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Tournament: NA | Round: 1 | Opponent: NA | Judge: NA Hi, I'm Jina (she/her). You can contact me via email: jinakang23@marlborough.org
10/11/21
JanFeb - Space Commons Aff
Tournament: Harvard-Westlake | Round: 2 | Opponent: Aaron Zhang | Judge: Danielle Dosch AC Advantage 1: Space Debris Private companies are cramming satellites into the Earth’s orbit, which are quickly becoming defunct pieces of “space junk.” Therese Wood, 20 - ("Who owns our orbit: Just how many satellites are there in space?," World Economic Forum, 10-23-2020, 12-8-2021https:www.weforum.org/agenda/2020/10/visualizing-easrth-satellites-sapce-spacex)AW There are nearly 6,000 satellites circling the Earth, but only 40 are operational. Satellites are a vital part of our infrastructure, helping us to use GPS, access the internet and support studies of the Earth. Out of the 2,666 operational satellites circling the globe in April 2020, 1,007 were for communication services. 446 are used for observing the Earth and 97 for navigation/ GPS purposes. Over half of satellites in space are non-operational. For centuries, humans have looked to space and the stars for answers. The fascination is more than philosophical—it’s coupled with the need to solve problems here on Earth. Today, there are seemingly countless benefits and applications of space technology. Satellites, for instance, are becoming critical for everything from internet connectivity and precision agriculture, to border security and archaeological study. Right now, there are nearly 6,000 satellites circling our tiny planet. About 60 of those are defunct satellites—space junk—and roughly 40 are operational. As highlighted in the chart above, The Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS), determined that 2,666 operational satellites circled the globe in April of 2020. Over the coming decade, it’s estimated by Euroconsult that 990 satellites will be launched every year. This means that by 2028, there could be 15,000 satellites in orbit. Nearly 10,000 satellites will be launched form 2019-2028. Image: Visual Capitalist With SpaceX’s planned Starlink constellation of 12,000 satellites and Amazon’s proposed constellation in the works, the new space race continues its acceleration. Let’s take a closer look at who operates those satellites and how they apply their technology. Technology with a purpose Humans have long used space for navigation. While sailors once relied on the stars, today we use satellites for GPS, navigation, and various other applications. More than half of Earth’s operational satellites are launched for commercial purposes. About 61 of those provide communications, including everything from satellite TV and Internet of Things (IoT) connectivity to global internet. Over 1,000 satellites are for communication purposes. Image: Visual Capitalist Second to communications, 27 of commercial satellites have been launched for Earth Observation (EO) purposes, including environmental monitoring and border security. Commercial satellites, however, can serve multiple purposes. One week, a satellite may be ‘tasked’ to image a contested border. It could later be tasked to monitor the reclamation of a mining site or even the aftermath of a natural disaster. 54 of operational satellites are for commercial use. Image: Visual Capitalist Government and civil purposes make up 21 of all of Earth’s operational satellites, and military purposes come in at 13. Who owns Earth’s orbit? Space operators SpaceX—founded by Elon Musk—is not only a disruptive launch provider for missions to the International Space Station (saving NASA millions). It’s also the largest commercial operator of satellites on the planet. With 358 satellites launched as of April, part of SpaceX’s mission is to boost navigation capabilities and supply the world with space-based internet. While the company operated 22 of the world’s operational satellites as of April, it went on to launch an additional 175 satellites in the span of one month, from August to September 2020 Increasing space debris levels inevitably set off a chain of collisions. Chelsea MuñOz-Patchen, 19 - ("Regulating the Space Commons: Treating Space Debris as Abandoned Property in Violation of the Outer Space Treaty," University of Chicago, 2019, 12-6-2021, https://cjil.uchicago.edu/publication/regulating-space-commons-treating-space-debris-abandoned-property-violation-outer-space)//AW Debris poses a threat to functioning space objects and astronauts in space, and may cause damage to the earth’s surface upon re-entry.29 Much of the small debris cannot be tracked due to its size and the velocity at which it travels, making it impossible to anticipate and maneuver to avoid collisions.30 To remain in orbit, debris must travel at speeds of up to 17,500 miles per hour.31 At this speed even very small pieces of debris can cause serious damage, threatening a spacecraft and causing expensive damage.32 There are millions of these very small pieces, and thousands of larger ones.33 The small-to-medium pieces of debris “continuously shed fragments like lens caps, booster upper stages, nuts, bolts, paint chips, motor sprays of aluminum particles, glass splinters, waste water, and bits of foil,” and may stay in orbit for decades or even centuries, posing an ongoing risk.34 Debris ten centimeters or larger in diameter creates the likelihood of complete destruction for any functioning satellite with which it collides.35 Large nonfunctional objects remaining in orbit are a collision threat, capable of creating huge amounts of space debris and taking up otherwise useful orbit space.36 This issue is of growing importance as more nations and companies gain the ability to launch satellites and other objects into space.37 From February 2009 through the end of 2010, more than thirty-two collision-avoidance maneuvers were reportedly used to avoid debris by various space agencies and satellite companies, and as of March 2012, the crew of the International Space Station (ISS) had to take shelter three times due to close calls with passing debris.38 These maneuvers require costly fuel usage and place a strain on astronauts.39 Furthermore, the launches of some spacecraft have “been delayed because of the presence of space debris in the planned flight paths.”40 In 2011, Euroconsult, a satellite consultant, projected that there would be “a 51 increase in satellites launched in the next decade over the number launched in the past decade.”41 In addition to satellites, the rise of commercial space tourism will also increase the number of objects launched into space and thus the amount of debris.42 The more objects are sent into space, and the more collisions create cascades of debris, the greater the risk of damage to vital satellites and other devices relied on for “weather forecasting, telecommunications, commerce, and national security.”43 The Space Debris Mitigation Guidelines44 were created by UNCOPUOS with input from the IADC and adopted in 2007.45 The guidelines were developed to address the problem of space debris and were intended to “increase mutual understanding on acceptable activities in space.”46 These guidelines are nonbinding but suggest best practices to implement at the national level when planning for a launch. Many nations have adopted the guidelines to some degree, and some have gone beyond what the guidelines suggest.47 While the guidelines do not address existing debris, they do much to prevent the creation of new debris. The Kessler Syndrome is the biggest concern with space debris. The Kessler Syndrome is a cascade created when debris hits a space object, creating new debris and setting off a chain reaction of collisions that eventually closes off entire orbits.48 The concern is that this cascade will occur when a tipping point is reached at which the natural removal rate cannot keep up with the amount of new debris added.49 At this point a collision could set off a cascade destroying all space objects within the orbit.50 In 2011, The National Research Council predicted that the Kessler Syndrome could happen within ten to twenty years.51 Donald J. Kessler, the astrophysicist and NASA scientist who theorized the Kessler Syndrome in 1978, believes this cascade may be a century away, meaning that there is still time to develop a solution.52 Collisions make orbit unusable, causing nuclear war, mass starvation, and economic destruction. Les Johnson 13, Deputy Manager for NASA's Advanced Concepts Office at the Marshall Space Flight Center, Co-Investigator for the JAXA T-Rex Space Tether Experiment and PI of NASA's ProSEDS Experiment, Master's Degree in Physics from Vanderbilt University, Popular Science Writer, and NASA Technologist, Frequent Contributor to the Journal of the British Interplanetary Sodety and Member of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, National Space Society, the World Future Society, and MENSA, Sky Alert!: When Satellites Fail, p. 9-12 language modified Whatever the initial cause, the result may be the same. A satellite destroyed in orbit will break apart into thousands of pieces, each traveling at over 8 km/sec. This virtual shotgun blast, with pellets traveling 20 times faster than a bullet, will quickly spread out, with each pellet now following its own orbit around the Earth. With over 300,000 other pieces of junk already there, the tipping point is crossed and a runaway series of collisions begins. A few orbits later, two of the new debris pieces strike other satellites, causing them to explode into thousands more pieces of debris. The rate of collisions increases, now with more spacecraft being destroyed. Called the "Kessler Effect", after the NASA scientist who first warned of its dangers, these debris objects, now numbering in the millions, cascade around the Earth, destroying every satellite in low Earth orbit. Without an atmosphere to slow them down, thus allowing debris pieces to bum up, most debris (perhaps numbering in the millions) will remain in space for hundreds or thousands of years. Any new satellite will be threatened by destruction as soon as it enters space, effectively rendering many Earth orbits unusable. But what about us on the ground? How will this affect us? Imagine a world that suddenly loses all of its space technology. If you are like most people, then you would probably have a few fleeting thoughts about the Apollo-era missions to the Moon, perhaps a vision of the Space Shuttle launching astronauts into space for a visit to the International Space Station (ISS), or you might fondly recall the "wow" images taken by the orbiting Hubble Space Telescope. In short, you would know that things important to science would be lost, but you would likely not assume that their loss would have any impact on your daily life. Now imagine a world that suddenly loses network and cable television, accurate weather forecasts, Global Positioning System (GPS) navigation, some cellular phone networks, on-time delivery of food and medical supplies via truck and train to stores and hospitals in virtually every community in America, as well as science useful in monitoring such things as climate change and agricultural sustainability. Add to this the disabling crippling of the US military who now depend upon spy satellites, space-based communications systems, and GPS to know where their troops and supplies are located at all times and anywhere in the world. The result is a nightmarish world, one step away from nuclear war, economic disaster, and potential mass starvation. This is the world in which we are now perilously close to living. Space satellites now touch our lives in many ways. And, unfortunately, these satellites are extremely vulnerable to risks arising from a half-century of carelessness regarding protecting the space environment around the Earth as well as from potential adversaries such as China, North Korea, and Iran. No government policy has put us at risk. It has not been the result of a conspiracy. No, we are dependent upon them simply because they offer capabilities that are simply unavailable any other way. Individuals, corporations, and governments found ways to use the unique environment of space to provide services, make money, and better defend the country. In fact, only a few space visionaries and futurists could have foreseen where the advent of rocketry and space technology would take us a mere 50 years since those first satellites orbited the Earth. It was the slow progression of capability followed by dependence that puts us at risk. The exploration and use of space began in 1957 with the launch of Sputnik 1 by the Soviet Union. The United States soon followed with Explorer 1. Since then, the nations of the world have launched over 8,000 spacecraft. Of these, several hundred are still providing information and services to the global economy and the world's governments. Over time, nations, corporations, and individuals have grown accustomed to the services these spacecraft provide and many are dependent upon them. Commercial aviation, shipping, emergency services, vehicle fleet tracking, financial transactions, and agriculture are areas of the economy that are increasingly reliant on space. Telestar 1, launched into space in the year of my birth, 1962, relayed the world's first live transatlantic news feed and showed that space satellites can be used to relay television signals, telephone calls, and data. The modern telecommunications age was born. We've come a long way since Telstar; most television networks now distribute most, if not ali, of their programming via satellite. Cable television signals are received by local providers from satellite relays before being sent to our homes and businesses using cables. With 65 of US households relying on cable television and a growing percentage using satellite dishes to receive signals from direct-to-home satellite television providers, a large number of people would be cut off from vital information in an emergency should these satellites be destroyed. And communications satellites relay more than television signals. They serve as hosts to corporate video conferences and convey business, banking, and other commercial information to and from all areas of the planet. The first successful weather satellite was TIROS. Launched in 1960, TIROS operated for only 78 days but it served as the precursor for today's much more long-lived weather satellites, which provide continuous monitoring of weather conditions around the world. Without them, providing accurate weather forecasts for virtually any place on the globe more than a day in advance would be nearly impossible. Figure !.1 shows a satellite image of Hurricane Ivan approaching the Alabama Gulf coast in 2004. Without this type of information, evacuation warnings would have to be given more generally, resulting in needless evacuations and lost economic activity (from areas that avoid landfall) and potentially increasing loss of life in areas that may be unexpectedly hit. The formerly top-secret Corona spy satellites began operation in 1959 and provided critical information about the Soviet Union's military and industrial capabilities to a nervous West in a time of unprecedented paranoia and nuclear risk. With these satellites, US military planners were able to understand and assess the real military threat posed by the Soviet Union. They used information provided by spy satellites to help avert potential military confrontations on numerous occasions. Conversely, the Soviet Union's spy satellites were able to observe the United States and its allies, with similar results. It is nearly impossible to move an army and hide it from multiple eyes in the sky. Satellite information is critical to all aspects of US intelligence and military planning. Spy satellites are used to monitor compliance with international arms treaties and to assess the military activities of countries such as China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea. Figure 1.2 shows the capability of modem unclassified space-based imaging. The capability of the classified systems is presumed to be significantly better, providing much more detail. Losing these satellites would place global militaries on high alert and have them operating, literally, in the blind. Our military would suddenly become vulnerable in other areas as well. GPS, a network of 24-32 satellites in medium-Earth orbit, was developed to provide precise position information to the military, and it is now in common use by individuals and industry. The network, which became fully operational in 1993, allows our armed forces to know their exact locations anywhere in the world. It is used to guide bombs to their targets with unprecedented accuracy, requiring that only one bomb be used to destroy a target that would have previously required perhaps hundreds of bombs to destroy in the pre-GPS world (which, incidentally, has resulted in us reducing our stockpile of non-GPS-guided munitions dramatically). It allows soldiers to navigate in the dark or in adverse weather or sandstorms. Without GPS, our military advantage over potential adversaries would be dramatically reduced or eliminated.
Advantage 2: Corporate Colonialism Tech-billionaires advance a vision of private space colonization as a source of infinite resources to cure society’s ills. This rationalizes unrestrained consumption and replicates the logic of imperialism. Mccormick 21 Ted McCormick writes about the history of science, empire, and economic thought. He has a Ph.D. in history from Columbia University and teaches at Concordia University in Montreal. “The billionaire space race reflects a colonial mindset that fails to imagine a different world”. 8-15-2021. The Conversation. https://theconversation.com/the-billionaire-space-race-reflects-a-colonial-mindset-that-fails-to-imagine-a-different-world-165235. Accessed 12-15-2021; marlborough JH It was a time of political uncertainty, cultural conflict and social change. Private ventures exploited technological advances and natural resources, generating unprecedented fortunes while wreaking havoc on local communities and environments. The working poor crowded cities, spurring property-holders to develop increased surveillance and incarceration regimes. Rural areas lay desolate, buildings vacant, churches empty — the stuff of moralistic elegies. ¶Epidemics raged, forcing quarantines in the ports and lockdowns in the streets. Mortality data was the stuff of weekly news and commentary. ¶Depending on the perspective, mobility — chosen or compelled — was either the cause or the consequence of general disorder. Uncontrolled mobility was associated with political instability, moral degeneracy and social breakdown. However, one form of planned mobility promised to solve these problems: colonization. ¶Europe and its former empires have changed a lot since the 17th century. But the persistence of colonialism as a supposed panacea suggests we are not as far from the early modern period as we think. ¶Colonial promise of limitless growth ¶Seventeenth-century colonial schemes involved plantations around the Atlantic, and motivations that now sound archaic. Advocates of expansion such as the English writer Richard Hakluyt, whose Discourse of Western Planting (1584) outlined the benefits of empire for Queen Elizabeth: the colonization of the New World would prevent Spanish Catholic hegemony and provide a chance to claim Indigenous souls for Protestantism. ¶But a key promise was the economic and social renewal of the mother country through new commodities, trades and territory. Above all, planned mobility would cure the ills of apparent overpopulation. Sending the poor overseas to cut timber, mine gold or farm cane would, according to Hakluyt, turn the “multitudes of loiterers and idle vagabonds” that “swarm(ed)” England’s streets and “pestered and stuffed” its prisons into industrious workers, providing raw materials and a reason to multiply. Colonization would fuel limitless growth. ¶As English plantations took shape in Ulster, Virginia, New England and the Caribbean, “projectors” — individuals (nearly always men) who promised to use new kinds of knowledge to radically and profitably transform society — tied mobility to new sciences and technologies. They were inspired as much by English philosopher Francis Bacon’s vision of a tech-centred state in The New Atlantis as by his advocacy of observation and experiment. ¶Discovery and invention ¶The English agriculturalist Gabriel Plattes cautioned in 1639 that “the finding of new worlds is not like to be a perpetual trade.” But many more saw a supposedly vacant America as an invitation to transplant people, plants and machinery. ¶The inventor Cressy Dymock (from Lincolnshire, where fen-drainage schemes were turning wetlands dry) sought support for a “perpetual motion engine” that would plough fields in England, clear forest in Virginia and drive sugar mills in Barbados. Dymock identified private profit and the public good by speeding plantation and replacing costly draught animals with cheaper enslaved labour. Projects across the empire would employ the idle, create “elbow-room,” heal “unnatural divisions” and make England “the garden of the world.” ¶Extraterrestrial exploration ¶Today, the moon and Mars are in projectors’ sights. And the promises billionaires Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos make for colonization are similar in ambition to those of four centuries ago. ¶As Bezos told an audience at the International Space Development Conference in 2018: “We will have to leave this planet, and we’re going to leave it, and it’s going to make this planet better.” Bezos traces his thinking to Princeton physicist Gerald O’Neill, whose 1974 article “The Colonization of Space” (and 1977 book, The High Frontier) presented orbiting settlements as solutions to nearly every major problem facing the Earth. Bezos echoes O’Neill’s proposal to move heavy industry — and industrial labour — off the planet, rezoning Earth as a mostly residential, green space. A garden, as it were. ¶Musk’s plans for Mars are at once more cynical and more grandiose, in timeline and technical requirements if not in ultimate extent. They center on the dubious possibility of “terraforming” Mars using resources and technologies that don’t yet exist. ¶Musk planned to send the first humans to Mars in 2024, and by 2030, he envisioned breaking ground on a city, launching as many as 100,000 voyages from Earth to Mars within a century. ¶As of 2020, the timeline had been pushed back slightly, in part because terraforming may require bombarding Mars with 10,000 nuclear missiles to start. But the vision – a Mars of thriving crops, pizza joints and “entrepreneurial opportunities,” preserving life and paying dividends while Earth becomes increasingly uninhabitable — remains. Like the colonial company-states of the 17th and 18th centuries, Musk’s SpaceX leans heavily on government backing but will make its own laws on its newly settled planet. ¶A failure of the imagination ¶The techno-utopian visions of Musk and Bezos betray some of the same assumptions as their early modern forebears. They offer colonialism as a panacea for complex social, political and economic ills, rather than attempting to work towards a better world within the constraints of our environment. ¶And rather than facing the palpably devastating consequences of an ideology of limitless growth on our planet, they seek to export it, unaltered, into space. They imagine themselves capable of creating liveable environments where none exist. ¶But for all their futuristic imagery, they have failed to imagine a different world. And they have ignored the history of colonialism on this one. Empire never recreated Eden, but it did fuel centuries of growth based on expropriation, enslavement and environmental transformation in defiance of all limits. We are struggling with these consequences today. If only wealthy elites can tap the vast resources of outer space, we lock in a permanent and unconscionable inequality. Private space colonization amounts to unchecked exploitation and authoritarian corporate control of future settlements. Spencer ‘17 Spencer, Keith A. senior editor at Salon “Keep the Red Planet Red.” Jacobin, 2 May 2017, https://www.jacobinmag.com/2017/02/mars-elon-musk-space-exploration-nasa-colonization. Accesserd 12/15/2021 marlborough JH As the Western liberal order continues to unravel, can you really blame anyone who wants to get off this planet? Since space travel became technologically feasible in the twentieth century, many thinkers — from Arthur C. Clarke to Buckminster Fuller — envisioned the human colonization of other planets as all but inevitable. “Man will not always stay on Earth,” wrote Soviet rocket scientist Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, “the pursuit of light and space will lead him to penetrate the bounds of the atmosphere, timidly at first, but in the end to conquer the whole of solar space.” In their heydays, both the American and Soviet space programs funded research into Mars colonization, viewing it as the next logical step for humanity. In the past two decades however, people have started to pin their hopes for intergalactic travel on private groups instead of public agencies. While President Obama was privatizing much of the American space program, a flurry of ventures released competing proposals to visit and/or colonize the red planet. These schemes’ feasibility and harebrained-ness vary: the Mars Foundation, run by multimillionaire former investor Dennis Tito, is soliciting private donations to send a couple on a flyby of the red planet. Mars One, a Dutch nonprofit, wants to fund a permanent human colony through “merchandise sales, ads on video content, brand partnerships, speaking engagements, broadcasting rights, intellectual property rights, games and apps, and events.” The most famous — and perhaps most likely to succeed — comes from entrepreneur and engineer Elon Musk, the multibillionaire CEO of SpaceX and Tesla Motors. Musk’s articulation of his Mars mission reveals not only what’s wrong with how we think about extraterrestrial colonies and resources, but also how little faith most people have in democracy here on Earth. Interplanetary Technocracy Given his reputation as an engineering genius, Musk’s vision for colonization seems the most plausible of the private missions to Mars. After all, SpaceX, which he admitted to founding specifically to colonize the solar system, became the first private company to successfully launch a rocket into orbit in 2008. In September 2016, at the International Astronautical Congress in Guadalajara, Musk laid out a detailed vision for his colonization project, including financial estimates, engineering specs for the reusable “Interplanetary Transit System,” and the price of a passenger ticket — around $200,000. Musk’s presentation even included a snazzy computer-animated video of the transit system in action and details about the long trip there, which would offer colonists games, restaurants, and entertainment. “It’ll be, like, really fun to go . . . You’re gonna have a great time,” Musk said. His approach to colonizing Mars comes straight out of Silicon Valley’s playbook: Musk has taken a “problem” — how to colonize Mars — and hacked a feasible “solution” that is one part engineering, one part moxie. Just add investors and we’ll be building cities on the red planet in no time. Though vague, Musk reiterated that his vision would need funding. His talk of “tickets” implies that colonists will likely pay for much of the mission. Unlike a space agency’s astronaut selection process, then, his Mars mission will be limited to those who can afford it. In that sense, Musk’s colonization plan looks a lot like joining a country club or gated community — or any other model of private access to space for those who can afford it. Musk’s proposal — heavy on the engineering and business details, light on the philosophical or political implications of colonization — epitomizes technocracy. He doesn’t seem interested in thinking through Mars’s policy or governance, the labor necessitated by building a civilization from scratch, or the problems that will arise from sending rich tourists to self-manage in a place with scant resources demanding communal organization and thinking. The True Value of Mars For some, sending a few rich folks off to Mars seems like a great idea. After all, it’s hardly an Eden waiting to be destroyed. Unlike previous colonial projects, there are no natives to exploit; no wildlife to hunt to extinction; no ecosystem to radically alter; no fossil fuels to extract; and no climate in danger of destruction from carbon emission. Mars’s atmosphere is already 96 percent carbon dioxide! Why not let Musk and his millionaire buddies take off for a few rounds of golf on the frosted dunes? If they get stuck there, all the better. From a humanistic perspective, however, even a lifeless world like Mars holds incredible scientific, educational, and environmental value. To let private interests colonize, terraform, or populate it without considering this collective value would be short-sighted. Indeed, when it comes to colonization, we should hope humanity has learned from its past mistakes and is ready to set upon a more democratic process. Perhaps Earth can agree to hold a public discussion before we set about strip-mining Mars’s glorious dunes, vistas, and mountains, lest the tallest mountain in the solar system become a trash heap like Everest. Government space agencies have gone to great lengths to keep the scientific and social benefits of publicly funded exploration intact. This is why NASA makes all its mission data public, and also why it insists on sterilizing space probes to avoid contaminating other worlds with cellular life from Earth — one stray terrestrial extremophile could confuse the search for microbial life off-planet. The agency, recognizing its work’s educational value, has sent elementary school children’s experiments into space and hosted public naming competitions for geographic features. Likewise, NASA thinks beyond the engineering challenges: they also consider space travel’s psychological and biological effects, surely an important field of study in anticipation of the long space flights required for interplanetary travel. Private industry will be unlikely to follow these collective practices, as its desire for profit or for exclusive property rights — physical and intellectual — will outweigh any public benefit. I Want to Believe The public and media reaction to Musk’s presentation — more than the presentation itself —reflects the current state of our politics. “The mood at the conference was almost as giddy as a rock concert or the launch of a new Apple product, with people lining up for Mr. Musk’s presentation a couple of hours in advance,” wrote Kenneth Chang in the New York Times, who devoted 1,200 words to it. “Elon Musk finally told the world his vision for colonizing Mars, and it turned out to be one hell of a show,” exclaimed Loren Grush in a video article for the Verge. Grush noted that Musk drew an “insane crowd,” describing how “people actually stampeded into the hall where his lecture was in order to get a good seat.” He began in lofty tones: “I want to . . . make Mars seem possible. Make it seem as though it is something we can do in our lifetimes.” This statement implied that we needed some great technological leap forward before embarking on this adventure, but, in fact, travel to Mars has been possible for well over half a century. Given the political will, we can go right now. The subtext of Musk’s message, then, was that our democratic governments will never execute big science and engineering projects. People should trust in the private vision for colonization and space travel instead. In Earth politics, this lack of faith in democratic institutions is nothing new. This idea’s policy implications — that collectively we can’t have big public projects or any sort of real democratic decision-making, and must cede our whims to privately funded foundations and technocratic “experts” — have already taken hold of most countries. As far as I could find, none of the magazines that covered Musk’s announcement mentioned this metatheme, namely, that a public and democratically organized colonization of Mars will never happen. No one questioned the premise that we must let billionaires decide how and when to go to Mars — or that it is the only possible way to get there. Musk’s tech-industry social circle benefits from branding technology as synonymous with progress. As a result, many tech employees work long hours to achieve this invisible notion of progress, but their work just fattens their employer’s profit margins. One can imagine the grueling labor required to make an inhospitable planet habitable. On Mars, employees would exhaust themselves for a corporation under the guise of “survival.” After all, regardless of whether a foundation or a corporation spearheads the colonization effort, they will be incentivized, even forty million miles away, to squeeze as much labor out of their workers at the lowest cost. Further, the question of who is allowed to go to Mars will become as important as the question of who isn’t. If, as Musk proposes, the trip requires a “ticket” — which, as he claims, will eventually drop to only $100,000 — it seems probable that those who can afford to go will mostly resemble, ethnically and politically, Earth’s ruling class. Imagine: the red planet turned racist country club. These questions matter more than how to engineer a rocket or how to build greenhouses or how to harvest water. In fact, state-funded research has already largely solved these technical problems — or, at the least, led to numerous creative ideas about making a Mars colony self-sufficient. The Martian Commons Any colonization effort on Mars — even if only a small number of humans go — will present huge political challenges in terms of the labor and personal rights of its citizens. To wit: what kinds of reproductive restrictions will exist on a planet of scarce resources? How will colonists ration food and activity? What about personal privacy? If Martian citizens are working in a life-or-death situation, can the workers strike? At least in its early years, Mars would have a scarcity economy — in other words, resources would likely have to be rationed in order for the collective to survive. A private colony would be unlikely to make any kind of egalitarian guarantee — after all, if there’s a ticket price, there will certainly be a Martian service economy pampering the space tourists. Inequalities will emerge in terms of labor, housing, food, and access to other resources. In fact, we already know what a privatized Mars might resemble: Mount Everest. At higher elevations, it becomes a barren, lifeless, cold world, where climbers require oxygen tanks to survive. The cost of ascending is as steep as the mountain: between $30,000 to $100,000. Climbers’ journeys are only made possible by their Sherpas’ exploited labor, many of whom die in accidents and are paid as little as $5,000 a year by Western companies. Now imagine this situation replicated forty million miles off, on a lifeless planet, where two-way Earth communication takes almost an hour, and you can envision how dire things could get. A New Hope Musk spent nearly an hour of his speech detailing the technological aspects of Mars travel: the landers, the rockets, the fuel costs, and so on. Musk takes a technology-first approach and rarely mentions the numerous social aspects. His speech and its collective reactions attest to a naïve, John Galt fantasy about how policy and engineering come to pass: through the mind of the lone genius, who alone holds the key to humanity’s future. We saw the same fantasy at work last week when, in the wake of President Trump’s executive order banning emigration from seven majority-Muslim countries, Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz announced his plan to hire ten thousand refugees and was immediately hailed as a liberal hero. The message was clear: we can’t hope to help refugees ourselves, or on a democratic basis — we must rely on the whims of the rich to push forward progressive causes. Alas, the reaction to Musk’s speech also demonstrates how public sentiment has changed: collectively, we no longer believe in public space exploration. Even if we know state agencies can launch a Mars mission, few think it will happen. This doesn’t bode well for how we think of the commons. Are rich people and their foundations the only ones who can save us? The plethora of private Mars proposals reflects a lack of faith in democracy on Earth, in particular in our democratic influence over the directions science and engineering research take. And while faith in public institutions sits at an all-time low, we seem more than happy to hear what the rich can make possible and to believe their promises. Musk is just one of many technocrats who think of a Mars voyage as a technological problem. Not only is it not a technological problem, it’s not even a problem. Colonization of Mars should be seen as a complex social and political policy, with so much potential to create inequality and oppression that it cannot rationally be undertaken without political consensus and a stratagem for maintaining democracy and egalitarianism. We are ready to colonize Mars, and have been for half a century. Doing so without a democratic plan will present unimaginable dangers for the planet and colonists alike. As socialists, our rallying cry should be this: Keep the red planet