officers for an illegal strike. The DPOA’s strategy paid off. The walkout left Detroit Police Commissioner Ray Girardin feeling “practically helpless.” “I couldn’t force them to work,” he later told The Washington Post. Rather than risk public ire by allowing the blue flu to continue, Cavanagh relented. Ultimately, the DPOA got the raises it sought, making Detroit officers the highest paid in the nation. This was far from the end of the fight between Cavanagh and the DPOA. In the ensuing months and years, they continued to tussle over wages, pensions, the budget, the integration of squad cars and the hiring of black officers. The threat of another blue flu loomed over all these disputes, helping the union to win many of them. And Detroit was not an outlier. Throughout the 1960s, ’70s and ’80s, the blue flu was a ubiquitous and highly effective tactic in Baltimore, Memphis, New Orleans, Chicago, Newark, New York and many other cities. In most cases, as author Kristian Williams writes, “When faced with a walkout or slowdown, the authorities usually decided that the pragmatic need to get the cops back to work trumped the city government’s long term interest in diminishing the rank and file’s power.” But each time a city relented to this pressure, they ceded more and more power to police unions, which would turn to the strategy repeatedly to defend officers’ interests — particularly when it came to efforts to address systemic racism in police policies and practices. In 1970, black residents of Pittsburgh’s North Side neighborhood raised an outcry over the “hostile sadistic treatment” they experienced at the hands of white police officers. They lobbied Mayor Peter F. Flaherty to assign more black officers to their neighborhood. The mayor agreed, transferring several white officers out of the North Side and replacing them with black officers. While residents cheered this decision, white officers and the Fraternal Order of Police (FOP), which represented them, were furious. They slammed the transfer as “discrimination” against whites. About 425 of the Pittsburgh Police Department’s 1,600 police officers called out sick in protest. Notably, black police officers broke with their white colleagues and refused to join the walkout. They praised the transfer as a “long overdue action” and viewed the walkout as a betrayal of officers’ oath to protect the public. Nonetheless, the tactic paid off. After several days, Flaherty caved to the “open revolt” of white officers, agreeing to halt the transfers and instead submit the dispute to binding arbitration between the city and the police union. Black officers, though, continued to speak out against their union’s support of racist practices, and many of them later resigned from the union in protest. Similar scenarios played out in Detroit, Chicago and other cities in the 1960s and ’70s, as white officers continually staged walkouts to preserve the segregated status quo in their departments. These blue flu strikes amounted to an authoritarian power grab by police officers bent on avoiding oversight, rejecting reforms and shoring up their own authority. In the aftermath of the 1967 Detroit walkout, a police commissioner’s aide strongly criticized the police union’s strong-arm tactics, saying “it smacks of a police state.” The clash left one newspaper editor wondering, “Who’s the Boss of the Detroit Police?” But in the “law and order” climate of the late 1960s, such criticism did not resonate enough to stir a groundswell of public opinion against the blue flu. And police unions dismissed critics by arguing that officers had “no alternative” but to engage in walkouts to get city officials to make concessions. Revolt against racial capitalism should explicitly be against the police – strikes enable them to continue oppressing the working class Clark 19, School Director and Professor of Labor and Employment Relations, Penn State ("Why police unions are not part of the American labor movement," Conversation, https://theconversation.com/why-police-unions-are-not-part-of-the-american-labor-movement-142538) KD A central concern with police unions is that they use collective bargaining to negotiate contracts that reduce police transparency and accountability. This allows officers who engage in excessive violence to avoid the consequences of their actions and remain on the job. In a way, some police unions have created an alternative justice system that prevents police departments and municipalities from disciplining or discharging officers who have committed crimes against the people they are sworn to serve. In Minneapolis, residents filed more than 2,600 misconduct complaints against police officers between 2012 and 2020. But only 12 of those grievances resulted in discipline. The most significant punishment any officer received was a 40-hour suspension. Besides collective bargaining, police have used the political process – including candidate endorsements and lobbying – to secure local and state legislation that protects their members and quells efforts to provide greater police accountability. Police officers are a formidable political force because they represent the principle of law and order. Candidates endorsed by the police unions can claim they are the law and order candidate. Once these candidates win office, police unions have significant leverage to lobby for policies they support or block those they oppose. Because of this power, critics claim that police unions don’t feel accountable to the citizens they serve. An attorney who sued the Minneapolis Police Department on behalf of a Black resident who was severely beaten by police officers said that he is convinced that Minneapolis “officers think they don’t have to abide by their own training and rules when dealing with the public.”
Police power and lack of accountability leads to over policing in minority neighborhoods Greenhouse 20, Steven. Steven Greenhouse was a reporter at the New York Times for thirty-one years; he covered labor and workplace matters there for nineteen. He is the author of “Beaten Down, Worked Up: The Past, Present, and Future of American Labor.” “How Police Unions Enable and Conceal Abuses of Power.” The New Yorker, 18 June 2020, https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/how-police-union-power-helped-increase-abuses. GHS-AA A 2018 University of Oxford study of the hundred largest American cities found that the extent of protections in police contracts was directly and positively correlated with police violence and other abuses against citizens. A 2019 University of Chicago study found that extending collective-bargaining rights to Florida sheriffs’ deputies led to a forty per cent statewide increase in cases of violent misconduct—translating to nearly twelve additional such incidents annually. In a forthcoming study, Rob Gillezeau, a professor and researcher, concluded that, from the nineteen-fifties to the nineteen-eighties, the ability of police to collectively bargain led to a substantial rise in police killings of civilians, with a greater impact on people of color. “With the caveat that this is very early work,” Gillezeau wrote on Twitter, on May 30th, “it looks like collective bargaining rights are being used to protect the ability of officers to discriminate in the disproportionate use of force against the non-white population.” Other studies revealed that many existing mechanisms for disciplining police are toothless. WBEZ, a Chicago radio station, found that, between 2007 and 2015, Chicago’s Independent Police Review Authority investigated four hundred shootings by police and deemed the officers justified in all but two incidents. Since 2012, when Minneapolis replaced its civilian review board with an Office of Police Conduct Review, the public has filed more than twenty-six hundred misconduct complaints, yet only twelve resulted in a police officer being punished. The most severe penalty: a forty-hour suspension. When the St. Paul Pioneer Press reviewed appeals involving terminations from 2014 to 2019, it discovered that arbitrators ruled in favor of the discharged police and corrections officers and ordered them reinstated forty-six per cent of the time. (Non-law-enforcement workers were reinstated at a similar rate.) For those demanding more accountability, a large obstacle is that disciplinary actions are often overturned if an arbitrator finds that the penalty the department meted out is tougher than it was in a similar, previous case—no matter if the penalty in the previous case seemed far too lenient. To critics, all of this highlights that the disciplinary process for law enforcement is woefully broken, and that police unions have far too much power. They contend that robust protections, including qualified immunity, give many police officers a sense of impunity—an attitude exemplified by Derek Chauvin keeping his knee on George Floyd’s neck for nearly nine minutes, even as onlookers pleaded with him to stop. “We’re at a place where something has to change, so that police collective bargaining no longer contributes to police violence,” Benjamin Sachs, a labor-law professor at Harvard, told me. Sachs said that bargaining on “matters of discipline, especially related to the use of force, has insulated police officers from accountability, and that predictably can increase the problem.” Over policing leads to more anti-black violence and a greater number of black people shot by white police officers. Mock 19, Brentin. Brentin Mock covers national politics for Colorlines. He previously served as lead reporter for Voting Rights Watch 2012, covering the challenges presented by new voter ID laws, suppression of voter registration drives and other attempts to limit electoral power of people of color. Brentin is also a contributor for Demos’ blog PolicyShop, where he covers voting rights and civil rights; and also a blogger for Grist.org, where he writes about environmental justice. You can read some of his other work at Next American City, Facing South, The Root, In These Times, American Prospect and The Washington Post. “What New Research Says About Race and Police Shootings.” CityLab, 6 Aug. 2019, https://www.citylab.com/equity/2019/08/police-officer-shootings-gun-violence-racial-bias-crime-data/595528/ GHS-AA In the U.S., African Americans are 2.5 times more likely to be killed by police than white people. For black women, the rate is 1.4 times more likely. That’s according to a new study conducted by Frank Edwards, of Rutgers University’s School of Criminal Justice, Hedwig Lee, of Washington University in St. Louis’s Department of Sociology, and Michael Esposito, of the University of Michigan’s Institute for Social Research. The researchers used verified data on police killings from 2013 to 2018 compiled by the website Fatal Encounters, created by Nevada-based journalist D. Brian Burghart. Under their models, they found that roughly 1-in-1,000 black boys and men will be killed by police in their lifetime. For white boys and men, the rate is 39 out of 100,000. In fact, people of color in general were found more likely to be killed by police than their white counterparts. The study was published on Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, or PNAS, a journal that recently drew controversy for publishing another study on police killing disparities. That study, led by Michigan State University psychology professor Joseph Cesario, published on July 22, found that violent crime rates and the racial demographics of a given location are better indicators for determining a police killing victim’s race. As Cesario explained in a press release: Many people ask whether black or white citizens are more likely to be shot and why. If you live in a county that has a lot of white people committing crimes, white people are more likely to be shot. If you live in a county that has a lot of black people committing crimes, black people are more likely to be shot. The two studies are just the latest salvos in a long-running debate over whether police violence towards African Americans is better explained because of racial prejudice or because black people are really violent enough to justify extra police force. The Cesario study, with its focus on crime rates, seems to fall in the latter camp. Both rely on media-generated police shootings data—Cesario’s uses databases produced by The Washington Post and The Guardian. Several academics have challenged Cesario’s methodology, namely his decision to “sidestep the benchmark” of using population to calculate racial disparity. It has been questioned whether using population is an appropriate benchmark in these kinds of analyses: Critics of this technique believe that population-benchmarking is flawed because it assumes black and white people have an equal likelihood of encountering police. (An example of population-benchmarking is, as Cesario’s study explains, stating: “26 of civilians killed by police shootings in 2015 were Black even though Black civilians comprise only 12 of the U.S. population. According to this 12 benchmark, more Black civilians are fatally shot than we would expect, indicating disparity.”) The problem with this, as Princeton professor Jonathan Mummolo, explained on Twitter, is that it still rests on the assumption that black and white officers encounter black civilians in equal numbers, or in even temperaments—which they don’t.
12/3/21
NOVDEC - T - Worker v2
Tournament: Glenbrooks Speech and Debate Tournament | Round: 4 | Opponent: Marlborough WR | Judge: Vishan Chaudhary Interp – Workers must get paid. The aff must defend a just government recognizes workers right to strike.
