1ac- labor ac 1nc- disclosure theory t nebel innovation da case 1ar- all 2nr- disclosure case 2ar- case disclosure
Meadows
1
Opponent: Diamond Bar NC | Judge: Ribera, Claudia
1ac- Covid 1nc- BioTech da Climate patents da BioTerror PIC India soft power da case 1ar- all 1nc- Climate patents da case 2ar- all
Meadows
4
Opponent: Lexington FM | Judge: Hernandez, Santalucia
1ac- Covid 1nc- Global Instability da Innovation da China Heg da case 1ar- all 2nr- China Heg da case 2ar- case China Heg da
Meadows
5
Opponent: Harvard Westlake AD | Judge: Nyberg, Amy
1ac- Covid 2nc- T-reductions Pharma da Native Patent Rights cp case 1ar- all 2nr- T-reductions Native Patent Rights cp case 2ar- case Native Patent Rights cp T-reductions
UT
4
Opponent: Los Altos BF | Judge: McLoughlin, Samantha
1ac- brazil 1nc- t-a cap k bolsonaro da case 1ar- all 2nr- da case 2ar- case da
UT
2
Opponent: Dripping Springs CD | Judge: Das, Sreyaash
1ac- brazil 1nc- social net cp healthcare da military da case 1ar- all 2nr- all 2ar- perm
To modify or delete round reports, edit the associated round.
Cites
Entry
Date
0 - contact
Tournament: x | Round: 1 | Opponent: x | Judge: x spisarik2023@ihs.immaculateheart.org 3107102366
12/3/21
0-Util
Tournament: Damus Hollywood Invitational | Round: 1 | Opponent: Brentwood ZL | Judge: Sachin Shah The standard is maximizing expected wellbeing First, pleasure and pain are intrinsically valuable. People consistently regard pleasure and pain as good reasons for action, despite the fact that pleasure doesn’t seem to be instrumentally valuable for anything. Moen 16 Ole Martin Moen, Research Fellow in Philosophy at University of Oslo “An Argument for Hedonism” Journal of Value Inquiry (Springer), 50 (2) 2016: 267–281 SJDI Let us start by observing, empirically, that a widely shared judgment about intrinsic value and disvalue is that pleasure is intrinsically valuable and pain is intrinsically disvaluable. On virtually any proposed list of intrinsic values and disvalues (we will look at some of them below), pleasure is included among the intrinsic values and pain among the intrinsic disvalues. This inclusion makes intuitive sense, moreover, for there is something undeniably good about the way pleasure feels and something undeniably bad about the way pain feels, and neither the goodness of pleasure nor the badness of pain seems to be exhausted by the further effects that these experiences might have. “Pleasure” and “pain” are here understood inclusively, as encompassing anything hedonically positive and anything hedonically negative.2 The special value statuses of pleasure and pain are manifested in how we treat these experiences in our everyday reasoning about values. If you tell me that you are heading for the convenience store, I might ask: “What for?” This is a reasonable question, for when you go to the convenience store you usually do so, not merely for the sake of going to the convenience store, but for the sake of achieving something further that you deem to be valuable. You might answer, for example: “To buy soda.” This answer makes sense, for soda is a nice thing and you can get it at the convenience store. I might further inquire, however: “What is buying the soda good for?” This further question can also be a reasonable one, for it need not be obvious why you want the soda. You might answer: “Well, I want it for the pleasure of drinking it.” If I then proceed by asking “But what is the pleasure of drinking the soda good for?” the discussion is likely to reach an awkward end. The reason is that the pleasure is not good for anything further; it is simply that for which going to the convenience store and buying the soda is good.3 As Aristotle observes: “We never ask a man what his end is in being pleased, because we assume that pleasure is choice worthy in itself.”4 Presumably, a similar story can be told in the case of pains, for if someone says “This is painful!” we never respond by asking: “And why is that a problem?” We take for granted that if something is painful, we have a sufficient explanation of why it is bad. If we are onto something in our everyday reasoning about values, it seems that pleasure and pain are both places where we reach the end of the line in matters of value. Moreover, only pleasure and pain are intrinsically valuable. All other values can be explained with reference to pleasure; Occam’s razor requires us to treat these as instrumentally valuable. Moen 16 Ole Martin Moen, Research Fellow in Philosophy at University of Oslo “An Argument for Hedonism” Journal of Value Inquiry (Springer), 50 (2) 2016: 267–281 SJDI I think several things should be said in response to Moore’s challenge to hedonists. First, I do not think the burden of proof lies on hedonists to explain why the additional values are not intrinsic values. If someone claims that X is intrinsically valuable, this is a substantive, positive claim, and it lies on him or her to explain why we should believe that X is in fact intrinsically valuable. Possibly, this could be done through thought experiments analogous to those employed in the previous section. Second, there is something peculiar about the list of additional intrinsic values that counts