red! This private expansion into space results in corporate colonization of planets that undermines the interests of the rest of humanity. Spencer ’17 Spencer, Keith A. senior editor at Salon“Against Mars-a-Lago: Why SpaceX's Mars Colonization Plan Should Terrify You.” Salon, Salon.com, Oct. 8 2017, https://www.salon.com/2017/10/08/against-mars-a-lago-why-spacexs-mars-colonization-plan-should-terrify-you/. When CEO Elon Musk announced last month that his aerospace company SpaceX would be sending cargo missions to Mars by 2022 — the first step in his tourism-driven colonization plan — a small cheer went up among space and science enthusiasts. Writing in the New York Post, Stephen Carter called Musk’s vision “inspiring,” a salve for politically contentious times. “Our species has turned its vision inward; our image of human possibility has grown cramped and pessimistic,” Carter wrote: "We dream less of reaching the stars than of winning the next election; less of maturing as a species than of shunning those who are different; less of the blessings of an advanced technological tomorrow than of an apocalyptic future marked by a desperate struggle to survive. Maybe a focus on the possibility of reaching our nearest planetary neighbor will help change all that." The Post editorial reflected a growing media consensus that humankind’s ultimate destiny is the colonization of the solar system — yet on a private basis. American government leaders generally agree with this vision. Obama egged on the privatization of NASA by legislating a policy shift to private commercial spaceflight, awarding government contracts to private companies like SpaceX to shuttle supplies to the International Space Station. “Governments can develop new technology and do some of the exciting early exploration but in the long run it's the private sector that finds ways to make profit, finds ways to expand humanity,” said Dr. S. Pete Worden, the director of the NASA Ames Research lab, in 2012. And in a Wall Street Journal op-ed this week, Vice President Mike Pence wrote of his ambitions to bring American-style capitalism to the stars: “In the years to come, American industry must be the first to maintain a constant commercial human presence in low-Earth orbit, to expand the sphere of the economy beyond this blue marble,” Pence wrote. One wonders if these luminaries know their history. There has be no instance in which a private corporation became a colonizing power that did not end badly for everyone besides the shareholders. The East India Company is perhaps the finest portent of Musk’s Martian ambitions. In 1765, the East India Company forced the Mughal emperor to sign a legal agreement that would essentially permit their company to become the de facto rulers of Bengal. The East India Company then collected taxes and used its private army, which was over 200,000 strong by the early 19th century, to repress those who got in the way of its profit margins. “It was not the British government that seized India at the end of the 18th century, but a dangerously unregulated private company headquartered in one small office, five windows wide, in London, and managed in India by an unstable sociopath,” writes William Dalrymple in the Guardian. “It almost certainly remains the supreme act of corporate violence in world history.” The East India Company came to colonize much of the Indian subcontinent. In the modern era, an era in which the right of corporations to do what they want, unencumbered, has become a sacrosanct right in the eyes of many politicians, the lessons of the East India Company seem to have been all but forgotten. As Dalrymple writes: Democracy as we know it was considered an advance over feudalism because of the power that it gave the commoners to share in collective governance. To privately colonize a nation, much less a planet, means ceding governance and control back to corporations whose interest is not ours, and indeed, is always at odds with workers and residents — particularly in a resource-limited environment like a spaceship or the red planet. Even if, as Musk suggests, a private foundation is put in charge of running the show on Mars, their interests will inherently be at odds with the workers and employees involved. After all, a private foundation is not a democracy; and as major philanthropic organizations like the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation illustrate, often do the bidding of their rich donors, and take an important role in ripening industries and regions for exploitation by Western corporations. Yet Mars’ colonization is a bit different than Bengal, namely in that it is not merely underdeveloped; it is undeveloped. How do you start an entirely new economy on a virgin world with no industry? After all, Martian resource extraction and trade with Earth is not feasible; the cost of transporting material across the solar system is astronomical, and there are no obvious minerals on Mars that we don’t already have in abundance on Earth. The only basis for colonization of Mars that Musk can conceive of is one based on tourism: the rich pay an amount — Musk quotes the ticket price at $200,000 if he can get 1 million tourists to pay that — that entitles them to a round-trip ticket. And while they’re on Mars and traveling to it, they luxuriate: Musk has assured that the trip would be “fun.” This is what makes Musk’s Mars vision so different than, say, the Apollo missions or the International Space Station. This isn’t really exploration for humanity’s sake — there’s not that much science assumed here, as there was in the Moon missions. Musk wants to build the ultimate luxury package, exclusively for the richest among us. Musk isn’t trying to build something akin to Matt Damon’s spartan research base in "The Martian." He wants to build Mars-a-Lago. And an economy based on tourism, particularly high-end tourism, needs employees — even if a high degree of automation is assumed. And as I’ve written about before, that means a lot of labor at the lowest cost possible. Imagine signing away years of your life to be a housekeeper in the Mars-a-Lago hotel, with your communications, water, food, energy usage, even oxygen tightly managed by your employer, and no government to file a grievance to if your employer cuts your wages, harasses you, cuts off your oxygen. Where would Mars-a-Lago's employees turn if their rights were impinged upon? Oh wait, this planet is run privately? You have no rights. Musk's vision for Mars colonization is inherently authoritarian. The potential for the existence of the employees of the Martian tourism industry to slip into something resembling indentured servitude, even slavery, cannot be underestimated. We have government regulations for a reason on Earth — to protect us from the fresh horror Musk hopes to export to Mars. If he's considered these questions, he doesn't seem to care; for Musk, the devil's in the technological and financial details. The social and political are pretty uninteresting to him. This is unsurprising; accounts from those who have worked closely with him hint that he, like many CEOs, may be a sociopath. Even as a space enthusiast, I cannot get excited about the private colonization of Mars. You shouldn’t be either. This is not a giant leap for mankind; this is the next great leap in plutocracy. The mere notion that global wealth is so unevenly distributed that a small but sufficient sum of rich people could afford this trip is unsettling, indicative of the era of astonishing economic inequality in which we suffer. Thomas Frank, writing in Harpers, once wrote of a popular t-shirt he sighted while picnicking in a small West Virginia coal town: “Mine it union or keep it in the ground.” The idea, of course, is that the corporations interested in resource extraction do not care whatsoever about their workers’ health, safety, or well-being; the union had their interests at heart, and was able to negotiate for safety, job security, and so on. I’d like to see a similar t-shirt or bumper sticker emerge among scientists and space enthusiasts: “Explore Mars democratically, or keep it in the sky.” Neoliberalism destroys ethics, locks in poverty and exploitation, decimates the environment, and causes war. Werlhof 15 – Claudia, Professor of Political Science/Women's Studies, University Innsbruck (Austria), 2015 (“Neoliberal Globalization: Is There an Alternative to Plundering the Earth?” Global Research, May 25th, Available Online at http://www.globalresearch.ca/neoliberal-globalization-is-there-an-alternative-to-plundering-the-earth/24403) At the center of both old and new economic liberalism lies: Self-interest and individualism; segregation of ethical principles and economic affairs, in other words: a process of ‘de-bedding’ economy from society; economic rationality as a mere cost-benefit calculation and profit maximization; competition as the essential driving force for growth and progress; specialization and the replacement of a subsistence economy with profit-oriented foreign trade (‘comparative cost advantage’); and the proscription of public (state) interference with market forces.3 Where the new economic liberalism outdoes the old is in its global claim. Today’s economic liberalism functions as a model for each and everyone: all parts of the economy, all sectors of society, of life/nature itself. As a consequence, the once “de-bedded” economy now claims to “im-bed” everything, including political power. Furthermore, a new twisted “economic ethics” (and with it a certain idea of “human nature”) emerges that mocks everything from so-called do-gooders to altruism to selfless help to care for others to a notion of responsibility.4 This goes as far as claiming that the common good depends entirely on the uncontrolled egoism of the individual and, especially, on the prosperity of transnational corporations. The allegedly necessary “freedom” of the economy – which, paradoxically, only means the freedom of corporations – hence consists of a freedom from responsibility and commitment to society. The maximization of profit itself must occur within the shortest possible time; this means, preferably, through speculation and “shareholder value”. It must meet as few obstacles as possible. Today, global economic interests outweigh not only extra-economic concerns but also national economic considerations since corporations today see themselves beyond both community and nation.5 A “level playing field” is created that offers the global players the best possible conditions. This playing field knows of no legal, social, ecological, cultural or national “barriers”.6 As a result, economic competition plays out on a market that is free of all non-market, extra-economic or protectionist influences – unless they serve the interests of the big players (the corporations), of course. The corporations’ interests – their maximal growth and progress – take on complete priority. This is rationalized by alleging that their well-being means the well-being of small enterprises and workshops as well. The difference between the new and the old economic liberalism can first be articulated in quantitative terms: after capitalism went through a series of ruptures and challenges – caused by the “competing economic system”, the crisis of capitalism, post-war “Keynesianism” with its social and welfare state tendencies, internal mass consumer demand (so-called Fordism), and the objective of full employment in the North. The liberal economic goals of the past are now not only euphorically resurrected but they are also “globalized”. The main reason is indeed that the competition between alternative economic systems is gone. However, to conclude that this confirms the victory of capitalism and the “golden West” over “dark socialism” is only one possible interpretation. Another – opposing – interpretation is to see the “modern world system” (which contains both capitalism and socialism) as having hit a general crisis which causes total and merciless competition over global resources while leveling the way for investment opportunities, i.e. the valorization of capital.7 The ongoing globalization of neoliberalism demonstrates which interpretation is right. Not least, because the differences between the old and the new economic liberalism can not only be articulated in quantitative terms but in qualitative ones too. What we are witnessing are completely new phenomena: instead of a democratic “complete competition” between many small enterprises enjoying the freedom of the market, only the big corporations win. In turn, they create new market oligopolies and monopolies of previously unknown dimensions. The market hence only remains free for them, while it is rendered unfree for all others who are condemned to an existence of dependency (as enforced producers, workers and consumers) or excluded from the market altogether (if they have neither anything to sell or buy). About fifty percent of the world’s population fall into this group today, and the percentage is rising.8 Anti-trust laws have lost all power since the transnational corporations set the norms. It is the corporations – not “the market” as an anonymous mechanism or “invisible hand” – that determine today’s rules of trade, for example prices and legal regulations. This happens outside any political control. Speculation with an average twenty percent profit margin edges out honest producers who become “unprofitable”.9 Money becomes too precious for comparatively non-profitable, long-term projects, or projects that only – how audacious! – serve a good life. Money instead “travels upwards” and disappears. Financial capital determines more and more what the markets are and do.10 By delinking the dollar from the price of gold, money creation no longer bears a direct relationship to production”.11 Moreover, these days most of us are – exactly like all governments – in debt. It is financial capital that has all the money – we have none.12 Small, medium, even some bigger enterprises are pushed out of the market, forced to fold or swallowed by transnational corporations because their performances are below average in comparison to speculation – rather: spookulation – wins. The public sector, which has historically been defined as a sector of not-for-profit economy and administration, is “slimmed” and its “profitable” parts (“gems”) handed to corporations (privatized). As a consequence, social services that are necessary for our existence disappear. Small and medium private businesses – which, until recently, employed eighty percent of the workforce and provided normal working conditions – are affected by these developments as well. The alleged correlation between economic growth and secure employment is false. When economic growth is accompanied by the mergers of businesses, jobs are lost.13 If there are any new jobs, most are precarious, meaning that they are only available temporarily and badly paid. One job is usually not enough to make a living.14 This means that the working conditions in the North become akin to those in the South, and the working conditions of men akin to those of women – a trend diametrically opposed to what we have always been told. Corporations now leave for the South (or East) to use cheap – and particularly female – labor without union affiliation. This has already been happening since the 1970s in the “Export Processing Zones” (EPZs, “world market factories” or “maquiladoras”), where most of the world’s computer chips, sneakers, clothes and electronic goods are produced.15 The EPZs lie in areas where century-old colonial-capitalist and authoritarian-patriarchal conditions guarantee the availability of cheap labor.16 The recent shift of business opportunities from consumer goods to armaments is a particularly troubling development.17 It is not only commodity production that is “outsourced” and located in the EPZs, but service industries as well. This is a result of the so-called Third Industrial Revolution, meaning the development of new information and communication technologies. Many jobs have disappeared entirely due to computerization, also in administrative fields.18 The combination of the principles of “high tech” and “low wage”/”no wage” (always denied by “progress” enthusiasts) guarantees a “comparative cost advantage” in foreign trade. This will eventually lead to “Chinese wages” in the West. A potential loss of Western consumers is not seen as a threat. A corporate economy does not care whether consumers are European, Chinese or Indian. The means of production become concentrated in fewer and fewer hands, especially since finance capital – rendered precarious itself – controls asset values ever more aggressively. New forms of private property are created, not least through the “clearance” of public property and the transformation of formerly public and small-scale private services and industries to a corporate business sector. This concerns primarily fields that have long been (at least partly) excluded from the logic of profit – e.g. education, health, energy or water supply/disposal. New forms of so-called enclosures emerge from today’s total commercialization of formerly small-scale private or public industries and services, of the “commons”, and of natural resources like oceans, rain forests, regions of genetic diversity or geopolitical interest (e.g. potential pipeline routes), etc.19 As far as the new virtual spaces and communication networks go, we are witnessing frantic efforts to bring these under private control as well.20 All these new forms of private property are essentially created by (more or less) predatory forms of appropriation. In this sense, they are a continuation of the history of so-called original accumulation which has expanded globally, in accordance with to the motto: “Growth through expropriation!”21 Most people have less and less access to the means of production, and so the dependence on scarce and underpaid work increases. The destruction of the welfare state also destroys the notion that individuals can rely on the community to provide for them in times of need. Our existence relies exclusively on private, i.e. expensive, services that are often of much worse quality and much less reliable than public services. (It is a myth that the private always outdoes the public.) What we are experiencing is undersupply formerly only known by the colonial South. The old claim that the South will eventually develop into the North is proven wrong. It is the North that increasingly develops into the South. We are witnessing the latest form of “development”, namely, a world system of underdevelopment.22 Development and underdevelopment go hand in hand.23 This might even dawn on “development aid” workers soon. It is usually women who are called upon to counterbalance underdevelopment through increased work (“service provisions”) in the household. As a result, the workload and underpay of women takes on horrendous dimensions: they do unpaid work inside their homes and poorly paid “housewifized” work outside.24 Yet, commercialization does not stop in front of the home’s doors either. Even housework becomes commercially co-opted (“new maid question”), with hardly any financial benefits for the women who do the work.25 Not least because of this, women are increasingly coerced into prostitution, one of today’s biggest global industries.26 This illustrates two things: a) how little the “emancipation” of women actually leads to “equal terms” with men; and b) that “capitalist development” does not imply increased “freedom” in wage labor relations, as the Left has claimed for a long time.27 If the latter were the case, then neoliberalism would mean the voluntary end of capitalism once it reaches its furthest extension. This, however, does not appear likely. Today, hundreds of millions of quasi-slaves, more than ever before, exist in the “world system.”28 The authoritarian model of the “Export Processing Zones” is conquering the East and threatening the North. The redistribution of wealth runs ever more – and with ever accelerated speed – from the bottom to the top. The gap between the rich and the poor has never been wider. The middle classes disappear. This is the situation we are facing. It becomes obvious that neoliberalism marks not the end of colonialism but, to the contrary, the colonization of the North. This new “colonization of the world”29 points back to the beginnings of the “modern world system” in the “long 16th century”, when the conquering of the Americas, their exploitation and colonial transformation allowed for the rise and “development” of Europe.30 The so-called “children’s diseases” of modernity keep on haunting it, even in old age. They are, in fact, the main feature of modernity’s latest stage. They are expanding instead of disappearing. Where there is no South, there is no North; where there is no periphery, there is no center; where there is no colony, there is no – in any case no “Western” – civilization.31 Austria is part of the world system too. It is increasingly becoming a corporate colony (particularly of German corporations). This, however, does not keep it from being an active colonizer itself, especially in the East.32 Social, cultural, traditional and ecological considerations are abandoned and give way to a mentality of plundering. All global resources that we still have – natural resources, forests, water, genetic pools – have turned into objects of utilization. Rapid ecological destruction through depletion is the consequence. If one makes more profit by cutting down trees than by planting them, then there is no reason not to cut them.33 Neither the public nor the state interferes, despite global warming and the obvious fact that the clearing of the few remaining rain forests will irreversibly destroy the earth’s climate – not to mention the many other negative effects of such actions.34 Climate, animal, plants, human and general ecological rights are worth nothing compared to the interests of the corporations – no matter that the rain forest is not a renewable resource and that the entire earth’s ecosystem depends on it. If greed, and the rationalism with which it is economically enforced, really was an inherent anthropological trait, we would have never even reached this day. The commander of the Space Shuttle that circled the earth in 2005 remarked that “the center of Africa was burning”. She meant the Congo, in which the last great rain forest of the continent is located. Without it there will be no more rain clouds above the sources of the Nile. However, it needs to disappear in order for corporations to gain free access to the Congo’s natural resources that are the reason for the wars that plague the region today. After all, one needs diamonds and coltan for mobile phones. Today, everything on earth is turned into commodities, i.e. everything becomes an object of “trade” and commercialization (which truly means liquidation, the transformation of all into liquid money). In its neoliberal stage it is not enough for capitalism to globally pursue less cost-intensive and preferably “wageless” commodity production. The objective is to transform everyone and everything into commodities, including life itself.35 We are racing blindly towards the violent and absolute conclusion of this “mode of production”, namely total capitalization/liquidation by “monetarization”.36 We are not only witnessing perpetual praise of the market – we are witnessing what can be described as “market fundamentalism”. People believe in the market as if it was a god. There seems to be a sense that nothing could ever happen without it. Total global maximized accumulation of money/capital as abstract wealth becomes the sole purpose of economic activity. A “free” world market for everything has to be established – a world market that functions according to the interests of the corporations and capitalist money. The installment of such a market proceeds with dazzling speed. It creates new profit possibilities where they have not existed before, e.g. in Iraq, Eastern Europe or China. One thing remains generally overlooked: the abstract wealth created for accumulation implies the destruction of nature as concrete wealth. The result is a “hole in the ground” and next to it a garbage dump with used commodities, outdated machinery and money without value.37 However, once all concrete wealth (which today consists mainly of the last natural resources) will be gone, abstract wealth will disappear as well. It will, in Marx’s words, “evaporate”. The fact that abstract wealth is not real wealth will become obvious, and so will the answer to the question of which wealth modern economic activity has really created. In the end it is nothing but monetary wealth (and even this mainly exists virtually or on accounts) that constitutes a monoculture controlled by a tiny minority. Diversity is suffocated and millions of people are left wondering how to survive. And really: how do you survive with neither resources nor means of production nor money? The nihilism of our economic system is evident. The whole world will be transformed into money – and then it will disappear. After all, money cannot be eaten. What no one seems to consider is the fact that it is impossible to re-transform commodities, money, capital and machinery into nature or concrete wealth. It seems that underlying all “economic development” is the assumption that “resources”, the “sources of wealth”,38 are renewable and everlasting – just like the “growth” they create.39 The notion that capitalism and democracy are one is proven a myth by neoliberalism and its “monetary totalitarianism”.40 The primacy of politics over economy has been lost. Politicians of all parties have abandoned it. It is the corporations that dictate politics. Where corporate interests are concerned, there is no place for democratic convention or community control. Public space disappears. The res publica turns into a res privata, or – as we could say today – a res privata transnationale (in its original Latin meaning, privare means “to deprive”). Only those in power still have rights. They give themselves the licenses they need, from the “license to plunder” to the “license to kill”.41 Those who get in their way or challenge their “rights” are vilified, criminalized and to an increasing degree defined as “terrorists” or, in the case of defiant governments, as “rogue states” – a label that usually implies threatened or actual military attack, as we can see in the cases of Yugoslavia, Afghanistan and Iraq, and maybe Syria and Iran in the near future. U.S. President Bush had even spoken of the possibility of “preemptive” nuclear strikes should the U.S. feel endangered by weapons of mass destruction.42 The European Union did not object.43 Neoliberalism and war are two sides of the same coin.44 Free trade, piracy and war are still “an inseparable three” – today maybe more so than ever. War is not only “good for the economy” but is indeed its driving force and can be understood as the “continuation of economy with other means”.45 War and economy have become almost indistinguishable.46 Wars about resources – especially oil and water – have already begun.47 The Gulf Wars are the most obvious examples. Militarism once again appears as the “executor of capital accumulation” – potentially everywhere and enduringly.48 Human rights and rights of sovereignty have been transferred from people, communities and governments to corporations.49 The notion of the people as a sovereign body has practically been abolished. We have witnessed a coup of sorts. The political systems of the West and the nation state as guarantees for and expression of the international division of labor in the modern world system are increasingly dissolving.50 Nation states are developing into “periphery states” according to the inferior role they play in the proto-despotic “New World Order”.51 Democracy appears outdated. After all, it “hinders business”.52 The “New World Order” implies a new division of labor that does no longer distinguish between North and South, East and West – today, everywhere is South. An according International Law is established which effectively functions from top to bottom (“top-down”) and eliminates all local and regional communal rights. And not only that: many such rights are rendered invalid both retroactively and for the future.53 The logic of neoliberalism as a sort of totalitarian neo-mercantilism is that all resources, all markets, all money, all profits, all means of production, all “investment opportunities”, all rights and all power belong to the corporations only. To paraphrase Richard Sennett: “Everything to the Corporations!”54 One might add: “Now!” The corporations are free to do whatever they please with what they get. Nobody is allowed to interfere. Ironically, we are expected to rely on them to find a way out of the crisis we are in. This puts the entire globe at risk since responsibility is something the corporations do not have or know. The times of social contracts are gone.55 In fact, pointing out the crisis alone has become a crime and all critique will soon be defined as “terror” and persecuted as such.56 IMF Economic Medicine Since the 1980s, it is mainly the Structural Adjustment Programs (SAPs) of the World Bank and the IMF that act as the enforcers of neoliberalism. These programs are levied against the countries of the South which can be extorted due to their debts. Meanwhile, numerous military interventions and wars help to take possession of the assets that still remain, secure resources, install neoliberalism as the global economic politics, crush resistance movements (which are cynically labeled as “IMF uprisings”), and facilitate the lucrative business of reconstruction.57 In the 1980s, Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher introduced neoliberalism in Anglo-America. In 1989, the so-called “Washington Consensus” was formulated. It claimed to lead to global freedom, prosperity and economic growth through “deregulation, liberalization and privatization”. This has become the credo and promise of all neoliberals. Today we know that the promise has come true for the corporations only – not for anybody else. In the Middle East, the Western support for Saddam Hussein in the war between Iraq and Iran in the 1980s, and the Gulf War of the early 1990s, announced the permanent U.S. presence in the world’s most contested oil region. In continental Europe, neoliberalism began with the crisis in Yugoslavia caused by the Structural Adjustment Programs (SAPs) of the World Bank and the IMF. The country was heavily exploited, fell apart and finally beset by a civil war over its last remaining resources.58 Since the NATO war in 1999, the Balkans are fragmented, occupied and geopolitically under neoliberal control.59 The region is of main strategic interest for future oil and gas transport from the Caucasus to the West (for example the “Nabucco” gas pipeline that is supposed to start operating from the Caspian Sea through Turkey and the Balkans by 2011.60 The reconstruction of the Balkans is exclusively in the hands of Western corporations. All governments, whether left, right, liberal or green, accept this. There is no analysis of the connection between the politics of neoliberalism, its history, its background and its effects on Europe and other parts of the world. Likewise, there is no analysis of its connection to the new militarism. Plan The appropriation of outer space by private entities is unjust. Thus, the plan. Plan text: Outer space ought to be recognized as a global commons as per the Goehring card. Goehring describes but does not advocate treating space in this way. Goehring 6/3 - John S. Goehring B.A., University of California, Berkeley; J.D., Tulane Law School; LL.M., McGill University, Institute of Air and Space Law) is a space and international law attorney for the Department of Defense and a judge advocate in the United States Air Force Reserve, “Why Isn’t Outer Space a Global Commons?” Journal of National Security Law and Policy. Vol. 11:573. (June 3, 2021).https://jnslp.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/Why_Isnt_Outer_Space_a_Global_Commons_2.pdf AT B. Global Commons as a Constraining Concept In an economic context, as opposed to a military or geopolitical context, “global commons” is typically used to convey a constraining concept. The concept of a “commons” may be thought of as constraining because it is often associated with notions of shared ownership, public governance, or limitations on use. Whether these constraints are viewed positively or negatively is a subjective assessment. The constraining concept is more complicated than the enabling concept because it can reflect two distinct meanings. This is likely a function of its history. “The ‘commons,’ of course, has a long historical and intellectual lineage ranging from the enclosure movement in England, to Garret Hardin’s famous Tragedy of the Commons parable, to Elinor Ostrom’s Nobel-prize winning work on governing common pool resources,” observe Professors Foster and Iaione.30 Applying rational-choice theory, Hardin postulated that individual actors “automatically tend to over-exploit and plunder common-pool resources that are freely available to everyone.”31 The only possible solution to this dilemma, according to Hardin, was “the enclosure of resources through private property, or, failing that, public regulation.”32 Ostrom’s work later “turned Hardin’s conventional wisdom upside down: complex socio-ecological systems (in which goods are extractable and beneficiaries are hard to exclude) can prove to be sustainable resource domains granted that its stakeholders adopt a polycentric and self-regulated mode of governance.”33 As this brief summary suggests, one meaning of “commons” is simply to describe a category of goods.34 This usage was typical prior to Ostrom’s influence.35 In this meaning, a common is a resource to which access is shared, such as an open hunting ground. Some common resources may offer more than one type of benefit. For example, a hunting ground may offer open space for recreation, game to hunt, and trees for building. Some common resources may be subtractable, meaning that use of the resource subtracts from the ability of others to use the resource, while others remain plentiful. Describing a resource in this manner, as a common resource, does not necessarily imply any particular property regime or use limitations.36 A common hunting ground, for instance, may be publicly owned or privately owned. Ostrom helped popularize the term “common pool resource” to describe this general category of resources.37 As Dr. Tepper argues, “it is crucial to differentiate between resources and the legal regime that governs them.”38 This is because the term “global commons” – or simply “commons” – can also be used in an economic sense to refer to a form of collective ownership and governance rather than to the economic goods themselves.39 As Professors Cogolati and Woulters observe, “under Ostrom’s influence, the commons have become more closely connected with the collective self-governance and participatory mechanisms they imply, than with the strict category of (rivalrous and non-excludable) economic goods they used to refer to.”40 This may account for the notion held by some that “the commons is less a description of the resource and its characteristics and more of a normative claim to the resource” (emphasis original).41 Used in this way, a commons is a category of property rights based on collective ownership.42 Put simply, “commons” is sometimes used to refer to common property, meaning a resource with more than one owner, and which therefore should be governed collectively. This notion of a commons is sometimes associated with the common heritage of mankind concept, particularly in the context of outer space. As expressed in Article 11(3) of the 1979 Moon Agreement, the common heritage of mankind concept creates a new type of territorial status in which the moon and celestial bodies “are not only in themselves not subject to national appropriation in a territorial sense, but the fruits and resources of which are also deemed to be the property of mankind at large,” according to Professor Cheng.43 This principle, as characterized by Professor Christol, not only “protects the proposition what sic given areas and their resources are open to inclusive use and that there may not be exclusive use,” but also “goes farther: it asserts that there must be a sharing of the benefits and of the values derived from the indicated commons.”44 In other words, status as the common heritage of mankind does not permit full private property rights in space resources. It should be noted that the concept of the common heritage of mankind is not limited to the outer space domain. In 1970, the United Nations (UN) General Assembly passed a non-binding resolution declaring “the sea-bed and ocean floor, and the subsoil thereof, beyond the limits of national jurisdiction (hereinafter referred to as the area), as well as the resources of the area, are the common heritage of mankind.”45 Years later – after the completion of the Moon Agreement – this principle was codified in Article 136 of the 1982 UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS).46 Importantly, while the area is the common heritage of mankind according to the Convention, the high seas above the area remains free.47 Hence, some may refer to the high seas as a global commons (in the enabling sense), while others may refer to the deep sea bed as a global commons (in the constraining sense) – a clear example of why the term is fraught with misunderstanding. While the concept of common heritage of the seabed and of the Moon and other celestial bodies are linked, the Moon Agreement declares that the content of the common heritage of mankind concept as it applies to States Parties “finds its expression in the provisions of this Agreement” and nowhere else.48 In general, the concept “lacks a precise definition” but “basically wishes to convey the idea that management, exploitation and distribution of the natural resources of the area in question are matters to be decided upon by the international community and are not to be left to the initiative and discretion of individual States and their nationals.”49 The United States has not signed the Moon Agreement and rejects the notion that outer space resources are the common heritage of mankind, a position clearly reiterated in Executive Order 13914.50 The last of the five international space treaties to have been negotiated in the United Nations Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space (COPUOS), the Moon Agreement is regarded as a failed treaty with only 18 nations having signed on, none of which is China, Russia, or the United States, the three most prominent space-faring States.51 VISITED STATUS OF INTERNATIONAL AGREEMENTS RELATING TO ACTIVITIES IN OUTER SPACE, UNITED NATIONS OFFICE FOR OUTER SPACE AFFAIRS, https://perma.cc/8VA5-4UW8 (last July 11, 2020). The 1967 Outer Space Treaty, by contrast, has over 100 States Parties.52 Context is essential for discerning the distinction between the constraining concept and the enabling concept. By themselves, “global commons” or “commons” do not necessarily convey one concept or the other. Describing a resource as a “global commons” in an economic context implies a focus on an open access resource and the consumption of that resource; it suggests a resource allocation problem in need of a solution and inevitably invites questions about ownership. In contrast, referring to a global commons in a military or geopolitical context implies a focus on the use of an open access domain and, when used accurately, the lack of ownership is a settled question. Indeed, the distinction between a focus on a thing (res) itself and a focus on the right to use and explore a domain is among the reasons the term “res communis” is not interchangeable with “global commons” when used in a military or geopolitical sense.53 Solvency Treating space as a commons solves orbital debris. States already agree to a limited regime of this type. Silverstein and Panda ‘3/9 - Benjamin Silverstein research analyst for the Space Project at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. MA, International Relations, Syracuse University Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs BA, International Affairs, George Washington University and Ankit Panda Stanton Senior Fellow in the Nuclear Policy Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. AB, Princeton University, “Space Is a Great Commons. It’s Time to Treat It as Such.” Carnegie Endowment for International Peace (Web). March 9, 2021. Accessed Dec. 13, 2021. https://carnegieendowment.org/2021/03/09/space-is-great-commons.