Workers get paid Cambridge Dictionary https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english/worker ghs-rodz workers plural POLITICS specialized members of the working class (= a social group that consists of people who own little or no property and who have to work, usually doing physical work, to get money): Violation – incarcerated workers are not paid Texas Department of Criminal Justice, no date “Frequently Asked Questions,” Texas department of criminal justice - https://www.tdcj.texas.gov/faq/cid.html ghs-rodz The day starts with wake-up call at 3:30 a.m. and breakfast is served at 4:30 a.m. Inmates report to their work assignments at 6:00 a.m. Every inmate who is physically able has a job in the prison system. Inmates are not paid for their work, but they can earn privileges as a result of good work habits. Inmates also learn job skills that can help them find employment when released from prison. 8 states – that’s 16^ of the aff – Texas + florida are two of the biggest states in the US Kent State 8/27 "How Much do Prisoners Make in Each State?," 8/27/2021 https://onlinedegrees.kent.edu/sociology/criminal-justice/community/how-much-do-prisoners-make-in-each-state ghs-rodz Eight States Pay Nothing to Inmates Unfortunately, government-run facilities in some states don’t pay their inmates at all for their prison labor. Those states include Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Mississippi, Oklahoma, South Carolina, and Texas.1 Despite not being paid for their labor, inmates may still want to work because it could help their chances of being released on parole.
That exempts this list of 95 types of workers and more IET 21, ("19 Types of Industry Sectors," Indeed Career Guide, Indeed Editorial Team, https://www.indeed.com/career-advice/finding-a-job/types-of-industry) KD Types of industries There are many kinds of industries you can pursue based on your interests and preferred responsibilities. Here are some common types of industries to consider: Advertising and marketing Advertising and marketing industries typically focus on promoting products to audiences through paid and organic efforts. Employees understand how to attract audiences and publish campaigns using media and print outlets. Careers to consider include: Creative director Copywriter Graphic designer Marketing coordinator Social media coordinator Related: What Are Advertising Degrees? Aerospace In the aerospace industry, employees research, develop and manufacture flight vehicles. They aim to make flight—whether in helicopters, planes or rockets—safe for travelers and employees involved with aviation. Many elements go into this industry, like testing, selling, maintaining, repairing, building and designing various flight machines. Several small companies focus on making aircraft components and selling them to larger manufacturers. Careers to consider include: Aeronautical engineer Aircraft designer Aircraft mechanic Aviation manager Pilot Related: Aeronautics vs. Aerospace Engineering: Definitions and Differences Agriculture The agriculture industry typically focuses on cultivating plants, land and animals to make foods, drinks and other essential items. As technology grows, this industry continues to modernize, allowing farmers to naturally and safely grow more plants. Researchers and scientists within this industry regularly develop innovative ways to create a stronger ecosystem. Those who work in this industry usually produce, sell or export agricultural items and goods to various businesses. Careers to consider include: Agronomist Farmer Food inspector Landscape designer Wildlife biologist Related: How To Become an Agricultural Manager in 6 Steps Computer and technology The computer and technology industry typically focuses on fixing and repairing computer hardware systems, developing or updating new applications and enhancing business networking and software systems. The industry usually interacts with other industries to improve efficiency and productivity levels. For instance, the health care industry adapts many computer systems to store patient records and request medication orders from pharmacies. Careers to consider include: Application developer Computer programmer Information security analyst Software engineer Web developer Construction The construction industry consists of employees who build certain houses, buildings or other structures for residents, businesses or community members. It is regularly adapting to technology advancements to more efficiently build safe, quality structures. These advancements also help them complete more complex tasks like constructing skyscrapers or conducting inspections on areas of bridges or buildings that are difficult for construction workers to reach. There are different types of construction work that can fit into the construction industry sector. The three main categories include: General construction: Those who construct buildings, residential properties or houses are typically completing general construction projects. Specialized construction: This type of construction typically requires more expertise in a certain aspect of construction, such as woodworking, concrete or electrical construction. Heavy construction: Employees who build bridges or roads and construct other larger construction tasks typically fall into the heavy construction category. Careers to consider include: Brickmason Concrete laborer Construction worker Electrician Equipment operator Related: What Are the Different Types of Construction Jobs? Education Th education industry comprises all academic institutions including elementary schools, middle schools, high schools, colleges, universities, learning institutes and technical schools. It also includes both public and private institutions. Public institutes receive government funding while a single person or group of people run and fund private institutions. Careers to consider include: Academic advisor Daycare teacher Professor Special education teacher Teacher Related: Academic Curriculum Vitae (CV) Template (Plus Writing Tips) Energy The energy industry handles matters like renewable and nonrenewable energy to improve the environment and enhance the cost efficiencies of most businesses. Various operations within the energy field include manufacturing, refining and extraction. Other companies that may fall within the energy sector are nuclear power, coal energy and electric power, which are all an essential part of improving the environment. Extensive research is typically conducted by scientists within this industry to find innovative ways to conserve resources and use alternate energies, like wind, hydroelectric and solar energies. Careers to consider include: Energy engineer Environmental technician Solar consultant Urban planner Wind turbine technician Related: Careers in Electricity Entertainment The entertainment and music industry is one of the largest industries in the world. Different types of entertainment within this industry include sports, music, theater, movies, television and web series. This industry usually contains a mixture of performers, crew members and management working together to make the entire industry operate smoothly. Since there are so many employees in this industry, it can typically be more challenging to earn a job in this industry than others. Careers to consider include: Actor Booking agent Film crew Photographer Theatre manager Related: How To Work in the Entertainment Industry: Your Guide To Starting a Career Fashion Employees in the fashion industry focus on areas like marketing, supply chain, e-commerce, media and manufacturing clothing apparel, jewelry, accessories, cosmetics and footwear. They may sell products within the fashion industry to small business store owners, larger supply chains or popular department store locations. There are employees within this industry who may design these apparel and merchandise items while others focus on purchasing and reselling them. Careers to consider include: Buyer Fashion designer Merchandiser Stylist Textile designer Related: Courses To Pursue for Fashion Designing Finance and economic The finance and economic industries handle various aspects of money management and can include areas like banking, corporate finance, public finance, personal finance, investing and asset management. Some employees may work primarily in banks helping others responsibly handle their finances while others may focus solely on keeping businesses financially stable. Many employees in this industry must remain aware of economic conditions and trends to provide valuable financial advice to their clients. Careers to consider include: Certified public accountant (CPA) Financial analyst Financial planner Investment banker Private equity associate Related: 10 Jobs in Financial Securities (With Salaries and Duties Food and beverage The food and beverage industry involves preserving, processing and serving food items. This industry typically works with those in the agriculture industry to receive ingredients from them. They then use these ingredients to create different food and beverage items. Food and beverage employees may also take these food items and process them by adding chemicals and colors to preserve their taste. The food and beverage industry has significantly grown due to the high demand for quick and processed foods. Catering services, fine dining restaurants and bars also fall within the food and beverage industry. Careers to consider include: Bartender Executive chef Line cook Restaurant manager Sommelier Health care Employees who work in the health care industry focus on providing diagnostic, preventative, curative, therapeutic and rehabilitative care to patients to keep them in stable health conditions. The key objective of the health care industry is to prevent and treat any injuries, illnesses or sicknesses patients may have. Careers to consider include: Biomedical engineer Dentist Physician Physician assistant Registered nurse Related: 20 of the Fastest Growing Health Care Jobs Hospitality The hospitality industry works closely with customers to provide a satisfying and unique experience. Employees within this industry typically offer services to meet people's preferences rather than their needs like in the health care industry. The main categories within the hospitality industry are travel, tourism and food and beverage. Businesses like bed and breakfasts, hotels, motels, restaurants and travel agencies typically belong to the hospitality industry. Careers to consider include: Event specialist Front-desk agent Hotel manager Spa manager Travel agent Related: Hospitality Skills To Include on Your Resume by Job Type Manufacturing In the manufacturing industry, employees convert raw components and materials into final products which they sell to companies. Businesses will then take these products and market them to consumers for profits. There are several categories within the manufacturing sector, including wood, leather, paper, textile, transportation equipment and many other materials used to make products. Manufacturing employees usually work in plants, factories or mills. Careers to consider include: Assembler Manufacturing technician Packaging engineer Welder Woodworker Media and news The media and news industry aims to provide essential news to community members and individuals locally and worldwide. Employees typically publish these news stories in outlets like television, radio, online articles, websites, social media, newspapers or podcasts. As technology evolves, more forms of media will become available to consumers which means more jobs in this industry should continue to appear. Careers to consider include: Broadcaster Journalist Producer Social media specialist Video editor Mining The mining industry is an older industry that handles the location and extraction of metals and other natural resources from the earth's surface. This includes coal, oil and natural gas, rock, and other materials. Mining organizations operate all over the world to provide materials for jewelry and other commercial items. Careers to consider include: Coal miner Geologist Mining engineer Petroleum engineer Roustabout Pharmaceutical Pharmaceutical companies research, develop and sell medicine and other drugs to patients, physicians and insurance companies. This industry focuses heavily on research and development to create new and innovative medications to safely improve patients' health and well-being. Employees within this industry spend a significant amount of time researching, creating and selling drugs to cure diseases or treat symptoms for both people and animals. Those who create medical devices, like surgical equipment items, also work in the pharmaceutical industry. Careers to consider include: Chemist Nuclear pharmacist Pharmaceutical manufacturer Pharmacist Pharmacologist Related: Pharmacy Skills: What Are Employers Looking For? Telecommunication Companies in the telecommunications industry construct, install and repair common communication devices like cell phones, cable or internet. The telecommunication industry allows individuals to communicate with others and send information to and from several parts of the world using audio or visual devices. Many organizations within this industry are internet service providers, cable and satellite companies and wireless internet service providers. Careers to consider include: Cable installer Data analyst Systems manager Telecommunications engineer Telecommunications operator Related: Telecommunication: Definition, Types and Careers Transportation Transportation is a large industry handling the movement of people, items and animals using various modes of transportation like trains, trucks, planes and boats. The transportation industry continues to grow, and it includes a wide range of career opportunities for different skill levels, schedules, interests and abilities. Companies will always need to move goods and products and people will always have places they need to go. This makes the transportation industry a fairly secure industry to pursue a career in. Careers to consider include: Distribution manager Supply chain specialist Traffic controller Transportation engineer Truck driver.
Net Benefits – 1 Limits – 95 workers plus limitless combinations and sub designations like workers makes negating impossible especially with no unifying disads against workers with entirety different negotiations – especially key for incarcerated workers which is not a designation for a worker but how they are – that’s a voting issue for extra-T since the aff can then solve every neg position – limits outweighs – aff gets infinite prep and sets terms for debate so DAs and PICs are inherently reactive and its absurd to say potential neg abuse justifies the aff being flat-out non-T
2 Prefer terms of art grounded in the topic lit – they’re key to check arbitrary Frankenstein definitions and ensure that definitions are predictable and conducive to debates over the core controversies of the topic. That controls the internal link to any substantive education.