in hedonism’s favor: the listed values have a strong tendency to be well explained as things that help promote pleasure and avert pain. To go through Frankena’s list, life and consciousness are necessary presuppositions for pleasure; activity, health, and strength bring about pleasure; and happiness, beatitude, and contentment are regarded by Frankena himself as “pleasures and satisfactions.” The same is arguably true of beauty, harmony, and “proportion in objects contemplated,” and also of affection, friendship, harmony, and proportion in life, experiences of achievement, adventure and novelty, self-expression, good reputation, honor and esteem. Other things on Frankena’s list, such as understanding, wisdom, freedom, peace, and security, although they are perhaps not themselves pleasurable, are important means to achieve a happy life, and as such, they are things that hedonists would value highly. Morally good dispositions and virtues, cooperation, and just distribution of goods and evils, moreover, are things that, on a collective level, contribute a happy society, and thus the traits that would be promoted and cultivated if this were something sought after. To a very large extent, the intrinsic values suggested by pluralists tend to be hedonic instrumental values. Indeed, pluralists’ suggested intrinsic values all point toward pleasure, for while the other values are reasonably explainable as a means toward pleasure, pleasure itself is not reasonably explainable as a means toward the other values. Some have noticed this. Moore himself, for example, writes that though his pluralistic theory of intrinsic value is opposed to hedonism, its application would, in practice, look very much like hedonism’s: “Hedonists,” he writes “do, in general, recommend a course of conduct which is very similar to that which I should recommend.”24 Ross writes that “it is quite certain that by promoting virtue and knowledge we shall inevitably produce much more pleasant consciousness. These are, by general agreement, among the surest sources of happiness for their possessors.”25 Roger Crisp observes that “those goods cited by non-hedonists are goods we often, indeed usually, enjoy.”26 What Moore and Ross do not seem to notice is that their observations give rise to two reasons to reject pluralism and endorse hedonism. The first reason is that if the suggested non-hedonic intrinsic values are potentially explainable by appeal to just pleasure and pain (which, following my argument in the previous chapter, we should accept as intrinsically valuable and disvaluable), then—by appeal to Occam’s razor—we have at least a pro tanto reason to resist the introduction of any further intrinsic values and disvalues. It is ontologically more costly to posit a plurality of intrinsic values and disvalues, so in case all values admit of explanation by reference to a single intrinsic value and a single intrinsic disvalue, we have reason to reject more complicated accounts. The fact that suggested non-hedonic intrinsic values tend to be hedonistic instrumental values does not, however, count in favor of hedonism solely in virtue of being most elegantly explained by hedonism; it also does so in virtue of creating an explanatory challenge for pluralists. The challenge can be phrased as the following question: If the non-hedonic values suggested by pluralists are truly intrinsic values in their own right, then why do they tend to point toward pleasure and away from pain?27 Moral uncertainty means preventing extinction should be our highest priority. Bostrom 12 Nick Bostrom. Faculty of Philosophy and Oxford Martin School University of Oxford. “Existential Risk Prevention as Global Priority.” Global Policy (2012) These reflections on moral uncertainty suggest an alternative, complementary way of looking at existential risk; they also suggest a new way of thinking about the ideal of sustainability. Let me elaborate.¶ Our present understanding of axiology might well be confused. We may not now know — at least not in concrete detail — what outcomes would count as a big win for humanity; we might not even yet be able to imagine the best ends of our journey. If we are indeed profoundly uncertain about our ultimate aims, then we should recognize that there is a great option value in preserving — and ideally improving — our ability to recognize value and to steer the future accordingly. Ensuring that there will be a future version of humanity with great powers and a propensity to use them wisely is plausibly the best way available to us to increase the probability that the future will contain a lot of value. To do this, we must prevent any existential catastrophe. Reducing the risk of extinction is always priority number one. Bostrom 12 Faculty of Philosophy and Oxford Martin School, University of Oxford., Existential Risk Prevention as Global Priority. Forthcoming book (Global Policy). MP. http://www.existenti...org/concept.pdf Even if we use the most conservative of these estimates, which entirely ignores the possibility of space colonization and software minds, we find that the expected loss of an existential catastrophe is greater than the value of 10^16 human lives. This