-it-s-time-to-treat-it-as-such-pub-84018 AT The failure to manage Earth orbits as a commons undermines safety and predictability, exposing space operators to growing risks such as collisions with other satellites and debris. The long-standing debris problem has been building for decades and demands an international solution.¶ Competing states need to coalesce behind a commons-based understanding of Earth orbits to set the table for a governance system to organize space traffic and address rampant debris. New leadership in the United States can spur progress on space governance by affirming that Earth orbits are a great commons. So far, President Joe Biden and his administration have focused on major space projects, but a relatively simple policy declaration that frames Earth orbits as a great commons can support efforts to negotiate space governance models for issues like debris mitigation and remediation. The Biden administration can set the stage to pursue broad space policy goals by establishing a consensus among states, particularly those with the most invested in Earth orbits, that space is a great commons.¶ THE PRESSING NEED FOR SPACE GOVERNANCE¶ The Earth orbits that provide the majority of benefits to states and commercial ventures represent only a tiny fraction of outer space as a whole. Competition for the limited volume of these Earth orbits is especially fierce since two satellites cannot be in the same place at the same time and not all orbits are equally useful for all missions. The number of objects residing in Earth orbits is now at an all-time high, with most new objects introduced into orbits at altitudes of between 400 and 700 kilometers above sea level. Millions of pieces of debris in Earth orbits pose a threat to continuing space operations. For instance, the final U.S. space shuttle missions faced 1-in-300 odds of losing a space vehicle or crew member to orbital debris or micrometeoroid impacts.¶ Collisions with fragments of orbital litter as small as a few millimeters across can ruin satellites and end missions. Current technologies cannot track all of these tiny pieces of debris, leaving space assets at the mercy of undetectable, untraceable, and unpredictable pieces of space junk. Some researchers have determined that the debris population in low Earth orbit is already self-sustaining, meaning that collisions between space objects will produce debris more rapidly than natural forces, like atmospheric drag, can remove it from orbit.¶ States—namely the United States, Russia, China, and India—have exacerbated this debris accumulation trend by testing kinetic anti-satellite capabilities or otherwise purposefully fragmenting their satellites in orbit. These states, along with the rest of the multilateral disarmament community, are currently at an impasse on establishing future space governance mechanisms that can address the debris issue. A portion of this impasse may be attributable to disparate views of the nature of outer space in the international context. Establishing a clear view among negotiating parties that Earth orbits should be treated as a great commons would establish a basis for future agreements that reduce debris-related risks.¶ Beyond debris-generating, kinetic anti-satellite weapons tests, revolutionary operating concepts challenge existing space traffic management practices. For instance, commercial ventures are planning networks of thousands of satellites to provide low-latency connectivity on Earth and deploying them by the dozens. States are following this trend. Some are considering transitioning away from using single (or few) exquisite assets in higher orbits and toward using many satellites in low Earth orbits. These new operational concepts could lead to an increase in collision risks.¶ Without new governance agreements, problems related to debris, heavy orbital traffic, and harmful interference will only intensify. Debris in higher orbits can persist for a century or more. The costs of adapting to increasingly polluted orbits would be immense, and the opportunity costs would be even higher. For instance, all else being equal, hardening satellites against collisions increases their mass and volume, in turn raising launch costs per satellite. These costs, rooted in a failure to govern space as a commons, will be borne by all space actors, including emerging states and commercial entities.¶ EXISTING FORMS OF SPACE GOVERNANCE¶ A well-designed governance system, founded on a widespread understanding of Earth orbits as a great commons, could temper these risks. Currently, space is not wholly unregulated, but existing regulations are limited both in scope and implementation. Many operators pledge to follow national regulations and international guidelines, but decentralized accountability mechanisms limit enforcement. These guidelines also do not cover the full range of potentially risky behaviors in space. For example, while some space operators can maneuver satellites to avoid collisions, there are no compulsory rules or standards on who has the right of way.¶ At the interstate level, seminal multilateral agreements provide some more narrow guidance on what is and is not acceptable in space. Most famously, the Outer Space Treaty affirms that outer space “shall be free for exploration and use by all states without discrimination of any kind” and that “there shall be free access to all areas of celestial bodies.” Similar concepts of Earth orbits being a great commons arise in subsequent international texts. Agreements like the Liability Convention impose fault-based liability for debris-related collisions in space, but it is difficult to prove fault in this regime in part because satellite owners and operators have yet to codify a standard of care in space, and thus the regime does not clearly disincentivize debris creation in orbit. Other rules of behavior in Earth orbits have been more successful in reducing harmful interference between satellite operations, but even these efforts are limited in scope.¶ States have acceded to supranational regulations of the most limited (and thus most valuable) Earth orbits. The International Telecommunication Union (ITU) coordinates, but does not authorize, satellite deployments and operations in geosynchronous orbits and manages radiofrequency spectrum assignments in other regions of space to reduce interference between satellites. These coordination activities are underpinned by the ITU’s constitution, which reminds states “that radio frequencies and any associate orbits . . . are limited natural resources,” indicating a commons-based approach to governing the radiofrequency spectrum. However, the union’s processes are still adapting to new operational realities in low Earth orbit, and these rules were never designed to address issues like debris. Space resources must be distributed democratically—this requires challenging private control of outer space. Levine 15 Nick Levine, MPhil candidate in history of science at the University of Cambridge, 3-21-2015, "Democratize the Universe," Jacobin, https://jacobinmag.com/2015/03/space-industry-extraction-levine The privatization of the Milky Way has begun. Last summer, the bipartisan ASTEROIDS Act was introduced in Congress. The legislation’s aim is to grant US corporations property rights over any natural resources — like the platinum-group metals used in electronics — that they extract from asteroids. The bill took advantage of an ambiguity in the United Nations’ 1967 Outer Space Treaty. That agreement forbade nations and private organizations from claiming territory on celestial bodies, but was unclear about whether the exploitation of their natural resources would be allowed, and if so, on what terms. The legal framework governing the economic development of outer space will have enormous effects on the distribution of wealth and income in the Milky Way and beyond. We could fight for a galactic democracy, where the proceeds of the space economy are distributed widely. Or we could accept the trickle-down astronomics anticipated by the ASTEROIDS Act, which would allow for the concentration of vast amounts of economic and political power in the hands of a few corporations and the most technologically developed nations. Given the pressing problems of inequality and climate change on Earth, the US left has been understandably uninterested in or largely dismissive of any space pursuits. For this reason, it remains unprepared to organize around extraterrestrial economic justice. The Left’s rejection of space has effectively ceded the celestial commons to the business interests who would literally universalize laissez-faire. Organizing around extraterrestrial politics wasn’t always treated as an escapist distraction. In the 1970s, fighting for a celestial commons was a pillar of developing countries’ struggle to create a more equitable economic order. Starting in the 1960s, a coalition of underdeveloped nations, many recently decolonized, asserted their strength in numbers in the United Nations by forming a caucus known as the Group of 77. In the early 1970s, this bloc announced its intention to establish a “new international economic order,” which found its expression in a series of UN treaties governing international regions, like sea beds and outer space, that they hoped would spread the economic benefits of the commons more equitably, with special attention to less developed nations. For these countries — as well as for the nervous US business interests that opposed them — their plan to “socialize the moon,” as some put it at the time, was the first step toward a more egalitarian distribution of wealth and power in human society. It will be years before the industrialization of outer space is economically viable, if it ever is. But the legal framework that would shape that transition is being worked out now. The ASTEROIDS Act was submitted on behalf of those who would benefit most from a laissez-faire extraterrestrial system. If we leave the discussion about celestial property rights to the business interests that monopolize it now, any dream of economic democracy in outer space will go the way of jetpacks, flying cars, and the fifteen-hour workweek. As Below, So Above Left critics of space proposals make the same mistakes as the most techno-utopian starry-eyed industrialists. From the point of view of the latter, celestial development will provide ultimate salvation to the human race by making us a multi-planetary species; the former see outer space as an infinite void essentially antagonistic to human life, interest in which is only orchestrated for cynical political ends. Each side misconceives extraterrestrial pursuits as qualitatively different from economic activities on Earth. Venturing into space may be a greater technical challenge; it may cost more, be more dangerous, or be a mistaken use of resources. But to understand these prospects in existential terms rather than as a new episode in the familiar history of industrial development and resource extraction — with all the political-strategic dangers and organizing opportunities that come with them — is to be blinded by the space romanticism that is a peculiar vestige of Cold War geopolitics. Whether and how we should go to space are not profound philosophical questions, at least not primarily. What’s at stake is not just the “stature of man,” as Hannah Arendt put it, but a political-economic struggle over the future of the celestial commons, which could result in a dramatic intensification of inequality — or a small step for humankind toward a more egalitarian state of affairs on our current planet. Undoubtedly, there are good reasons to be skeptical about going to space. Some have argued that it shifts attention away from solving the difficult problems of economic and environmental justice on Earth — think of Gil Scott-Heron’s spoken-word poem “Whitey on the Moon,” which juxtaposes the deprivation of the American underclass with the vast resources diverted to space. Scott-Heron’s critique is powerful, but it’s important to remember that he was denouncing an unjust economic system. He wasn’t issuing a timeless condemnation of space pursuits as such. Whether the aims of providing for all and developing outer space are mutually exclusive depends on the political forces on the ground. We might also question whether mining asteroids would be detrimental to our current planet’s environment in the medium term. If we don’t find a renewable way to blast off into outer space, the exploitation of these resources could lead to an intensification of, not a move away from, the fossil-fuel economy. If the environmental impact of space mining turns out to be large, it would be analogous to fracking — a technological development that gives us access to new resources, but with devastating ecological side effects — and ought to be opposed on similar grounds. On the other hand, some speculate that mining the Moon’s Helium-3 reserves, for example, could provide an abundant source of clean energy. The terrestrial environmental impact of space activity remains an open question that must be explored before we stake our hopes on the economic development of outer space. Philosophers have suggested that we might have ethical duties to preserve the “natural” states of celestial bodies. Others fear that our activities might unknowingly wipe out alien microbial life. We should remain sensitive to the aesthetic and cultural value of outer space, as well as the potential for extinction and the exhaustion of resources misleadingly proclaimed to be limitless. But if the Left rejects space on these grounds we abandon its fate to the will of private interests. These concerns shouldn’t cause us to write off space altogether — rather, they should motivate us even more to fight for the careful, democratic use of celestial resources for the benefit of all. There is also reason to be cautiously optimistic about extending economic activity to outer space. For one, the resources there — whether platinum-group metals useful in electronics, or fuels that could be central to the semi-independent functioning of an outer space economy — have the potential to raise our standards of living. Imagine, a superabundance of asteroid metals that are scarce on Earth, like platinum, driving the sort of automation that could expand output and reduce the need to work. Of course, there’s nothing inevitable about the benefits of productivity gains being distributed widely, as we’ve seen in the United States over the past forty years. This is a problem not limited to space, and the myth of the “final frontier” must not distract us from the already existing problems of wealth and income distribution on Earth. While the industrialization of the solar system isn’t a panacea for all economic ills, it does offer a significant organizing opportunity, since it will force a confrontation over the future of the vast celestial commons. The democratic possibilities of such a struggle have been recognized before: one conservative American citizens’ group in the 1970s called a progressive UN space treaty a “vital component of Third World demands for massive redistribution of wealth so as ultimately to equate the economic positions of the two hemispheres.” Many in the 1970s identified the egalitarian potential in the development of outer space, and the Left must not overlook it today. Back to the Future One of the Group of 77’s major goals was to apply some of the redistributive functions of the welfare state on a global scale. In 1974, that coalition issued a “Declaration on the Establishment of a New International Economic Order,” which called for a fairer system of global trade and resource distribution, one that could alleviate historical inequality. One of the battlegrounds for the Group of 77 was the negotiation over extraterrestrial property rights. The Outer Space Treaty of 1967, signed by over ninety countries in the heat of the first sprint to the moon, rejected the notion that celestial bodies fell under the legal principle of res nullius — meaning that outer space was empty territory that could be claimed for a nation through occupation. It forbade the “national appropriation by claim of sovereignty, by means of use or occupation, or by any other means” of outer space. But the treaty was not just restrictive. It also had a positive requirement for extraterrestrial conduct: “The exploration and use of outer space,” it declared, “shall be carried out for the benefit and in the interests of all countries, irrespective of their degree of economic or scientific development, and shall be the province of all mankind.” However, nobody knew what this would mean in practice: was it a call for egalitarian economics, or an empty proclamation of liberal benevolence? Complicating matters, it was unclear whether the extraction and sale of natural resources from outer space fell under the category of “appropriation,” which had been forbidden. And what exactly was this benefit to all countries that our outer space pursuits were supposed to bring? How would its distribution be enforced? Which interpretation would win out was more a question of political power than of esoteric legal maneuvers. The Group of 77 took an activist approach to these issues, proposing amendments to the Outer Space Treaty regime that would spread the economic benefits of the celestial commons to less developed countries that did not have the resources to get to space, let alone mine it. Thus in 1970, the Argentine delegate to the UN Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space proposed to legally designate outer space and its resources “the common heritage of mankind.” First applied in negotiations over maritime law a few years earlier, the “common heritage” concept was intended to give legal grounding to the peaceful international governance of the commons. As an alternative to the laissez-faire approach advocated by many private interests, the “common heritage” principle also provided a legal framework for the democratic distribution of revenues derived from the international commons. In 1973, the Indian delegation to the Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space tried to put this idea into celestial practice, proposing an amendment to the Outer Space Treaty that called for equitable sharing of space benefits, particularly with developing countries. The Brazilian delegate to the committee summarized the group’s position: “It does not seem justifiable . . . that space activities . . . should evolve in a climate of total laissez-faire, which would conceal under the cloak of rationality new ways for an abusive exercise of power by those who exert control over technology.” Despite opposition from both the Soviet Union and the United States, the final draft of this new outer space agreement included a version of the “common heritage of mankind” doctrine. When the finalized treaty was brought to the US in 1979 for ratification, business groups balked. The vision of egalitarian galactic democracy suggested by the document was rightly seen as contrary to narrow American interests. The United Technologies Corporation, a designer and manufacturer of aircrafts and other heavy machinery (including the Black Hawk helicopter) took out a large advertisement in the Washington Post and a number of other newspapers, warning that the treaty would establish an “OPEC-like monopoly, require mandatory transfer of technology, and impose high international taxes on profits as a way of shifting wealth from the developed to the less developed countries.” The president of the corporation, Alexander Haig, also testified against the treaty in Congress in 1979, warning that “the common heritage concept expressed in the treaty underlies Third World efforts directed at a fundamental redistribution of global wealth.” Haig was hired as Ronald Reagan’s secretary of state in 1981, and political opposition to the bill forced NASA’s chief counsel to abandon defense of the treaty. In the end, the Moon Treaty, as the 1979 document came to be known, failed to gain more than a few signatories, leaving open the question of how the benefits of outer space were to be shared. In 1988, a different coalition of developing countries added the question of space benefits to the UN outer space committee’s agenda. But they failed to gain traction, and by 1993 they had to concede, as two long-time delegates to the outer space committee put it, that “their attempt at a redistributive revolution in international space cooperation had failed.” The conversation had shifted from the distribution of economic benefits to a narrower emphasis on international scientific coordination and development aid. This retreat culminated in a 1996 declaration that limited the interpretation of the “benefit” clause of the Outer Space Treaty to vague promises to help less developed countries improve their space technologies. The ultimate failure of the Moon Treaty was representative of broader developments in international politics, as the influence of the Group of 77 declined. The fact that the structural adjustment policies of the Washington Consensus won out over the Third World’s redistributive goals was the result of contingent factors — the oil shock’s exacerbation of debt crises, for instance — but it also indicated the limits of the power the Group of 77 had wielded in the first place. In October 2014, the UN outer space committee issued a press release summarizing its most recent session. Its headline: “Outer Space Benefits Must Not Be Allowed to Widen Global Gap between Economic, Social Inequality, Fourth Committee Told.” Despite paying lip service to its past concerns, the outer space committee now emphasizes equal access, voluntary technology transfers, and modest development aid over the direct redistributive approach it took in the 1970s. This shift from struggling for equality of outcome to equality of opportunity, with no accountability mechanism in place to ensure even the latter, represents a striking regression. The egalitarian dreams of the “revolution of the colonized” in the UN, as it was called at the time, have been forgotten. The Empire Strikes Back Recent US plans for outer space development, shaped overwhelmingly by Silicon Valley’s intuitions and capital, stand in stark contrast to the futuristic democratic dreams of the Group of 77. The most prominent of these entrepreneurial visions has been Elon Musk’s plan to colonize Mars. For now, international law seems to unequivocally forbid territorial claims on Mars and other celestial bodies. The legal status of resource extraction, on the other hand, remains an open question. A vocal group of entrepreneurs is hoping to set a precedent for the private appropriation of natural resources from asteroids, without internationally redistributive obligations. Planetary Resources, an asteroid-mining company whose backers include Larry Page, Eric Schmidt, and James Cameron, plans to launch satellites to prospect for valuable asteroids in the next two years. Another US firm, Deep Space Industries, will launch exploratory satellites as soon as next year. These entrepreneurs hope to extract the valuable platinum-group metals, essential for manufacturing electronics, that are rare on Earth. Sensationalist articles on space mining will tell you about an asteroid worth $20 trillion. Investors also believe that asteroids might provide water that could be broken down into oxygen and hydrogen in space, yielding air for astronauts and fuel for their ships. This could facilitate a dramatic acceleration in the economic development of outer space. The CEO of Deep Space Industries said he hopes asteroids near Earth will be “like the Iron Range of Minnesota was for the Detroit car industry last century — a key resource located near where it was needed. In this case, metals and fuel from asteroids can expand the in-space industries of this century. That is our strategy.” Another entrepreneur called the industrialization of outer space the “biggest wealth-creation opportunity in modern history.” Before this value can be generated, however, the legal wrinkles have to be ironed out. And so in the summer of 2014, the ASTEROIDS Act was introduced in the House of Representatives to “promote the right of United States commercial entities to explore and utilize resources from asteroids in outer space, in accordance with the existing international obligations of the United States, free from harmful interference, and to transfer or sell such resources.” The legislation was intended to clarify US interpretations of international space law, explicitly granting American companies the right to extract asteroid resources and bring them to market. The conclusion of Congress’s last session means that the bill will have to be reintroduced for it to move forward, and it is uncertain exactly when and how this will happen. But its appearance marked another clear attempt to unilaterally push international norms toward the free extraction of outer space resources, with limited democratic responsibilities attached — and it will not be the last. Joanne Gabrynowicz, editor emerita of the Journal of Space Law, said that an adviser to Planetary Resources had drafted the bill. Deep Space Industries also sent a letter supporting it directly to the space subcommittee of the House of Representatives. Moreover, Congressman Bill Posey, a cosponsor of the act, represents Florida, a state that Gabrynowicz pointed out has recently been forced to try to attract commercial space business — a direct response to the economic hardship caused by the decommissioning NASA’s space shuttle program. Such extraterrestrial special interests will no doubt continue to exert legislative pressure. In addition to asteroids, companies are investing millions in mining the moon, despite legal uncertainties. One such company, Moon Express, has already received a $10 million data-sharing contract from NASA. One of that company’s founders, a former dot-com billionaire, told the Los Angeles Times: There is strong legal precedent and consensus of “finders, keepers” for resources that are liberated through private investment, and the same will be true on the moon. You don’t have to own land to have ownership of resources you unlock from it. Moon Express will use existing precedents of peaceful presence and exploration set by the US government forty years ago. This redeployment of the finders-keepers principle is anathema to the redistributive regime imagined by the Group of 77. Private companies like Planetary Resources and Moon Express, with support from the federal government, are betting not only on the viability of space industrialization, but also on their ability to push through a legal regime that will validate their property claims on their terms. But the universalization of laissez-faire is not inevitable. Final Frontier Thesis The history of the Moon Treaty serves as a reminder that outer space is not just a screen onto which we project techno-utopian fantasies or existential anxieties about the infinite void. It has been, and will continue to be, a site of concrete struggle over economic power. The politics of the present are undoubtedly different from those of the 1970s. The egalitarian project of the Group of 77 has given way to BRICS-style market liberalism. Global capital has gained power where international labor efforts have stagnated. Domestic inequalities have skyrocketed. The rapid proliferation of information technologies has temporarily masked the reality that the future, to paraphrase William Gibson, is not being very evenly distributed. Without international political organization to challenge galactic market fundamentalism, a twenty-first century space odyssey could mean the concentration of even more wealth and income in the hands of a few powerful corporations and the most technologically advanced countries. At the same time, and for the same reasons, the prospect of preserving the final frontier as a celestial commons presents an opportunity to fight for a more democratic political economy. Sharing the benefits of the celestial commons is key to expanding democracy to a galactic scale. One time-tested means of distributing the benefits of natural-resource extraction universally is the sovereign wealth fund, which Alaska uses to deliver oil revenue to its residents. As an international commons, outer space offers an opportunity to experiment with such redistributive mechanisms beyond the traditional confines of the nation-state. Organizing around an issue of such scale may seem utopian, but it’s also necessary. From regulating capital to mitigating climate change, the problems that confront us are inherently global in scope and require commensurate strategies. At the very least, the global left ought to demand the creation of an independent Galactic Wealth Fund to manage the proceeds of outer space resources on behalf of all human beings. At first, it would amount to little, divided up among all of us. But as the space economy grows relative to the terrestrial one, social dividends from the Galactic Wealth Fund could provide the basis for a truly universal basic income. This is just one component of a broader platform for galactic democracy that must be developed collectively. Extraterrestrial economic justice — not just shiny technological advances — will be central to any truly egalitarian politics in the twenty-first century. It’s time to start building a democratic futurism. States can extend existing models to govern space, but recognition of space as a commons is key. Silverstein and Panda ‘3/9 - Benjamin Silverstein research analyst for the Space Project at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. MA, International Relations, Syracuse University Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs BA, International Affairs, George Washington University and Ankit Panda Stanton Senior Fellow in the Nuclear Policy Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. AB, Princeton University, “Space Is a Great Commons. It’s Time to Treat It as Such.” Carnegie Endowment for International Peace (Web). March 9, 2021. Accessed Dec. 13, 2021. https://carnegieendowment.org/2021/03/09/space-is-great-commons.-it-s-time-to-treat-it-as-such-pub-84018 AT BUILDING ON PRIOR MODELS FOR MANAGING COMMONS¶ The histories of other great commons provide lessons on how to manage shared space resources meaningfully and effectively. Efforts to minimize damage to other great commons—like the Convention on Long-Range Transboundary Air Pollution and subsequent protocols—offer guidance on how to resolve compliance issues. Notably, the negotiations on the original convention on air pollution involved, among others, the United States and the Soviet Union. This suggests that states can pursue mutual benefits in areas considered great commons even under competitive conditions. More recent negotiations on the convention’s accompanying protocols show that these competing states can even agree on financing a monitoring regime to support progress.¶ Existing conventions and implementing agreements indicate that states can reach valuable commitments to manage the Earth’s great commons. These governance models protect state interests and preserve the commons themselves. These principles apply to space, but progress on establishing more encompassing space governance principles, enforcement mechanisms, and dispute resolution procedures hinges on states sharing the fundamental view that space is a great commons. Reaching such a consensus is an important first step.¶ New leadership in prominent spacefaring states can revitalize efforts to recognize space as a commons and can build on established legal standards to pursue commons-related principles for governing Earth orbits. Space actors do not have to resolve all their competing interests based on the debris problem. But negligence, mismanagement, or poorly designed rules may spell disaster for Earth orbits. As a more diverse range of actors with space-based interests emerges, no single actor will be able to unilaterally impose universal rules. States can, however, negotiate agreements to manage commons areas to better pursue national objectives. The only way to effectively govern state and commercial space activities is to settle on and abide by common norms or rules.¶ New conventions or regulatory mechanisms for governing Earth orbits will not appear overnight, but states can build toward these goals by clarifying their commitments to treat space as a commons and pursuing governance arrangements that reflect this commitment. New policies in the United States should reflect that Earth orbits are a great commons. Treating space as a commons is key to ethical exploration and human survival. Fisk N.D. - L. A. Fisk President of the Committee on Space Research, chartered by the International Council for Scientific Unions, “Space as a Global Commons,” UNOOSA (Web). ND. Accessed Dec. 13, 2021. https://www.unoosa.org/documents/pdf/hlf/1st_hlf_Dubai/Presentations/26.pdf AT There is an urgency to consider and act on this issue. • With each passing year, our technological civilization becomes increasingly dependent on the satellites in orbit. • The primal threats to our civilization – global climate change and space weather – can only be understood, and dealt with by using the global perspective of observations from space. • We need to recognize also that we are extending the human presence, whether through robotic spacecraft or eventually with humans, throughout our solar system. And we have a commitment as a civilization to behave responsibility in this endeavor. To protect the environments we will explore, and to protect ourselves against any contamination of our planet that results from this exploration. Space as a Global Commons It follows therefore that, given the centrality of space for the future of our civilization, we need to have policies and practices in place, which are shared by all spacefaring nations, that will allow and encourage each and every nation that desires to and has the capability to use and to explore space for peaceful purposes, to do so. We thus need to recognize, encourage, and enable space as a global commons. A ‘commons’ in the English language is a piece of land owned by and used by all members of a community, as in a pasture used by all residents of a village. Many nations of the world view space as a global commons, a resource not owned by any one nation but crucial to the future of all humankind.