DTD on T – the debate shouldn’t have happened if they were abusive
Competing Interps on T since its binary and a question of models – Good enough isn’t good—there can be no reasonable interp of what the topic actually means
No RVIs on T – 1 Illogical—T is a gateway issue, winning T is meeting a baseline to have the debate to begin with 2 T is reactionary, they shouldn’t win for meeting their preround burden
11/21/21
NOVDEC - T - Workers
Tournament: Glenbrooks Speech and Debate Tournament | Round: 2 | Opponent: Lake Highland Prep AB | Judge: Joshua StPeter Interp: The aff must defend that a just government recognizes all workers right to strike. Violation: They only defend micro and platform workers That exempts this list of 95 types of workers and more IET 21, ("19 Types of Industry Sectors," Indeed Career Guide, Indeed Editorial Team, https://www.indeed.com/career-advice/finding-a-job/types-of-industry) KD Types of industries There are many kinds of industries you can pursue based on your interests and preferred responsibilities. Here are some common types of industries to consider: Advertising and marketing Advertising and marketing industries typically focus on promoting products to audiences through paid and organic efforts. Employees understand how to attract audiences and publish campaigns using media and print outlets. Careers to consider include: Creative director Copywriter Graphic designer Marketing coordinator Social media coordinator Related: What Are Advertising Degrees? Aerospace In the aerospace industry, employees research, develop and manufacture flight vehicles. They aim to make flight—whether in helicopters, planes or rockets—safe for travelers and employees involved with aviation. Many elements go into this industry, like testing, selling, maintaining, repairing, building and designing various flight machines. Several small companies focus on making aircraft components and selling them to larger manufacturers. Careers to consider include: Aeronautical engineer Aircraft designer Aircraft mechanic Aviation manager Pilot Related: Aeronautics vs. Aerospace Engineering: Definitions and Differences Agriculture The agriculture industry typically focuses on cultivating plants, land and animals to make foods, drinks and other essential items. As technology grows, this industry continues to modernize, allowing farmers to naturally and safely grow more plants. Researchers and scientists within this industry regularly develop innovative ways to create a stronger ecosystem. Those who work in this industry usually produce, sell or export agricultural items and goods to various businesses. Careers to consider include: Agronomist Farmer Food inspector Landscape designer Wildlife biologist Related: How To Become an Agricultural Manager in 6 Steps Computer and technology The computer and technology industry typically focuses on fixing and repairing computer hardware systems, developing or updating new applications and enhancing business networking and software systems. The industry usually interacts with other industries to improve efficiency and productivity levels. For instance, the health care industry adapts many computer systems to store patient records and request medication orders from pharmacies. Careers to consider include: Application developer Computer programmer Information security analyst Software engineer Web developer Construction The construction industry consists of employees who build certain houses, buildings or other structures for residents, businesses or community members. It is regularly adapting to technology advancements to more efficiently build safe, quality structures. These advancements also help them complete more complex tasks like constructing skyscrapers or conducting inspections on areas of bridges or buildings that are difficult for construction workers to reach. There are different types of construction work that can fit into the construction industry sector. The three main categories include: General construction: Those who construct buildings, residential properties or houses are typically completing general construction projects. Specialized construction: This type of construction typically requires more expertise in a certain aspect of construction, such as woodworking, concrete or electrical construction. Heavy construction: Employees who build bridges or roads and construct other larger construction tasks typically fall into the heavy construction category. Careers to consider include: Brickmason Concrete laborer Construction worker Electrician Equipment operator Related: What Are the Different Types of Construction Jobs? Education Th education industry comprises all academic institutions including elementary schools, middle schools, high schools, colleges, universities, learning institutes and technical schools. It also includes both public and private institutions. Public institutes receive government funding while a single person or group of people run and fund private institutions. Careers to consider include: Academic advisor Daycare teacher Professor Special education teacher Teacher Related: Academic Curriculum Vitae (CV) Template (Plus Writing Tips) Energy The energy industry handles matters like renewable and nonrenewable energy to improve the environment and enhance the cost efficiencies of most businesses. Various operations within the energy field include manufacturing, refining and extraction. Other companies that may fall within the energy sector are nuclear power, coal energy and electric power, which are all an essential part of improving the environment. Extensive research is typically conducted by scientists within this industry to find innovative ways to conserve resources and use alternate energies, like wind, hydroelectric and solar energies. Careers to consider include: Energy engineer Environmental technician Solar consultant Urban planner Wind turbine technician Related: Careers in Electricity Entertainment The entertainment and music industry is one of the largest industries in the world. Different types of entertainment within this industry include sports, music, theater, movies, television and web series. This industry usually contains a mixture of performers, crew members and management working together to make the entire industry operate smoothly. Since there are so many employees in this industry, it can typically be more challenging to earn a job in this industry than others. Careers to consider include: Actor Booking agent Film crew Photographer Theatre manager Related: How To Work in the Entertainment Industry: Your Guide To Starting a Career Fashion Employees in the fashion industry focus on areas like marketing, supply chain, e-commerce, media and manufacturing clothing apparel, jewelry, accessories, cosmetics and footwear. They may sell products within the fashion industry to small business store owners, larger supply chains or popular department store locations. There are employees within this industry who may design these apparel and merchandise items while others focus on purchasing and reselling them. Careers to consider include: Buyer Fashion designer Merchandiser Stylist Textile designer Related: Courses To Pursue for Fashion Designing Finance and economic The finance and economic industries handle various aspects of money management and can include areas like banking, corporate finance, public finance, personal finance, investing and asset management. Some employees may work primarily in banks helping others responsibly handle their finances while others may focus solely on keeping businesses financially stable. Many employees in this industry must remain aware of economic conditions and trends to provide valuable financial advice to their clients. Careers to consider include: Certified public accountant (CPA) Financial analyst Financial planner Investment banker Private equity associate Related: 10 Jobs in Financial Securities (With Salaries and Duties Food and beverage The food and beverage industry involves preserving, processing and serving food items. This industry typically works with those in the agriculture industry to receive ingredients from them. They then use these ingredients to create different food and beverage items. Food and beverage employees may also take these food items and process them by adding chemicals and colors to preserve their taste. The food and beverage industry has significantly grown due to the high demand for quick and processed foods. Catering services, fine dining restaurants and bars also fall within the food and beverage industry. Careers to consider include: Bartender Executive chef Line cook Restaurant manager Sommelier Health care Employees who work in the health care industry focus on providing diagnostic, preventative, curative, therapeutic and rehabilitative care to patients to keep them in stable health conditions. The key objective of the health care industry is to prevent and treat any injuries, illnesses or sicknesses patients may have. Careers to consider include: Biomedical engineer Dentist Physician Physician assistant Registered nurse Related: 20 of the Fastest Growing Health Care Jobs Hospitality The hospitality industry works closely with customers to provide a satisfying and unique experience. Employees within this industry typically offer services to meet people's preferences rather than their needs like in the health care industry. The main categories within the hospitality industry are travel, tourism and food and beverage. Businesses like bed and breakfasts, hotels, motels, restaurants and travel agencies typically belong to the hospitality industry. Careers to consider include: Event specialist Front-desk agent Hotel manager Spa manager Travel agent Related: Hospitality Skills To Include on Your Resume by Job Type Manufacturing In the manufacturing industry, employees convert raw components and materials into final products which they sell to companies. Businesses will then take these products and market them to consumers for profits. There are several categories within the manufacturing sector, including wood, leather, paper, textile, transportation equipment and many other materials used to make products. Manufacturing employees usually work in plants, factories or mills. Careers to consider include: Assembler Manufacturing technician Packaging engineer Welder Woodworker Media and news The media and news industry aims to provide essential news to community members and individuals locally and worldwide. Employees typically publish these news stories in outlets like television, radio, online articles, websites, social media, newspapers or podcasts. As technology evolves, more forms of media will become available to consumers which means more jobs in this industry should continue to appear. Careers to consider include: Broadcaster Journalist Producer Social media specialist Video editor Mining The mining industry is an older industry that handles the location and extraction of metals and other natural resources from the earth's surface. This includes coal, oil and natural gas, rock, and other materials. Mining organizations operate all over the world to provide materials for jewelry and other commercial items. Careers to consider include: Coal miner Geologist Mining engineer Petroleum engineer Roustabout Pharmaceutical Pharmaceutical companies research, develop and sell medicine and other drugs to patients, physicians and insurance companies. This industry focuses heavily on research and development to create new and innovative medications to safely improve patients' health and well-being. Employees within this industry spend a significant amount of time researching, creating and selling drugs to cure diseases or treat symptoms for both people and animals. Those who create medical devices, like surgical equipment items, also work in the pharmaceutical industry. Careers to consider include: Chemist Nuclear pharmacist Pharmaceutical manufacturer Pharmacist Pharmacologist Related: Pharmacy Skills: What Are Employers Looking For? Telecommunication Companies in the telecommunications industry construct, install and repair common communication devices like cell phones, cable or internet. The telecommunication industry allows individuals to communicate with others and send information to and from several parts of the world using audio or visual devices. Many organizations within this industry are internet service providers, cable and satellite companies and wireless internet service providers. Careers to consider include: Cable installer Data analyst Systems manager Telecommunications engineer Telecommunications operator Related: Telecommunication: Definition, Types and Careers Transportation Transportation is a large industry handling the movement of people, items and animals using various modes of transportation like trains, trucks, planes and boats. The transportation industry continues to grow, and it includes a wide range of career opportunities for different skill levels, schedules, interests and abilities. Companies will always need to move goods and products and people will always have places they need to go. This makes the transportation industry a fairly secure industry to pursue a career in. Careers to consider include: Distribution manager Supply chain specialist Traffic controller Transportation engineer Truck driver.