implies that the expected value of reducing existential risk by a mere one millionth of one percentage point is at least a hundred times the value of a million human lives. The more technologically comprehensive estimate of 10 54 humanbrain-emulation subjective life-years (or 10 52 lives of ordinary length) makes the same point even more starkly. Even if we give this allegedly lower bound on the cumulative output potential of a technologically mature civilization a mere 1 chance of being correct, we find that the expected value of reducing existential risk by a mere one billionth of one billionth of one percentage point is worth a hundred billion times as much as a billion human lives. One might consequently argue that even the tiniest reduction of existential risk has an expected value greater than that of the definite provision of any ordinary good, such as the direct benefit of saving 1 billion lives. And, further, that the absolute value of the indirect effect of saving 1 billion lives on the total cumulative amount of existential risk—positive or negative—is almost certainly larger than the positive value of the direct benefit of such an action.
11/7/21
JanFeb- China AC
Tournament: CPS | Round: 1 | Opponent: Carlsbad JM | Judge: Mork, Alexandra Plan: The appropriation of outer space by private entities in the People’s Republic of China is unjust. Chinese space industrial base is set to surpass the US Patel 21 (Neel, space reporter for MIT Technology Review, and I also write The Airlock newsletter, your number one source for everything happening off this planet. Before joining, he worked as a freelance science and technology journalist, contributing stories to Popular Science, The Daily Beast, Slate, Wired, the Verge, and elsewhere. Prior to that, he was an associate editor for Inverse, where I grew and led the website’s space coverage.) “China’s surging private space industry is out to challenge the US” MIT Technology Review, 1/21/2021. https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/01/21/1016513/china-private-commercial-space-industry-dominance/ BC How did China get here—and why? Until recently, China’s space activity has been overwhelmingly dominated by two state-owned enterprises: the China Aerospace Science and Industry Corporation Limited (CASIC) and the China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation (CASC). A few private space firms have been allowed to operate in the country for a while: for example, there’s the China Great Wall Industry Corporation Limited (in reality a subsidiary of CASC), which has provided commercial launches since it was established in 1980. But for the most part, China’s commercial space industry has been nonexistent. Satellites were expensive to build and launch, and they were too heavy and large for anything but the biggest rockets to actually deliver to orbit. The costs involved were too much for anything but national budgets to handle. That all changed this past decade as the costs of making satellites and launching rockets plunged. In 2014, a year after Xi Jinping took over as the new leader of China, the Chinese government decided to treat civil space development as a key area of innovation, as it had already begun doing with AI and solar power. It issued a policy directive called Document 60 that year to enable large private investment in companies interested in participating in the space industry. “Xi’s goal was that if China has to become a critical player in technology, including in civil space and aerospace, it was critical to develop a space ecosystem that includes the private sector,” says Namrata Goswami, a geopolitics expert based in Montgomery, Alabama, who’s been studying China’s space program for many years. “He was taking a cue from the American private sector to encourage innovation from a talent pool that extended beyond state-funded organizations.” As a result, there are now 78 commercial space companies operating in China, according to a 2019 report by the Institute for Defense Analyses. More than half have been founded since 2014, and the vast majority focus on satellite manufacturing and launch services. For example, Galactic Energy, founded in February 2018, is building its Ceres rocket to offer rapid launch service for single payloads, while its Pallas rocket is being built to deploy entire constellations. Rival company i-Space, formed in 2016, became the first commercial Chinese company to make it to space with its Hyperbola-1 in July 2019. It wants to pursue reusable first-stage boosters that can land vertically, like those from SpaceX. So does LinkSpace (founded in 2014), although it also hopes to use rockets to deliver packages from one terrestrial location to another. Spacety, founded in 2016, wants to turn around customer orders to build and launch its small satellites in just six months. In December it launched a miniaturized version of a satellite that uses 2D radar images to build 3D reconstructions of terrestrial landscapes. Weeks later, it released the first images taken by the satellite, Hisea-1, featuring three-meter resolution. Spacety wants to launch a constellation of these satellites to offer high-quality imaging at low