1/15/22
NovDec - Incarcerated Workers Aff v2
Tournament: Damus Hollywood | Round: 4 | Opponent: Elizabeth Johnstone | Judge: Dylan Liu AC Incarcerated workers do not have a right to strike in the US. Harvard Law Review, 19 - ("Striking the Right Balance: Toward a Better Understanding of Prison Strikes," Harvard Law Review 03/8/2019, accessed 10-28-2021, https://harvardlawreview.org/2019/03/striking-the-right-balance-toward-a-better-understanding-of-prison-strikes/)//ML II. LEGAL FRAMEWORK GOVERNING PRISON STRIKES: STATE LAW AND FEDERAL STATUTES¶ A. Statutes and Regulations¶ As a threshold matter, state and federal statutory law provides no recourse for protecting prison strikes. Incarcerated individuals are not included as protected “employees” in the text of federal labor laws like the Fair Labor Standards Act78 and the National Labor Relations Act,79 and courts have refused to extend the protections that these statutes offer to those confined within prison walls.80 Further, this Note is aware of no state labor laws, or for that matter any state constitutional provisions, that have been interpreted to allow prisoners to strike. ¶Not only are prison strikes not protected by statutory law — they also are often explicitly prohibited. State statutes and prison regulations pose the most immediate barrier to prison strike activity, as states across the union appear to categorically bar prison strikes and other forms of inmate collective organizing. For instance, Alaska’s administrative code lists “participation in an organized work stoppage” and “encouraging others to engage in a food strike” as “high-moderate infractions.”81 The same is true at the federal level, as the Bureau of Prisons has made “engaging in or encouraging a group demonstration” and “encouraging others to refuse to work, or to participate in a work stoppage” prohibited acts.82 ¶ Further research is certainly necessary to develop a fuller, more nuanced treatment of the various state and federal statutory schemes that impact prison strikes.83 But even this brief overview drives home a clear bottom line: that state and federal laws, in their current forms, likely offer no viable protection for prison strikes and indeed often prohibit them outright. ¶B. Constitutional Law ¶ The Supreme Court has not spoken directly on the question of whether peaceful prison protests merit constitutional protection. However, two areas of constitutional analysis — prisoners’ rights broadly and prisoners’ First Amendment rights specifically — suggest that under current law, the answer to this question is likely also a resounding no.¶ 1. Prisoners’ Constitutional Rights Generally. — Section 1 of the Thirteenth Amendment states: “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.”84 By its express terms, the amendment creates an explicit exception for persons serving a sentence pursuant to conviction of a crime, and it therefore offers prisoners no basis to refuse to work or to engage in other forms of peaceful strikes.85 ¶ Despite the Thirteenth Amendment’s clear textual carve-out, courts have not, in modern times, read the wording of the amendment literally to allow the State to treat inmates like slaves.86 According to the Court, “there is no iron curtain drawn between the Constitution and the prisons of this country.”87 Instead, as neither slaves nor free people,88 inmates retain some (but not all) of their constitutional rights when they cross into the prison.89 The Supreme Court has time and again asserted that “lawful incarceration brings about the necessary withdrawal or limitation of many privileges and rights.”90 This is the case not only because of the inherently “deprivatory” nature of imprisonment,91 but also because prison administrators must be accorded wide latitude in the complex and difficult task of operating a penal institution.92 This deference, however, “yields to the strictures of the Constitution.”93 Indeed, courts recognize that inmates, despite being incarcerated, retain particular constitutional rights “that the courts must be alert to protect.”94 Such rights that an inmate retains are those “that are not inconsistent with his status as a prisoner or with the legitimate penological objective of the corrections system.”95 ¶ However, as the Court explained in Turner v. Safley, 96 a prison regulation may infringe on a prisoner’s retained constitutional rights as long as “it is reasonably related to legitimate penological interests.”97 Turner identified four relevant factors in determining the reasonableness of a prison regulation: (1) whether there is “a ‘valid, rational connection’ between the regulation and the legitimate governmental interest advanced to justify it”;98 (2) whether alternative means for exercising the asserted right remain available;99 (3) whether accommodation of the asserted right will adversely affect “guards, other inmates, and . . . the allocation of prison resources generally”;100 and (4) whether there is a “ready alternative”101 to the regulation “that fully accommodates the prisoner’s right at de minimis cost to valid penological interests.”102 ¶ So, under the general legal framework for prisoners’ rights, finding constitutional protection for peaceful collective actions like the 2018 prison strike will likely face an uphill battle. Such a right to strike not only must fit within the confines of a “retained right,” which appears to be narrowly defined; it also must go up against Turner and its progeny, which mandate rational basis review for any prison regulation — providing prison officials with broad deference to curtail any rights that a prisoner might retain.103 Turning to prisoner First Amendment jurisprudence specifically, it becomes even clearer that a right to strike likely cannot navigate either difficulty successfully.¶ 2. Prisoners’ First Amendment Rights. — The First Amendment of the Constitution includes within its guarantees political rights to communicate, associate, and present grievances to the government.104 These rights go to the very heart of our political system — one that, as a democracy, values the participation of its citizens.105 Outside of prison walls, the Supreme Court has recognized that individuals may, in many situations, exercise their First Amendment associational rights by peacefully engaging in a work strike.106 Inside prison walls, however, the right to strike is a legal gray area. The Court has analyzed a number of First Amendment rights, including those implicating concerted political activity and association, in the prison context — asking whether (1) the First Amendment right in question is inconsistent with an inmate’s status as a prisoner and (2) prison officials’ interference with such a right reasonably relates to a legitimate penological interest.¶ 107 However, the Court has yet to perform such an analysis for prison strikes specifically. But one seminal Supreme Court case — Jones v. North Carolina Prisoners’ Labor Union, Inc.108 — casts serious doubt on prisoners’ collective right to strike. In Jones, a prisoners’ labor union109 brought an action under 42 U.S.C. § 1983, claiming that the North Carolina Department of Corrections violated its First Amendment rights110 by promulgating a prison rule that prohibited, among other things, union meetings among inmates.111 The three-judge district court agreed, granting substantial injunctive relief to the union.112 The Supreme Court reversed, however, doing so on two main grounds. Writing for the majority, then-Justice Rehnquist first invoked the familiar notion that “the fact of confinement and the needs of the penal institution impose limitations on constitutional rights,” especially First Amendment associational rights.113 Then, without engaging with the specific nature of the potentially retained associational interest in question (that is, that of organizing as a union), Justice Rehnquist concluded that the challenged regulation did not unduly abridge inmates’ First Amendment rights.114 He did so by adopting a rational basis test — emphasizing the critical importance of “wide-ranging judicial deference” to prison officials and their informed discretion in carrying out penological goals.115 In particular, Justice Rehnquist argued that “responsible prison officials must be permitted to take reasonable steps to forestall” the “everpresent potential for violent confrontation” within prisons.116 And as he highlighted, North Carolina prison administrators had testified that the presence of, and potentially even the very objectives of, a prisoners’ union did potentially pose a danger117 — likely resulting in increased friction between inmates themselves or between inmates and prison personnel, as well as in “easily foreseeable” outcomes like “work stoppages.”118 ¶ In light of Jones, it is unlikely that the Supreme Court would, if the question came before it, recognize inmates’ First Amendment right to strike. Although the case concerned the specific issue of prison unions, the Jones Court’s holding was, in its methodology and reasoning, farreaching — (1) providing prison administrators with wide latitude to curtail any inmate collective activity that, in their “reasonable” judgment, threatened institutional order and security119 and, as a result, (2) appearing to severely curtail inmates’ First Amendment rights.120 The Court’s broad deference and narrow First Amendment view should therefore naturally be expected to extend to prison strikes and other forms of collective protest, about which prison officials have consistently offered similar safety concerns and which they have uniformly sought to ban,121 and which Jones specifically acknowledged as a possible unwelcome outcome of allowing prisoners to unionize. ¶ That Jones likely prevents any constitutional protection for prison strikes — and therefore liberally protects prison regulations banning strike activities — is reinforced by how the Supreme Court has applied the case over the past forty years. In Turner, for example, the Court rejected efforts to cabin Jones to barring only “‘presumptively dangerous’ inmate activities.”122 The Court specifically discussed Jones as part of a line of “prisoners’ rights” cases permitting “reasonable” prison regulations to impinge on inmates’ constitutional rights123 and ultimately relied in part on Jones to fashion its general four-part framework for assessing “reasonableness” across prison regulations.124 And in Overton v. Bazzetta, 125 the Supreme Court again invoked Jones to emphasize that “freedom of association is among the rights least compatible with incarceration”126 — though it declined to draw any precise boundaries that would be helpful for determining what, if any, associational rights inmates retain within prison walls, and whether those include strikes.127 ¶Lower courts have not been as wary to draw such boundaries. Under Jones, lower federal courts have uniformly held that prisoners have no constitutionally protected right under the First Amendment to strike. One district court interpreted Jones to hold that prison officials may act to prevent such strikes whenever they have a “good faith” belief that such strikes “threaten the security of the institutions they manage.”128 Lower courts have rejected a right to strike by simply citing to or briefly discussing Jones and contending that it naturally compels such a result,129 or by drawing an explicit connection between the prohibited prison unions at issue in Jones and prison strikes, dubbing strikes to be “a species of ‘organized union activity.’”130 They have also done so by delving into the specifics of why strikes purportedly pose safety and security risks within prisons and why prison regulations barring strikes are therefore rationally related to legitimate penological goals.131 ¶ Lower courts also have justified upholding prison regulations barring strikes by explicitly or implicitly turning to the general Turner framework that Jones helped create — including by arguing that there are ready alternatives to prison strikes,132 or that such regulations are generally permissible exercises of penal authority.133 And finally, it is worth noting that lower federal courts have, in deferring to prison offi- cials’ judgments regarding security, also permitted all manner of regulations designed to punish strikers134 and aid officials in preventing strikes from occurring.135 In short, there exists little, if any, room under current constitutional case law for protecting prison strikes. Incarceration disproportionately affects people of color, which causes a permanent reduction in job opportunities and quality of life. Rezal 21 Adriana Rezal data journalism fellow with U.S. News and World Report, 21 - ("A New Report Explores Racial Disparities in America’s Incarceration Rates," US News and World Report, 10-3-21, accessed 11-3-2021, https://www.usnews.com/news/best-states/articles/2021-10-13/report-highlights-staggering-racial-disparities-in-us-incarceration-rates)//LF A national view of U.S. incarcerated populations by race and ethnicity shows high rates of disparity among the country's communities of color and white Americans, especially among Black communities. While Black Americans are on average 4.8 times more likely to be incarcerated than white Americans, in some states such as New Jersey, Black Americans can be up to 12.5 times more likely to be incarcerated than white Americans. Hawaii demonstrates the lowest differential of Black to white American imprisonment, as shown by the map below. However, Black Americans in Hawaii are still over twice as likely to be incarcerated than white residents. While Latino individuals are on average 1.3 times more likely to be incarcerated than whites in the U.S., in some states such as Massachusetts, Latino populations are up to 4.1 times more likely to be incarcerated than whites. In 20 states, including Oklahoma, North Carolina and New Hampshire, the data in the report shows the likelihood of imprisonment is higher for whites compared to the Latino population. However the report emphasizes the unreliability of ethnicity data possibly contributing to an underestimation of Black and Latino American data. "An example lies in Florida, which claims that 13 of its prison population is Latinx though more than one quarter of its residents are Latinx," (a gender neutral term for 'Latino,' according to the report. "There are most assuredly more Latinx people in prison than are officially reported but the exact number is unknown." When it comes to incarceration, the U.S. is a world leader with 1.2 million people in state prisons across the country. According to the report, imprisonment is a life-altering event that can create negative impacts on the individual and societal level. Individuals released from incarceration may have difficulty gaining employment, finding stable housing and experience reduced lifetime earnings. Additionally, high levels of incarceration within communities can result in increased crime rates and contribute to neighborhood deterioration, according to the study. Although the U.S. remains a world leader in imprisonment, The Sentencing Project reports that nine states have been successful in decreasing their incarcerated population by more than 30 in recent years as a result of policy reforms and reduced prison admissions and lengths of stay. These states include Alaska, New Jersey, New York, Connecticut, Alabama, Rhode Island, Vermont, Hawaii and California. The report cites a number of causes for racial disparity within U.S. prisons. According to the report, the nation's history of white supremacy over Black people created a legacy of racial subordination that impacts their criminal justice outcomes today. The report also asserts that communities of color, especially Black Americans, are negatively affected by biased policies and practices including police-citizen relations, pre-trial detention, the weight criminal history records can carry in sentencing and unequal prosecutorial charging. Prison working conditions are terrible—prisoners work in unsafe conditions and accrue thousands of dollars in debt. Eisen 20 Lauren-Brooke Eisen director of the Brennan Center’s Justice Program where she leads the organization’s work to end mass incarceration, 20 - ("Covid-19 Highlights the Need for Prison Labor Reform," Brennan Center for Justice, 4-17-2020, accessed 11-4-2021, https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/covid-19-highlights-need-prison-labor-reform)//ML For decades, prisoners in American correctional facilities have worked for no wages or mere pennies an hour. As the United States attempts to reduce transmission of Covid-19, more than a dozen states are now relying on this captive labor force to manufacture personal protective equipment badly needed by healthcare workers and other frontline responders.¶ Prisoners in Missouri are currently earning between $0.30 and $0.71 an hour to produce hand sanitizer, toilet paper, and protective gowns that will be distributed across the state. In Louisiana, prisoners are making hand sanitizer for about $0.40 an hour. And in Arkansas, where incarcerated workers are producing cloth masks for prisoners, correctional officers, and other government workers, their labor is entirely uncompensated.¶ This unprecedented health emergency is re-exposing how our country’s long-held practice of paying nothing or next-to-nothing for incarcerated labor, with no labor protections, is akin to modern-day slavery.¶ Prisoners are not protected by the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA), the federal law establishing minimum wage and overtime pay eligibility for both private sector and government workers. In 1993, a federal appeals court held that it is up to Congress, not the courts, to decide whether the FLSA applies to incarcerated workers.¶ Courts have also ruled that the National Labor Relations Act, which guarantees the right of private sector employees to collective bargaining, does not apply in prisoners.¶ Even worse, prisoners are excluded from the U.S. Occupational Health and Safety Administration protections that require employers to provide a safe working environment. This dehumanizing lack of protection for prison workers has long subjected them to conditions that have endangered their physical safety.¶ Amid a health threat that worsens in crowded environments, many prisoners are working without any mandated protections. Congress must amend the language of federal employment protections to explicitly extend to work behind bars.¶ Forced labor in prisons has its roots in the post-Civil War Reconstruction period, when Southern planters faced the need to pay the labor force that had long worked for free under brutal conditions to produce the economic capital of the South.¶ Though the 13th Amendment abolished “involuntary servitude,” it excused forcible labor as punishment for those convicted of crimes. As a result, Southern states codified punitive laws, known as the Black Codes, to arbitrarily criminalize the activity of their former slaves. Loitering and congregating after dark, among other innocuous activities, suddenly became criminal. Arrest and convictions bound these alleged criminals to terms of incarceration, often sentenced to unpaid labor for wealthy plantation owners.¶ In the following decades, Southern states — desperate for cheap labor and revenue — widely began leasing prisoners to local planters and Northern industrialists who took responsibility for their housing and feeding, a practice known as convict leasing.¶ Under this system, the captive labor market worked long hours in unsafe conditions, often treated as poorly as they had been as slaves. Records approximate that on an average day between 1885 and 1920, 10,000 to 20,000 prisoners — the overwhelming majority of them Black Americans — continued to toil under these insufferable circumstances.¶ In the 1930s, a series of laws prohibited state prisons from using prison labor, but the federal government continued to rely on this workforce to meet the demands of the rapidly changing markets of mid-century. By 1979, Congress passed legislation allowing state corrections officials to collaborate with private industries to produce prison-made goods, birthing the modern era of prison labor. ¶ Today, approximately 55 percent of the American prison population works while serving their sentences. Prison jobs are broadly divided into two categories: prison support work — such as food preparation, laundry services, and maintenance work — and “correctional industries” jobs, in which prisoners might make license plates, sew military uniforms, or staff a call center. It is prisoners in correctional industries who are currently being deployed to help meet the nation’s need for protective gear.¶ While so many behind bars are manufacturing items the country desperately needs to combat our current health crisis, their low wages and lack of labor protections — among myriad other factors — mean they are not accorded the same benefits or recognition as other workers.¶ What’s more, the measly cents per hour that is typical compensation across often-dangerous prison jobs is not nearly enough to cover the court fees and fines, restitution, child support, and room and board expenses that most state departments of corrections deduct from prisoners’ earnings. When there is anything left, it is barely enough to pay for commissary goods such as food, hygienic products, and toiletries, let alone marked-up email services that prisoners rely on to stay in touch with their loved ones. Despite working for years, many prisoners are left with thousands of dollars in crippling debt by the time they complete their sentences.¶ In 2018, prisoners in dozens of facilities across the country went on strike and issued a list of demands, which included “an immediate end to prison slavery” and that prisoners be “paid the prevailing wage in their state or territory for their labor.”¶ This time of national emergency requires that everyone do their part to slow the spread of coronavirus. The significant shortage of face masks, protective gowns, and hand sanitizer that is putting the lives of our frontline workers in jeopardy necessitates bold and swift action. But if the states and federal government are going to rely on correctional labor to manufacture this equipment, they need to improve the wages and labor protections of our incarcerated workers. To fail to do so is not far off from the devaluation and brutalization of slave labor that was ostensibly abandoned a century and a half ago. Prisoners make almost no money for their labor. Fulcher 15 Patrice A. Fulcher Associate Professor at The John Marshall Law School, 15 - ("," Journal of Civil Rights and Economic Development, Winter 2015, accessed 10-28-2021, https://scholarship.law.stjohns.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1759andcontext=jcred)//ML B.87 In 2011, FPI's net sales were 745 million dollars and their earnings were 62 million dollars.88 Restricted to sell its products only to federal agencies, FPI's largest purchaser is the U.S. Department of Defense, which makes up 52 of it revenues. 89 The FPI use to have a mandatory source requirement for all federal agencies, but it was amended to prohibit any federal agency from purchasing FPI products or services, unless the agency determines that the products offered are the "best value". 90 So in addition to making license plates, furniture and other typical prison-made goods, thousands of federal inmates work for FPI making supplies for the U.S. military. FPI inmates who are given this assignment find themselves making anti-tank missiles, body armor, land mine sweepers, components for fighter aircrafts, and other gear for the Pentagon. 91 ¶Consequently, an inmate who works within the federal prison labor system may make a maximum of $64.00 a month (prior to any state deductions for room and board, taxes, etc., assuming an inmate works 5 days a week for 8 hours), and a maximum of $92.00 a month (subtracting 50 of the wages for the IRFP, assuming an inmate works 5 days a week for 8 hours) if he works for FPI.¶ B. State Prison Labor Systems ¶There are approximately 1,382,000 inmates in state prisons in the U.S.92 State prisoners work within varying labor systems while incarcerated. 9 3 State inmates may (1) work within the confines of a prison, where state or private entities manage the facility, sell the products produced, and receive the profits, (2) work in jobs directly benefiting prison operations by cleaning, cooking, or doing laundry, or (3) work outside of prison walls laboring for the state or private companies. 94 Over the last 30 years, at least 37 states have enacted laws permitting the use of inmate labor by private enterprise. 9 5 State inmates' wages are determined by the state in which they are incarcerated, and may be affected depending on whether the state correctional facility is certified under the Prison Industry Enhancement Certification Program. ¶1. State Prison Labor ¶ Under The Prison Industry Enhancement Certification Program ("PIE") In 1979, Congress passed the Prison Industry Enhancement Certification program ("PIE") under the Justice System Improvement Act.96 The PIE exempts state and local correction departments from the Ashurst-Sumners Act legislation, which placed restrictions on the interstate sale and transportation of prison-made goods.9 7 The specific goal of the PIE was to provide private-sector work opportunities to prisoners by certifying 50 state correctional agencies to sell prison made goods interstate and to the Federal Government (over the original $10,000 limitation). 98 Once a state agency is certified under the PIE, its corrections department may either sell prison made goods on its own, or enter into prison labor contracts with private companies to sell goods in the free market.99 ¶ In order to qualify for PIE certification, correctional agencies have to apply through the Bureau of Justice Assistance ("BJA") or the National Correctional Industries Association, pay state prisoners a prevailing wage, and meet several other statutory requirements.10 0 Paying inmate workers prevailing wages under the PIE may appear equitable on its face, but it is not. Most inmates see only 20 of their gross wages because the PIE also allows for 80 wage deductions for room and board, victim assistance, taxes, and family support.lO' While expecting convicts to defray the cost of their incarceration and victim services is reasonable, as will be seen in part x of this article, the current scheme is short sighted and unwise because, among other things, so little attention is given to reducing recidivism through prison programs and support for newly released inmates. ¶According to the Bureau of Justice Assistance, there were 37 state, and 4 county-based PIE certified correctional industry programs in the U.S. in 2011.102 These PIE programs include the management of at least 175 business partnerships with private industry. 103 In 2012, the number of PIE certifications increased to 45; these certified correctional agencies employed a total of 4,700 inmates. 104 Furthermore, the 45 certified PIE agencies generated $9,780,130 in gross salary revenues in 2012.105 A majority of those earnings went to net inmate salaries ($3,958,354), then correctional institution for room and board ($3,482,883), state and federal taxes ($989,503) victims' programs ($947,770), and the lowest amount to inmate family support ($401,620).106 Therefore, each of the 4,700 prisoners working for PIE certified programs made approximately $842.00 in 2012, which equates to $70.00 a month.¶ ¶2. State Prison Labor Without PIE Protections ¶ State correctional industries without PIE protections are prohibited from selling prison-made products interstate. 107 They also are under no federal obligation to pay working prisoners prevailing wages as required for certification under PIE.108 Depending on the facility, these state correctional agencies typically require inmates to work, and pay inmates from $0.17 to $5.35 per hour.109 There are also several state-operated correctional institutions that force prisoners to work, but pay them absolutely nothing for their labor. For example, the Georgia Department of Corrections does not pay working inmates.1 10 Once a person is sentenced to one of the Georgia's 31 state prisons, he or she will be ordered to either work jobs that directly benefit the prison, make products to be sold to government agencies, or perform city work detail jobs without getting paid a cent.11 In light of these facts, it is not surprising that on December 9, 2010, thousands of Georgia inmates staged the largest prison protest in U.S. History.ll 2 Through the use of contraband cell phones, Georgia inmates in at least seven different state prisons coordinated a nonviolent prison strike.l13 These protesting inmates had several demands, but high on their list was to be paid a living wage for work.114 "If they would start paying us, that would reduce crime behind the walls," said Mike, one of the protesting prisoners, "inmates would have the means to get hygiene items and food from the commissary." 15 The protest lasted approximately 5 days and unfortunately, the prisoners' demands have still not been met.116 Almost all Georgia state-prisoners are still working for free, at least three inmates have publically complained that they were brutally beaten for their involvement in the protest, and in July 2012 several Georgia prisoners went on a hunger strike to protest additional inhumane punishments stemming from the 2010 prison protest.117 ¶Finally, state prisoners labor for correctional institutions that fall under the supervision of state departments of correction, but are separate selfsustaining corporate entities. Some of the prison industries have PIE certification for all of their work programs while others certify only certain jobs under PIE. Two such institutions in the U.S. are the Georgia Correctional Industries ("GCI") and the Oregon Corrections Enterprise ("OCE").118 GCI and OCE utilize state inmate labor to produce and sell a plethora of services and products to state and local government agencies. 19 For instance, GCI employs 1,400 Georgia inmates, who manufacture garments and bedding, institutional and office furniture, cleaning chemicals, perform embroidery, screen printing, reupholstering, engraving, optical, and framing services, work in milk and meat processing plants, and on farms to produce beef and pork, and harvest fruits and vegetables, eggs, grits, and corn. 120 GCI has some work programs certified under PIE, but a majority of the employed inmates work for less than minimum wage.121 GCI boast on its website that they "maintain one of the lowest raw food costs in the nation-$1.57 per day per inmate".122 So inmates laboring in GCI food production factories and fields in the sweltering heat of the Deep South are paid roughly $31.40 a month if they are lucky (prior to state deductions and if they work 5 days a week). Approximately 1,100 of Oregon's 14,300 prisoners work for OCE and perform a variety of services for Oregon government agencies; printing, call centers, laundry service, and mailing projects, and document scanning to name a few. 123 OCE has PIE certification, but it is difficult to determine whether it applies to all of their work programs since inmates' wages still appear to be low.124 In a study conducted by University of Oregon students, three inmates at OCE reported that after working each month, they had $50.00 to send home to their families or add to phone call accounts. 125 ¶ C. Private Prison Labor Systems ¶ State governments turned to prison privatization in order to solve the problems arising from the mass incarceration of people in the U.S.126 Thus, the top two private prison corporations in the U.S., Corrections Corporation of America, Inc. ("CCA") and The GEO Group, Inc. ("GEO"), have made billions from acquiring state and federal contracts to manage prisoners. 127 CCA is the leading private prison in the U.S. for it profits from housing more than 80,000 prisoners in the U.S.128 GEO, is one of the world's largest private prison corporations with approximately 80,000 beds and 114 facilities located in the U.S., the United Kingdom, Australia, and South Africa. 129 GEO is only second to CCA in the U.S. because GEO has 56 Facilities and a bed capacity of 61,132,130 while CCA 60 facilities with a bed capacity of more than 90,000.131 ¶ It is clear that CCA and GEO deliver profits to their shareholders from housing inmates, but they also create wealth through forced prison labor. CCA maintains that inmates work in vocational jobs including carpentry, computer applications, construction and building trades, electrical, horticulture and landscaping, masonry, painting, and plumbing. 132 GEO also reports that it provides vocational training, but does not list the specific jobs that inmates perform.133 Since the PIE only applies to state correctional agencies, CCA and GEO are unable to apply directly for certification. As a result, CCA and GEO are under no obligations to pay their inmates prevailing wages. ¶It is difficult to determine how much private prisons actually pay working inmates, but there is nothing to dispute that private prisons also force able inmates to work. It is estimated that private prisons on average pay inmates 17¢ per hour for a maximum of six hours a day, with CCA paying working prisoners the most at .50¢ per hour for "highly skilled positions".134 Other sources suggest that CCA pays working inmates $1.00 a day, and at the same time charges them $5.00 a minute for telephone calls. 135 Additional reports indicate that private prisons pay an average of 93¢ to $4.73 per hour.136 ¶ Private prison companies also capitalized on the growing incarceration of undocumented workers in the U.S. by obtaining million dollar federal detention contracts to house detainees for Immigration and Customs Enforcement ("ICE"). 1 37 Like the other inmates they house, private prison companies also force immigration detainees to work. 138 CCA operates an immigration detention center in Gainesville, Georgia.139 Female detainees in this facility have complained that they are paid subminimum wages for their work and about inadequate medical and living conditions. 140 Low wages for prisoners create cycles of recidivism. Fulcher 15 Patrice A. Fulcher Associate Professor at The John Marshall Law School, 15 - ("," Journal of Civil Rights and Economic Development, Winter 2015, accessed 10-28-2021, https://scholarship.law.stjohns.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1759andcontext=jcred)//ML B. Reallocate Greater Wealth To Working Prisoners and Decrease Recidivism ¶ Working for slave wages or as a slave without compensation is the harsh economic reality for millions of prisoners in the U.S. Then after succumbing to living a life as a slave for the duration of their sentence, these prisoners are released back to society, without any means of financial support from their labors. Often indigent, homeless, and unable to overcome the challenge of obtaining employment with a conviction, many former inmates reoffend.192 Moreover, for those who do secure jobs, their earnings are greatly limited by their criminal records. A recent PEW study revealed "past incarceration reduced subsequent wages by 11 percent, cut annual employment by nine weeks and reduced yearly earnings by 40 percent."1 93 As a result, U.S. recidivism rates will remain high unless former prisoners have economic resources immediately upon release. Thus, the FLSA should be emancipated from the constraints imposed, not by Congress, but by rigid and unsupported judicial interpretation that wrongly exclude working prisoners from its provisions. Free the FLSA and compensate working inmates; allow prisoners to accumulate capital while they are incarcerated, so they will have a means of support to help them rebuild their lives, and not have to commit crimes to survive. ¶ Hence, I propose the following basic guidelines in providing FLSA coverage to working inmates: (1) employment should be voluntary; those who do not wish to work must take vocational classes for their entire prison sentence, (2) working inmates should be paid at least minimum wage, (3) automatic wage deductions shall be allowed for taxes and other previous court ordered obligations only, and (4) a forced 80 percent wage deduction will be deposited into an outside interest bearing bank account, accessible only upon release. In adopting this payment scheme, the economic reality for working prisoners will be greatly improved.¶ Utilizing the total PIE quarterly statics from 2012 mentioned above in section III(B)(1)(only subtracting family costs and taxes), each of the, 4,700 inmates working in PIE programs would have received approximately $356.00 a month instead of $70.00.194 This figure represents net wages after an 80 percent deduction of $1,427.00 is transferred into an interest bearing account.1 95 Additionally, since today's prisoners serve an average of 5.2 years in prison, 196 each of the 4,700 inmates under the proposed new FLSA guidelines would have at least $3,567.50 upon his or her release if the 80 were placed in an account with an interest rate of at least a 3. Granted, this amount may not seem significant, but it is better than expecting that a bus ticket and a knapsack of clothes will be enough to enable a person who has been incarcerated to build his life in free society. ¶ Plan Plan: The United States ought to recognize the unconditional right of incarcerated workers to strike. Solvency The right to strike is key for prisoners hoping to reform the criminal justice system, allows prison laborers to publicize their conditions and assert their right to dignity Harvard Law Review, 19 - ("Striking the Right Balance: Toward a Better Understanding of Prison Strikes," Harvard Law Review 03/8/2019, accessed 10-28-2021, https://harvardlawreview.org/2019/03/striking-the-right-balance-toward-a-better-understanding-of-prison-strikes/)//ML But in order to ensure that the Constitution truly does not stop at the prison walls, courts cannot simply accept prison administrators’ fears regarding strikes at face value and instead should rigorously test their credibility and basis in fact.143 And more importantly, by over-deferring and failing to engage in any analysis of the merits of prison strikes, courts miss an important opportunity. As this Note has argued, prison strikes represent an underappreciated aspect of prison life — the means by which prisoners have, throughout the course of American history, surfaced pressing problems of our carceral state and initiated important transformations in our prison system. Therefore, it is imperative to meaningfully consider why and how such strikes merit legal protection — even if such protection appears to fly in the face of the current state of the law and to defy conventional wisdom. To that end, this Part first explores the First Amendment as one potential avenue for considering the merits of prison strikes, by presenting three critical First Amendment values contained within prison strikes,144 and it then briefly discusses other potential legal avenues for courts and scholars to consider. A. Considering the First Amendment Values of Prison Strikes The right to strike within prisons may be conceptually viewed as a composite of three separate fundamental First Amendment freedoms: the freedom to peacefully associate, the freedom of speech, and the freedom to assemble and petition for redress of grievances.145 Each is considered in turn. 1. Association. — The right to peaceful association is one that captures the right of individuals to commune with others for the expression of ideas and for effective advocacy.146 Strikes, like prison unions, represent an important means of association for prisoners — allowing them to “lay claim to a social identity as ‘workers’ . . . and in doing so generate claims to respect and solidarity.”147 This identity and solidarity can, in turn, enable inmates to engage in productive and peaceful bargains with prison officials for better conditions, higher pay, and other reform desires. Bargaining is, in many respects, already very common in prisons, “for the simple reason that prison administrators rarely have sufficient resources to gain complete conformity to all the rules.”148 However, such bargaining typically happens in an informal, ongoing, private process;149 in their recurrent, day-to-day contact with inmates, prison administrators use their arsenal of tools150 to “negotiate” only with select inmate leaders,151 with the central goal of maintaining “short term surface order.”152 This informal bargaining is “dysfunctional” to the long-term stability of prison institutions and “the real needs of those incarcerated within” them153 — creating hierarchical relationships154 that breed mistrust155 and leave many inmates powerless and feeling aggrieved.156 As a result, inmates often feel that they have to resort to violence to protect themselves from exploitation, express their dissatisfaction, and obtain redress.157 Alternatively, peaceful, collective prison strikes avoid these harmful consequences by allowing for “open” and “formal” negotiations between all inmates and prison staff.158 Such transparent and legitimated bargaining benefits both inmates and prisons as a whole. By initiating peaceful protests such as work stoppages, all inmates are able “to solve problems, maximize gains, articulate goals, develop alternative strategies, and deal with administrators without resorting to force or violence.”159 And by permitting peaceful strikes, prison administrators “provide inmates with a channel for airing grievances and gaining official response . . . giving the institution a kind of safety-valve for peaceful, rather than violent, change”160 — avoiding potentially expensive and time-consuming litigation and even helping rehabilitate inmates,161 all while deemphasizing hierarchical structures in prisons that harm institutional order.162 2. Speech. — A prison strike also represents a critical way by which inmates can express themselves.163 First, as alluded to above, a strike allows inmates to claim and communicate an identity — as more than just marginalized, ignored convicts with little to no self-determination, but instead as workers and human beings entitled to basic dignity. Such collective actions represent the “performative declaration and affirmation of rights that one does not (yet) have.”164 And, as Professor Jocelyn Simonson discusses, these strikes are collective contestations to “demand dignity, calling attention to the ways in which prisoners are treated as less than human and in the process reclaiming their own agency.”165 Such dignitary considerations, which courts have sought to protect under First Amendment principles, should therefore naturally extend to prisoners attempting to, through strikes, express their basic selfworth.166 Beyond representing a form of inherent, individual expression for inmates, prison strikes also represent a broader form of expression, allowing inmates to be visible to and heard by the public at large. Over the course of American history, inmates — by virtue of being locked up in isolated, impregnable penitentiaries — have largely been a silent and ignored segment of the American population.167 Through peaceful protests like the 2018 national prison strike, however, their suffering, their calls for reform, and their voices are, for the first time, directly expressed on a large scale, ringing out loudly beyond the prison walls and jumpstarting important conversations of criminal justice reform. It is critical to protect such expression; “indeed, it is from the voices of those who have been most harmed by the punitive nature of our criminal justice system that we can hear the most profound reimaginings of how the system might be truly responsive to local demands for justice and equality.”168 3. Petition for Redress. Inmates’ strikes can be seen not only as expressions of their dignity and general efforts to express their voices beyond prison walls but also as significant methods of assembly to call attention to specific grievances and seek redress from the government.169 While in theory “there is no iron curtain drawn between the Constitution and the prisons of this country,”170 in practice, “prisons often escape the daily microscope focused on other American institutions such as schools, churches, and government.”171 Courts grant prison administrators wide deference not only in running day-to-day life within prisons but also in restricting press access to prisons.172 Therefore, much of the American public — already closed off from and largely indifferent to the lives of prisoners — is kept even more in the dark about prison conditions and the state of our carceral system as a whole. Prison conditions, from what has been documented, are horrendous across states. Many prisons are severely overcrowded and seriously understaffed;173 inmates routinely experience physical abuse and even death at the hands of prison guards,174 receive inadequate protection from guards, are deprived of basic necessities,175 are given substandard medical care,176 and are forced to live in squalor and tolerate extreme circumstances;177 most prisoners have minimal, if any, access, to rehabilitative or mental health services;178 and prisoners have little legal recourse, as internal prison grievance procedures are often stacked against inmates,179 and judicial deference and federal legislation have effectively shut the courthouse doors on prisoners’ civil rights claims.180 And across prisons, criminal sentencing laws not only have contributed to an unprecedented era of mass incarceration, but also have forced African Americans and people of color broadly to bear much of this burden.181 As the Marshall Project states, “society won’t fix a prison system it can’t see”;182 peaceful prison strikes like the 2018 strike, however, draw back the “iron curtain” of prison walls, bringing to light many of the pressing issues described above. Through these strikes, inmates are able not only to express their grievances to their prison administrators, but also to “publicize their on-the-ground realities to the larger world”183 and, in turn, gain attention from and access to the political branches able to implement policy reforms.184 As recent history has shown, inmates have experienced some success by pressing their claims against the government through publicized strikes. For example, as described above, the California strikes in 2011 and 2013 generated public outcry that eventually resulted in transfor- mations to the California prison system’s solitary confinement policies.185 In Alabama, inmates’ participation in the 2016 nationwide prison strike helped prompt the Department of Justice to open an investigation into the state’s prison conditions.186 And more broadly speaking, strikes like the 2018 strike have begun to “remedy power imbalances, bring aggregate structural harms into view, and shift deeply entrenched legal and constitutional” barriers to critical prison reforms.187 B. Considering Additional Legal Avenues for Protecting Prison Strikes The foregoing analysis suggests that the First Amendment is a critical, worthwhile vehicle for considering the merits of a right to strike for prisoners. As Justice Black recognized, the importance of such analysis likely transcends prisoners themselves. He wrote: “I do not believe that it can be too often repeated that the freedoms of speech, press, petition and assembly guaranteed by the First Amendment must be accorded to the ideas we hate or sooner or later they will be denied to the ideas we cherish.”188 But this Note acknowledges that judicial recognition of prison strikes’ First Amendment values requires significant doctrinal change. Convincing the Supreme Court to overturn its Jones and Turner precedents, and instead to adopt a test with less deference than is currently afforded to prison administrators, is unlikely. As a result, future research is necessary to identify other potential avenues to consider the legal status and merits of prison strikes. As alluded to above, labor law presents one such promising avenue, as does state constitutional and statutory law. Drawing from the broader j Incarcerated workers are uniquely vulnerable to exploitation the right to strike is a key weapon in fighting for better conditions Kelly 18 Kim Kelly is a freelance journalist and organizer based in Philadelphia. Her work on labor, class, politics, and culture has appeared in the New Republic, the Washington Post, the Baffler, and Esquire, among other publications, and she is the author of FIGHT LIKE HELL, a forthcoming book of intersectional labor history. “How the Ongoing Prison Strike is Connected to the Labor Movement”. 