Net Benefits – 1 Limits – 95 workers plus limitless combinations and sub designations like workers makes negating impossible especially with no unifying disads against workers with entirety different negotiations – especially key for micro and platform workers which is not a designation for a worker but stratification by their job – that’s a voting issue for extra-T since the aff can then solve every neg position – limits outweighs – aff gets infinite prep and sets terms for debate so DAs and PICs are inherently reactive and its absurd to say potential neg abuse justifies the aff being flat-out non-T
DTD on T – the debate shouldn’t have happened if they were abusive
Competing Interps on T since its binary and a question of models – Good enough isn’t good—there can be no reasonable interp of what the topic actually means
No RVIs on T – 1 Illogical—T is a gateway issue, winning T is meeting a baseline to have the debate to begin with 2 T is reactionary, they shouldn’t win for meeting their preround burden 3 Forcing the 1NC to go all in on theory kills substance education and neg flex—o/w on real world
11/21/21
SEPOCT - CP - Public-Private Partnerships
Tournament: Plano West Classic | Round: 2 | Opponent: Strake Jesuit VJ | Judge: Sreyaash Das CP Text: The member nations of the World Trade Organization ought to establish public-private partnerships between pharmaceutical companies and governmental ministries. Patent waivers are insufficient to solve unequal COVID vaccine distribution – public-private partnerships boost innovation to speed up vaccination – prefer my ev, it’s comparative Rubin and Saidel 8/31/21 (Harvey Rubin M.D. Ph.D. is a Professor of Medicine and Computer Science at the University of Pennsylvania. Nicholas Saidel J.D. is the Associate Director for the Institute for Strategic Threat Analysis and Response (ISTAR) at the University of Pennsylvania), “Innovation beyond patent waivers: Achieving global vaccination goals through public-private partnerships”, Brookings Institution, Reimagining Modern-day Markets and Regulations, https://www.brookings.edu/blog/up-front/2021/08/31/innovation-beyond-patent-waivers-achieving-global-vaccination-goals-through-public-private-partnerships/ NT An optimal solution to the currently inequitable global distribution of COVID-19 vaccines requires more innovation than a temporary waiver of patents. A process is needed whereby LMICs can take some level of ownership over the manufacturing and distribution of critical vaccines and medicines without the bureaucratic red tape associated with compulsory licensing. We suggest that PPPs between pharmaceutical companies and relevant governmental ministries that are well-funded by access to the capital markets through impact bonds is a comprehensive, sustainable solution to the problem of achieving global vaccination goals. A PPP can be defined as: Co-operation of some sort of durability between specific public and private actors in which they jointly develop infrastructure, products, and services (including knowledge and dissemination of information) and share risks (financial and/or prestige), cost and resources, which are applied in the development and delivery process. This solution has three essential components: first, identifying the incentives for the private sector to participate in the partnership; second, inducing the public sector to transfer some of its mission and responsibilities to the partnership; and third, access to capital markets. As the current authors wrote in 2016: Private sector entities can profit from PPPs—especially with LMICs that present a new or unsaturated market for a wide range of a pharmaceutical company’s products. Increased brand recognition, increased market penetration, entry into new markets, preserving the existing customer base, gaining new customers, and garnering favorable status for introduction of new products are all attractive concepts for private sector partners. Relaxed barriers to market entry (e.g., tariffs and taxes) and access to LMIC raw data would also motivate a private sector entity to forge a relationship with public entities. The public sector can be incentivized to formalize a PPP for pharmaceutical and vaccine-related issues like supply chain management, data capture and analysis, quality control, and inventory optimization. PPPs would assist in speeding up the scaling required to develop sufficient quantities of COVID-19 vaccines and medicines, and LMICs would be better prepared for future pandemics. Access to the capital markets through “impact bonds” can provide a source of sustainable funds. Impact bonds work in a series of steps (see Figure 1. below): Investors purchase bonds and provide up-front risk capital to finance the program(s). Prior to issuance of the bonds, well-defined metrics leading to specific sets of outcomes for success of the partnership need to be negotiated. The progress toward fulfilling these outcomes will be monitored and rigorously measured by an independent organization at every stage. When the partnership demonstrates that it has met its goals, the outcome payers—who can be public sector entities (i.e., Ministries of Health or Finance), the private sector, development banks, or combinations of all three—are contractually and legally required to repay the investors. The key advantage of this approach is the additional accountability for outcomes that investment brings. Investors’ interest in achieving measurable success provides a framework that incentivizes flexible and effective program implementation. Risk is transferred to the investor, and the focus on rigorously measured outcomes ensures that scarce donor funding is only used for tangible, verifiable outcomes. The metrics, goals, and outcomes must be uniquely crafted for each country in which the impact bond is issued. Ultimately, a successful PPP might lead to healthier populations, more robust and cost-effective national healthcare systems, and economic growth. As Brookings Institution scholars wrote in a review of USAID’s PPPs: “On a conceptual level, public-private partnerships are a win-win, even a win-win-win, as they often involve three types of organizations: a public agency, a for-profit business, and a nonprofit entity. PPPs use public resources to leverage private resources and expertise to advance a public purpose. In turn, non-public sectors—both businesses and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs)—use their funds and expertise to leverage government resources, clout, and experience to advance their own objectives, consistent with a PPP’s overall public purpose. The data from the USAID data set confirm this conceptual mutual reinforcement of public and private goals.” A case study is further illustrative of how PPPs play an integral role in pandemic-related solutions. Established in 2003, The U.S. President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) is a U.S. government foreign aid program focused on controlling the HIV/AIDS epidemic in more than 50 countries. PEPFAR has saved millions of lives; experts note that PPPs played a key role in this effort, strengthening logistics, supply chains, and HIV lab practices: PEPFAR’s Supply Chain Management System took advantage of private industry’s best practices in logistics, and a partnership with the medical technology company BD (Becton, Dickinson and Company) improved laboratory systems throughout sub-Saharan Africa. We found that setting ambitious goals, enlisting both global and local partners, cultivating a culture of collaboration, careful planning, continuous monitoring and evaluation, and measuring outcomes systematically led to the most effective programs. Other examples of successful PPPs in global health include the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunizations (GAVI); the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, TB and Malaria; Global Alliance for TB Drug Development, Drugs for Neglected Diseases initiative (DNDi); International AIDS Vaccine Initiative (IAVI); Medicines for Malaria Venture; Harnessing Non-State Actors for Better Health for the Poor; and PPPs for Universal Health Coverage. CONCLUSION Patent waivers will not correct the lack of capacity in the majority of LMICs that is necessary to implement domestic production of vaccines. Cold chain infrastructure, logistics and data systems, robust supply chains (including access to the raw materials needed for disease testing and vaccine/medicine production), and storage and administration need to be developed. Finally, there is a desperate need to train and maintain a skilled workforce to permanently meet not only the ongoing challenges of the current pandemic and any future pandemic but also to build capacity and jobs in the biomedical sectors. Implementing an impact bond-funded PPP to fully develop, manage, and sustain a vaccine and critical medicine supply/cold chain is the most promising path forward to broaden access to COVID-19 vaccines and therapeutics in LMICs. It’s an ambitious goal that requires cooperation among entities with disparate interests, but the current alternatives are not working. The patent waiver debate could yield fruit by perhaps streamlining TRIPS’ compulsory licensing process or by granting waivers to countries that have the capacity to make generics at lower cost. However, the core long-term problem for most LMICs will remain without engagement with the private sector’s expertise and access to capital markets. PPPs are the best way these countries will be able to strengthen their infrastructure, supply chain capacity, and technical expertise sufficiently and permanently in order to respond to pandemics effectively—a result that is required for global health security and equity.
10/23/21
SEPOCT - DA - Counterfeit Medicines
Tournament: Plano West Classic | Round: 2 | Opponent: Strake Jesuit VJ | Judge: Sreyaash Das Healthcare counterfeiting is on the rise, but national regulations in the status quo combat the problem for the WTO – IP is the goldilocks enabler for sustained cooperation. Bentley 21, (“The insidious problem of counterfeiting in healthcare," Raconteur, https://www.raconteur.net/legal/intellectual-property/counterfeiting-healthcare/) KD Criminal activity in healthcare has also intensified with the coronavirus pandemic. Under Interpol’s Operation Pangea XIII, conducted last March, police, customs and health authorities in 90 countries seized counterfeit face masks, self-testing kits, anti-viral medication and other products worth more than $14 million, leading to 121 arrests and the closure of 2,500 weblinks and websites. National and regional regulation, and the work of healthcare producers and law enforcement agencies including the police and customs officials, all provide the front-line defence against healthcare counterfeiting. Healthcare producers use a plethora of measures to combat the problem, notably barcodes, holograms and anti-tampering devices as well as a range of fieldwork. In addition to mandatory features required by regulators for packaging, including serialisation, pharmaceuticals giant Novartis uses overt and covert security features so country verifiers can identify falsified products. Mobile laboratories are used by its forensic teams to analyse suspected samples in the field. A new cloud-based, mobile-enabled solution, which will accelerate the testing, detecting and reporting of false medicines to national authorities and WHO, is now being piloted. Technology is a critical enabler in the fight against pharmaceutical crime, says Stanislas Barro, Novartis global head of anti-counterfeiting. “Detecting falsified medicines requires state-of-the-art technology to test packaging and products in the field. We use online monitoring, like webcrawlers with customised parameters, to monitor the internet 24/7 to detect illicit sales of suspected falsified medicines using our brands,” he says. The company has also built a data analytics and visualisation dashboard to support its risk-analysis effort, he adds. Although counterfeiters are prosecuted by law enforcement agencies, the actions of IP holders remain vital. “We file trademarks to clearly identify our products and record our IP rights with customs authorities globally to empower them to identify suspected falsified goods,” says Myrtha Hurtado Rivas, Novartis global head of legal brand protection. “But companies like ours cannot fully shift responsibility to reduce patient risk to national law enforcers. Taking action based on IP rights is necessary, for instance to ensure rogue online pharmacies are taken down swiftly. In the majority of legal actions, having an IP right increases the chances of success against counterfeiters.” Legitimate pharmaceutical companies also have a duty to report confirmed incidents of falsified versions of their products to local health authorities, Novartis points out, and it has voluntarily committed to reporting these to WHO within seven days of discovery following WHO’s recommendations. IP is the key tool to prevent the spread of counterfeit medicines – the 1AC removes insurance measures for companies to have the necessary standards for developing high-quality medications. FIFARMA 21, Latin American Federation of Pharma Industry, represent 16 research-based biopharmaceutical companies and 11 local associations dedicated to discovering and developing innovative, quality and safe health products and services that improve the lives of patients in Latin America and the Caribbean and advocate for patient-centric, sustainable health systems characterized by high regulatory standards and ethical principles ("This is how we fight counterfeit medicines with Intellectual Property," https://fifarma.org/en/this-is-how-we-fight-counterfeit-medicines-with-intellectual-property/) KD The role of IP In addition to functioning as a tool to maintain constant innovation in the industry, IP helps reducing counterfeit medicines because medicines have better technologies and ingredients are more difficult to copy. This means that, through market incentives, the industry manages to have high quality infrastructure, new technology and trained personnel, to create specialized and specific medicines and therapies, which is why