cost. To a large extent, China is following the same blueprint drawn up by the US: using government contracts and subsidies to give these companies a foot up. US firms like SpaceX benefited greatly from NASA contracts that paid out millions to build and test rockets and space vehicles for delivering cargo to the International Space Station. With that experience under its belt, SpaceX was able to attract more customers with greater confidence. Venture capital is another tried-and-true route. The IDA report estimates that VC funding for Chinese space companies was up to $516 million in 2018—far shy of the $2.2 billion American companies raised, but nothing to scoff at for an industry that really only began seven years ago. At least 42 companies had no known government funding. And much of the government support these companies do receive doesn’t have a federal origin, but a provincial one. “These companies are drawing high-tech development to these local communities,” says Hines. “And in return, they’re given more autonomy by the local government.” While most have headquarters in Beijing, many keep facilities in Shenzhen, Chongqing, and other areas that might draw talent from local universities. There’s also one advantage specific to China: manufacturing. “What is the best country to trust for manufacturing needs?” asks James Zheng, the CEO of Spacety’s Luxembourg headquarters. “It’s China. It’s the manufacturing center of the world.” Zheng believes the country is in a better position than any other to take advantage of the space industry’s new need for mass production of satellites and rockets alike. A strong space industrial base makes government sponsored operations in space economically feasible Patel 21 (Neel, space reporter for MIT Technology Review, and I also write The Airlock newsletter, your number one source for everything happening off this planet. Before joining, he worked as a freelance science and technology journalist, contributing stories to Popular Science, The Daily Beast, Slate, Wired, the Verge, and elsewhere. Prior to that, he was an associate editor for Inverse, where I grew and led the website’s space coverage.) “China’s surging private space industry is out to challenge the US” MIT Technology Review, 1/21/2021. https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/01/21/1016513/china-private-commercial-space-industry-dominance/ BC China’s space program might have been slowed by the pandemic in 2020, but it certainly didn’t stop. The year’s highlights included sending a rover to Mars, bringing moon rocks back to Earth, and testing out the next-generation crewed vehicle that should take taikonauts into orbit—and possibly to the moon—one day. But there were a few achievements the rest of the world might not have noticed. One was the November 7 launch of Ceres-1, a new type of rocket that, at just 62 feet in height, is capable of taking 770 pounds of payload into low Earth orbit. The launch sent the Tianqi 11 communications satellite into space. At first glance, the Ceres-1 launch might seem unremarkable. Ceres-1, however, wasn’t built and launched by China’s national program. It was a commercial rocket—only the second from a Chinese company ever to go into space. And the launch happened less than three years after the company was founded. The achievement is a milestone for China’s fledgling—but rapidly growing—private space industry, an increasingly critical part of the country’s quest to dethrone the US as the world’s preeminent space power. The rivalry between the US and China, whose space program has surged over the last two decades, is what most people mean when they refer to the 21st-century's space race. China is set to build a new space station later this year and will likely attempt to send its taikonauts to the moon before the decade ends. But these big-picture projects represent just one aspect of the country’s space ambitions. Increasingly, the focus is now on the commercial space industry as well. The nation's growing private space business is less focused on bringing prestige and glory to the nation and more concerned with reducing the cost of spaceflight, increasing its international influence—and making money. “The state is really great at large, ambitious projects like going to the moon or developing a large reconnaissance satellite,” says Lincoln Hines, a Cornell University researcher who focuses on Chinese foreign policy. “But it’s not responsive to meeting market needs”—one big way to encourage rapid technological growth and innovation. “I think the government thinks its commercial space sector can be complementary to the state,” he says. What are the market needs that Hines is referring to? Satellites, and rockets that can launch them into orbit. The space industry is undergoing a renaissance thanks to two big trends spurred by the commercial industry: we can make satellites for less money by making them smaller and using off-the-shelf hardware; and we can also make rockets for less money, by using less costly materials or reusing boosters after they’ve already flown (which SpaceX pioneered with its Falcon 9). These trends mean it is now cheaper to send stuff into space, and the