9-4-2018. Teen Vogue. https://www.teenvogue.com/story/labor-day-2018-how-the-ongoing-prison-strike-is-connected-to-the-labor-movement. Accessed 11-1-2021; MJen It’s a tough time to be a worker in America. The Trump administration has slashed important workplace safety regulations to ribbons; the economic gap between the poor and working classes and the 1 continues to widen at an alarming rate; poverty remains rampant; and overall, union membership, which affords protection to workers throughout the country, hovered around only 11 for 2017. Headlines alleging worker exploitation at Silicon Valley giants like Amazon, Tesla, and Uber bombard our screens; even “progressive” media organizations swept up in the digital media organizing wave are struggling, as BuzzFeed founder Jonah Peretti has repeatedly spoken out against unionizing, while Slate and Thrillist employees who have unionized have accused the companies of using anti-union tactics and stalling the process. And the most vulnerable worker populations—sex workers, immigrants, and undocumented people—face increased repression from the government. There is hope, though. For centuries, a worker’s most potent weapon against exploitation from capitalism and oppression from the powers that be has been direct action: the strike. And right now, America’s prisoners are on strike. Incarcerated workers across the nation are standing up to protest their inhumane living conditions and buck the horrific yoke of prison slavery with organized labor’s strongest weapons—solidarity and collective action. The prison strike was organized by workers both inside and outside detention facilities, spearheaded by Jailhouse Lawyers Speak (JLS), and supported by the Incarcerated Workers Organizing Committee (IWOC) and the Free Alabama Movement (FAM), and sparked by deadly uprisings at Lee Correctional Institution in South Carolina earlier this year that cost seven prisoners’ lives. The strike began on August 21 and ends on September 9, dates that reflect the legacy of rebellion in American prisons: on August 21, 1971, George Jackson was killed by prison guards in San Quentin, and his death was met by protests from other prisoners across the country, culminating in the famed September 9 uprising at the Attica Correctional Facility in upstate New York. By choosing these dates, participants in the prison strike of 2018 are drawing a direct line between their current struggle and the struggles of those who have come before, emphasizing the stark fact that very little has changed in terms of conditions or opportunities for those who are locked up and held by the state since the birth of the modern prison system. The striking prisoners of today have released a a list of ten demands. which calls for improvements to the current living conditions in prisons, increased rehabilitation programs, educational opportunities, and specific policy goals. This essentially articulates the idea of non-reformist reforms, a central plank of prison abolition. By illuminating the barbarity of the current prison system and calling for its abolishment while advocating for an improvement in current conditions, they are—to paraphrase French socialist André Gorz—asking not for what can be achieved within a current system, but for what should be possible. As of August 21, across 17 states (and one Canadian province), these incarcerated workers are demanding real, tangible prison reform, and the abolition of one of America’s great enduring shames—the loophole enacted by the 13th amendment that decrees slavery can be used to penalize those convicted of a crime. This is where the term “prison slavery” originates, as director Ava DuVernay laid out in her groundbreaking 2016 documentary 13th, which argues that slavery never ended — it was just repurposed by the prison industrial complex and blossomed as mass incarceration. Her documentary argued that the new American plantations don’t grow cotton, they work prison jobs churning out license plates and other cheap goods, for which prisoners are paid mere pennies on the hour—if at all. Meanwhile, prison labor generates an estimated $1 billion per year, proving to be quite a profitable business for the private companies and corporations who benefit from prisoners’ work. Prison labor is used to manufacture a vast array of consumer goods, from Christmas toys and blue jeans to military equipment, lingerie, and car parts. Incarcerated people also frequently serve as a captive labor force for prisons themselves as kitchen and maintenance workers, and for a variety of other services, from shoveling snow after a Boston blizzard to harvesting oranges in Florida. (California recently made headlines when it was revealed that it was using prison labor to fight its deadly wildfires, which it has done since the 1940s; the prisoners (which included some juvenile offenders) were reportedly paid $1 per hour plus $2 per day to risk their lives, and are barred from becoming firefighters after their release.) Prisoners are paid very little for their work; the average wage in state prisons ranges, on average, from 14 cents to 63 cents per hour for “regular” prison jobs, and between 33 cents and $1.41 per hour for those who work for state-owned businesses, and while they are working full-time jobs, prisoners do not always have the benefit of basic labor protections, such as minimum wage, sick leave, or overtime pay. Given that the United States has the highest incarceration rate in the world, with 2.3 million people currently behind bars, the prison industrial complex would collapse were it to pay incarcerated workers the minimum wage—which creates further incentive for them to keep locking people up. Many prisoners welcome the chance to work during their incarceration, because it gets them out of their cells, allows them to make purchases from commissary, and gives them the opportunity to send money home to their loved ones, but not everyone is given a choice: according to Newsweek, some prisoners in eight states—Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Mississippi, Oklahoma, South Carolina, and Texas—are not paid at all for their labor in government-run facilities. Unlike most other workers, prisoners cannot simply walk off the job; they are forced to get more creative. Participants in the strike have several options available to them, according to Mother Jones, including commissary boycotts, work stoppages, sit-ins, and hunger strikes, and reports of participation are continually coming in from different facilities. In addition, these workers also have much more to fear in terms of retaliation, and several organizers say that they have already endured punitive measures. Participating in a prison strike is a matter of life or death, but for prisoners seeking justice, if not freedom, there is really no other option. There has been a huge amount of media coverage over this prison strike, a massive contrast to the last major national prison strike in 2016, which was said by some to be the largest prison strike in American history and involved what one organizer estimated as roughly 20,000 incarcerated workers and across at least 20 facilities yet received little to no mainstream media coverage. The tide seems to be turning, buoyed by a number of factors, from the continuing outcry over police brutality and more visible conversations over the horrors of the prison industrial complex to the overtly racist practices of the Trump regime. More people on the outside are waking up to the terrible plight of our siblings behind the walls, but awareness isn’t enough: they need support, solidarity, and action. It bears remembering that, above all, this strike is a human rights campaign. Ending prison slavery and supporting incarcerated workers is absolutely a labor issue, and every union and labor activist in the nation should be standing up to support their efforts. The companies who profit off of this modern day slavery have blood on their hands, just like history’s craven factory owners and coal bosses who oversaw the deaths and degradation of previous generations. We need to equate monetarily supporting companies that use prison labor with crossing the picket line, and to scabbing for enslavement. The fact that there are human beings housed in cages who are forced to work for slave wages is completely unacceptable by any metric, and fixing (if not completely abolishing) this wretched system should be a priority for those who consider themselves part of the labor movement, or on the right side of history. An injury to one is an injury to all, and our fellow workers on the inside are bleeding out. Prisoners currently face massive barriers to striking – they get punished and aren’t allowed to unionize Kozlowska 16 Hanna is a reporter on Quartz's investigations team. She previously worked for The New York Times as a writer for NYT Opinion and was a fellow at Foreign Policy magazine. She was also a stringer for the Times in Poland. “US prisoners are going on strike to protest a massive forced labor system”. 9-06-2016. Quartz. https://qz.com/777415/an-unprecedented-prison-strike-hopes-to-change-the-fate-of-the-900000-americans-trapped-in-an-exploitative-labor-system/. Accessed 11-1-2021; MJen On Friday (Sept. 9) prison inmates across the US will participate in what organizers are touting as the “largest prison strike in history,” stopping work in protest of what many call a modern version of slavery. The protest, organized across 24 states, is spearheaded by the inmate-led Free Alabama Movement (FAM) and coordinated by the Incarcerated Workers Organizing Committee (IWOC), a branch of an international labor union. Its manifesto, published online by “prisoners across the United States,” reads: This is a call to end slavery in America…To every prisoner in every state and federal institution across this land, we call on you to stop being a slave, to let the crops rot in the plantation fields, to go on strike and cease reproducing the institutions of your confinement. The strike will be held on the 45th anniversary of the Attica prison revolt, when prisoners took control of a maximum-security correctional facility near Buffalo, New York, demanding better conditions and an end to their brutal treatment. Today, nearly 900,000 US prisoners work while incarcerated. The Bureau of Prisons, which oversees all federal inmates requires that all prisoners (barring medical reasons) work. State prisoners are in the same boat; according to Eric Fink, a professor at Elon Law school, in all or nearly all US states prisoners must work. If they refuse, they can be punished with solitary confinement, revoking visitation, or other measures. Inmates receive very little pay for their labor—in federal prisons it ranges from $0.12 to $0.40 an hour. In some states, like Texas, those held at state prisons receive zero compensation. The majority of inmates work on prison maintenance and upkeep—cleaning, cooking, etc.—but approximately 80,000 do work for the outside world. Sometimes these jobs are the result of government contracts; other times, prisoners end up doing work for private companies such as Victoria’s Secret, Whole Foods or Walmart. Unlike other American workers, these prisoners are not protected by labor laws. They don’t have access to worker’s compensation, they get payed well below the minimum wage, and they cannot effectively form unions. Courts have ruled that because the relationship between prisons and inmates is not that of an employer and a worker, inmates don’t get these labor protections. According to The Nation, there is a faction among the organizers that would rather see prison labor abolished, but IWOC is pushing for inmates to unionize. “Prisoners are the most exploited labor class in this country,” says Azzurra Crispino, spokesperson for the organization. The moral case to let prisoners unionize and have the protections given to civilian workers is straightforward: forcing people to work is inhumane, as are the ridiculously low wages and often the labor conditions themselves. The economic case is much more complex. Prisons argue that paying inmates a minimum wage would bankrupt them—in fact, Alex Friedmann, an editor for Prison Legal News told The American Prospect that the criminal justice system would collapse has little potential to significantly add to the GDP, there are longer-term and broader effects to consider. Higher wages can help not only inmates, but their dependents in the outside world, who might avoid ending up on welfare having greater support. Cheap inmate labor may save money for prisons or corporations, but meaningful, decently-paid employment and job training could reduce recidivism and future crime. Ultimately, it’s the taxpayers who pay for most of the criminal justice system, and that means they are subsidizing cheap labor for big corporations instead of investing in reducing crime in the future. In addition to putting pressure on individual institutions, strike organizers are hoping to raise awareness among the public. “Nothing is preventing employers from paying prisoners a decent wage and offering benefits and after 300 years it’s pretty clear it isn’t going to happen on its own. No more than slavery was ended in this country because slave owners got enlightened,” said Paul Wright, editor of Prison Legal News and prisoner rights advocate. “Alas, there is no General Sherman coming to rescue and liberate America’s prison slaves.” Framework The impact of structural violence cumulatively outweighs – challenging the structures that facilitate inequality is necessary Ansell 17 - David A. Ansell, Senior Vice President, Associate Provost for Community Health Equity, and Michael E. Kelly Professor of Medicine at Rush University Medical Center (The Death Gap: How Inequality Kills, p. 7-10) There are many different kinds of violence. Some are obvious: punches, attacks, gunshots, explosions. These are the kinds of inter- personal violence that we tend to hear about in the news. Other kinds of violence are intimate and emotional. But the deadliest and most thoroughgoing kind of violence is woven into the fabric of American society. It exists when some groups have more access to goods, resources, and opportunities than other groups, including health and life itself. This violence delivers specific blows against particular bodies in particular neighborhoods. This unequal advantage and violence is built into the very rules that govern our society. In the absence of this violence, large numbers of Americans would be able to live fuller and longer lives. This kind of violence is called structural violence, because it is embedded in the very laws, policies, and rules that govern day-to- day life.8 It is the cumulative impact of laws and social and economic policies and practices that render some Americans less able to access resources and opportunities than others. This inequity of advantage is not a result of the individuals personal abilities but is built into the systems that govern society. Often it is a product of racism, gender, and income inequality. The diseases and premature mortality that Windora and many of my patients experienced were, in the words of Dr. Paul Farmer, "biological reflections of social fault lines."9 As a result of these fault lines, a disproportional burden of illness, suffering, and premature mortality falls on certain neighborhoods, like Windora's. Structural violence can overwhelm an individual's ability to live a free, unfettered, healthy life. As I ran to evaluate Windora, I knew that her stroke was caused in part by lifelong exposure to suffering, racism, and economic deprivation. Worse, the poverty of West Humboldt Park that contributed to her illness is directly and inextricably related to the massive concentration of wealth and power in other neighborhoods just miles away in Chicago's Gold Coast and suburbs. That concentration of wealth could not have occurred without laws, policies, and practices that favored some at the expense of others. Those laws, policies, and practices could not have been passed or enforced if access to political and economic power had not been concentrated in the hands of a few. Yet these political and economic structures have become so firmly entrenched (in habits, social relations, economic arrangements, institutional practices, law, and policy) that they have become part of the matrix of American society. The rules that govern day-to-day life were written to benefit a small elite at the expense of people like Windora and her family. These rules and structures are powerful destructive forces. The same structures that render life predictable, secure, comfortable, and pleasant for many destroy the lives of others like Windora through suffering, poverty, ill health, and violence. These structures are neither natural nor neutral. The results of structural violence can be very specific. In Windora's case, stroke precursors like chronic stress, poverty, and uncontrolled hypertension run rampant in neighborhoods like hers. Windora's ill- ness was caused by neither her cultural traits nor the failure of her will. Her stroke was caused in part by inequity. She is one of the lucky ones, though, because even while structural violence ravages her neighbor- hood, it also abets the concentration of expensive stroke-intervention services in certain wealthy teaching hospitals like mine. If I can get to her in time, we can still help her. Income Inequality and Life Inequality Of course, Windora is not the only person struggling on account of structural violence. Countless neighborhoods nationwide are suffering from it, and people are dying needlessly young as a result. The mag- nitude of this excess mortality is mind-boggling. In 2009 my friend Dr. Steve Whitman asked a simple question, "How many extra black people died in Chicago each year, just because they do not have the same health outcomes as white Chicagoans?" When the Chicago Sun- Times got wind of his results, it ran them on the front page in bold white letters on a black background: "health care gap kills 3200 Black Chicagoans and the Gap is Growing." The paper styled the head- line to look like the declaration of war that it should have been. In fact, we did find ourselves at war not long ago, when almost 3,000 Americans were killed. That was September 11,2001. That tragedy propelled the country to war. Yet when it comes to the premature deaths of urban Americans, no disaster area has been declared. No federal troops have been called up. No acts of Congress have been passed. Yet this disaster is even worse: those 3,200 black people were in Chicago alone, in just one year. Nationwide each year, more than 60,000 black people die prematurely because of inequality.10 While blacks suffer the most from this, it is not just an issue of racism, though racism has been a unique and powerful transmitter of violence in America for over four hundred years.11 Beyond racism, poverty and income inequality perpetuated by exploitative market capitalism are singular agents of transmission of disease and early death. As a result, there is a new and alarming pattern of declining life expectancy among white Americans as well. Deaths from drug overdoses in young white Americans ages 25 to 34 have exploded to levels not seen since the AIDS epidemic. This generation is the first since the Vietnam War era to experience higher death rates than the prior generation.12 White Americans ages 45 to 54 have experienced skyrocketing premature death rates as well, something not seen in any other developed na- tion.13 White men in some Appalachian towns live on average twenty years less than white men a half-day's drive away in the suburbs of Washington, DC. Men in McDowell County, West Virginia, can look forward to a life expectancy only slightly better than that of Haitians.14 But those statistics reflect averages, and every death from structural violence is a person. When these illnesses and deaths are occurring one at a time in neighborhoods that society has decided not to care about—neighborhoods populated by poor, black, or brown people— they seem easy to overlook, especially if you are among the fortunate few who are doing incredibly well. The tide of prosperity in America has lifted some boats while others have swamped. Paul Farmer, the physician-anthropologist who founded Partners in Health, an inter- national human rights agency, reflects on the juxtaposition of "unprecedented bounty and untold penury": "It stands to reason that as beneficiaries of growing inequality, we do not like to be reminded of misery of squalor and failure. Our popular culture provides us with no shortage of anesthesia."15 That people suffer and die prematurely because of inequality is wrong. It is wrong from an ethical perspective. It is wrong from a fair- ness perspective. And it is wrong because we have the means to fix it.
Underview 2 Their disads will surely be ridiculous. (A) Ethics – The state is complicit in perpetuating inequalities that are terrible for incarcerated workers. Apply a VERY high standard of proof to any rationalization of that policy. (B) Compound Probability - Multiplied probabilities of long link chains have negligible net probabilities. This is the slippery slope fallacy. (C) Causal Direction - They will say the fractional probability of a huge impact still has a large expected value, but it’s impossible to determine the direction of low-probability links. Does the butterfly flapping its wings cause the hurricane or prevent it? Disregard tiny-probability links because they don’t guide decision-making. (D) Complexity – the DA presents a simplistic and deterministic narrative that fails to account for the myriad confounding factors that can disrupt or reverse the link chain of the DA. The most important of these is the probability that people will recognize the dangerous path they’re on and change course, e.g. leaders backing down during the Cuban Missile Crisis. (E) Decision Gridlock – Every course of action or inaction has a negligible possibility of causing extinction. This makes it impossible to prioritize averting existential risk over all else because such risk is unavoidable. We have no choice but to prioritize REALISTIC probabilities.
11/7/21
NovDec Incarcerated Workers Aff
Tournament: Damus Hollywood | Round: 2 | Opponent: Davis Shedd | Judge: Jonah Gentleman Marlborough JK v Vestavia Hills DS AC Incarcerated workers do not have a right to strike in the US. Harvard Law Review, 19 - ("Striking the Right Balance: Toward a Better Understanding of Prison Strikes," Harvard Law Review 03/8/2019, accessed 10-28-2021, https://harvardlawreview.org/2019/03/striking-the-right-balance-toward-a-better-understanding-of-prison-strikes/)//ML II. LEGAL FRAMEWORK GOVERNING PRISON STRIKES: STATE LAW AND FEDERAL STATUTES¶ A. Statutes and Regulations¶ As a threshold matter, state and federal statutory law provides no recourse for protecting prison strikes. Incarcerated individuals are not included as protected “employees” in the text of federal labor laws like the Fair Labor Standards Act78 and the National Labor Relations Act,79 and courts have refused to extend the protections that these statutes offer to those confined within prison walls.80 Further, this Note is aware of no state labor laws, or for that matter any state constitutional provisions, that have been interpreted to allow prisoners to strike. ¶Not only are prison strikes not protected by statutory law — they also are often explicitly prohibited. State statutes and prison regulations pose the most immediate barrier to prison strike activity, as states across the union appear to categorically bar prison strikes and other forms of inmate collective organizing. For instance, Alaska’s administrative code lists “participation in an organized work stoppage” and “encouraging others to engage in a food strike” as “high-moderate infractions.”81 The same is true at the federal level, as the Bureau of Prisons has made “engaging in or encouraging a group demonstration” and “encouraging others to refuse to work, or to participate in a work stoppage” prohibited acts.82 ¶ Further research is certainly necessary to develop a fuller, more nuanced treatment of the various state and federal statutory schemes that impact prison strikes.83 But even this brief overview drives home a clear bottom line: that state and federal laws, in their current forms, likely offer no viable protection for prison strikes and indeed often prohibit them outright. ¶B. Constitutional Law ¶ The Supreme Court has not spoken directly on the question of whether peaceful prison protests merit constitutional protection. However, two areas of constitutional analysis — prisoners’ rights broadly and prisoners’ First Amendment rights specifically — suggest that under current law, the answer to this question is likely also a resounding no.¶ 1. Prisoners’ Constitutional Rights Generally. — Section 1 of the Thirteenth Amendment states: “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.”84 By its express terms, the amendment creates an explicit exception for persons serving a sentence pursuant to conviction of a crime, and it therefore offers prisoners no basis to refuse to work or to engage in other forms of peaceful strikes.85 ¶ Despite the Thirteenth Amendment’s clear textual carve-out, courts have not, in modern times, read the wording of the amendment literally to allow the State to treat inmates like slaves.86 According to the Court, “there is no iron curtain drawn between the Constitution and the prisons of this country.”87 Instead, as neither slaves nor free people,88 inmates retain some (but not all) of their constitutional rights when they cross into the prison.89 The Supreme Court has time and again asserted that “lawful incarceration brings about the necessary withdrawal or limitation of many privileges and rights.”90 This is the case not only because of the inherently “deprivatory” nature of imprisonment,91 but also because prison administrators must be accorded wide latitude in the complex and difficult task of operating a penal institution.92 This deference, however, “yields to the strictures of the Constitution.”93 Indeed, courts recognize that inmates, despite being incarcerated, retain particular constitutional rights “that the courts must be alert to protect.”94 Such rights that an inmate retains are those “that are not inconsistent with his status as a prisoner or with the legitimate penological objective of the corrections system.”95 ¶ However, as the Court explained in Turner v. Safley, 96 a prison regulation may infringe on a prisoner’s retained constitutional rights as long as “it is reasonably related to legitimate penological interests.”97 Turner identified four relevant factors in determining the reasonableness of a prison regulation: (1) whether there is “a ‘valid, rational connection’ between the regulation and the legitimate governmental interest advanced to justify it”;98 (2) whether alternative means for exercising the asserted right remain available;99 (3) whether accommodation of the asserted right will adversely affect “guards, other inmates, and . . . the allocation of prison resources generally”;100 and (4) whether there is a “ready alternative”101 to the regulation “that fully accommodates the prisoner’s right at de minimis cost to valid penological interests.”102 ¶ So, under the general legal framework for prisoners’ rights, finding constitutional protection for peaceful collective actions like the 2018 prison strike will likely face an uphill battle. Such a right to strike not only must fit within the confines of a “retained right,” which appears to be narrowly defined; it also must go up against Turner and its progeny, which mandate rational basis review for any prison regulation — providing prison officials with broad deference to curtail any rights that a prisoner might retain.103 Turning to prisoner First Amendment jurisprudence specifically, it becomes even clearer that a right to strike likely cannot navigate either difficulty successfully.¶ 2. Prisoners’ First Amendment Rights. — The First Amendment of the Constitution includes within its guarantees political rights to communicate, associate, and present grievances to the government.104 These rights go to the very heart of our political system — one that, as a democracy, values the participation of its citizens.105 Outside of prison walls, the Supreme Court has recognized that individuals may, in many situations, exercise their First Amendment associational rights by peacefully engaging in a work strike.106 Inside prison walls, however, the right to strike is a legal gray area. The Court has analyzed a number of First Amendment rights, including those implicating concerted political activity and association, in the prison context — asking whether (1) the First Amendment right in question is inconsistent with an inmate’s status as a prisoner and (2) prison officials’ interference with such a right reasonably relates to a legitimate penological interest.¶ 107 However, the Court has yet to perform such an analysis for prison strikes specifically. But one seminal Supreme Court case — Jones v. North Carolina Prisoners’ Labor Union, Inc.108 — casts serious doubt on prisoners’ collective right to strike. In Jones, a prisoners’ labor union109 brought an action under 42 U.S.C. § 1983, claiming that the North Carolina Department of Corrections violated its First Amendment rights110 by promulgating a prison rule that prohibited, among other things, union meetings among inmates.111 The three-judge district court agreed, granting substantial injunctive relief to the union.112 The Supreme Court reversed, however, doing so on two main grounds. Writing for the majority, then-Justice Rehnquist first invoked the familiar notion that “the fact of confinement and the needs of the penal institution impose limitations on constitutional rights,” especially First Amendment associational rights.113 Then, without engaging with the specific nature of the potentially retained associational interest in question (that is, that of organizing as a union), Justice Rehnquist concluded that the challenged regulation did not unduly abridge inmates’ First Amendment rights.114 He did so by adopting a rational basis test — emphasizing the critical importance of “wide-ranging judicial deference” to prison officials and their informed discretion in carrying out penological goals.115 In particular, Justice Rehnquist argued that “responsible prison officials must be permitted to take reasonable steps to forestall” the “everpresent potential for violent confrontation” within prisons.116 And as he highlighted, North Carolina prison administrators had testified that the presence of, and potentially even the very objectives of, a prisoners’ union did potentially pose a danger117 — likely resulting in increased friction between inmates themselves or between inmates and prison personnel, as well as in “easily foreseeable” outcomes like “work stoppages.”118 ¶ In light of Jones, it is unlikely that the Supreme Court would, if the question came before it, recognize inmates’ First Amendment right to strike. Although the case concerned the specific issue of prison unions, the Jones Court’s holding was, in its methodology and reasoning, farreaching — (1) providing prison administrators with wide latitude to curtail any inmate collective activity that, in their “reasonable” judgment, threatened institutional order and security119 and, as a result, (2) appearing to severely curtail inmates’ First Amendment rights.120 The Court’s broad deference and narrow First Amendment view should therefore naturally be expected to extend to prison strikes and other forms of collective protest, about which prison officials have consistently offered similar safety concerns and which they have uniformly sought to ban,121 and which Jones specifically acknowledged as a possible unwelcome outcome of allowing prisoners to unionize. ¶ That Jones likely prevents any constitutional protection for prison strikes — and therefore liberally protects prison regulations banning strike activities — is reinforced by how the Supreme Court has applied the case over the past forty years. In Turner, for example, the Court rejected efforts to cabin Jones to barring only “‘presumptively dangerous’ inmate activities.”122 The Court specifically discussed Jones as part of a line of “prisoners’ rights” cases permitting “reasonable” prison regulations to impinge on inmates’ constitutional rights123 and ultimately relied in part on Jones to fashion its general four-part framework for assessing “reasonableness” across prison regulations.124 And in Overton v. Bazzetta, 125 the Supreme Court again invoked Jones to emphasize that “freedom of association is among the rights least compatible with incarceration”126 — though it declined to draw any precise boundaries that would be helpful for determining what, if any, associational rights inmates retain within prison walls, and whether those include strikes.127 ¶Lower courts have not been as wary to draw such boundaries. Under Jones, lower federal courts have uniformly held that prisoners have no constitutionally protected right under the First Amendment to strike. One district court interpreted Jones to hold that prison officials may act to prevent such strikes whenever they have a “good faith” belief that such strikes “threaten the security of the institutions they manage.”128 Lower courts have rejected a right to strike by simply citing to or briefly discussing Jones and contending that it naturally compels such a result,129 or by drawing an explicit connection between the prohibited prison unions at issue in Jones and prison strikes, dubbing strikes to be “a species of ‘organized union activity.’”130 They have also done so by delving into the specifics of why strikes purportedly pose safety and security risks within prisons and why prison regulations barring strikes are therefore rationally related to legitimate penological goals.131 ¶ Lower courts also have justified upholding prison regulations barring strikes by explicitly or implicitly turning to the general Turner framework that Jones helped create — including by arguing that there are ready alternatives to prison strikes,132 or that such regulations are generally permissible exercises of penal authority.133 And finally, it is worth noting that lower federal courts have, in deferring to prison offi- cials’ judgments regarding security, also permitted all manner of regulations designed to punish strikers134 and aid officials in preventing strikes from occurring.135 In short, there exists little, if any, room under current constitutional case law for protecting prison strikes. Incarceration disproportionately affects people of color, which causes a permanent reduction in job opportunities and quality of life. Rezal 21 Adriana Rezal data journalism fellow with U.S. News and World Report, 21 - ("A New Report Explores Racial Disparities in America’s Incarceration Rates," US News and World Report, 10-3-21, accessed 11-3-2021, https://www.usnews.com/news/best-states/articles/2021-10-13/report-highlights-staggering-racial-disparities-in-us-incarceration-rates)//LF A national view of U.S. incarcerated populations by race and ethnicity shows high rates of disparity among the country's communities of color and white Americans, especially among Black communities. While Black Americans are on average 4.8 times more likely to be incarcerated than white Americans, in some states such as New Jersey, Black Americans can be up to 12.5 times more likely to be incarcerated than white Americans. Hawaii demonstrates the lowest differential of Black to white American imprisonment, as shown by the map below. However, Black Americans in Hawaii are still over twice as likely to be incarcerated than white residents. While Latino individuals are on average 1.3 times more likely to be incarcerated than whites in the U.S., in some states such as Massachusetts, Latino populations are up to 4.1 times more likely to be incarcerated than whites. In 20 states, including Oklahoma, North Carolina and New Hampshire, the data in the report shows the likelihood of imprisonment is higher for whites compared to the Latino population. However the report emphasizes the unreliability of ethnicity data possibly contributing to an underestimation of Black and Latino American data. "An example lies in Florida, which claims that 13 of its prison population is Latinx though more than one quarter of its residents are Latinx," (a gender neutral term for 'Latino,' according to the report. "There are most assuredly more Latinx people in prison than are officially reported but the exact number is unknown." When it comes to incarceration, the U.S. is a world leader with 1.2 million people in state prisons across the country. According to the report, imprisonment is a life-altering event that can create negative impacts on the individual and societal level. Individuals released from incarceration may have difficulty gaining employment, finding stable housing and experience reduced lifetime earnings. Additionally, high levels of incarceration within communities can result in increased crime rates and contribute to neighborhood deterioration, according to the study. Although the U.S. remains a world leader in imprisonment, The Sentencing Project reports that nine states have been successful in decreasing their incarcerated population by more than 30 in recent years as a result of policy reforms and reduced prison admissions and lengths of stay. These states include Alaska, New Jersey, New York, Connecticut, Alabama, Rhode Island, Vermont, Hawaii and California. The report cites a number of causes for racial disparity within U.S. prisons. According to the report, the nation's history of white supremacy over Black people created a legacy of racial subordination that impacts their criminal justice outcomes today. The report also asserts that communities of color, especially Black Americans, are negatively affected by biased policies and practices including police-citizen relations, pre-trial detention, the weight criminal history records can carry in sentencing and unequal prosecutorial charging. Prison working conditions are terrible—prisoners work in unsafe conditions and accrue thousands of dollars in debt. Eisen 20 Lauren-Brooke Eisen director of the Brennan Center’s Justice Program where she leads the organization’s work to end mass incarceration, 20 - ("Covid-19 Highlights the Need for Prison Labor Reform," Brennan Center for Justice, 4-17-2020, accessed 11-4-2021, https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/covid-19-highlights-need-prison-labor-reform)//ML For decades, prisoners in American correctional facilities have worked for no wages or mere pennies an hour. As the United States attempts to reduce transmission of Covid-19, more than a dozen states are now relying on this captive labor force to manufacture personal protective equipment badly needed by healthcare workers and other frontline responders.¶ Prisoners in Missouri are currently earning between $0.30 and $0.71 an hour to produce hand sanitizer, toilet paper, and protective gowns that will be distributed across the state. In Louisiana, prisoners are making hand sanitizer for about $0.40 an hour. And in Arkansas, where incarcerated workers are producing cloth masks for prisoners, correctional officers, and other government workers, their labor is entirely uncompensated.¶ This unprecedented health emergency is re-exposing how our country’s long-held practice of paying nothing or next-to-nothing for incarcerated labor, with no labor protections, is akin to modern-day slavery.¶ Prisoners are not protected by the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA), the federal law establishing minimum wage and overtime pay eligibility for both private sector and government workers. In 1993, a federal appeals court held that it is up to Congress, not the courts, to decide whether the FLSA applies to incarcerated workers.¶ Courts have also ruled that the National Labor Relations Act, which guarantees the right of private sector employees to collective bargaining, does not apply in prisoners.¶ Even worse, prisoners are excluded from the U.S. Occupational Health and Safety Administration protections that require employers to provide a safe working environment. This dehumanizing lack of protection for prison workers has long subjected them to conditions that have endangered their physical safety.¶ Amid a health threat that worsens in crowded environments, many prisoners are working without any mandated protections. Congress must amend the language of federal employment protections to explicitly extend to work behind bars.¶ Forced labor in prisons has its roots in the post-Civil War Reconstruction period, when Southern planters faced the need to pay the labor force that had long worked for free under brutal conditions to produce the economic capital of the South.¶ Though the 13th Amendment abolished “involuntary servitude,” it excused forcible labor as punishment for those convicted of crimes. As a result, Southern states codified punitive laws, known as the Black Codes, to arbitrarily criminalize the activity of their former slaves. Loitering and congregating after dark, among other innocuous activities, suddenly became criminal. Arrest and convictions bound these alleged criminals to terms of incarceration, often sentenced to unpaid labor for wealthy plantation owners.