they are difficult to replicate. On the other hand, political will functions as another important axis, as it must prosecute those who are making counterfeit medicines. This is achieved through a constant conversation between industry and governments. Therefore, it will be absolutely clear how to identify the authenticity of medicines. In short, IP allows quality standards to be clearer and stricter, and regulators to have greater knowledge and traceability of each product that enters the market. Through IP, you can establish a record of all products globally, which makes it easier to find possible counterfeit medicines. Consequently, the best way to fight counterfeit medicines is through accessing the best quality medicines and for this to happen, an ecosystem between countries, regulators and industry is needed. This ecosystem shall take into account the structural deficiencies of each country and addresses them in a holistic manner, to provide the best quality medicines. In the end, with the Intellectual Property associated with the creation of the product, there are also associated standards of transparency and detailed information that every regulatory agency can access. Moreover, the value chains will receive all this information in order to be aware of the appearance of products that are not registered with the standards of a product protected by IP. Also, IP helps to combat counterfeit medicines internationally, since there are laws that cover all member countries of the United Nations and punish more severely those who commit this crime. Likewise, these laws provide countries with the necessary mechanisms to take concrete action once a counterfeit medicine is discovered. This, of course, must go hand in hand with the political will of each country, because only with collaboration between different actors will it be possible to prosecute the entire chain of counterfeit medicines. Counterfeits inflate prices for market introductions and strengthen anti-microbial resistance – that’s the key internal link to pandemics Buckley and Gostin 13, Senior Program Officer at National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine; Highest Academic Rank at Georgetown Law, American law professor who specializes in public health law. He was a Fulbright Fellow and is best known as the author of the Model State Emergency Health Powers Act and as a significant contributor to journals on medicine and law ("The Effects of Falsified and Substandard Drugs," https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK202526/) KD Individual patients have much to lose from substandard and falsified medicines. These products also encourage drug resistance and thereby threaten population health today and for future generations. This is a particular concern with substandard products where the dose of active ingredient is low and variable and with falsified products diluted by criminals in an effort to pass screening assays. Drug resistance is common in pathogens with short life cycles: viruses, bacteria, and protozoa. Poor-quality antimicrobial medications, taken frequently and, in poor countries, generally taken without professional supervision, contribute to drug resistance. Antimicrobial Resistance Antibiotics should be used only when indicated, in the appropriate dose, and for the correct length of time. Ensuring the proper treatment with the right combination of drugs is the underlying principle of Directly Observed Treatment—Short Course (DOTS), the internationally accepted method of tuberculosis surveillance and treatment (WHO SEARO, 2006). DOTS also depends on a safe and reliable drug supply. Poor-quality drugs have been cited as a causal factor for the rise of multidrug-resistant tuberculosis (Kelland, 2012). Over time, the bacteria causing tuberculosis have become increasingly drug resistant. Multidrug-resistant tuberculosis precedes extensively drug-resistant tuberculosis, and finally, sometimes, totally drug-resistant tuberculosis (Udwadia, 2012). Extensively drug-resistant strains of tuberculosis account for about 6 percent of incident infections worldwide, but much more in China, India, and the former Soviet Union (Jain and Mondal, 2008). Figure 2-1 shows the increasing incidence of multidrug-resistant tuberculosis around the world. Drug-resistant bacteria often surface in hospitals, causing infections that are difficult to treat and are an important killer of adults in low-and middle-income countries (Okeke et al., 2005b; WHO, 2012a). It is difficult to estimate the burden of antimicrobial resistance in low- and middle-income countries, in part because of the dearth of data, especially from francophone Africa, the Asian Pacific, and the former Soviet Union (Okeke et al., 2005a). The data that do exist are grim. Multidrug-resistant staphylococcus, an emerging problem in India and sub-Saharan Africa (Parasa et al., 2010; Vincent et al., 2009), accounts for more than half of all nosocomial infections in parts of Latin America (Guzmán-Blanco et al., 2009). (See Figure 2-2.) In a qualitative study in Orissa, India, doctors, veterinarians, and pharmacists cited poor-quality antibiotics as a cause of drug resistance, but mentioned it only in passing, focusing more on patient and provider behaviors (Sahoo et al., 2010). This is consistent with most public health literature, which gives great deal of attention to the overuse of antibiotics as contributing to the rise of antimicrobial resistance in general (Byarugaba, 2010; Okeke et al., 2005b) and drug-resistant pneumonia in particular (Unicef and WHO, 2006). Comparatively little work, however, discusses the role of drug quality in encouraging bacterial resistance. Antibiotics that contain low doses of active ingredient cause low circulating levels of the drug in the patient. This contributes to treatment failure and selectively favors the growth of drug-resistant organisms (Okeke et al., 2005b). Resistance is most common among the oldest and least expensive families of antibiotics (Okeke et al., 2005b). According to a recent Tufts University estimate, it costs more than $1.3 billion to bring a new drug to market (Kaitin, 2010). Antibiotics in particular offer pharmaceutical companies a low return on investment; patients take them for only a week or two, in contrast to lifetime regimes of maintenance drugs. There would be even less monetary incentive to develop antibiotic for only the poorest parts of the world. Preserving antibiotics is imperative and depends on maintaining drug quality as much as on encouraging rational use.
AMR is the key internal link to sustained pandemics and causes biowarfare – extinction - AMR - no herd immunity - longer-lasting and stronger pandemics MacIntyre et al 18, Principal Research Fellow, School of Public Health and Community Medicine, UNSW Medicine, University of New South Wales, Sydney, NSW 2052 Australia ("Converging and emerging threats to health security," PubMed Central (PMC), https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7104605/) KD There is growing recognition of the costs and significance of AMR. Multi-resistant organisms are emerging at much higher rates than seen previously, with urgent attention needed to mitigate a risk which is predicted in one report to be the greatest global burden of disease (Review on Antimicrobial Resistance 2016). One recent estimate indicates that by 2050, infections from resistant bacteria may overtake cancer as the leading cause of death in the world and cost US$100 trillion. This estimate has been questioned and likely an overestimate, but AMR nonetheless causes a significant burden of disease (De Kraker et al. 2016). The world is in urgent need of new strategies in the human, animal, agricultural and food industries. This includes reviewing how we price/value antimicrobials, incentives for new antimicrobial development and judicious use, and restrictions around use across sectors. In addition, serious AMR could be engineered and released as an act of bioterrorism, given the availability of technology such as CRISP Cas9 (MacIntyre and Bui 2017). A longer-term model of population risk (versus immediate individual risk of often minor infection) is required to guide everyday use and mitigate this global threat. Whether a bioterrorist attack, pandemic or infections complicated by AMR, the risk is increasing as outlined above. Infectious diseases do not respect international borders and can spread rapidly around the world. The continued growth in large urban areas, and megacities in particular, in which high population densities represent optimum conditions for spread of infection merits significant attention in biosecurity. This risk is heightened for megacities in developing countries in which serious gaps exist in public health surveillance for early detection of epidemic threats, together with inadequate critical infrastructure and other preparedness resources. Prevention, mitigation and control of these threats, therefore, require efforts at local, national and global levels. Despite the call for a One Health approach (Rabinowitz et al. 2013), there is no suitable system for governing use of antimicrobials across human health, animal health and food production, and often no coordination of efforts across these sectors. Global legal and governance frameworks for pandemics and bioterrorism are critical, but there are gaps in some relevant regulations—the International Health Regulations (IHR) (World Health Organization 2017c), the Biological Weapons Convention (BWC) (United Nations Office for Disarmament Affairs 2016) and the Cartagena Protocol (Convention on Biological Diversity 2012). The IHR provides a framework for epidemic preparedness, but many countries do not have the resources to comply with them, and the IHR has not been fully revised since 2005 (World Health Organization 2008). The BWC was revised in 2016, but widely regarded as unenforceable and inadequate in considering new technologies such as CRISPR Cas9 (Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 2016). The Cartagena protocol was developed to address regulation of movements of living modified organisms (LMOs) resulting from biotechnology from one country to another, but has focused on ecology and biodiversity and has not been utilised for human biosecurity. The TAPIC framework (Trump 2017) is a good starting point for considering how existing regulations can be improved and enforced and how new ones could be developed globally.
10/23/21
SEPOCT - K - Afropesssimism
Tournament: Heart of Texas | Round: 2 | Opponent: Harker RM | Judge: Leah Clark-Villanueva The only ethical demand available to modern politics is that of the Slave, the demand for the end of the world itself. The grammar of the 1AC is inadequate and parasitic on Blackness as a sentient object and distances itself from the articulation of the gratuitous violence that positions blackness as the anti-human and the structural antagonism that undergirds political life. Wilderson 10 (Frank B. Wilderson III is American writer, dramatist, filmmaker and critic. He is a full professor of Drama and African American studies at the University of California, Irvine. He received his BA in government and philosophy from Dartmouth College, his MA in fine arts from Columbia University and his PhD in Rhetoric and Film Studies from the University of California, Berkeley), Red, White, and Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms, Duke University Press, Pg. 74-78. KD In the Introduction and the preceding chapter, we have seen how the aporia between Black being and political ontology has existed since Arab and European enslavement of Africans, and how the need to craft an ensemble of questions through which to arrive at an unflinching paradigmatic analysis of political ontology is repeatedly thwarted in its attempts to find a language that can express the violence of slave-making, a violence that is both structural and performative. Humanist discourse, the discourse whose epistemological machinations provide our conceptual frameworks for thinking political ontology, is diverse and contrary. But for all its diversity and contrariness it is sutured by an implicit rhetorical consensus that violence accrues to the Human body as a result of transgressions, whether real or imagined, within the Symbolic Order. That is to say, Humanist discourse can only think a subject’s relation to violence as a contingency and not as a matrix that positions the subject. Put another way, Humanism has no theory of the slave because it imagines a subject who has been either alienated in language (Lacan) and/or alienated from his/her cartographic and temporal capacities (Marx). It cannot imagine an object who has been positioned by gratuitous violence and who has no cartographic and temporal capacities to lose—a sentient being for whom recognition and incorporation is impossible. In short, political ontology, as imagined through Humanism, can only produce discourse that has as its foundation alienation and exploitation as a grammar of suffering, when what is needed (for the Black, who is always already a slave) is an ensemble of ontological questions that has as its foundation accumulation and fungibility as a grammar of suffering (Hartman). The violence of the Middle Passage and the slave estate (Spillers), technologies of accumulation and fungibility, recompose and reenact their horrors upon each succeeding generation of Blacks. This violence is both gratuitous, that is, it is not contingent upon transgressions against the hegemony of civil society; and structural, in that it positions Blacks ontologically outside of humanity and civil society. Simultaneously, it renders the ontological status of humanity (life itself) wholly dependent on civil society’s repetition compulsion: the frenzied and fragmented machinations through which civil society reenacts gratuitous violence upon the Black—that civil society might know itself as the domain of humans— generation after generation. Again, we need a new language of abstraction to explain this horror. The explanatory power of Humanist discourse is bankrupt in the face of the Black. It is inadequate and inessential to, as well as parasitic on, the ensemble of