services and data that satellites can offer have come down in price accordingly. China has seen an opportunity. A 2017 report by Bank of America Merrill Lynch estimates that the space industry could be worth up to $2.7 trillion by 2030. Setting foot on the moon and establishing a lunar colony might be a statement of national power, but securing a share of such a highly lucrative business is perhaps even more important to the country’s future. “In the future, there will be tens of thousands of satellites waiting to launch, which is a major opportunity for Galactic Energy” says Wu Yue, a company spokesperson. The problem is, China has to make up decades’ worth of ground lost to the West. The PRC uses the private sector to develop “wish-list” military assets and pursue counterbalancing with Russia Curcio 8/24 (Blaine, an Affiliate Senior Consultant for Euroconsult, based in Hong Kong. Since joining Euroconsult in 2018, he has contributed to a wide range of consulting missions and research reports, primarily covering the satcom sector globally, and broader space industry in China.) “Developments in China's Commercial Space Sector” The National Bureau of Asian Research, 8/24/2021. https://www.nbr.org/publication/developments-in-chinas-commercial-space-sector/ BC There has been discussion that China and Russia might partner to develop a lunar space station. How is this affecting China-Russia space cooperation as well as China’s commercial space sector? The Russian and U.S. space industries are the two oldest. They have a lot of space programs, experts, and related intellectual property and have been integrated into the space ecosystem. The Chinese space sector has developed primarily independently from the U.S.-Russia system. There has been some collaboration between China and Europe since the Wolf Amendment, but the absence of any kind of commercial space companies until recently, combined with the sensitivity around the International Traffic in Arms Regulations (a U.S. export-control regime), has forced the Chinese space ecosystem to develop pretty much independently. Russia, though a nation in decline, still likes projects involving space to bolster national pride. As a result, there has been a broader trend over the last five to ten years of a gradual realignment of the Russian space sector toward China in terms of both the government and the industrial base. More Russian companies are looking to China to buy products. Historically these companies have bought material from Europe, but they have recently turned more to China because of how weak the Russian ruble is, making imports more expensive. At the same time, Chinese companies are looking to Russia as an export market as well as to Russia and former Soviet states as investment opportunities. There is synergy, for example, between a Chinese rocket company that sees a relatively cheap Ukrainian rocket company with specific technology that it wants and a Ukrainian company that has all the technology, intellectual property, and “know-how,” but does not have that much money. The international lunar research station is beneficial to the commercial space sector to the extent that the national team would be occupied with the space station. As the national team gets bigger and takes on more sophisticated projects, this may help free up the kind of lower-end work companies were doing before and create more room for commercial competition. Moving forward, if there are massive lunar projects and a large Chinese space station, these developments are all things that will occupy a lot of top engineers and SOEs. There will be a need for a bigger commercial sector to contribute to emerging projects and complete the technological development of the more commercial, as opposed to institutional or national-level, projects in the space sector. What is the relationship between China’s space industry development and its Military-Civil Fusion strategy, and how is this affecting the commercial space sector? There are two main types of impact: the technological impact and the broader policy impact. As part of the Military-Civil Fusion strategy, the Chinese government wants to develop specific capabilities and emphasize specific technologies, which produce the technological impact. From that perspective, this strategy dictates what the commercial space sector does in terms of RandD, and the technological direction it takes. Zhuhai satellite is an example of this strategy. Since Zhuhai satellite was a spinoff from the Harbin Institute of Technology, which has a military link, there is a possibility that it is pursuing more space technologies that are related to Military-Civil Fusion. The second type is the broader policy impact. Because the central government makes Military-Civil Fusion a significant policy objective, there will be industrial bases that are built to support related technologies. More money and resources will be available for a startup that will support China’s strategic and tech ambitions. Because of the money and resources that are available, the development of the space industry will change as companies adapt their activities to what the government is emphasizing and to what kind of