¶ In the following decades, Southern states — desperate for cheap labor and revenue — widely began leasing prisoners to local planters and Northern industrialists who took responsibility for their housing and feeding, a practice known as convict leasing.¶ Under this system, the captive labor market worked long hours in unsafe conditions, often treated as poorly as they had been as slaves. Records approximate that on an average day between 1885 and 1920, 10,000 to 20,000 prisoners — the overwhelming majority of them Black Americans — continued to toil under these insufferable circumstances.¶ In the 1930s, a series of laws prohibited state prisons from using prison labor, but the federal government continued to rely on this workforce to meet the demands of the rapidly changing markets of mid-century. By 1979, Congress passed legislation allowing state corrections officials to collaborate with private industries to produce prison-made goods, birthing the modern era of prison labor. ¶ Today, approximately 55 percent of the American prison population works while serving their sentences. Prison jobs are broadly divided into two categories: prison support work — such as food preparation, laundry services, and maintenance work — and “correctional industries” jobs, in which prisoners might make license plates, sew military uniforms, or staff a call center. It is prisoners in correctional industries who are currently being deployed to help meet the nation’s need for protective gear.¶ While so many behind bars are manufacturing items the country desperately needs to combat our current health crisis, their low wages and lack of labor protections — among myriad other factors — mean they are not accorded the same benefits or recognition as other workers.¶ What’s more, the measly cents per hour that is typical compensation across often-dangerous prison jobs is not nearly enough to cover the court fees and fines, restitution, child support, and room and board expenses that most state departments of corrections deduct from prisoners’ earnings. When there is anything left, it is barely enough to pay for commissary goods such as food, hygienic products, and toiletries, let alone marked-up email services that prisoners rely on to stay in touch with their loved ones. Despite working for years, many prisoners are left with thousands of dollars in crippling debt by the time they complete their sentences.¶ In 2018, prisoners in dozens of facilities across the country went on strike and issued a list of demands, which included “an immediate end to prison slavery” and that prisoners be “paid the prevailing wage in their state or territory for their labor.”¶ This time of national emergency requires that everyone do their part to slow the spread of coronavirus. The significant shortage of face masks, protective gowns, and hand sanitizer that is putting the lives of our frontline workers in jeopardy necessitates bold and swift action. But if the states and federal government are going to rely on correctional labor to manufacture this equipment, they need to improve the wages and labor protections of our incarcerated workers. To fail to do so is not far off from the devaluation and brutalization of slave labor that was ostensibly abandoned a century and a half ago. Prisoners make almost no money for their labor. Fulcher 15 Patrice A. Fulcher Associate Professor at The John Marshall Law School, 15 - ("," Journal of Civil Rights and Economic Development, Winter 2015, accessed 10-28-2021, https://scholarship.law.stjohns.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1759andcontext=jcred)//ML B.87 In 2011, FPI's net sales were 745 million dollars and their earnings were 62 million dollars.88 Restricted to sell its products only to federal agencies, FPI's largest purchaser is the U.S. Department of Defense, which makes up 52 of it revenues. 89 The FPI use to have a mandatory source requirement for all federal agencies, but it was amended to prohibit any federal agency from purchasing FPI products or services, unless the agency determines that the products offered are the "best value". 90 So in addition to making license plates, furniture and other typical prison-made goods, thousands of federal inmates work for FPI making supplies for the U.S. military. FPI inmates who are given this assignment find themselves making anti-tank missiles, body armor, land mine sweepers, components for fighter aircrafts, and other gear for the Pentagon. 91 ¶Consequently, an inmate who works within the federal prison labor system may make a maximum of $64.00 a month (prior to any state deductions for room and board, taxes, etc., assuming an inmate works 5 days a week for 8 hours), and a maximum of $92.00 a month (subtracting 50 of the wages for the IRFP, assuming an inmate works 5 days a week for 8 hours) if he works for FPI.¶ B. State Prison Labor Systems ¶There are approximately 1,382,000 inmates in state prisons in the U.S.92 State prisoners work within varying labor systems while incarcerated. 9 3 State inmates may (1) work within the confines of a prison, where state or private entities manage the facility, sell the products produced, and receive the profits, (2) work in jobs directly benefiting prison operations by cleaning, cooking, or doing laundry, or (3) work outside of prison walls laboring for the state or private companies. 94 Over the last 30 years, at least 37 states have enacted laws permitting the use of inmate labor by private enterprise. 9 5 State inmates' wages are determined by the state in which they are incarcerated, and may be affected depending on whether the state correctional facility is certified under the Prison Industry Enhancement Certification Program. ¶1. State Prison Labor ¶ Under The Prison Industry Enhancement Certification Program ("PIE") In 1979, Congress passed the Prison Industry Enhancement Certification program ("PIE") under the Justice System Improvement Act.96 The PIE exempts state and local correction departments from the Ashurst-Sumners Act legislation, which placed restrictions on the interstate sale and transportation of prison-made goods.9 7 The specific goal of the PIE was to provide private-sector work opportunities to prisoners by certifying 50 state correctional agencies to sell prison made goods interstate and to the Federal Government (over the original $10,000 limitation). 98 Once a state agency is certified under the PIE, its corrections department may either sell prison made goods on its own, or enter into prison labor contracts with private companies to sell goods in the free market.99 ¶ In order to qualify for PIE certification, correctional agencies have to apply through the Bureau of Justice Assistance ("BJA") or the National Correctional Industries Association, pay state prisoners a prevailing wage, and meet several other statutory requirements.10 0 Paying inmate workers prevailing wages under the PIE may appear equitable on its face, but it is not. Most inmates see only 20 of their gross wages because the PIE also allows for 80 wage deductions for room and board, victim assistance, taxes, and family support.lO' While expecting convicts to defray the cost of their incarceration and victim services is reasonable, as will be seen in part x of this article, the current scheme is short sighted and unwise because, among other things, so little attention is given to reducing recidivism through prison programs and support for newly released inmates. ¶According to the Bureau of Justice Assistance, there were 37 state, and 4 county-based PIE certified correctional industry programs in the U.S. in 2011.102 These PIE programs include the management of at least 175 business partnerships with private industry. 103 In 2012, the number of PIE certifications increased to 45; these certified correctional agencies employed a total of 4,700 inmates. 104 Furthermore, the 45 certified PIE agencies generated $9,780,130 in gross salary revenues in 2012.105 A majority of those earnings went to net inmate salaries ($3,958,354), then correctional institution for room and board ($3,482,883), state and federal taxes ($989,503) victims' programs ($947,770), and the lowest amount to inmate family support ($401,620).106 Therefore, each of the 4,700 prisoners working for PIE certified programs made approximately $842.00 in 2012, which equates to $70.00 a month.¶ ¶2. State Prison Labor Without PIE Protections ¶ State correctional industries without PIE protections are prohibited from selling prison-made products interstate. 107 They also are under no federal obligation to pay working prisoners prevailing wages as required for certification under PIE.108 Depending on the facility, these state correctional agencies typically require inmates to work, and pay inmates from $0.17 to $5.35 per hour.109 There are also several state-operated correctional institutions that force prisoners to work, but pay them absolutely nothing for their labor. For example, the Georgia Department of Corrections does not pay working inmates.1 10 Once a person is sentenced to one of the Georgia's 31 state prisons, he or she will be ordered to either work jobs that directly benefit the prison, make products to be sold to government agencies, or perform city work detail jobs without getting paid a cent.11 In light of these facts, it is not surprising that on December 9, 2010, thousands of Georgia inmates staged the largest prison protest in U.S. History.ll 2 Through the use of contraband cell phones, Georgia inmates in at least seven different state prisons coordinated a nonviolent prison strike.l13 These protesting inmates had several demands, but high on their list was to be paid a living wage for work.114 "If they would start paying us, that would reduce crime behind the walls," said Mike, one of the protesting prisoners, "inmates would have the means to get hygiene items and food from the commissary." 15 The protest lasted approximately 5 days and unfortunately, the prisoners' demands have still not been met.116 Almost all Georgia state-prisoners are still working for free, at least three inmates have publically complained that they were brutally beaten for their involvement in the protest, and in July 2012 several Georgia prisoners went on a hunger strike to protest additional inhumane punishments stemming from the 2010 prison protest.117 ¶Finally, state prisoners labor for correctional institutions that fall under the supervision of state departments of correction, but are separate selfsustaining corporate entities. Some of the prison industries have PIE certification for all of their work programs while others certify only certain jobs under PIE. Two such institutions in the U.S. are the Georgia Correctional Industries ("GCI") and the Oregon Corrections Enterprise ("OCE").118 GCI and OCE utilize state inmate labor to produce and sell a plethora of services and products to state and local government agencies. 19 For instance, GCI employs 1,400 Georgia inmates, who manufacture garments and bedding, institutional and office furniture, cleaning chemicals, perform embroidery, screen printing, reupholstering, engraving, optical, and framing services, work in milk and meat processing plants, and on farms to produce beef and pork, and harvest fruits and vegetables, eggs, grits, and corn. 120 GCI has some work programs certified under PIE, but a majority of the employed inmates work for less than minimum wage.121 GCI boast on its website that they "maintain one of the lowest raw food costs in the nation-$1.57 per day per inmate".122 So inmates laboring in GCI food production factories and fields in the sweltering heat of the Deep South are paid roughly $31.40 a month if they are lucky (prior to state deductions and if they work 5 days a week). Approximately 1,100 of Oregon's 14,300 prisoners work for OCE and perform a variety of services for Oregon government agencies; printing, call centers, laundry service, and mailing projects, and document scanning to name a few. 123 OCE has PIE certification, but it is difficult to determine whether it applies to all of their work programs since inmates' wages still appear to be low.124 In a study conducted by University of Oregon students, three inmates at OCE reported that after working each month, they had $50.00 to send home to their families or add to phone call accounts. 125 ¶ C. Private Prison Labor Systems ¶ State governments turned to prison privatization in order to solve the problems arising from the mass incarceration of people in the U.S.126 Thus, the top two private prison corporations in the U.S., Corrections Corporation of America, Inc. ("CCA") and The GEO Group, Inc. ("GEO"), have made billions from acquiring state and federal contracts to manage prisoners. 127 CCA is the leading private prison in the U.S. for it profits from housing more than 80,000 prisoners in the U.S.128 GEO, is one of the world's largest private prison corporations with approximately 80,000 beds and 114 facilities located in the U.S., the United Kingdom, Australia, and South Africa. 129 GEO is only second to CCA in the U.S. because GEO has 56 Facilities and a bed capacity of 61,132,130 while CCA 60 facilities with a bed capacity of more than 90,000.131 ¶ It is clear that CCA and GEO deliver profits to their shareholders from housing inmates, but they also create wealth through forced prison labor. CCA maintains that inmates work in vocational jobs including carpentry, computer applications, construction and building trades, electrical, horticulture and landscaping, masonry, painting, and plumbing. 132 GEO also reports that it provides vocational training, but does not list the specific jobs that inmates perform.133 Since the PIE only applies to state correctional agencies, CCA and GEO are unable to apply directly for certification. As a result, CCA and GEO are under no obligations to pay their inmates prevailing wages. ¶It is difficult to determine how much private prisons actually pay working inmates, but there is nothing to dispute that private prisons also force able inmates to work. It is estimated that private prisons on average pay inmates 17¢ per hour for a maximum of six hours a day, with CCA paying working prisoners the most at .50¢ per hour for "highly skilled positions".134 Other sources suggest that CCA pays working inmates $1.00 a day, and at the same time charges them $5.00 a minute for telephone calls. 135 Additional reports indicate that private prisons pay an average of 93¢ to $4.73 per hour.136 ¶ Private prison companies also capitalized on the growing incarceration of undocumented workers in the U.S. by obtaining million dollar federal detention contracts to house detainees for Immigration and Customs Enforcement ("ICE"). 1 37 Like the other inmates they house, private prison companies also force immigration detainees to work. 138 CCA operates an immigration detention center in Gainesville, Georgia.139 Female detainees in this facility have complained that they are paid subminimum wages for their work and about inadequate medical and living conditions. 140 Low wages for prisoners create cycles of recidivism. Fulcher 15 Patrice A. Fulcher Associate Professor at The John Marshall Law School, 15 - ("," Journal of Civil Rights and Economic Development, Winter 2015, accessed 10-28-2021, https://scholarship.law.stjohns.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1759andcontext=jcred)//ML B. Reallocate Greater Wealth To Working Prisoners and Decrease Recidivism ¶ Working for slave wages or as a slave without compensation is the harsh economic reality for millions of prisoners in the U.S. Then after succumbing to living a life as a slave for the duration of their sentence, these prisoners are released back to society, without any means of financial support from their labors. Often indigent, homeless, and unable to overcome the challenge of obtaining employment with a conviction, many former inmates reoffend.192 Moreover, for those who do secure jobs, their earnings are greatly limited by their criminal records. A recent PEW study revealed "past incarceration reduced subsequent wages by 11 percent, cut annual employment by nine weeks and reduced yearly earnings by 40 percent."1 93 As a result, U.S. recidivism rates will remain high unless former prisoners have economic resources immediately upon release. Thus, the FLSA should be emancipated from the constraints imposed, not by Congress, but by rigid and unsupported judicial interpretation that wrongly exclude working prisoners from its provisions. Free the FLSA and compensate working inmates; allow prisoners to accumulate capital while they are incarcerated, so they will have a means of support to help them rebuild their lives, and not have to commit crimes to survive. ¶ Hence, I propose the following basic guidelines in providing FLSA coverage to working inmates: (1) employment should be voluntary; those who do not wish to work must take vocational classes for their entire prison sentence, (2) working inmates should be paid at least minimum wage, (3) automatic wage deductions shall be allowed for taxes and other previous court ordered obligations only, and (4) a forced 80 percent wage deduction will be deposited into an outside interest bearing bank account, accessible only upon release. In adopting this payment scheme, the economic reality for working prisoners will be greatly improved.¶ Utilizing the total PIE quarterly statics from 2012 mentioned above in section III(B)(1)(only subtracting family costs and taxes), each of the, 4,700 inmates working in PIE programs would have received approximately $356.00 a month instead of $70.00.194 This figure represents net wages after an 80 percent deduction of $1,427.00 is transferred into an interest bearing account.1 95 Additionally, since today's prisoners serve an average of 5.2 years in prison, 196 each of the 4,700 inmates under the proposed new FLSA guidelines would have at least $3,567.50 upon his or her release if the 80 were placed in an account with an interest rate of at least a 3. Granted, this amount may not seem significant, but it is better than expecting that a bus ticket and a knapsack of clothes will be enough to enable a person who has been incarcerated to build his life in free society. ¶ Plan Plan: The United States ought to recognize the unconditional right of incarcerated workers to strike. Solvency The right to strike is key for prisoners hoping to reform the criminal justice system, allows prison laborers to publicize their conditions and assert their right to dignity Harvard Law Review, 19 - ("Striking the Right Balance: Toward a Better Understanding of Prison Strikes," Harvard Law Review 03/8/2019, accessed 10-28-2021, https://harvardlawreview.org/2019/03/striking-the-right-balance-toward-a-better-understanding-of-prison-strikes/)//ML But in order to ensure that the Constitution truly does not stop at the prison walls, courts cannot simply accept prison administrators’ fears regarding strikes at face value and instead should rigorously test their credibility and basis in fact.143 And more importantly, by over-deferring and failing to engage in any analysis of the merits of prison strikes, courts miss an important opportunity. As this Note has argued, prison strikes represent an underappreciated aspect of prison life — the means by which prisoners have, throughout the course of American history, surfaced pressing problems of our carceral state and initiated important transformations in our prison system. Therefore, it is imperative to meaningfully consider why and how such strikes merit legal protection — even if such protection appears to fly in the face of the current state of the law and to defy conventional wisdom. To that end, this Part first explores the First Amendment as one potential avenue for considering the merits of prison strikes, by presenting three critical First Amendment values contained within prison strikes,144 and it then briefly discusses other potential legal avenues for courts and scholars to consider. A. Considering the First Amendment Values of Prison Strikes The right to strike within prisons may be conceptually viewed as a composite of three separate fundamental First Amendment freedoms: the freedom to peacefully associate, the freedom of speech, and the freedom to assemble and petition for redress of grievances.145 Each is considered in turn. 1. Association. — The right to peaceful association is one that captures the right of individuals to commune with others for the expression of ideas and for effective advocacy.146 Strikes, like prison unions, represent an important means of association for prisoners — allowing them to “lay claim to a social identity as ‘workers’ . . . and in doing so generate claims to respect and solidarity.”147 This identity and solidarity can, in turn, enable inmates to engage in productive and peaceful bargains with prison officials for better conditions, higher pay, and other reform desires. Bargaining is, in many respects, already very common in prisons, “for the simple reason that prison administrators rarely have sufficient resources to gain complete conformity to all the rules.”148 However, such bargaining typically happens in an informal, ongoing, private process;149 in their recurrent, day-to-day contact with inmates, prison administrators use their arsenal of tools150 to “negotiate” only with select inmate leaders,151 with the central goal of maintaining “short term surface order.”152 This informal bargaining is “dysfunctional” to the long-term stability of prison institutions and “the real needs of those incarcerated within” them153 — creating hierarchical relationships154 that breed mistrust155 and leave many inmates powerless and feeling aggrieved.156 As a result, inmates often feel that they have to resort to violence to protect themselves from exploitation, express their dissatisfaction, and obtain redress.157 Alternatively, peaceful, collective prison strikes avoid these harmful consequences by allowing for “open” and “formal” negotiations between all inmates and prison staff.158 Such transparent and legitimated bargaining benefits both inmates and prisons as a whole. By initiating peaceful protests such as work stoppages, all inmates are able “to solve problems, maximize gains, articulate goals, develop alternative strategies, and deal with administrators without resorting to force or violence.”159 And by permitting peaceful strikes, prison administrators “provide inmates with a channel for airing grievances and gaining official response . . . giving the institution a kind of safety-valve for peaceful, rather than violent, change”160 — avoiding potentially expensive and time-consuming litigation and even helping rehabilitate inmates,161 all while deemphasizing hierarchical structures in prisons that harm institutional order.162 2. Speech. — A prison strike also represents a critical way by which inmates can express themselves.163 First, as alluded to above, a strike allows inmates to claim and communicate an identity — as more than just marginalized, ignored convicts with little to no self-determination, but instead as workers and human beings entitled to basic dignity. Such collective actions represent the “performative declaration and affirmation of rights that one does not (yet) have.”164 And, as Professor Jocelyn Simonson discusses, these strikes are collective contestations to “demand dignity, calling attention to the ways in which prisoners are treated as less than human and in the process reclaiming their own agency.”165 Such dignitary considerations, which courts have sought to protect under First Amendment principles, should therefore naturally extend to prisoners attempting to, through strikes, express their basic selfworth.166 Beyond representing a form of inherent, individual expression for inmates, prison strikes also represent a broader form of expression, allowing inmates to be visible to and heard by the public at large. Over the course of American history, inmates — by virtue of being locked up in isolated, impregnable penitentiaries — have largely been a silent and ignored segment of the American population.167 Through peaceful protests like the 2018 national prison strike, however, their suffering, their calls for reform, and their voices are, for the first time, directly expressed on a large scale, ringing out loudly beyond the prison walls and jumpstarting important conversations of criminal justice reform. It is critical to protect such expression; “indeed, it is from the voices of those who have been most harmed by the punitive nature of our criminal justice system that we can hear the most profound reimaginings of how the system might be truly responsive to local demands for justice and equality.”168 3. Petition for Redress. Inmates’ strikes can be seen not only as expressions of their dignity and general efforts to express their voices beyond prison walls but also as significant methods of assembly to call attention to specific grievances and seek redress from the government.169 While in theory “there is no iron curtain drawn between the Constitution and the prisons of this country,”170 in practice, “prisons often escape the daily microscope focused on other American institutions such as schools, churches, and government.”171 Courts grant prison administrators wide deference not only in running day-to-day life within prisons but also in restricting press access to prisons.172 Therefore, much of the American public — already closed off from and largely indifferent to the lives of prisoners — is kept even more in the dark about prison conditions and the state of our carceral system as a whole. Prison conditions, from what has been documented, are horrendous across states. Many prisons are severely overcrowded and seriously understaffed;173 inmates routinely experience physical abuse and even death at the hands of prison guards,174 receive inadequate protection from guards, are deprived of basic necessities,175 are given substandard medical care,176 and are forced to live in squalor and tolerate extreme circumstances;177 most prisoners have minimal, if any, access, to rehabilitative or mental health services;178 and prisoners have little legal recourse, as internal prison grievance procedures are often stacked against inmates,179 and judicial deference and federal legislation have effectively shut the courthouse doors on prisoners’ civil rights claims.180 And across prisons, criminal sentencing laws not only have contributed to an unprecedented era of mass incarceration, but also have forced African Americans and people of color broadly to bear much of this burden.181 As the Marshall Project states, “society won’t fix a prison system it can’t see”;182 peaceful prison strikes like the 2018 strike, however, draw back the “iron curtain” of prison walls, bringing to light many of the pressing issues described above. Through these strikes, inmates are able not only to express their grievances to their prison administrators, but also to “publicize their on-the-ground realities to the larger world”183 and, in turn, gain attention from and access to the political branches able to implement policy reforms.184 As recent history has shown, inmates have experienced some success by pressing their claims against the government through publicized strikes. For example, as described above, the California strikes in 2011 and 2013 generated public outcry that eventually resulted in transfor- mations to the California prison system’s solitary confinement policies.185 In Alabama, inmates’ participation in the 2016 nationwide prison strike helped prompt the Department of Justice to open an investigation into the state’s prison conditions.186 And more broadly speaking, strikes like the 2018 strike have begun to “remedy power imbalances, bring aggregate structural harms into view, and shift deeply entrenched legal and constitutional” barriers to critical prison reforms.187 B. Considering Additional Legal Avenues for Protecting Prison Strikes The foregoing analysis suggests that the First Amendment is a critical, worthwhile vehicle for considering the merits of a right to strike for prisoners. As Justice Black recognized, the importance of such analysis likely transcends prisoners themselves. He wrote: “I do not believe that it can be too often repeated that the freedoms of speech, press, petition and assembly guaranteed by the First Amendment must be accorded to the ideas we hate or sooner or later they will be denied to the ideas we cherish.”188 But this Note acknowledges that judicial recognition of prison strikes’ First Amendment values requires significant doctrinal change. Convincing the Supreme Court to overturn its Jones and Turner precedents, and instead to adopt a test with less deference than is currently afforded to prison administrators, is unlikely. As a result, future research is necessary to identify other potential avenues to consider the legal status and merits of prison strikes. As alluded to above, labor law presents one such promising avenue, as does state constitutional and statutory law. Drawing from the broader j Incarcerated workers are uniquely vulnerable to exploitation the right to strike is a key weapon in fighting for better conditions Kelly 18 Kim Kelly is a freelance journalist and organizer based in Philadelphia. Her work on labor, class, politics, and culture has appeared in the New Republic, the Washington Post, the Baffler, and Esquire, among other publications, and she is the author of FIGHT LIKE HELL, a forthcoming book of intersectional labor history. “How the Ongoing Prison Strike is Connected to the Labor Movement”. 9-4-2018. Teen Vogue. https://www.teenvogue.com/story/labor-day-2018-how-the-ongoing-prison-strike-is-connected-to-the-labor-movement. Accessed 11-1-2021; MJen It’s a tough time to be a worker in America. The Trump administration has slashed important workplace safety regulations to ribbons; the economic gap between the poor and working classes and the 1 continues to widen at an alarming rate; poverty remains rampant; and overall, union membership, which affords protection to workers throughout the country, hovered around only 11 for 2017. Headlines alleging worker exploitation at Silicon Valley giants like Amazon, Tesla, and Uber bombard our screens; even “progressive” media organizations swept up in the digital media organizing wave are struggling, as BuzzFeed founder Jonah Peretti has repeatedly spoken out against unionizing, while Slate and Thrillist employees who have unionized have accused the companies of using anti-union tactics and stalling the process. And the most vulnerable worker populations—sex workers, immigrants, and undocumented people—face increased repression from the government. There is hope, though. For centuries, a worker’s most potent weapon against exploitation from capitalism and oppression from the powers that be has been direct action: the strike. And right now, America’s prisoners are on strike. Incarcerated workers across the nation are standing up to protest their inhumane living conditions and buck the horrific yoke of prison slavery with organized labor’s strongest weapons—solidarity and collective action. The prison strike was organized by workers both inside and outside detention facilities, spearheaded by Jailhouse Lawyers Speak (JLS), and supported by the Incarcerated Workers Organizing Committee (IWOC) and the Free Alabama Movement (FAM), and sparked by deadly uprisings at Lee Correctional Institution in South Carolina earlier this year that cost seven prisoners’ lives. The strike began on August 21 and ends on September 9, dates that reflect the legacy of rebellion in American prisons: on August 21, 1971, George Jackson was killed by prison guards in San Quentin, and his death was met by protests from other prisoners across the country, culminating in the famed September 9 uprising at the Attica Correctional Facility in upstate New York. By choosing these dates, participants in the prison strike of 2018 are drawing a direct line between their current struggle and the struggles of those who have come before, emphasizing the stark fact that very little has changed in terms of conditions or opportunities for those who are locked up and held by the state since the birth of the modern prison system. The striking prisoners of today have released a a list of ten demands. which calls for improvements to the current living conditions in prisons, increased rehabilitation programs, educational opportunities, and specific policy goals. This essentially articulates the idea of non-reformist reforms, a central plank of prison abolition. By illuminating the barbarity of the current prison system and calling for its abolishment while advocating for an improvement in current conditions, they are—to paraphrase French socialist André Gorz—asking not for what can be achieved within a current system, but for what should be possible. As of August 21, across 17 states (and one Canadian province), these incarcerated workers are demanding real, tangible prison reform, and the abolition of one of America’s great enduring shames—the loophole enacted by the 13th amendment that decrees slavery can be used to penalize those convicted of a crime. This is where the term “prison slavery” originates, as director Ava DuVernay laid out in her groundbreaking 2016 documentary 13th, which argues that slavery never ended — it was just repurposed by the prison industrial complex and blossomed as mass incarceration. Her documentary argued that the new American plantations don’t grow cotton, they work prison jobs churning out license plates and other cheap goods, for which prisoners are paid mere pennies on the hour—if at all. Meanwhile, prison labor generates an estimated $1 billion per year, proving to be quite a profitable business for the private companies and corporations who benefit from prisoners’ work. Prison labor is used to manufacture a vast array of consumer goods, from Christmas toys and blue jeans to military equipment, lingerie, and car parts. Incarcerated people also frequently serve as a captive labor force for prisons themselves as kitchen and maintenance workers, and for a variety of other services, from shoveling snow after a Boston blizzard to harvesting oranges in Florida. (California recently made headlines when it was revealed that it was using prison labor to fight its deadly wildfires, which it has done since the 1940s; the prisoners (which included some juvenile offenders) were reportedly paid $1 per hour plus $2 per day to risk their lives, and are barred from becoming firefighters after their release.) Prisoners are paid very little for their work; the average wage in state prisons ranges, on average, from 14 cents to 63 cents per hour for “regular” prison jobs, and between 33 cents and $1.41 per hour for those who work for state-owned businesses, and while they are working full-time jobs, prisoners do not always have the benefit of basic labor protections, such as minimum wage, sick leave, or overtime pay. Given that the United States has the highest incarceration rate in the world, with 2.3 million people currently behind bars, the prison industrial complex would collapse were it to pay incarcerated workers the minimum wage—which creates further incentive for them to keep locking people up. Many prisoners welcome the chance to work during their incarceration, because it gets them out of their cells, allows them to make purchases from commissary, and gives them the opportunity to send money home to their loved ones, but not everyone is given a choice: according to Newsweek, some prisoners in eight states—Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Mississippi, Oklahoma, South Carolina, and Texas—are not paid at all for their labor in government-run facilities. Unlike most other workers, prisoners cannot simply walk off the job; they are forced to get more creative. Participants in the strike have several options available to them, according to Mother Jones, including commissary boycotts, work stoppages, sit-ins, and hunger strikes, and reports of participation are continually coming in from different facilities. In addition, these workers also have much more to fear in terms of retaliation, and several organizers say that they have already endured punitive measures. Participating in a prison strike is a matter of life or death, but for prisoners seeking justice, if not freedom, there is really no other option. There has been a huge amount of media coverage over this prison strike, a massive contrast to the last major national prison strike in 2016, which was said by some to be the largest prison strike in American history and involved what one organizer estimated as roughly 20,000 incarcerated workers and across at least 20 facilities yet received little to no mainstream media coverage. The tide seems to be turning, buoyed by a number of factors, from the continuing outcry over police brutality and more visible conversations over the horrors of the prison industrial complex to the overtly racist practices of the Trump regime. More people on the outside are waking up to the terrible plight of our siblings behind the walls, but awareness isn’t enough: they need support, solidarity, and action. It bears remembering that, above all, this strike is a human rights campaign. Ending prison slavery and supporting incarcerated workers is absolutely a labor issue, and every union and labor activist in the nation should be standing up to support their efforts. The companies who profit off of this modern day slavery have blood on their hands, just like history’s craven factory owners and coal bosses who oversaw the deaths and degradation of previous generations. We need to equate monetarily supporting companies that use prison labor with crossing the picket line, and to scabbing for enslavement. The fact that there are human beings housed in cages who are forced to work for slave wages is completely unacceptable by any metric, and fixing (if not completely abolishing) this wretched system should be a priority for those who consider themselves part of the labor movement, or on the right side of history. An injury to one is an injury to all, and our fellow workers on the inside are bleeding out. Prisoners currently face massive barriers to striking – they get punished and aren’t allowed to unionize Kozlowska 16 Hanna is a reporter on Quartz's investigations team. She previously worked for The New York Times as a writer for NYT Opinion and was a fellow at Foreign Policy magazine. She was also a stringer for the Times in Poland. “US prisoners are going on strike to protest a massive forced labor system”. 9-06-2016. Quartz. https://qz.com/777415/an-unprecedented-prison-strike-hopes-to-change-the-fate-of-the-900000-americans-trapped-in-an-exploitative-labor-system/. Accessed 11-1-2021; MJen On Friday (Sept. 9) prison inmates across the US will participate in what organizers are touting as the “largest prison strike in history,” stopping work in protest of what many call a modern version of slavery. The protest, organized across 24 states, is spearheaded by the inmate-led Free Alabama Movement (FAM) and coordinated by the Incarcerated Workers Organizing Committee (IWOC), a branch of an international labor union. Its manifesto, published online by “prisoners across the United States,” reads: This is a call to end slavery in America…To every prisoner in every state and federal institution across this land, we call on you to stop being a slave, to let the crops rot in the plantation fields, to go on strike and cease reproducing the institutions of your confinement. The strike will be held on the 45th anniversary of the Attica prison revolt, when prisoners took control of a maximum-security correctional facility near Buffalo, New York, demanding better conditions and an end to their brutal treatment. Today, nearly 900,000 US prisoners work while incarcerated. The Bureau of Prisons, which oversees all federal inmates requires that all prisoners (barring medical reasons) work. State prisoners are in the same boat; according to Eric Fink, a professor at Elon Law school, in all or nearly all US states prisoners must work. If they refuse, they can be punished with solitary confinement, revoking visitation, or other measures. Inmates receive very little pay for their labor—in federal prisons it ranges from $0.12 to $0.40 an hour. In some states, like Texas, those held at state prisons receive zero compensation. The majority of inmates work on prison maintenance and upkeep—cleaning, cooking, etc.—but approximately 80,000 do work for the outside world. Sometimes these jobs are the result of government contracts; other times, prisoners end up doing work for private companies such as Victoria’s Secret, Whole Foods or Walmart. Unlike other American workers, these prisoners are not protected by labor laws. They don’t have access to worker’s compensation, they get payed well below the minimum wage, and they cannot effectively form unions. Courts have ruled that because the relationship between prisons and inmates is not that of an employer and a worker, inmates don’t get these labor protections. According to The Nation, there is a faction among the organizers that would rather see prison labor abolished, but IWOC is pushing for inmates to unionize. “Prisoners are the most exploited labor class in this country,” says Azzurra Crispino, spokesperson for the organization. The moral case to let prisoners unionize and have the protections given to civilian workers is straightforward: forcing people to work is inhumane, as are the ridiculously low wages and often the labor conditions themselves. The economic case is much more complex. Prisons argue that paying inmates a minimum wage would bankrupt them—in fact, Alex Friedmann, an editor for Prison Legal News told The American Prospect that the criminal justice system would collapse has little potential to significantly add to the GDP, there are longer-term and broader effects to consider. Higher wages can help not only inmates, but their dependents in the outside world, who might avoid ending up on welfare having greater support. Cheap inmate labor may save money for prisons or corporations, but meaningful, decently-paid employment and job training could reduce recidivism and future crime. Ultimately, it’s the taxpayers who pay for most of the criminal justice system, and that means they are subsidizing cheap labor for big corporations instead of investing in reducing crime in the future. In addition to putting pressure on individual institutions, strike organizers are hoping to raise awareness among the public. “Nothing is preventing employers from paying prisoners a decent wage and offering benefits and after 300 years it’s pretty clear it isn’t going to happen on its own. No more than slavery was ended in this country because slave owners got enlightened,” said Paul Wright, editor of Prison Legal News and prisoner rights advocate. “Alas, there is no General Sherman coming to rescue and liberate America’s prison slaves.” Framework The impact of structural violence cumulatively outweighs – challenging the structures that facilitate inequality is necessary Ansell 17 - David A. Ansell, Senior Vice President, Associate Provost for Community Health Equity, and Michael E. Kelly Professor of Medicine at Rush University Medical Center (The Death Gap: How Inequality Kills, p. 7-10) There are many different kinds of violence. Some are obvious: punches, attacks, gunshots, explosions. These are the kinds of inter- personal violence that we tend to hear about in the news. Other kinds of violence are intimate and emotional. But the deadliest and most thoroughgoing kind of violence is woven into the fabric of American society. It exists when some groups have more access to goods, resources, and opportunities than other groups, including health and life itself. This violence delivers specific blows against particular bodies in particular neighborhoods. This unequal advantage and violence is built into the very rules that govern our society. In the absence of this violence, large numbers of Americans would be able to live fuller and longer lives. This kind of violence is called structural violence, because it is embedded in the very laws, policies, and rules that govern day-to- day life.8 It is the cumulative impact of laws and social and economic policies and practices that render some Americans less able to access resources and opportunities than others. This inequity of advantage is not a result of the individuals personal abilities but is built into the systems that govern society. Often it is a product of racism, gender, and income inequality. The diseases and premature mortality that Windora and many of my patients experienced were, in the words of Dr. Paul Farmer, "biological reflections of social fault lines."9 As a result of these fault lines, a disproportional burden of illness, suffering, and premature mortality falls on certain neighborhoods, like Windora's. Structural violence can overwhelm an individual's ability to live a free, unfettered, healthy life. As I ran to evaluate Windora, I knew that her stroke was caused in part by lifelong exposure to suffering, racism, and economic deprivation. Worse, the poverty of West Humboldt Park that contributed to her illness is directly and inextricably related to the massive concentration of wealth and power in other neighborhoods just miles away in Chicago's Gold Coast and suburbs. That concentration of wealth could not have occurred without laws, policies, and practices that favored some at the expense of others. Those laws, policies, and practices could not have been passed or enforced if access to political and economic power had not been concentrated in the hands of a few. Yet these political and economic structures have become so firmly entrenched (in habits, social relations, economic arrangements, institutional practices, law, and policy) that they have become part of the matrix of American society. The rules that govern day-to-day life were written to benefit a small elite at the expense of people like Windora and her family. These rules and structures are powerful destructive forces. The same structures that render life predictable, secure, comfortable, and pleasant for many destroy the lives of others like Windora through suffering, poverty, ill health, and violence. These structures are neither natural nor neutral. The results of structural violence can be very specific. In Windora's case, stroke precursors like chronic stress, poverty, and uncontrolled hypertension run rampant in neighborhoods like hers. Windora's ill- ness was caused by neither her cultural traits nor the failure of her will. Her stroke was caused in part by inequity. She is one of the lucky ones, though, because even while structural violence ravages her neighbor- hood, it also abets the concentration of expensive stroke-intervention services in certain wealthy teaching hospitals like mine. If I can get to her in time, we can still help her. Income Inequality and Life Inequality Of course, Windora is not the only person struggling on account of structural violence. Countless neighborhoods nationwide are suffering from it, and people are dying needlessly young as a result. The mag- nitude of this excess mortality is mind-boggling. In 2009 my friend Dr. Steve Whitman asked a simple question, "How many extra black people died in Chicago each year, just because they do not have the same health outcomes as white Chicagoans?" When the Chicago Sun- Times got wind of his results, it ran them on the front page in bold white letters on a black background: "health care gap kills 3200 Black Chicagoans and the Gap is Growing." The paper styled the head- line to look like the declaration of war that it should have been. In fact, we did find ourselves at war not long ago, when almost 3,000 Americans were killed. That was September 11,2001. That tragedy propelled the country to war. Yet when it comes to the premature deaths of urban Americans, no disaster area has been declared. No federal troops have been called up. No acts of Congress have been passed. Yet this disaster is even worse: those 3,200 black people were in Chicago alone, in just one year. Nationwide each year, more than 60,000 black people die prematurely because of inequality.10 While blacks suffer the most from this, it is not just an issue of racism, though racism has been a unique and powerful transmitter of violence in America for over four hundred years.11 Beyond racism, poverty and income inequality perpetuated by exploitative market capitalism are singular agents of transmission of disease and early death. As a result, there is a new and alarming pattern of declining life expectancy among white Americans as well. Deaths from drug overdoses in young white Americans ages 25 to 34 have exploded to levels not seen since the AIDS epidemic. This generation is the first since the Vietnam War era to experience higher death rates than the prior generation.12 White Americans ages 45 to 54 have experienced skyrocketing premature death rates as well, something not seen in any other developed na- tion.13 White men in some Appalachian towns live on average twenty years less than white men a half-day's drive away in the suburbs of Washington, DC. Men in McDowell County, West Virginia, can look forward to a life expectancy only slightly better than that of Haitians.14 But those statistics reflect averages, and every death from structural violence is a person. When these illnesses and deaths are occurring one at a time in neighborhoods that society has decided not to care about—neighborhoods populated by poor, black, or brown people— they seem easy to overlook, especially if you are among the fortunate few who are doing incredibly well. The tide of prosperity in America has lifted some boats while others have swamped. Paul Farmer, the physician-anthropologist who founded Partners in Health, an inter- national human rights agency, reflects on the juxtaposition of "unprecedented bounty and untold penury": "It stands to reason that as beneficiaries of growing inequality, we do not like to be reminded of misery of squalor and failure. Our popular culture provides us with no shortage of anesthesia."15 That people suffer and die prematurely because of inequality is wrong. It is wrong from an ethical perspective. It is wrong from a fair- ness perspective. And it is wrong because we have the means to fix it. Underview 1 Scholarly discourse and engagement with politics is key to effective structural reform - critique is insufficient. Purdy ’20 - Jedediah S. Britton-Purdy et al, 20 - ("Building a Law-and-Political-Economy Framework: Beyond the Twentieth-Century Synthesis by Jedediah S. Britton-Purdy, David Singh Grewal, Amy Kapczynski, K. Sabeel Rahman :: SSRN," 3-2-2020, https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3547312)//ey/