questions which the dead but sentient thing, the Black, struggles to articulate in a world of living subjects. My work on film, cultural theory, and political ontology marks my attempt to contribute to this often fragmented and constantly assaulted quest to forge a language of abstraction with explanatory powers emphatic enough to embrace the Black, an accumulated and fungible object, in a human world of exploited and alienated subjects. The imposition of Humanism’s assumptive logic has encumbered Black film studies to the extent that it is underwritten by the assumptive logic of White or non-Black film studies. This is a problem of Cultural Studies writ large. In this chapter, I want to offer a brief illustration of how we might attempt to break the theoretical impasse between, on the one hand, the assumptive logic of Cultural Studies and, on the other hand, the theoretical aphasia to which Cultural Studies is reduced when it encounters the (non)ontological status of the Black. I will do so not by launching a frontal attack against White film theory, in particular, or even Cultural Studies broadly speaking, but by interrogating Jacques Lacan— because Lacanian psychoanalysis is one of the twin pillars that shoulders film theory and Cultural Studies.i My problem with Cultural Studies is that when it theorizes the interface between Blacks and Humans it is hobbled in its attempts to (a) expose power relationships and (b) examine how relations of power influence and shape cultural practice. Cultural Studies insists upon a grammar of suffering which assumes that we are all positioned essentially by way of the Symbolic Order, what Lacan calls the wall of language—and as such our potential for stasis or change (our capacity for being oppressed or free) is overdetermined by our “universal” ability or inability to seize and wield discursive weapons. This idea corrupts the explanatory power of most socially engaged films and even the most radical line of political action because it produces a cinema and a politics that cannot account for the grammar of suffering of the Black—the Slave. To put it bluntly, the imaginative labor (Jared Sexton 2003) of cinema, political action, and Cultural Studies are all afflicted with the same theoretical aphasia. They are speechless in the face of gratuitous violence. This theoretical aphasia is symptomatic of a debilitated ensemble of questions regarding political ontology. At its heart are two registers of imaginative labor. The first register is that of description, the rhetorical labor aimed at explaining the way relations of power are named, categorized, and explored. The second register can be characterized as prescription, the rhetorical labor predicated on the notion that everyone can be emancipated through some form of discursive, or symbolic, intervention. But emancipation through some form of discursive or symbolic intervention is wanting in the face of a subject position that is not a subject position—what Marx calls “a speaking implement” or what Ronald Judy calls “an interdiction against subjectivity.” In other words, the Black has sentient capacity but no relational capacity. As an accumulated and fungible object, rather than an exploited and alienated subject, the Black is openly vulnerable to the whims of the world; and so is his/her cultural “production.” What does it mean— what are the stakes—when the world can whimsically transpose one’s cultural gestures, the stuff of symbolic intervention, onto another worldly good, a commodity of style? Fanon echoes this question when he writes, “I came into the world imbued with the will to find a meaning in things, my spirit filled with the desire to attain to the source of the world, and then I found that I was an object in the midst of other objects” (BSWM 109). Fanon clarifies this assertion and alerts us to the stakes which the optimistic assumptions of Film Studies and Cultural Studies, the counter-hegemonic promise of alternative cinema, and the emancipatory project of coalition politics cannot account for, when he writes: “Ontology— once it is finally admitted as leaving existence by the wayside—does not permit us to understand the being of the black...” (110). This presents a challenge to film production and to film studies given their cultivation and elaboration by the imaginative labor of Cultural Studies, underwritten by the assumptive logic of Humanism; because if everyone does not possess the DNA of culture, that is, (a) time and space transformative capacity, (b) a relational status with other Humans through which one’s time and space transformative capacity is recognized and incorporated, and (c) a relation to violence that is contingent and not gratuitous, then how do we theorize a sentient being who is positioned not by the DNA culture but by the structure of gratuitous violence? How do we think outside of the conceptual framework of subalternity—that is, outside of the explanatory power of Cultural Studies—and think beyond the pale of emancipatory agency by way of symbolic intervention? I am calling for a different conceptual framework, predicated not on the subject- effect of cultural performance but on the structure of political ontology; one that allows us to substitute a politics of culture for a culture of politics. The value in this rests not simply in the way it would help us re-think cinema and performance, but in the way it can help us theorize what is at present only intuitive and anecdotal: the unbridgeable gap between Black being and Human life. To put a finer point on it, such a framework might enhance the explanatory power of theory, art, and politics by destroying and perhaps restructuring, the ethical range of our current ensemble of questions. This has profound implications for non-Black film studies, Black film studies, and African American Studies writ large because they are currently entangled in a multicultural paradigm that takes an interest in an insufficiently critical comparative analysis—that is, a comparative analysis which is in pursuit of a coalition politics (if not in practice then at least as an theorizing metaphor) which, by its very nature, crowds out and forecloses the Slave’s grammar of suffering. Anti-black and colonial structures overdetermine international conceptions of care, allowing people to conflate care with violence, causing the 1AC’s inability to think of Blackness as anything ‘otherwise’ than dependent on colonial powers for care in the wake – Sierra Leone during the Ebola epidemic proves Hirsch 19 (Lioba Assaba Hirsch, I am a qualitative and archival researcher with an interest in the colonial and antiblack entanglements of Western biomedicine and global health management. My research has focused on the historical development, contemporary management and colonial aftermath of British health interventions in West Africa. My PhD thesis analysed the British-led international Ebola response in Sierra Leone in the wake of British colonialism and the transatlantic slave trade. I have a BA in Political Sciences from Sciences Po Paris and an MSc in Political Sociology from the London School of Economics and Political Sciences (LSE). After completing my MSc I joined the field of international development by working for GIZ, the German government's international development agency in Zambia (2014-15) on a project seeking to strengthen Zambian civil society organisations. Between late 2015 and 2019 I worked towards a PhD at UCL's Department of Geography and Institute for Global Health. I joined the Centre for History in Public Health in November 2019.), “Antiblackness and global health: placing the 2014 - 15 Ebola response in the colonial wake”, University College London, Department of Geography Institute for Global Health, September 2019, pg. 219-223, https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10089879/1/Lioba20Hirsch20PhD20thesis.pdf NT 8.2.2 Thinking the response otherwise Building on from the previous section I further explore care and turn to what Sharpe (2016) calls ‘the inability to think Blackness otherwise’. I show how care can be analysed as being linked to the inability to think the Ebola response otherwise. In order to show this, I analyse two instances during my fieldwork in which people involved in the response analysed and reacted to being challenged on the neo-colonial implications of the response. I suggest that the inability or unwillingness to think the response and medical care that was provided outside of the normalised reality of colonialism and the structures of (post-)colonial dependency between Sierra Leone and the UK, illustrates the epistemic hold of the wake on thinking care and thinking the Ebola response. At the same time this inability/unwillingness further shows how colonial conflations of care and colonial/antiblack violence were epigrammatic in conversations about the response. Care here becomes an expression of continued dependency that extends, rather than counteracts the colonial present. 219 Sharpe writes about teaching a course on memory and trauma. She describes structuring her course around the trans-Atlantic slave trade and the Holocaust and narrates how her students reserved their empathy and care for discussions on the Holocaust, rather than the trans-Atlantic slave trade and enslavement. She (2016, p.11) analyses their reactions as follows: ... students would say things about the formerly enslaved like, “Well, they were given food and clothing; there was a kind of care there. And what would the enslaved have done otherwise?” The “otherwise” here means: What lives would Black people have had outside of slavery? How would they have survived independent of those who enslaved them? Sharpe’s description of students’ lack of care and her subsequent analysis of this reaction is important on several levels. It reaffirms that in her work care has multiple meanings and that it can be violence. But she also introduces a discussion on her students’ capacity to imagine Black life outside of enslavement and colonialism. As Sharpe (2016) states, her students’ ‘inability to think blackness otherwise’ is a fundamental characteristic of being in the wake. Some responders displayed a similar inability or unwillingness to think the response and African-ness ‘otherwise’. As I have shown in the previous chapter, antiblackness and the relevance of the colonial past to the development of the West African Ebola epidemic and subsequent international response was largely epigrammatic in the discussions I observed or had with experts and responders to the Ebola epidemic in Sierra Leone. Rather postcolonial dependencies were taken for granted, left unquestioned and used to reinforce ideas of British care for Sierra Leoneans. In order to illustrate how this inability to think otherwise manifested in my research, I return to the expert panel discussion on the Ebola response that I analysed in 7.2.1. I focus here on just one of the statements made during this discussion, which was, as I described, hosted at the Royal Society in London. Towards the end of the discussion in which a panel of global health experts reacted to a question posed on the neo-colonial nature of the Ebola response, I presented the words of a senior fellow, who was not part of the panel, but joined the discussion from the side of the room. In the previous chapter I focused largely on his remarks on Liberia-US relations and his assertion that they could not be qualified as neo-colonialism. I take my analysis up where I left off and focus in the following analysis on his statement on godparents. senior fellow: Look the Americans at the beginning of September said “We really want to help Liberia”, which was never an American colony, so you can’t describe that as neo-colonialism. And president Obama 220 contacted President Johnson- Sirleaf and said “What do you want?” She said what she wanted, the Americans responded. They said to us “We have to work inside a multilateral envelope, we created the biggest health mission we’ve ever done, we’ve never done one before”. The British came along very quickly afterwards, particularly Philip Hammond and together with the Prime Minister said, “We have to help Sierra Leone”. The French came in after that with Guinea. Again very strong. Thank Goodness! Supposing this had been in countries that did not have godparents like these, who just take these amazing decisions... (LSHTM, 2017) (emphasis added). The statement “Supposing this had been in countries that did not have godparents like these, who just take these amazing decisions...” exemplifies, I argue, what Sharpe (2016) calls an ‘inability to think blackness otherwise’. The speaker does not detail what the response would have looked like in countries that do not have ‘godparents’ as do Liberia, Guinea and Sierra Leone, nor does he go into detail on the nature of the godparents he refers to. His “supposing” is open ended and it is this open-endedness that signals most of all his inability or unwillingness to think the Ebola response otherwise. This inability to think the response otherwise is reminiscent of Sharpe’s description of her students’ inability to think blackness otherwise. Here I take “what would the enslaved have done otherwise?” (Sharpe, 2016, p.11) and “supposing this had been countries that did not have godparents like these” (LSHTM, 2017) to illustrate how our thinking and imagination is framed by being in the wake. The underlying question asked by the senior fellow, reminiscent of Sharpe’s students, is: how would Sierra Leoneans, Guineans and Liberians have survived independent of those who colonised them? The violence of the colonial past is in this reasoning obscured to make way for an interpretation of colonialism as care and colonialism as blessing. At the same time, the fellow’s choice of words is an (unanswered) invitation to imagine a non-colonised Africa. “Supposing this had been countries that did not have godparents like these ...” (LSHTM, 2017) invites us to think of Sierra Leone, Guinea and Liberia without ‘godparents’, that is to say without the experience of colonisation and colonial violence as care. To think the international Ebola response in a non-colonised setting requires care, as does the