support they can get from different stakeholders in order to survive. China does not currently have a huge commercial space sector. The only real way that these companies can grow is either by selling products to the existing space sector—which is not particularly easy at this stage—or by raising money from existing shareholders and trying to guess where the market is moving. Scenario one is space militarization: Sino-Russian space alliance undermines existing treaties and greenlights space militarization Bowman and Thompson 3/31 (Bradley Bowman, the senior director of the Center on Military and Political Power at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies) (Jared Thompson, a U.S. Air Force major and visiting military analyst at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.) “Russia and China Seek to Tie America’s Hands in Space” Foreign Policy 3/31/2021. https://foreignpolicy.com/2021/03/31/russia-china-space-war-treaty-demilitarization-satellites/ BC Consider the actions of the United States’ two great-power adversaries when it comes to anti-satellite weapons. China and Russia have sprinted to develop and deploy both ground-based and space-based weapons targeting satellites while simultaneously pushing the United States to sign a treaty banning such weapons. To protect its vital space-based military capabilities—including communications, intelligence, and missile defense satellites—and effectively deter authoritarian aggression, Washington should avoid being drawn into suspect international treaties on space that China and Russia have no intention of honoring. The Treaty on the Prevention of the Placement of Weapons in Outer Space and of the Threat or Use of Force Against Outer Space Objects (PPWT), which Beijing and Moscow have submitted at the United Nations, is a perfect example. PPWT signatories commit “not to place any weapons in outer space.” It also says parties to the treaty may not “resort to the threat or use of force against outer space objects” or engage in activities “inconsistent” with the purpose of the treaty. On the surface, that sounds innocuous. Who, after all, wants an arms race in space? The reality, however, is that China and Russia are already racing to field anti-satellite weapons and have been for quite some time. “The space domain is competitive, congested, and contested,” Gen. James Dickinson, the head of U.S. Space Command, said in January. “Our competitors, most notably China and Russia, have militarized this domain.” Beijing already has an operational ground-based anti-satellite missile capability. People’s Liberation Army units are training with the missiles, and the U.S. Defense Department believes Beijing “probably intends to pursue additional anti-satellite weapons capable of destroying satellites up to geosynchronous Earth orbit.” That is where America’s most sensitive nuclear communication and missile defense satellites orbit and keep watch. Similarly, Moscow tested a ground-based anti-satellite weapon in December that could destroy U.S. or allied satellites in orbit. That attack capability augments a ground-based laser weapon that Russian President Vladimir Putin heralded in 2018. In a moment of candor, Russia’s defense ministry admitted the system was designed to “fight satellites.” To make matters worse, both countries are also working to deploy space-based—or so-called “on-orbit”—capabilities to attack satellites. Meanwhile, at the United Nations and other international forums, China and Russia are pushing the PPWT and advocating for a “no first placement” resolution—saying all governments should commit not to be the first to put weapons in space. Yet more than two years ago, the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency noted that both China and Russia were already putting in space capabilities that could be used as weapons. The PPWT would thus protect their weapons while tying Washington’s hands. In a thinly veiled attempt to mask their intentions, the two countries claim that their on-orbit capabilities are simply for peaceful purposes—for assessing the condition of broken satellites and conducting repairs as needed. This “dual-use” disguise permits Beijing and Moscow to put into orbit ostensibly peaceful or commercial capabilities that those countries can actually use to disable or destroy U.S. military and intelligence satellites. China, for example, has tested several so-called scavenger satellites, which use grappling arms to capture other satellites. China has also demonstrated the capability to maneuver a satellite around the geosynchronous belt, allowing its satellites to sidle up to other satellites in space. Not to be outdone, Russia deployed a pair of “nesting doll” satellites that shadowed a U.S. satellite in space. One Russian satellite birthed another, with Russia’s defense ministry claiming its purpose was to assess the “technical condition of domestic satellites.” But later, the second satellite conducted a weapons test, firing what appeared to be a space torpedo. The Kremlin never explained how a fast-moving one-time projectile provided superior inspection benefits compared with the other Russian satellite flying persistently