To embrace the possibility of democratic renewal requires rejecting the terms of the Twentieth-Century Synthesis. We believe that the legal realists—and thinkers in a much longer history of political thought—were right in believing that "the economy" is neither self-defining nor self-justifying. The emphasis in these traditions has been the right one: on power, distribution, and the need for legitimacy as the central themes in the organization of economic life. Moreover, precisely because economic ordering is a political and legal artifact, the idea of an "autonomous" economic domain has always been obscurantist and ideological, even when accepted in good faith.' Law does not and never could simply defer to such a realm. Rather, law is perennially involved in creating and enforcing the terms of economic ordering, most particularly through the creation and maintenance of markets. One of its most important roles, indeed, is determining who is subject to market ordering and on what terms, and who is exempted in favor of other kinds of protection or provision.' Thus the program of law, politics, and institution building often called "neoliberalism" is, and can only be, a specific theory of how to use state power, to what ends, and for whose benefit.' The ideological work of the Twentieth-Century Synthesis has been to naturalize and embed in legal institutions from the Supreme Court to the Antitrust Office and World Trade Organization a specific disposition of power. This power represents a deployment of market ordering that produces intense and cross-cutting forms of inequality and democratic erosion. However, Twentieth-Century Synthesis theorists tend not to see this, precisely because the Synthesis makes it so hard to see (or at least so easy to overlook). If it is to succeed, law and political economy will also require something beyond mere critique. It will require a positive agenda. Many new and energized voices, from the legal academy to political candidates to movement activists, are already building in this direction,' calling for and giving shape to programs for more genuine democracy that also takes seriously questions of economic power and racial subordination;171 more equal distribution of resources and life chances;172 more public and shared resources and infrastructues;173 the displacement of concentrated corporate power and rooting of new forms of worker power;174 the end of mass incarceration and broader contestation of the long history of the criminalization and control of poor people and people of color in building capitalism;175 the recognition of finance and money as public infrastructures;176 the challenges posed by emerging forms of power and control arising from new technologies;177 and the need for a radical new emphasis on ecology.178 These are the materials from which a positive agenda, over time, will be built. Political fights interact generatively with scholarly and policy debates in pointing the way toward a more democratic political economy. The emergence of new grassroots movements, campaigns, and proposals seeking to deepen our democracy is no guarantee of success. But their prevalence and influence make clear the dangers and opportunities of this moment of upheaval—and highlight the stakes of building a new legal imaginary. 179 Neoliberal political economy, with its underlying commitments to efficiency, neutrality, and anti-politics, helped animate, shape, and legitimate a twentieth-century consensus that erased power, encased the market, and reinscribed racialized, economic, and gendered inequities. By contrast, a legal imaginary of democratic political economy, that takes seriously underlying concepts of power, equality, and democracy, can inform a wave of legal thought whose critique and policy imagination can amplify and accelerate these movements for structural reform and, if we are lucky, help remake our polity in more deeply democratic ways. Reform makes revolution more likely. Rejecting it condescendingly asserts the possibility of radical change is better than the certainty of real improvement. Delgado ’87 - Delgado, Richard teaches civil rights and critical race theory at University of Alabama School of Law. He has written and co-authored numerous articles and books, “The Ethereal Scholar: Does Critical Legal Studies Have What Minorities Want?”, Harvard Civil Rights - Civil Liberties Law Review, 1987 Critical scholars reject the idea of piecemeal reform. Incremental change, they argue, merely postpones the wholesale reformation that must occur to create a decent society.38 Even worse, an unfair social system survives by using piecemeal reform to disguise and legitimize oppression. 39 Those who control the system weaken resistance by pointing to the occasional concession to, or periodic court victory of, a black plaintiff or worker as evidence that the system is fair and just.40 In fact, Crits believe that teaching the common law or using the case method in law school is a disguised means of preaching incrementalism and thereby maintaining the current power structure.41 To avoid this, CLS scholars urge law professors to abandon the case method, give up the effort to find rationality and order in the case law, and teach in an unabashedly political fashion. 42 The CLS critique of piecemeal reform is familiar, imperialistic and wrong. Minorities know from bitter experience that occasional court victories do not mean the Promised Land is at hand.43 The critique is imperialistic in that it tells minorities and other oppressed peoples how they should interpret events affecting them.44 A court order directing a housing authority to disburse funds for heating in subsidized housing may postpone the revolution, or it may not. In the meantime, the order keeps a number of poor families warm. This may mean more to them than it does to a comfortable academic working in a warm office. It smacks of paternalism to assert that the possibility of revolution later outweighs the certainty of heat now, unless there is evidence for that possibility. The Crits do not offer such evidence. Indeed, some incremental changes may bring revolutionary changes closer, not push them further away. Not all small reforms induce complacency; some may whet the appetite for further combat. The welfare family may hold a tenants' union meeting in their heated living room. CLS scholars' critique of piecemeal reform often misses these possibilities, and neglects the question of whether total change, when it comes, will be what we want. Adopt a hybridizing strategy - exploiting contradictions in hegemonic discourse maintains critical distance while effectively challenging the state. Kapoor ‘08 Kapoor, 2008 (Ilan, Associate Professor at the Faculty of Environmental Studies, York University, “The Postcolonial Politics of Development,” p. 138-139) There are perhaps several other social movement campaigns that could be cited as examples of a ‘hybridizing strategy’.5 But what emerges as important from the Chipko and NBA campaigns is the way in which they treat laws and policies, institutional practices, and ideological apparatuses as deconstructible. That is, they refuse to take dominant authority at face value, and proceed to reveal its contingencies. Sometimes, they expose what the hegemon is trying to disavow or hide (exclusion of affected communities in project design and implementation, faulty information gathering and dissemination). Sometimes, they problematize dominant or naturalized truths (‘development = unlimited economic growth = capitalism’, ‘big is better’, ‘technology can save the environment’). In either case, by contesting, publicizing, and politicizing accepted or hidden truths, they hybridize power, challenging its smugness and triumphalism, revealing its impurities. They show power to be, literally and figuratively, a bastard. While speaking truth to power, a hybridizing strategy also exploits the instabilities of power. In part, this involves showing up and taking advantage of the equivocations of power — conflicting laws, contradictory policies, unfulfilled promises. A lot has to do here with publicly shaming the hegemon, forcing it to remedy injustices and live up to stated commitments in a more accountable and transparent manner. And, in part, this involves nurturing or manipulating the splits and strains within institutions. Such maneuvering can take the form of cultivating allies, forging alliances, or throwing doubt on prevailing orthodoxy. Note, lastly, the way in which a hybridizing strategy works with the dominant discourse. This reflects the negotiative aspect of Bhabha’s performativity. The strategy may outwit the hegemon, but it does so from the interstices of the hegemony. The master may be paralyzed, but his paralysis is induced using his own poison/medicine. It is for this reason that cultivating allies in the adversarial camp is possible: when you speak their language and appeal to their own ethical horizons, you are building a modicum of common ground. It is for this reason also that the master cannot easily dismiss or crush you. Observing his rules and playing his game makes it difficult for him not to take you seriously or grant you a certain legitimacy. The use of non-violent tactics may be crucial in this regard: state repression is easily justified against violent adversaries, but it is vulnerable to public criticism when used against non-violence. Thus, the fact that Chipko and the NBA deployed civil disobedience — pioneered, it must be pointed out, by the ‘father of the nation’ (i.e. Gandhi) — made it difficult for the state to quash them or deflect their claims. Using the government as a heuristic is better pragmatically and forces us to truly investigate political structures in search of ways to improve instead of using abstract solutions for concrete impacts. Zannoti ’13 - Zannoti, Laura, associate professor of Political Science at Virginia Tech., Ph.D. from the University of Washington in 2008 and joined the Purdue University faculty in 2009. “Governmentality, Ontology, Methodology: Re-thinking Political Agency in the Global World”, originally published online 30 December 2013, DOI: 10.1177/0304375413512098, P. Sage Publications MC By questioning substantialist representations of power and subjects, inquiries on the possibilities of political agency are reframed in a way that focuses on power and subjects’ relational character and the contingent processes of their (trans)formation in the context of agonic relations. Options for resistance to governmental scripts are not limited to ‘‘rejection,’’ ‘‘revolution,’’ or ‘‘dispossession’’ to regain a pristine ‘‘freedom from all constraints’’ or an immanent ideal social order. It is found instead in multifarious and contingent struggles that are constituted within the scripts of governmental rationalities and at the same time exceed and transform them. This approach questions oversimplifications of the complexities of liberal political rationalities and of their interactions with non-liberal political players and nurtures a radical skepticism about identifying universally good or bad actors or abstract solutions to political problems. International power interacts in complex ways with diverse political spaces and within these spaces it is appropriated, hybridized, redescribed, hijacked, and tinkered with. Governmentality as a heuristic focuses on performing complex diagnostics of events. It invites historically situated explorations and careful differentiations rather than overarching demonizations of ‘‘power,’’ romanticizations of the ‘‘rebel’’ or the ‘‘the local.’’ More broadly, theoretical formulations that conceive the subject in non-substantialist terms and focus on processes of subjectification, on the ambiguity of power discourses, and on hybridization as the terrain for political transformation, open ways for reconsidering political agency beyond the dichotomy of oppression/rebellion. These alternative formulations also foster an ethics of political engagement, to be continuously taken up through plural and uncertain practices, that demand continuous attention to ‘‘what happens’’ instead of fixations on ‘‘what ought to be.’’83 Such ethics of engagement would not await the revolution to come or hope for a pristine ‘‘freedom’’ to be regained. Instead, it would constantly attempt to twist the working of power by playing with whatever cards are available and would require intense processes of reflexivity on the consequences of political choices. To conclude with a famous phrase by Michel Foucault ‘‘my point is not that everything is bad, but that everything is dangerous, which is not exactly the same as bad. If everything is dangerous, then we always have something to do. So my position leads not to apathy but to hyper- and pessimistic activism.
11/6/21
SepOct Covid Aff
Tournament: St Marks | Round: 1 | Opponent: Muzzi Khan | Judge: David Dosch JYK AC I. Vaccine Apartheid A TRIPS waiver for covid vaccines will not pass in the squo. Baschuk 7/26 Bryce Baschuk Reporter, Bloomberg Economics, 21 - ("WTO Holiday From Vaccine Equity Talks Draws Calls for Action," Bloomberg, 7-26-2021, accessed 8-18-2021, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-07-26/wto-s-holiday-from-vaccine-equity-talks-draws-calls-for-action)//ML An urgent global effort to rebalance the inequity between rich, vaccinated nations and poor nations sliding further into pandemic misery is colliding with an immovable calendar conflict: the European summer holiday. Next week World Trade Organization delegates are planning to depart Geneva for their August break and, in doing so, pause their fractious debate over a proposal to waive intellectual-property protections for Covid-19 shots until the second week of September.¶ Before they leave, members will adopt a report that acknowledges they’ve made scant headway on the proposal aimed at making doses more widely available, which the world’s top health expert says is critical to ending a “moral failure.”¶ “With so many lives on the line, profits and patents must come second,” World Health Organization Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said during a virtual summit last week.¶ WTO Director-General Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala previously urged ambassadors to shorten their usual six-week summer holiday to focus on pressing issues like the waiver. Nevertheless, members aren’t planning to reconsider the matter until the week of Sept. 6, according to officials familiar with the planning.¶ “August doesn’t matter in Geneva; it doesn’t matter if people are dying around the world,” said Shailly Gupta, a spokesperson at Médecins Sans Frontières. “We hope members will move at a faster pace.”¶ Disagreement persists on the fundamental question of whether a waiver is the “appropriate and most effective way” to address the shortage of vaccines, according to a draft status report produced by Dagfinn Sørli, the chairman of WTO council on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights, or TRIPS.¶ That split could sink prospects for an ambitious vaccine waiver because WTO decisions must be taken on the basis of consensus -- which means any of the 164 members can veto a final agreement for any reason.¶ ”The WTO’s response to Covid is the most critical issue before our organization right now,” WTO spokesman Keith Rockwell said a phone interview. “Millions have died and lives are at stake. Finding a pragmatic outcome by December is essential.”¶ Proponents of the waiver had hoped to conclude their negotiations by the end of July and are now criticizing the European Union and other developed nations for sandbagging the talks.¶ EU ‘Not Interested’¶ The European Commission, which opposes a WTO TRIPS waiver, has proposed a series of measures that it argues will create greater legal certainty for nations to leverage existing trade tools in order to expand their production capacities.¶ “The EU is not interested,” Gupta said. “Switzerland, Norway and the United Kingdom are not engaging. They’re saying: ‘This or that won’t work; the waiver won’t work.’ There is no intention of engaging.”¶ A spokesman for the EU mission in Geneva declined to comment.§ Critics counter that the proposal from Brussels is a distraction to redirect focus from India and South Africa’s earlier waiver proposal and to prevent members from engaging in more detailed negotiations.¶ “The EU’s actions are incredibly cynical and dangerous,” said Lori Wallach, the founder of Public Citizen’s Global Trade Watch. “They have submitted a paper that basically conflicts with the text-based negotiations by saying ‘We don’t want a waiver.’”¶ The U.S., meanwhile, has taken a back seat in the process and enthusiasm about Washington’s engagement on the issue has begun to wane in the three months since Trade Representative Katherine Tai announced American support for a waiver.¶ Though Tai’s surprise announcement briefly knocked shares of Moderna Inc., Pfizer Inc., and BioNTech SE, the stocks quickly rebounded and all are now trading at or near their highest levels of the year.¶ “People feel that message from Ambassador Tai is not playing out on the ground or being implemented in a meaningful way,” said Thiru Balasubramaniam a managing director at Knowledge Ecology International in Europe. The only way to solve the pandemic is global vaccination, but current production is woefully short. Public Citizen 3/29 - Public Citizen “Public Citizen is a nonprofit consumer advocacy organization that champions the public interest in the halls of power. We defend democracy, resist corporate power and work to ensure that government works for the people – not for big corporations. Founded in 1971, we now have 500,000 members and supporters throughout the country. We don’t participate in partisan political activities or endorse any candidates for elected office. We take no government or corporate money, which enables us to remain fiercely independent and call out bad actors – no matter who they are or how much power and money they have.”, “Waiver of the WTO’s Intellectual Property Rules: Facts vs. Common Myths,” Public Citizen Global Trade Watch Series. March 29, 2021. Accessed Aug. 10, 2021. https://www.citizen.org/article/waiver-of-the-wtos-intellectual-property-rules-myths-vs-facts/ AT The COVID-19 public health disaster and resulting economic crises won’t end anywhere unless people everywhere are vaccinated. Despite this obvious truth, rich countries with only 14 of the global population have secured preferential access to over 50 of projected global vaccine supplies. Ongoing outbreaks anywhere allow the virus to mutate, threatening the whole world with vaccine-resistant variants or more deadly or easily spread variants. Governments invested billions to create the vaccines. But, there is a dire shortage, with no end in sight. As we enter the second quarter, about one billion doses have been produced in 2021. We need 10 to 12 billion to reach global herd immunity. And we will need far more if, like flu vaccines, they must be repeated or require booster shots. In every region, there are existing firms that could gear up production and governments willing to invest in expanding supply. But WTO rules require countries to guarantee pharmaceutical corporations monopoly control. More than 100 countries support a temporary, emergency suspension of these WTO rules, so more vaccines, treatments and diagnostic tests can be manufactured in as many places as possible. The United States and a handful of other WTO members are blocking the waiver: They won’t even agree to negotiate about waiver language to address whatever concerns that they may have with the current text. Donald Trump started this self-defeating blockade. President Joe Biden must reverse it to speed the end of the COVID-19 pandemic. Changing IP laws is key to combatting global health inequality and vaccine apartheid. Rich countries hoard vaccine supply, which means donor models never solve and reinforce colonialism. Harman et al 6/21 Sophie Harman professor of Politics and International Relations, Queen Mary University of London, Parsa Erfani Fogarty Global Health Fellow at the University of Global Health Equity and a medical student at Harvard Medical School, Tinashe Goronga Community Organiser Equal Health Global Campaign Against Racism at EqualHealth, Jason Hickel, Michelle Morse, Eugene T Richardson 6/21 - ("Global vaccine equity demands reparative justice — not charity," BMJ Global Health, 6/21/2021, https://gh.bmj.com/content/6/6/e006504)//ML By late April, more than 80 of the world’s COVID-19 vaccines had gone to people in wealthy countries, with just 0.3 to people in low-income countries.1 This reprehensible imbalance is no accident. High-income countries have used neocolonial negotiating power, global policy leverage and capital to procure enough doses to cover 245 of their citizens while leaving few doses for poorer countries.2 As a result, lower-income countries may not be able to vaccinate their populations until 2023.3¶ Such inequity is yet another example of how the interests of racial capitalism run roughshod over the golden rule of global solidarity—attend to the highest risk first.4 Currently, older and medically vulnerable individuals are dying from COVID-19 disproportionately in poor countries, while young, healthy individuals are getting vaccinated in wealthy ones.5 Vaccine apartheid is a not novel phenomenon. The notion that only certain corners of the world get to benefit from life-saving treatments is an everyday reality of a global health system driven by a capitalist, philanthropic model.6 7 But in times of crises—and as new variants threaten the vaccination plans of wealthy countries—these inequities and their solutions come to the forefront of global debate.8¶ Policy-makers in rich nations are aware of these issues. But the solutions they have proposed so far do nothing to address the underlying structural problems. They offer charitable donations and partial, temporary fixes that are designed to deflect the substantive demands for reform that global South countries are fighting for, including challenges to unethical intellectual property (IP) regimes.9 This approach will not work, because it is not designed to ‘work.’ If we want to end vaccine apartheid, we need to target the root causes of global health inequities. We need reparative justice.¶ Three limited ‘solutions’ to vaccine inequity¶ There are currently three approaches to reduce inequity in COVID-19 vaccine distribution: bilateral charity, multilateral charity and temporary waivers or suspensions of IP.¶ The first is the most straightforward. States that stockpile COVID-19 vaccines have committed to sharing their leftovers with low-income and middle-income countries. Norway was one of the first nations to accede to donating doses to poorer countries in parallel with its vaccine programme.10 This is the weakest form of equity as it is unclear if this will be done for free, at a lower cost, tied to diplomacy or conditionality, or crucially, when these vaccines will be made available, where they will go, or how many will be delivered. The bilateral charity approach has little to do with equity and more to do with geopolitics, wealth and aid dependency.11 12¶ The second is multilateral charity, best exemplified by COVAX. In 2020, COVAX emerged as an international collaboration by the World Health Organisation (WHO), United Nations Children’s Fund, Gavi and the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations to ensure equitable global access to COVID-19 vaccines.13 Rich countries can access doses for 10–50 of their populations, depending on how much they have paid in, and poor countries can access doses for 20 through the scheme. It is the 20 for poor countries that has come to be COVAX’s unique selling point: here is a mechanism that ensures every country in the world can get the vaccine regardless of ability to pay. This is the first time such an initiative has been trialled.¶ The shortcomings of COVAX are numerous. If vaccines are delivered as planned, COVAX may reach 27 of the population in lower-income countries by the end of 2021—a depressing goal compared with the estimated 70 coverage needed for herd immunity and the open vaccine access currently granted to Americans.14 15 Furthermore, COVAX is still significantly underfunded and there are concerns regarding supply chains. While capital and resource transfer from wealthy countries to poorer ones is surely needed in the current pandemic response, any system that solely relies on aid will ultimately fail to achieve equity. In the setting of vaccine scarcity, in which suppliers are unable to deliver doses as scheduled and countries are banning exports to keep vaccines at home, there is a risk that COVAX aid-recipient states will fall further down the priority list, awaiting the leftover vaccines from the rich country stockpiles.16–18¶ What may be most pernicious about the COVAX scheme, however, is that rich countries and their pharmaceutical companies have repeatedly used it as a shield to deflect demands for IP waivers. This is an enduring problem with aid: it papers over and distracts our attention away from the underlying structural violence. And in so doing, it maintains and perpetuates inequalities. Over 50 years ago, Kwame Nkrumah observed how aid is a ‘revolving credit’ which returns to countries of the global North in the form of increased profits.19 To the extent that COVAX is being leveraged to protect corporate patents and profits, Nkrumah’s words continue to be germane¶. The third approach is focused on pooling, temporary waivers, or suspension of IP. In May 2020, the WHO created the COVID-19 Technology Access Pool for companies to share IP and transfer technologies in a coordinated manner. But to date, not a single company has utilised the transfer process—likely because such forms of global IP sharing would quell profits, even if royalties are included.20 Pharmaceutical companies and universities prefer one-off transfer deals because it enables them to set their own terms with non-disclosure agreements. Given that they are accountable to shareholders and boards—not patients—financial incentives will drive transfer decisions, not public health demand.¶ Following the blockages at the WHO around IP, attention shifted towards the World Trade Organisation (WTO). In October 2020, India and South Africa proposed a temporary waiver of IP rights to COVID-19 technologies for the duration of the pandemic, so that all manufacturers with sufficient capacity and shared know-how could start production.21 Although backed by over 100 countries within the WTO and a global campaign for the ‘People’s Vaccine,’ the proposal has been repeatedly blocked at every committee meeting since then by select wealthy countries with large pharmaceutical industries, including the UK, Japan and EU states.22 23¶ Those who oppose the IP waiver argue that it will not do anything to solve the problem: even if you were to liberate the recipe for the vaccines, low-income and middle-income countries do not have the capacity to produce it.24 But this argument is specious. For one, several middle-income countries—including India, Brazil, Senegal and South Africa—do have the ability to ramp up production by repurposing existing manufacturing capacity.25 In addition, an IP waiver can and should be supplemented with technology transfers, logistical support and financial investment to facilitate this repurposing process. And the most important point is that such a waiver could drastically reduce costs across the board, making vaccine imports more affordable for poor countries.¶ Opponents of the waiver also claim that IP-related obstacles can be addressed through existing arrangements for ‘compulsory licensing’ under the WTO’s Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS).26 But the past evidence suggests that this process is slow, cumbersome and subject to various shaming practices by the international community.27 28 Some point instead to the possibility of voluntary licensing. But voluntary licenses are often executed secretly and are limited to companies or governments that can afford them. The University of Pennsylvania, which owns IP rights relating to the mRNA vaccines, is helping Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok develop a vaccine production facility. This partnership was possible because Thailand—unlike other middle-income countries—was able to put up the money.29 Poorer countries are left out. Sharing of IP and technology transfers can and will accelerate global vaccine production. The question is on whose terms. Organisations such as the WHO and African Union are currently mobilising support and resources to accelerate production in low-income and middle-income countries.30 31 But these efforts will be to waste unless IP for COVID-19 technologies is shared broadly and quickly.¶ Vaccine coloniality¶ Donor-based approaches to vaccine equity are grounded in old, even colonial ideas of aid and dependency, which have failed to serve the health needs of the Majority World or deliver on health equity. This failed model has not promoted health equity in the past and is clearly inadequate in the present, on account of dependency on donor whims (the bilateral ‘leftovers’ approach), persistent funding gaps and shortfalls (COVAX), and time-consuming diplomacy and filibustering over what is or is it not within current trade rules (WTO).¶ Once again in the political economy of global health, the charitable model of COVAX becomes the smokescreen for inequitable systems. When states are asked about their stockpiling, they point to COVAX. When pharmaceutical companies are asked about IP, they point to COVAX or their low-cost commitment. The focus on a donor-based model of aid in achieving vaccine equity has distracted leaders from the ideologies, economic systems and trade regulations that leave access to medicine to the forces of the marketplace rather than global health priorities.32 Achieving global vaccine justice requires a rapid shift in trade regulations and contract transparency that streamlines IP sharing and technology transfers. The resultant collaborations across economies will not only accelerate vaccine production but will also increase competition and push vaccine prices down.¶ Finally, old models of vaccine equity have not kept pace with changes in discourse and thinking around global health governance, equity and justice. 2021 is not the early 2000s, where new public–private partnerships or funding models were de rigueur. Donor countries are increasingly wary of aid dependency as they pay the cost of continuing high profile health programmes with diminishing strategic returns. Aid-recipient countries are similarly exasperated by funding gaps that lead to delays and materiel shortfalls, the NGO-industrial complex and attendant consultants that rationalise them, and fundamentally, by the notion that their populations only seem to matter when another state can capitalise on them.¶ Conclusion¶ Vaccine apartheid is only one symptom of broader global health inequalities that have their roots in colonialism and persist today because of neocolonial forms of power. As Grosfoguel writes, ‘The heterogeneous and multiple global structures put in place over a period of 450 years did not evaporate with the juridical–political decolonisation of the periphery over the past 50 years. We continue to live under the same ‘colonial power matrix.’ With juridical–political decolonisation we moved from a period of ‘global colonialism’ to the current period of ‘global coloniality.’33 Vaccine justice starts with moving beyond aid models of vaccine donation, in which poorer countries are gifted vaccine leftovers. It demands rapidly achieving global consensus for the IP waiver, democratising vaccine IP and know-how and supporting low-income and middle-income countries to build manufacturing capacity for this pandemic and the next. These steps can mark the start of a reparative justice movement in global health that demands we confront and overturn colonial legacies that continue to devastate the health of low- and middle-income countries.34 A commitment to funding vaccine justice in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic can be a first step in this direction. Compulsory licensing is not sufficient – drug company resistance, IP thickets, and devolved decision-making. Stiglitz and Wallach 4/26 - Joseph E. Stiglitz and Lori Wallach Joseph E. Stiglitz, co-recipient of the 2001 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics Sciences, teaches at Columbia University. Lori Wallach is the director of Public Citizen’s Global Trade Watch., “Opinion: Preserving intellectual property barriers to covid-19 vaccines is morally wrong and foolish,” Washington Post (Web). April 26, 2021. Accessed Aug. 10, 2021. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/04/26/preserving-intellectual-property-barriers-covid-19-vaccines-is-morally-wrong-foolish/ AT Unfortunately, the drug companies have consistently done whatever they can to preserve their monopoly control. Even today, as they battle the waiver and argue that existing compulsory licensing rights are sufficient, they lobby the U.S. government to sanction countries that use that tool.¶ These corporations have also undermined this option by building “thickets” of intellectual property barriers. They fortify their monopolies by registering exclusive rights to industrial designs and undisclosed data, such as trade secrets and test data, in addition to numerous patents and copyrights for each medicine. Each element would require a license, and the WTO’s flexibilities might not even encompass all of them.¶ Making matters more difficult, “product-by-product” and “country-by-country” compulsory licensing is nigh impossible to coordinate across countries for medicines with complex global supply chains, such as covid-19 vaccines. Vaccine shortfall causes widespread death and poverty. Public Citizen 3/1 - Public Citizen “Public Citizen is a nonprofit consumer advocacy organization that champions the public interest in the halls of power. We defend democracy, resist corporate power and work to ensure that government works for the people – not for big corporations. Founded in 1971, we now have 500,000 members and supporters throughout the country. We don’t participate in partisan political activities or endorse any candidates for elected office. We take no government or corporate money, which enables us to remain fiercely independent and call out bad actors – no matter who they are or how much power and money they have.”, “Backgrounder: WTO-Required Monopolies for Pharmaceutical Corporations Obstruct Global Production of COVID-19 Vaccines and Treatment,” Public Citizen Global Trade Watch Series. March 1, 2021. Accessed Aug. 12, 2021. https://www.citizen.org/article/wto-required-monopolies-for-pharmaceutical-corporations-obstruct-global-production-of-covid-19-vaccines-and-treatments/ AT It is obvious that current production capacity cannot supply enough vaccines for the entire world. Many people in low- and middle-income countries around the globe will not get vaccinated until at least 2022 unless the world manufactures many more doses, according to the British Medical Journal. The world’s poorest countries may wait until 2024 for mass immunization, if it happens at all, reports the Economist Intelligence Unit. The global vaccine apartheid unfolding right now could cost millions of lives and push tens of millions more into poverty. The devastation will be felt for a generation. A new International Chamber of Commerce report concluded that the world could face economic losses of more than $9 trillion under the scenario of wealthy nations being fully vaccinated by mid-2021, but poor countries largely shut out. Wealthy countries like the United States would bear nearly half of that hit. Vaccinating just half of low- and middle-income countries’ populations could reduce global losses by $5.5 trillion. Poverty and disease are mutually reinforcing, causing staggering suffering and injustice. Hollis and Pogge ’08 - Aidan Hollis Associate Professor of Economics, the University of Calgary and Thomas Pogge Leitner Professor of Philosophy and International Affairs, Yale University, “The Health Impact Fund Making New Medicines Accessible for All,” Incentives for Global Health (2008) AT In 2004, some 970 million people, around 15 percent of the world’s population, were living below the extreme poverty line of $1 a day (more strictly defi ned, $392.88 annually) in 1993 Purchasing Power Parity (PPP) terms (Chen and Ravallion 2007, 16579).3 Furthermore, those living below this very low poverty line fell on average around 28 percent below it. Th eir average annual purchasing power therefore corresponded to approximately $420 in the US in 2008 dollars.4¶ Th ese are the poorest of the poor. Th e World Bank also uses a somewhat less miserly poverty line, namely $2 dollar a day, or an annual amount of $785.76 PPP 1993. Th e Bank’s data show that around 40 percent of the world’s population, or over 2.5 billion people, lived in income poverty so defi ned in 2004,5 with this population falling on average 41 percent below this higher line.6 Individuals I;\pp
\n this much larger group could buy, on average, about as much in 2004 as could be bought in the US in 2008 for $690.¶ The Effects of Global Income Poverty on Health¶ The effects of such extreme income poverty are foreseeable and extensively documented. It is estimated that around 13 percent of all human beings (830 million) are chronically undernourished, 17 percent (1.1 billion) lack access to safe water, and 41 percent (2.6 billion) lack access to basic sanitation (UNDP 2006, 174, 33). About 31 percent (2 billion) lack access to crucial drugs and 25 percent (1.6 billion) lack electricity (Fogarty n.d., IEA 2002). Some 780 million adults are illiterate (UNESCO 2006), and 14 percent of children aged between fi ve and 17 (218 million) are child laborers, more than half in hazardous work (ILO 2006, 6).¶ Worldwide, diseases related to poverty, including communicable, maternal, perinatal, and nutritionrelated diseases, comprise over 50 percent of the burden of disease in low-income countries, nearly ten times their relative burden in developed countries (WHO 2006b, 3). If the developed world had its proportional share of poverty-related deaths (onethird of all deaths), severe poverty would kill some 16,000 Americans and 26,000 citizens of the European Union each week.¶ The cycle of mutually reinforcing poverty and disease besetting low income countries, and particularly the poorer communities in these countries, could be broken by signifi cantly reducing severe poverty. But it is also possible to make substantial progress against the global burden of disease more directly by improving health care in developing countries.¶ Poverty does not merely render poor people more vulnerable to disease, but also makes it less likely that they can obtain medical treatment for the diseases they contract. This is because in poor countries medical care is rarely available for free, and poor people are typically unable to buy either the care needed by themselves or their families or the insurance policies that would guarantee them such care. The price of health care in poor countries therefore also plays a crucial role in explaining the catastrophic health situation among the global poor.