realisation that our ability to think and theorise postcolonial Africa is constrained by being in the wake. An inability to think the response otherwise was also present in the following account. Anton, whom I have quoted previously and who worked for Organisation X and I had the following exchange when I relayed the senior fellow’s remarks: 221 Anton: flinches I think it is really, it is a very difficult one. And so, our understanding of Ebola comes from a bit of colonial history like Peter Piot going out into Congo, even though that wasn't a British colony - Lioba: interjects Yeah but he's Belgian. Anton: yeah you know it comes from colonial aspects of that. I don't know how these decisions were made in terms of how these countries were gonna get involved there. I mean it's really interesting to see the differences of how that happened really. The US came in and just took over Liberia, they just took over and that's the US way of doing things, but also they have this strange paternalistic relationship with Liberia ... they kind of care what's going on, but it’s odd. It's a little bit odd. The British relationship with Sierra Leone is something that I get very conflicted about. Now Sierra Leone is one of the few countries in the world that like genuinely loves Tony Blair. Lioba laughs No! People call their children Tony Blair, they think he's wonderful because he ended the civil war. It was one of the few scenarios in which British military involvement ended up with something relatively near to good. I don't know if I can say that looks hesitant, relatively good. So really bizarrely like actually quite made sense for the British government and the British military to get involved and actually there were people who wanted - there were newspaper columns, and I don't know if I could find them but I could try - there were newspaper columns in Sierra Leone calling for Sierra Leone to be recolonised by the British. It got to that kind of level. ... On the one hand I'm like, oh did it really have to do it did the UK really have to get involved? If it's against everything that I believed, that you have these colonial relations...on the other hand it's like, where else is it help going to come from? In the situation? Anton’s physical reaction when I summarised the moment at the expert panel discussion is telling. He flinched when I recounted the characterisation of British-Sierra Leonean relations. Anton was fully aware of the colonial aspects of the discovery of Ebola and they made him uncomfortable. As the quote shows, he was also aware of the long history of British post-colonial involvement in Sierra Leone. He hesitated when stating that the UK should get involved in Sierra Leone and seemed uncomfortable (“So really bizarrely like actually quite made sense for the British government ... to get involved”). Anton’s narration finishes, like the quote I asked him to comment on, with the inability to think the response otherwise: “On the other hand it’s like, where else is it help going to come from? In the situation?” Anton’s questions are open-ended. His relation to colonialism and the role it played in the development of the international Ebola response is radically different from that of the senior fellow speaking at the expert panel event on the Ebola response. In comparison to him, Anton recognises the colonial implications of the past for the present and recognises the problematic reproduction of dependencies. Yet his analysis ends with a similar inability to think the response otherwise, to think Sierra 222 Leonean life otherwise in the wake of British colonialism. Here, caring and thinking about care with regards to the Sierra Leonean Ebola epidemic are suggestive of the epistemic constraints of the wake. In both accounts the meaning of care displays colonial relations of dependency. In the senior fellow’s remarks this dependency is lauded and the colonial past interpreted as the reason for European and North American involvement in the West African epidemic. Anton views this relationship much more critically, but similarly finds himself unable to think the response outside of the constrains of the colonial wake. Again, I argue that how global health practitioners and analysts think about care and the wake has implications for how they conceptualise epidemic responses. In this part I have explored the epistemological dimensions of thinking care in the wake. Drawing on Sharpe’s (2016; 2018) writings about thinking and practicing care, I have argued that the way international responders and experts conceptualised care and understood it in relation to the Sierra Leonean Ebola epidemic was symptomatic of how they related to the reality of the wake. Though antiblackness and the wake still remained largely epigrammatic, I have started to show that some responders had awareness of the colonial implications of Britain’s intervention in Sierra Leone, a theme that I further explore in the second part of this chapter. The wake manifested, for international responders, in Sierra Leonean communities’ association of institutional care with violence and their subsequent hesitation to seek care in government and international treatment centres. As James suggested during his interview, rather than seeing communities’ attitudes as a problem, care should take their realities into account. I argue that Sharpe’s approaches to care offer a useful starting point to think about broader definitions of care in epidemic interventions. I have further argued that an unwillingness and/or inability to think the Ebola response otherwise hinged on responders and experts’ un/awareness of the wake and thereby placed the response and analyses thereof firmly in the wake. Here (white) unawareness of continuous antiblackness becomes a feature of the wake. The inescapable nature of the colonial wake is not only due to the historical fact of colonialism, which I have described in previous chapters, but also due to our inability to think the present and the future otherwise.41 The medical industrial complex and biomedicine are built on colonialism and the exploitation of black bodies for experimentation Wallace 20 (Gwendolyn Wallace (she/her) is a senior at Yale University pursuing a BA in the History of Science and Medicine, concentrating in Gender, Reproduction, and the Body. Her research interests include histories of community health activism, reproductive justice, and the intersections between race-making, science, and medicine. Gwendolyn enjoys working with young children, gardening, and searching for used bookstores to explore.), “To Abolish the Medical industrial Complex”, Black Agenda Report, 7-8-20, https://www.blackagendareport.com/abolish-medical-industrial-complex NT “Our systems of medical “care” have been built on carceral logics.” Black health disparities are not an incidental feature of the healthcare system. The coronavirus pandemic has further demonstrated that the medical industrial complex is so deeply deleterious to Black people that reforms like increasing the number of Black doctors or unconscious bias training for healthcare professionals are not enough to ensure Black people’s live. The values of the medical industrial complex run in contradiction to the well-being of all Black people. In her essay The Death Toll , Saidiya Hartman writes, “the health-care system is routinely indifferent to black suffering, doubting the shared sentence of bodies in pain, uncertain if the human is an expansive category or an exclusive one, if indeed a human is perceived at all.” The pledge to “do no harm” has little meaning when Black people are still excluded from the human. Ultimately, Black “health” is an impossibility in a system built and sustained by anti-black violence and logics. From its inception, the medical industrial complex has been in service of white supremacy and capitalism. In Frantz Fanon’s essay “Medicine and Colonialism,” he writes, “The colonial situation does not only vitiate the relations between doctor and patient. We have shown that the doctor always appears as a link in the colonialist network, as a spokesman for the occupying power.” The ruling class continues to claim that biomedicine is simply abused occasionally for evil purposes, which purposefully detracts from addressing that it has always been a child of slavery and European colonialism. “Black ‘health’ is an impossibility in a system built and sustained by anti-black violence and logics.” It is no coincidence that today, many health studies continue to act as though race is a biological category that exists without racism. Race-making has always been a crucial mission of the medical industrial complex. In his 1851 “Report on the Diseases and Physical Peculiarities of the Negro,” Samuel Cartwright, a prominent physician, writes about a mental illness called drapetomania which compels slaves to run away. Twenty-four years after Cartwright’s report, Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr., dean of Harvard Medical School and an avid eugenicist, wrote an 1875 essay about mechanisms of crime. He writes, “If genius and talent are inherited...why should not deep-rooted moral defects and obliquities show themselves, as well as other qualities, in the descendants of moral monsters?” Theories of genetic inferiority created by physicians were the same that Prudential, one of the largest insurers of Black people at the time, used to justify their announcement in 1881 that insurance policies held by Black adults would be worth only one third those of white people’s. Their weekly premiums, however, would be the same. It should come as no surprise then, that a 2020 paper published in the Journal of Internal Medicine was entitled, “Obesity in African-Americans: is physiology to blame?” before public outcry forced a change in title. Experimentation on Black people has also created the foundation for medical knowledge. People often reference the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, but there are also a plethora of other studies that were conducted on Black people, like the “Acres of Skin” experiments done by dermatologist Albert M. Kligman on incarcerated Black men in Philadelphia from 1951 to 1974. “Race-making has always been a crucial mission of the medical industrial complex.” White doctors even abused Black people after their deaths. In her book Medical Apartheid, scholar Harriet Washington explores the histories of medical schools stealing the bodies of Black people for dissection practice into the 20th century, even going do far as to rob Black cemeteries. Of course, medical history is also rife with examples of doctors abusing Black people’s reproductive freedoms. From J Marion Sims’ experimental surgeries on enslaved Black women in 1845, to George Gey’s 1951 theft of Henrietta Lacks cells which still power the medical industrial complex, biomedical encounters have always been a threat to Black women’s health. The Eugenics Board of North Carolina didn’t cease operations until 1977, and of the almost 8,000 people sterilized in the state, about 5,000 were black. While medical and research institutions make sure to target Black people for experimentation and abuse, they also systematically deny Black people healthcare resources. Chicago’s Southside neighborhood lacked an adult trauma center until 2018, despite its high rates of gun violence. This is just a part of a long history of medical facilities being intentionally built far away from predominantly Black neighborhoods. Framing any of the cases above as an exceptional misuse of science is a dangerous way of avoiding the conversation that they are all expected outcomes of a system that was never made to ensure the health of Black people. Science and medicine have not simply absorbed the racism of other institutions, they are institutional violence themselves. The state continues to discredit Black peoples’ legacies of healing through granny midwives, root workers, and conjurers because they are a threat to white supremacist capitalist medicine. Black people have been, and continue to be, the enemies of medicine. In the end, white people are only able to secure their own health when they can place it next to the unwavering illness of black people that they create and re-create. The alternative is an unflinching paradigmatic analysis that poses the question of whether civil society is ethical or not Wilderson 10 (Frank B. III, “Red, White, and Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms, pg. ix-x) we reject author’s use of ableist language STRANGE AS it might seem, this book project began in South Africa. During the last years of apartheid I worked for revolutionary change in both an underground and above-ground capacity, for the Charterist Movement in general and the ANC in particular. During this period, I began to see how essential an unflinching paradigmatic analysis is to a movement dedicated to the complete overthrow of an existing order. The neoliberal compromises that the radical elements of the Chartist Movement made with the moderate elements were due, in large part, to our inability or unwillingness to hold the moderates' feet to the fire of a political agenda predicated on an unflinching paradigmatic analysis. Instead, we allowed our energies and points of attention to be displaced by and onto pragmatic considerations. Simply put, we abdicated the power to pose the question—and the power to pose the question is the greatest power of all. Elsewhere, I have written about this unfortunate turn of events (Incognegro: A Memoir of Exile and Apartheid), so I'll not rehearse the details here. Suffice it to say, this book germinated in the many political and academic discussions and debates that I was fortunate enough to be a part of at a historic moment and in a place where the word revolution was spoken in earnest, free of qualifiers and irony. For their past and ongoing ideas and interventions, I extend solidarity and appreciation to comrades Amanda Alexander, Franco Barchiesi, Teresa Barnes, Patrick Bond, Ashwin Desai, Nigel Gibson, Steven Greenberg, Allan Horowitz, Bushy Kelebonye (deceased), Tefu Kelebonye, Ulrike Kistner, Kamogelo Lekubu, Andile Mngxitama, Prishani Naidoo, John Shai, and S'bu Zulu.