nearby. Instead of falling prey to China and Russia’s treaty trap, Washington must urgently work with allies to improve spaced-based military and intelligence capabilities. A well-crafted treaty that clearly defines acceptable and unacceptable actions in space and includes tough and realistic inspection and verification mechanisms could promote security and stability. But the PPWT is decidedly not that kind of treaty. For starters, the proposed treaty does not explicitly prohibit the ground-based anti-satellite weapons that China and Russia have already fielded. Nor does the proposed treaty prevent the deployment of space-based weapons under the cloak of civilian or commercial capabilities. The PPWT also does not prohibit the development, testing, or stockpiling of weapons on Earth that could be quickly put into orbit. Even if these deficiencies were addressed, the PPWT lacks any verification plan to ensure compliance. Instead, the treaty calls for “transparency and confidence-building measures” implemented on a “voluntary basis.” In other words, Beijing and Moscow want the United States to trust but never verify. But then again, Americans should not be surprised by the PPWT. Moscow habitually seeks to use international arms control treaties to constrain the United States while viewing treaty strictures as optional when they become inconvenient or when the Kremlin sees an opportunity to seize a military advantage. For more than a decade before its demise in 2019, Moscow used the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty to constrain the United States while the Kremlin produced, flight-tested, and fielded a ground-launched intermediate-range cruise missile in direct contravention of the treaty. Beijing, for its part, often exhibits an allergy to serious international arms control treaties. The willingness of the Chinese Communist Party to support the PPWT is, therefore, cause for some additional reflection in Washington. So instead of falling prey to China and Russia’s PPWT trap, the United States must urgently work with allies to improve the resilience and redundancy of spaced-based military and intelligence capabilities. Washington should also advance nascent efforts to establish rules of the road in space. “There are really no norms of behavior in space,” Gen. John Raymond, the chief of space operations at U.S. Space Force, said this month. “It’s the wild, wild West.” In a notable and positive step, the U.N. General Assembly passed a British-introduced resolution in December that seeks to establish “norms, rules and principles of responsible behaviours” in space, which could reduce the chances for dangerous miscalculation. The vote was 164 in favor, including the United States—and a mere 12 opposed. Any guesses regarding who voted no? You guessed it: China and Russia. They were joined by their friends Iran, North Korea, Syria, Venezuela, and Cuba. So much for a Chinese and Russian desire to pursue constructive and peaceful policies in space. Their duplicity continues. Extinction – destruction of satellites, diminished future use of near space, and terrestrial war Gilliard 19 (Alexandra, a Senior Editor and interviewer of international relations experts for the International Affairs Forum. She holds an M.S. in Global Studies and International Relations from Northeastern University, and a B.A. in International Relations from Boston University, with expertise in conflict resolution, arms control, human rights issues, and the MENA region.) “What Are The Consequences Of Militarizing Outer Space?” Global Security Review, 6/10/2019. https://globalsecurityreview.com/consequences-militarization-space/ BC Consequences of Armament and Aggression in Space The consequences of weapons testing and aggression in space could span generations, and current technological advances only increase the urgency for policymakers to pursue a limitations treaty. As it stands, there are three major ramifications of a potential arms race in space: The destruction of satellites As both financial and technological barriers to the space services industry have decreased, the number of governmental and private investors with assets in space has inevitably increased. There is now an abundance of satellites in space owned by multiple states and corporations. These satellites are used to not only coordinate military actions, but to perform more mundane tasks, like obtaining weather reports, or managing on-ground communications, and navigation. Should states begin weapons testing in space, debris could cloud the orbit and make positioning new satellites impossible, disrupting our current way of life. More pressing, however, is that if a country’s satellites are successfully destroyed by an enemy state, military capabilities can be severely hindered or destroyed, leaving the country vulnerable to attack and unable to coordinate its military forces on the ground. Diminished future use of near space Whether caused by weapons testing or actual aggression, the subsequent proliferation of debris around the planet would damage our future ability to access space. Not only would debris act as shrapnel to preexisting assets in space, but it would also become much more