II. Solvency Plan text: The member nations of the World Trade Organization ought to waive intellectual property protections for Covid-19 related medicines. Public Citizen 6/22 - Public Citizen et. al, “Please Speedily Secure Implementation of a COVID-19 Emergency Waiver of WTO TRIPS Rules for Vaccines, Tests and Treatments,” Open Letter to President Joe Biden. June 22, 2021. https://www.citizenstrade.org/ctc/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/COVIDTRIPSWaiver_SignOnLtr2_062221.pdf#new_tab AT We the undersigned organizations respectfully urge you to speedily secure a waiver that is:¶ • Comprehensive: The U.S. government must secure swift adoption of a temporary waiver of the patent, copyright, industrial design and undisclosed data rules of the WTO’s TRIPS Agreement with respect to COVID-19-related medical products. The scope of the waiver must extend beyond vaccines to also cover the diagnostic tests needed to detect outbreaks and variants; the treatments, ventilators and other medical devices necessary to shorten lockdowns and save the lives of the millions who will contract COVID-19 before sufficient vaccine doses can be made and the materials, components, means and methods of manufacturing such goods.¶ • Swift: The WTO Director General’s December 2021 deadline for a final waiver text is far too late to meet the urgency of the pandemic, which requires agreement on a waiver in a matter of weeks, not months.¶ • Long-lasting: A waiver must be of sufficient duration to incentivize and sustain increases in manufacturing capacity for and output of medical goods to prevent, contain or treat COVID19, taking into consideration that the pandemic may yet escape current vaccines. We support the waiver sponsors’ proposal that the initial waiver last three years and be regularly reviewed thereafter, particularly given uncertainties around variants, the need for boosters, and what levels of immunization may be needed.¶ Current global production capacity of COVID-19 vaccines, medicines, and diagnostic tests cannot come close to meeting global needs to detect, treat, prevent, or contain COVID-19. Absent significant increases in vaccine production, many in developing nations will not have access to vaccines until 2024. This lag would mean more deaths and the greater chances for development of new variants that can undermine vaccines' achievements to date.¶ Every country should have the right to develop and make their own vaccines free from the worry that they and their suppliers would be sued by IP holders. To date, vaccine intellectual property rightsholders have refused to issue open licenses under transparent and accountable terms and conditions, and transfer technology fully to and negotiate payment terms with qualified manufacturers in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, creating supply shortages and production bottlenecks and prohibiting urgently needed production of doses worldwide. The worst global health crisis in a century has resulted in at least 3.5 million deaths worldwide and is conservatively estimated to cost the U.S. alone $16 trillion in economic losses, accompanied by yet greater global losses that have impoverished hundreds of millions of people worldwide. We are in a race against time to save lives and prevent new variants. Absent a major increase in vaccines, treatments, diagnostic tests, ventilators, and other COVID-19-related medical supplies, the pandemic will rage largely unmitigated among a significant share of the world’s population. COVID-19 infections will increase, resulting in increased deaths and long-term damage to the health of millions of people, a dragging blow to the global economy and a risk that vaccine-resistant variants will put the world back on lockdown and evade immunity for those previously infected and/or vaccinated. The long-term impact on people’s health and the world’s health system would be unprecedented. A waiver would increase leverage over pharma and provide legal certainty needed to spur critical production. Stiglitz and Wallach 4/26 - Joseph E. Stiglitz and Lori Wallach Joseph E. Stiglitz, co-recipient of the 2001 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics Sciences, teaches at Columbia University. Lori Wallach is the director of Public Citizen’s Global Trade Watch., “Opinion: Preserving intellectual property barriers to covid-19 vaccines is morally wrong and foolish,” Washington Post (Web). April 26, 2021. Accessed Aug. 10, 2021. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/04/26/preserving-intellectual-property-barriers-covid-19-vaccines-is-morally-wrong-foolish/ AT A waiver would immediately increase government leverage over vaccine makers that refuse to license the technology. Firms could choose to either expand production by negotiating with governments, alternative suppliers and global initiatives, or risk governments circumventing them and forcing the transfer of technology.¶ A waiver would also provide legal certainty for governments and investors that are inclined to repurpose existing pharmaceutical manufacturing or build new facilities but are fearful of intellectual property liability. And it could boost production of covid-19 treatments unavailable in much of the world, as well as diagnostic tests and vaccine supply chain products. Legal certainty unlocks global production. Public Citizen 3/29 - Public Citizen “Public Citizen is a nonprofit consumer advocacy organization that champions the public interest in the halls of power. We defend democracy, resist corporate power and work to ensure that government works for the people – not for big corporations. Founded in 1971, we now have 500,000 members and supporters throughout the country. We don’t participate in partisan political activities or endorse any candidates for elected office. We take no government or corporate money, which enables us to remain fiercely independent and call out bad actors – no matter who they are or how much power and money they have.”, “Waiver of the WTO’s Intellectual Property Rules: Facts vs. Common Myths,” Public Citizen Global Trade Watch Series. March 29, 2021. Accessed Aug. 10, 2021. https://www.citizen.org/article/waiver-of-thea-wtos-intellectual-property-rules-myths-vs-facts/ AT Most critically, there simply is not enough supply to go around now or for every year in the future during which the whole world will need regular COVID vaccination to keep the virus under control. Thankfully, scores of countries are ready to invest in building new or repurposing existing production capacity. That is why more than 100 countries support a waiver of the WTO’s Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property (TRIPS). These countries seek certainty that if they adjust their domestic laws and practices to support that investment by providing access to the necessary technology, they will not get dragged into expansive WTO litigation or face retaliatory sanctions from countries claiming WTO violations. The waiver will also serve as a worldwide buffer against the political pressure and legal harassment to which Big Pharma subjects countries that seek to promote affordable access to medicines.¶ In many countries, the regulatory authorities that had to approve domestic use of various vaccines and other COVID-related medical products have significant information from the firms that they could share with skilled teams from local universities, government agencies and pharmaceutical manufacturers — if they were not obliged by WTO rules to guarantee monopoly control of it. And world-class pharmaceutical firms already are making generic versions of new cutting-edge HIV-AIDS medicines and pumping out vaccines based on the platform that, for instance, the Johnson and Johnson vaccine uses. Manufacturing capacity is widespread around the world. Public Citizen 3/29 - Public Citizen “Public Citizen is a nonprofit consumer advocacy organization that champions the public interest in the halls of power. We defend democracy, resist corporate power and work to ensure that government works for the people – not for big corporations. Founded in 1971, we now have 500,000 members and supporters throughout the country. We don’t participate in partisan political activities or endorse any candidates for elected office. We take no government or corporate money, which enables us to remain fiercely independent and call out bad actors – no matter who they are or how much power and money they have.”, “Waiver of the WTO’s Intellectual Property Rules: Facts vs. Common Myths,” Public Citizen Global Trade Watch Series. March 29, 2021. Accessed Aug. 10, 2021. https://www.citizen.org/article/waiver-of-the-wtos-intellectual-property-rules-myths-vs-facts/ AT In the press and on Capitol Hill, Big Pharma is pushing a Big Lie. The claim is that a lack of manufacturing capacity, not pharmaceutical corporation’s monopoly intellectual property (IP) protections, are thwarting greater production of COVID-19 vaccines. A related argument, with decidedly racist overtones, is that COVID-19 vaccines are too complicated for producers in developing countries to make successfully. The reality is that in every region of the world, there are multiple producers that could be greatly increasing global vaccine supplies if the technology and know-how were shared.¶ Just in Africa, “Biovac and Aspen in South Africa, Institute Pasteur in Senegal, and Vacsera in Egypt could rapidly retool factories to make mRNA vaccines,” notes a group of medicine-production experts in a recent Foreign Policy article. Indeed, a former Moderna director of chemistry revealed that with enough technology transfer and know- how-sharing, a modern factory should be able to get mRNA vaccine production online in, at most, three to four months. The Serum Institute in India already is slated to produce the AstraZeneca and Novavax vaccines, while Moderna declined to partner with a qualified Bangladeshi vaccine maker, claiming its engineers were too busy to focus beyond U.S. and EU production. In Latin America, existing facilities in Brazil, Argentina and Mexico under contract to monopoly holders are already pumping out vials, and in countries like Chile and Colombia, the pharmaceutical industry has expressed willingness to kickstart vaccine production.¶ Existing and planned contract manufacturing arrangements prove facilities in developing countries certainly can produce COVID-19 vaccines. But unless technology and know-how are shared more openly, the monopoly holders maintain absolute control over how much can be produced, what the price is and where it will be sold. So, 91 of the Johnson and Johnson vaccine that South African firm Aspen will manufacture must be shipped for sale outside South Africa, according to South Africa’s WTO Counselor. And the Serum Institute is barred from supplying upper- middle-income and high-income countries with the AstraZeneca vaccines it makes, meaning AstraZeneca can artificially segment the global market and ensure that it is the only supplier of the Oxford vaccine in the most profitable national markets, according to Doctors Without Borders.¶ Most critically, there simply is not enough supply to go around now or for every year in the future during which the whole world will need regular COVID vaccination to keep the virus under control. Thankfully, scores of countries are ready to invest in building new or repurposing existing production capacity. That is why more than 100 countries support a waiver of the WTO’s Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property (TRIPS). These countries seek certainty that if they adjust their domestic laws and practices to support that investment by providing access to the necessary technology, they will not get dragged into expansive WTO litigation or face retaliatory sanctions from countries claiming WTO violations. The waiver will also serve as a worldwide buffer against the political pressure and legal harassment to which Big Pharma subjects countries that seek to promote affordable access to medicines.¶ In many countries, the regulatory authorities that had to approve domestic use of various vaccines and other COVID-related medical products have significant information from the firms that they could share with skilled teams from local universities, government agencies and pharmaceutical manufacturers — if they were not obliged by WTO rules to guarantee monopoly control of it. And world-class pharmaceutical firms already are making generic versions of new cutting-edge HIV-AIDS medicines and pumping out vaccines based on the platform that, for instance, the Johnson and Johnson vaccine uses. III. Framing The Aff challenges dehumanizing cultural frames that allow us to ignore human suffering. Recognition of common vulnerability is key to a politics that rejects violence, oppression, and indifference. Butler ’04 - Judith Butler Prof. of Rhetoric and Comparative Literature, University of California at Berkeley, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence. New York: Verso (2006; First Published 2004). pp. 30-35 AT Is there something to be gained from grieving, from tarrying with grief, from remaining exposed to its unbearability and not endeavoring to seek a resolution for grief through violence? Is there something to be gained in the political domain by maintaining grief as part of the framework within which we think our international ties? If we stay with the sense of loss, are we left feeling only passive and powerless, as some might fear? Or are we, rather, returned to a sense of human vulnerability, to our collective responsibility for the physical lives of one another? Could the experience of a dislocation of First World safety not condition the insight into the radically inequitable ways that corporeal vulnerability is distributed globally? To foreclose that vulnerability, to banish it, to make ourselves secure at the expense of every other human consideration is to eradicate one of the most important resources from which we must take our bearings and find our way.¶ To grieve, and to make grief itself into a resource for politics, is not to be resigned to inaction, but it may be understood as the slow process by which we develop a point of identification with suffering itself. The disorientation of grief- “Who have I become?” or, indeed, “What is left of me?” “What is it in the Other that I have lost?” – posits the “I” in the mode of unknowingness.¶ But this can be a point of departure for a new understanding if the narcissistic preoccupation of melancholia can be moved into a consideration of the vulnerability of others. Then we might critically evaluate and oppose the conditions under which certain human lives are more vulnerable than others, and thus certain human lives are more grievable than others. From where might a principle emerge by which we vow to protect others from the kinds of violence we have suffered, if not from an apprehension of a common human vulnerability? I do not mean to deny that vulnerability is differentiated, that it is allocated differentially across the globe. I do not even mean to presume upon a common notion of the human, although to speak in its “name” is already (or perhaps only) to fathom its possibility.¶ I am referring to violence, vulnerability, and mourning, but there is a more general conception of the human with which I am trying to work here, one in which we are, from the start, given over to the other, one in which we are, from the start, even prior to individuation itself and, by virtue of bodily requirements, given over to some set of primary others: this conception means that we are vulnerable to those we are too young to know and to judge and, hence, vulnerable to violence; but also vulnerable to another range of touch, a range that includes the eradication of our being at the one end, and the physical support for our lives at the other.¶ Although I am insisting on referring to a common human vulnerability, one that emerges with life itself, I also insist that we cannot recover the source of this vulnerability: it precedes the formation of the “I.” This is a condition, a condition of being laid bare from the start and with which we cannot argue. I mean, that we can argue with it, but we are perhaps foolish, if not dangerous, when we do. I do not mean to suggest that the necessary support for a newborn is always there. Clearly, it is not, and for some this primary scene is a scene of abandonment or violence or starvation, that theirs are bodies given over to nothing, or to brutality, or to no sustenance.¶ We cannot understand vulnerability as a deprivation, however, unless we understand the need that is thwarted. Such infants still must be apprehended as given over, as given over to no one or to some insufficient support, or to an abandonment. It would be difficult, it not impossible, to understand how humans suffer from oppression without seeing how this primary condition is exploited and exploitable, thwarted and denied. The condition of primary vulnerability, of being given over to the touch of the other, even if there is no other there, and no support for our lives, signifies a primary helplessness and need, one to which any society must attend. Lives are supported and maintained differently, and there are radically different ways in which human physical vulnerability is distributed across the globe. Certain lives will be highly protected, and the abrogation of their claims to sanctity will be sufficient to mobilize the forces of war. Other lives will not find such fast and furious support and will not even qualify as “grievable.”¶ A hierarchy of grief could no doubt be enumerated. We have seen it already, in the genre of the obituary, where lives are quickly tidied up and summarized, humanized, usually married, or on the way to be, heterosexual, happy, monogamous. But this is just a sign of another differential relation to life, since we seldom, if ever, hear the names of the thousands of Palestinians who have died by the Israeli military with United States support, or any number of Afghan people, children and adults. Do they have names, faces, personal histories, family, favorite hobbies, slogans by which they life? What defense against the apprehension of loss is at work in the blithe way in which we accept deaths caused by military means with a shrug or with self-righteousness or with clear vindictiveness? To what extent have Arab peoples, predominantly practitioners of Islam, fallen outside the “human” as it has been naturalized in its “Western” mold by the contemporary workings of humanism? What are the cultural contours of the human at work here? How do our cultural frames for thinking the human set limits on the kinds of losses we can avow as loss? After all, if someone is lost, and that person is not someone, then what and where is the loss, and how does mourning take place?¶ This last is surely a question that lesbian, gay, and hi-studies have asked in relation to violence against sexual minorities; that transgendered people have asked as they are singled out for harassment and sometimes murder; that intersexed people have asked, whose formative years are so often marked by unwanted violence against their bodies in the name of a normative notion of the human, a normative notion of what the body of a human must be. This question is no doubt, as well, the basis of a profound affinity between movements centering on gender and sexuality and efforts to counter the normative human morphologies and capacities that condemn or efface those who are physically challenged. It must also be part of the affinity with anti-racist struggles, given the racial differential that undergirds the culturally viable notions of the human, ones that we see acted out in dramatic and terrifying ways in the global arena at the present time.¶ I am referring not only to humans not regarded as humans, and thus to a restrictive conception of the human that is based upon their exclusion. It is not a matter of a simple entry of the excluded into an established ontology, but an insurrection at the level of ontology, a critical opening up of the questions, What is real? Whose lives are real? How might reality be remade? Those who are unreal have, in a sense, already suffered the violence of derealization. What, then, is the relation between violence and those lives considered as "unreal"? Does violence effect that unreality? Does violence take place on the condition of that unreality?¶ If violence is done against those who are unreal, then, from the perspective of violence, it fails to injure or negate those lives since those lives are already negated. But they have a strange way of remaining animated and so must be negated again (and again). They cannot be mourned because they are always already lost or, rather, never "were," and they must be killed, since they seem to live on, stubbornly, in this state of deadness. Violence renews itself in the face of the apparent inexhaustibility of its object. The derealization of the "Other" means that it is neither alive nor dead, but interminably spectral. The infinite paranoia that imagines the war against terrorism as a war without end will be one that justifies itself endlessly in relation to the spectral infinity of its enemy, regardless of whether or not there are established grounds to suspect the continuing operation of terror cells with violent aims.¶ How do we understand this derealization? It is one thing to argue that first, on the level of discourse, certain lives are not considered lives at all, they cannot be humanized, that they fit no dominant frame for the human, and that their dehumanization occurs first, at this level, and that this level then gives rise to a physical violence that in some sense delivers the message of dehumanization that is already at work in the culture. It is another thing to say that discourse itself effects violence through omission. If 2oo,ooo Iraqi children were killed during the Gulf War and its aftermath/ do we have an image, a frame for any of those lives, singly or collectively? Is there a story we might find about those deaths in the media? Are there names attached to those children?¶ There are no obituaries for the war casualties that the United States inflicts, and there cannot be. If there were to be an obituary, there would have had to have been a life, a life worth noting, a life worth valuing and preserving, a life that qualifies for recognition. Although we might argue that it would be impractical to write obituaries for all those people, or for all people, I think we have to ask, again and again, how the obituary functions as the instrument by which grievability is publicly distributed. It is the means by which a life becomes, or fails to become, a publicly grievable life, an icon for national self-recognition, the means by which a life becomes noteworthy. As a result, we have to consider the obituary as an act of nation-building. The matter is not a simple one, for, if a life is not grievable, it is not quite a life; it does not qualify as a life and is not worth a note. It is already the unburied, if not the unburiable.¶ It is not simply, then, that there is a "discourse" of dehumanization that produces these effects, but rather that there is a limit to discourse that establishes the limits of human intelligibility. It is not just that a death is poorly marked, but that it is unmarkable. Such a death vanishes, not into explicit discourse, but in the ellipses by which public discourse proceeds. The queer lives that vanished on September I I were not publicly welcomed into the idea of national identity built in the obituary pages, and their closest relations were only belatedly and selectively (the marital norm holding sway once again) made eligible for benefits. But this should come as no surprise, when we think about how few deaths from AIDS were publicly grievable losses, and how, for instance, the extensive deaths now taking place in Africa are also, in the media, for the most part unmarkable and ungrievable.
The Aff challenges the hegemonic ideology of the status quo by rejecting sacrificial rationalizations. That logic is the basis for colonialism, slavery, genocide, war, and global poverty. Santos 3 2003, Boaventura de Souza Santos is a Professor of Sociology at the University of Coimbra, “Collective Suicide?”, Bad Subjects, Issue # 63 , http://www.ces.fe.uc.pt/opiniao/bss/072en.php According to Franz Hinkelammert, the West has repeatedly been under the illusion that it should try to save humanity by destroying part of it. This is a salvific and sacrificial destruction, committed in the name of the need to radically materialize all the possibilities opened up by a given social and political reality over which it is supposed to have total power. This is how it was in colonialism, with the genocide of indigenous peoples, and the African slaves. This is how it was in the period of imperialist struggles, which caused millions of deaths in two world wars and many other colonial wars. This is how it was in Stalinism, with the Gulag and in Nazism, with the holocaust. And now today, this is how it is in neoliberalism, with the collective sacrifice of the periphery and even the semiperiphery of the world system. With the war against Iraq, it is fitting to ask whether what is in progress is a new genocidal and sacrificial illusion, and what its scope might be. It is above all appropriate to ask if the new illusion will not herald the radicalization and the ultimate perversion of the western illusion: destroying all of humanity in the illusion of saving it. Sacrificial genocide arises from a totalitarian illusion that is manifested in the belief that there are no alternatives to the present-day reality and that the problems and difficulties confronting it arise from failing to take its logic of development to its ultimate consequences. If there is unemployment, hunger and death in the Third World, this is not the result of market failures; instead, it is the outcome of the market laws not having been fully applied. If there is terrorism, this is not due to the violence of the conditions that generate it; it is due, rather, to the fact that total violence has not been employed to physically eradicate all terrorists and potential terrorists. This political logic is based on the supposition of total power and knowledge, and on the radical rejection of alternatives; it is ultra-conservative in that it aims to infinitely reproduce the status quo. Inherent to it is the notion of the end of history. During the last hundred years, the West has experienced three versions of this logic, and, therefore, seen three versions of the end of history: Stalinism, with its logic of insuperable efficiency of the plan; Nazism, with its logic of racial superiority; and neoliberalism, with its logic of insuperable efficiency of the market. The first two periods involved the destruction of democracy. The last one trivializes democracy, disarming it in the face of social actors sufficiently powerful to be able to privatize the State and international institutions in their favour. I have described this situation as a combination of political democracy and social fascism. One current manifestation of this combination resides in the fact that intensely strong public opinion, worldwide, against the war is found to be incapable of halting the war machine set in motion by supposedly democratic rulers. At all these moments, a death drive, a catastrophic heroism, predominates, the idea of a looming collective suicide, only preventable by the massive destruction of the other. Paradoxically, the broader the definition of the other and the efficacy of its destruction, the more likely collective suicide becomes. In its sacrificial genocide version, neoliberalism is a mixture of market radicalization, neoconservatism and Christian fundamentalism. Its death drive takes a number of forms, from the idea of "discardable populations", referring to citizens of the Third World not capable of being exploited as workers and consumers, to the concept of "collateral damage" , to refer to the deaths, as a result of war, of thousands of innocent civilians. The last, catastrophic heroism, is quite clear on two facts: according to reliable calculations by the Non-Governmental Organization MEDACT, in London, between 48 and 260 thousand civilians will die during the war and in the three months after (this is without there being civil war or a nuclear attack); the war will cost 100 billion dollars, enough to pay the health costs of the world's poorest countries for four years. Is it possible to fight this death drive? We must bear in mind that, historically, sacrificial destruction has always been linked to the economic pillage of natural resources and the labor force, to the imperial design of radically changing the terms of economic, social, political and cultural exchanges in the face of falling efficiency rates postulated by the maximalist logic of the totalitarian illusion in operation. It is as though hegemonic powers, both when they are on the rise and when they are in decline, repeatedly go through times of primitive accumulation, legitimizing the most shameful violence in the name of futures where, by definition, there is no room for what must be destroyed. In today's version, the period of primitive accumulation consists of combining neoliberal economic globalization with the globalization of war. The machine of democracy and liberty turns into a machine of horror and destruction.
Underview 1 Their disads will surely be ridiculous. (A) Ethics – WTO countries are complicit in hoarding lifesaving medicines from the world’s most vulnerable people. Apply a VERY high standard of proof to any rationalization of that policy.
(B) Compound Probability - Multiplied probabilities of long link chains have negligible net probabilities. This is the slippery slope fallacy.
(C) Causal Direction - They will say the fractional probability of a huge impact still has a large expected value, but it’s impossible to determine the direction of low-probability links. Does the butterfly flapping its wings cause the hurricane or prevent it? Disregard tiny-probability links because they don’t guide decision-making.
(D) Complexity – the DA presents a simplistic and deterministic narrative that fails to account for the myriad confounding factors that can disrupt or reverse the link chain of the DA. The most important of these is the probability that people will recognize the dangerous path they’re on and change course, e.g. leaders backing down during the Cuban Missile Crisis.
(E) Decision Gridlock – Every course of action or inaction has a negligible possibility of causing extinction. This makes it impossible to prioritize averting existential risk over all else because such risk is unavoidable. We have no choice but to prioritize REALISTIC probabilities.