The 1AC and any perm forecloses the possibility of radical questioning about the ethicality of civil society by structurally adjusting the black body through the “political action” that ceases to be “inclusive” – the aff’s starting point places the black body upon a psychologically traumatic, dielectric state of abandonment that forecloses black liberation – if we win that their scholarship produces this structural violence that is an independent reason to vote negative Wilderson ‘10 (Frank B Wilderson III- Professor at UC irvine- Red, White and Black- p. 8-10) I have little interest in assailing political conservatives. Nor is my ar- gument wedded to the disciplinary needs of political science, or even sociology, where injury must be established, first, as White supremacist event, from which one then embarks on a demonstration of intent, or racism; and, if one is lucky, or foolish, enough, a solution is proposed. If the position of the Black is, as I argue, a paradigmatic impossibility in the Western Hemisphere, indeed, in the world, in other words, if a Black is the very antithesis of a Human subject, as imagined by Marxism and psy- choanalysis, then his or her paradigmatic exile is not simply a function of repressive practices on the part of institutions (as political science and sociology would have it). This banishment from the Human fold is to be found most profoundly in the emancipatory meditations of Black people's staunchest "allies," and in some of the most "radical" films. Here—not in restrictive policy, unjust legislation, police brutality, or conservative scholarship—is where the Settler/Master's sinews are most resilient. The polemic animating this research stems from (1) my reading of Native and Black American meta-commentaries on Indian and Black subject positions written over the past twenty-three years and ( 2 ) a sense of how much that work appears out of joint with intellectual protocols and political ethics which underwrite political praxis and socially engaged popular cinema in this epoch of multiculturalism and globalization. The sense of abandonment I experience when I read the meta-commentaries on Red positionality (by theorists such as Leslie Silko, Ward Churchill, Taiaiake Alfred, Vine Deloria Jr., and Haunani-Kay Trask) and the meta-commentaries on Black positionality (by theorists such as David Marriott, Saidiya Hartman, Ronald Judy, Hortense Spillers, Orlando Patterson, and Achille Mbembe) against the deluge of multicultural positivity is overwhelming. One suddenly realizes that, though the semantic field on which subjec- tivity is imagined has expanded phenomenally through the protocols of multiculturalism and globalization theory, Blackness and an unflinching articulation of Redness are more unimaginable and illegible within this expanded semantic field than they were during the height of the F B I ' S repressive Counterintelligence Program ( C O I N T E L P R O ) . On the seman- tic field on which the new protocols are possible, Indigenism can indeed lO become partially legible through a programmatics of structural adjust- ment (as fits our globalized era). In other words, for the Indians' subject position to be legible, their positive registers of lost or threatened cultural identity must be foregrounded, when in point of fact the antagonistic register of dispossession that Indians "possess" is a position in relation to a socius structured by genocide. As Churchill points out, everyone from Armenians to Jews have been subjected to genocide, but the Indigenous position is one for which genocide is a constitutive element, not merely an historical event, without which Indians would not, paradoxically, "exist." 9 Regarding the Black position, some might ask why, after claims suc- cessfully made on the state by the Civil Rights Movement, do I insist on positing an operational analytic for cinema, film studies, and political theory that appears to be a dichotomous and essentialist pairing of Masters and Slaves? In other words, why should we think of today's Blacks in the United States as Slaves and everyone else (with the exception of Indians) as Masters? One could answer these questions by demonstrat- ing how nothing remotely approaching claims successfully made on the state has come to pass. In other words, the election of a Black president aside, police brutality, mass incarceration, segregated and substandard schools and housing, astronomical rates of H I V infection, and the threat of being turned away en masse at the polls still constitute the lived expe- rience of Black life. But such empirically based rejoinders would lead us in the wrong direction; we would find ourselves on "solid" ground, which would only mystify, rather than clarify, the question. We would be forced to appeal to "facts," the "historical record," and empirical markers of stasis and change, all of which could be turned on their head with more of the same. Underlying such a downward spiral into sociology, political sci- ence, history, and public policy debates would be the very rubric that I am calling into question: the grammar of suffering known as exploitation and alienation, the assumptive logic whereby subjective dispossession is arrived at in the calculations between those who sell labor power and those who acquire it. The Black qua the worker. Orlando Patterson has already dispelled this faulty ontological grammar in Slavery and Social Death, where he demonstrates how and why work, or forced labor, is not a constituent element of slavery. Once the "solid" plank of "work" is removed from slavery, then the conceptually coherent notion of "claims against the state"—the proposition that the state and civil society are elastic enough to even contemplate the possibility of an emancipatory project for the Black position—disintegrates into thin air. The imaginary of the state and civil society is parasitic on the Middle Passage. Put an- other way, No slave, no world. And, in addition, as Patterson argues, no slave is in the world. If, as an ontological position, that is, as a grammar of suffering, the Slave is not a laborer but an anti-Human, a position against which Hu- manity establishes, maintains, and renews its coherence, its corporeal in- tegrity; if the Slave is, to borrow from Patterson, generally dishonored, perpetually open to gratuitous violence, and void of kinship structure, that is, having no relations that need be recognized, a being outside of re- lationality, then our analysis cannot be approached through the rubric of gains or reversals in struggles with the state and civil society, not unless and until the interlocutor first explains how the Slave is of the world. The onus is not on one who posits the Master/Slave dichotomy but on the one who argues there is a distinction between Slaveness and Blackness. How, when, and where did such a split occur? The woman at the gates of Columbia University awaits an answer. Thus, the ROB is to vote for the debater who best methodologically challenges anti-blackness.
10/17/21
SEPOCT - T - Nation
Tournament: Heart of Texas | Round: 3 | Opponent: Harker DS | Judge: Kristiana Baez Interp – Nations require a shared cultural identity. The aff must defend member nations of the WTO ought to reduce IP protections for medicines. Andrews 13, ("What is a ‘nation’? – Nationalism, Self-determination and Secession," Crerative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International Lisence, https://opentextbc.ca/nationalism/chapter/what-is-a-nation/) KD Guibernau (1996, p. 47) has defined the nation as: ‘a human group conscious of forming a community, sharing a common culture, attached to a clearly demarcated territory, having a common past and a common project for the future and claiming the right to rule itself’. So awareness, territory, history and culture, language and religion all matter. However, it is rare in the real world to find a case of a nation with a clear-cut and homogenous character in terms of this list of possibilities. Each nation is unique in the (alleged) makeup of its special character and worth. One crucial question is whether – and to what extent – a group must be aware of its alleged distinctiveness from other groups, in order to be classed as a nation. One could argue that a nation can objectively be defined as a group of people which possesses a shared and distinct, historically persistent cultural identity, and which makes up a majority within a given territorial area. If that is the case, then one could argue that even if such a ‘nation’ is not pushing for a right to self-determination (in any form), it nevertheless is a nation.
Violation – The EU has no unified culture, identity, or language DE 11, (Debating Europe, 12-19-2011, "Is a common European identity possible?," https://www.debatingeurope.eu/2011/12/19/is-a-european-identity-possible/#.YWRfTRDMJQJ) KD Indeed identity is an absolute and critical issue… but the EU is a geographical supra-structural blob on the map with no clear ideology amongst its populous, despite what the elected and non-elected leaders may otherwise state. Nikolai makes a good point. When in post-war Europe has “European solidarity” appeared quite so fleeting? With the British and French at each others’ throats and the Greeks making Nazi jokes at the Germans whilst the Germans suggest the Greeks mortgage off the Parthenon, never before has “European identity” seemed like such a bad joke. Was the idea doomed from the start? It doesn’t seem possible to create a sense of common identity and solidarity out of such a bitter stew of squabbling populism. Language, in particular, is often cited as the basis of a common identity; Benedict Anderson in Imagined Communities – his much-cited book on the construction of nationalism – argues that all national identities form around a common vernacular. Yet Europe has no common language. Will, then, all efforts at forging a common identity be in vain? Net benefits – First, Expanding the meaning of states lets them read plans about tons of international organizations – NATO, the UN, OPEC, World Bank, the EU, GCC, G7, the Arctic Council, and tons of others—all of which have different members and governing structures. This is exacerbated by the topic already having a different set actor. Two impacts – A there’s no unified neg ground – the neg loses generic disads to interstate treaties and state-directed action and has to prepare for plans enacted through tons of entirely different governance structures – there’s no process disad that links to every international organization. B they create a functionally unlimited topic where the neg can’t predict and prep for every aff. Limits is a VI —they let the neg generate good prep which creates deeper and better researched debates. Our interpretation still allows them to defend different WTO treaties and international waivers to solve trade secrets – that means they get plenty of affs and education about the international arena – outweighs on topic lit. WTO ND (World Trade Organization) “What is the WTO?” https://www.wto.org/english/thewto_e/whatis_e/whatis_e.htm The WTO is run by its member governments. All major decisions are made by the membership as a whole, either by ministers (who usually meet at least once every two years) or by their ambassadors or delegates (who meet regularly in Geneva).
DTD on T – the debate shouldn’t have happened if they were abusive
Competing Interps on T since its binary and a question of models – Good enough isn’t good—there can be no reasonable interp of what the topic actually means
No RVIs on T – 1 Illogical—T is a gateway issue, winning T is meeting a baseline to have the debate to begin with 2 T is reactionary, they shouldn’t win for meeting their preround burden 3 Forcing the 1NC to go all in on theory kills substance education and neg flex—o/w on real world
10/17/21
SEPOCT - T - Reduce
Tournament: Heart of Texas | Round: 2 | Opponent: Harker RM | Judge: Leah Clark-Villanueva Interp – Reduce means permanent reduction – it’s distinct from temporary suspensions. Reynolds, 59 – Judge (In the Matter of Doris A. Montesani, Petitioner, v. Arthur Levitt, as Comptroller of the State of New York, et al., Respondents NO NUMBER IN ORIGINAL Supreme Court of New York, Appellate Division, Third Department 9 A.D.2d 51; 189 N.Y.S.2d 695; 1959 N.Y. App. Div. LEXIS 7391 August 13, 1959)
Section 83's counterpart with regard to nondisability pensioners, section 84, prescribes a reduction only if the pensioner should again take a public job. The disability pensioner is penalized if he takes any type of employment. The reason for the difference, of course, is that in one case the only reason pension benefits are available is because the pensioner is considered incapable of gainful employment, while in the other he has fully completed his "tour" and is considered as having earned his reward with almost no strings attached. It would be manifestly unfair to the ordinary retiree to accord the disability retiree the benefits of the System to which they both belong when the latter is otherwise capable of earning a living and had not fulfilled his service obligation. If it were to be held that withholdings under section 83 were payable whenever the pensioner died or stopped his other employment the whole purpose of the provision would be defeated, i.e., the System might just as well have continued payments during the other employment since it must later pay it anyway. *13 The section says "reduced", does not say that monthly payments shall be temporarily suspended; it says that the pension itself shall be reduced. The plain dictionary meaning of the word is to diminish, lower or degrade. The word "reduce" seems adequately to indicate permanency. Violation – the plan waives intellectual property protections temporarily, which is an indefinite suspension. 1AC plan text says that it only waives ip protections during public health emergencies Net Benefits –
1 Limits – Their interpretation turns every single possible combo of IPR into an aff—they can read affs about different types of patents, DE, ME including utility, design, and plant, biological exclusivity, orphan drug exclusivity, Clinical Investigation exclusivity, Qualified Infectious Disease Product, and new chemical entities
That massively expands aff ground and makes it impossible for the neg to predict and prep for every aff – means no unified neg generics because you can’t read any DA against a partial reduction aff since they keep some IPP in place to solve neg internal links— makes effective neg prep on a big topic completely impossible. Limits is a VI for fairness—they let the neg generate good prep, and forces in-depth debates
DTD on T – the debate shouldn’t have happened if they were abusive
Competing Interps on T since its binary and a question of models – Good enough isn’t good—there can be no reasonable interp of what the topic actually means
No RVIs on T – 1 Illogical—T is a gateway issue, winning T is meeting a baseline to have the debate to begin with 2 T is reactionary, they shouldn’t win for meeting their preround burden