difficult to launch satellites or rockets, hindering scientific research, space exploration, and commercial operations. From the past fifty-odd years of activity in space alone, the debris left behind in Earth’s orbital field has already become hazardous to spacecraft — a main reason why the U.S. and the Soviet Union did not continue with ASAT testing during the Cold War. If greater pollution were to occur, space itself could be become unusable, resulting in the collapse of the global economic system, air travel, and various communications. Power imbalances and proliferation on the ground Only so many states currently have access to space—which means any militarization be by the few, while other states would be left to fend for themselves. This would establish a clear power imbalance that could breed distrust among nations, resulting in a more insecure world and a veritable power keg primed for war. Additionally, deterrence measures taken by states with access to space would escalate, attempting to build up weapons caches not dissimilar to the nuclear weapons stockpiling activities of the Cold War. In any arms race, it is inevitable that more advanced weaponry is created. Yet, this does not only pose a risk to assets in space. Should a terrestrial war break out, this weaponry may eventually be deployed on the ground, and space-faring states would be able to capitalize on the power imbalance by using these new developments against states that have not yet broken into the space industry or developed equally-advanced weaponry. Nuclear war causes extinction – famine and climate change Starr 15 (Steven, Director of the University of Missouri’s Clinical Laboratory Science Program and a senior scientist at the Physicians for Social Responsibility) “Nuclear War, Nuclear Winter, and Human Extinction,” Federation of American Scientists, 10/14/2015 DD While it is impossible to precisely predict all the human impacts that would result from a nuclear winter, it is relatively simple to predict those which would be most profound. That is, a nuclear winter would cause most humans and large animals to die from nuclear famine in a mass extinction event similar to the one that wiped out the dinosaurs. Following the detonation (in conflict) of US and/or Russian launch-ready strategic nuclear weapons, nuclear firestorms would burn simultaneously over a total land surface area of many thousands or tens of thousands of square miles. These mass fires, many of which would rage over large cities and industrial areas, would release many tens of millions of tons of black carbon soot and smoke (up to 180 million tons, according to peer-reviewed studies), which would rise rapidly above cloud level and into the stratosphere. For an explanation of the calculation of smoke emissions, see Atmospheric effects and societal consequences of regional scale nuclear conflicts. The scientists who completed the most recent peer-reviewed studies on nuclear winter discovered that the sunlight would heat the smoke, producing a self-lofting effect that would not only aid the rise of the smoke into the stratosphere (above cloud level, where it could not be rained out), but act to keep the smoke in the stratosphere for 10 years or more. The longevity of the smoke layer would act to greatly increase the severity of its effects upon the biosphere. Once in the stratosphere, the smoke (predicted to be produced by a range of strategic nuclear wars) would rapidly engulf the Earth and form a dense stratospheric smoke layer. The smoke from a war fought with strategic nuclear weapons would quickly prevent up to 70 of sunlight from reaching the surface of the Northern Hemisphere and 35 of sunlight from reaching the surface of the Southern Hemisphere. Such an enormous loss of warming sunlight would produce Ice Age weather conditions on Earth in a matter of weeks. For a period of 1-3 years following the war, temperatures would fall below freezing every day in the central agricultural zones of North America and Eurasia. For an explanation of nuclear winter, see Nuclear winter revisited with a modern climate model and current nuclear arsenals: Still catastrophic consequences. Nuclear winter would cause average global surface temperatures to become colder than they were at the height of the last Ice Age. Such extreme cold would eliminate growing seasons for many years, probably for a decade or longer. Can you imagine a winter that lasts for ten years? The results of such a scenario are obvious. Temperatures would be much too cold to grow food, and they would remain this way long enough to cause most humans and animals to starve to death. Global nuclear famine would ensue in a setting in which the infrastructure of the combatant nations has been totally destroyed, resulting in massive amounts of chemical and radioactive toxins being released into the biosphere. We don’t need a sophisticated study to tell us that no food and Ice Age temperatures for a decade would kill most people and animals on the planet. Would the few remaining survivors be able to survive in a radioactive, toxic environment? Scenario two is hegemony: Chinese space leadership encourages ASAT proliferation – only the plan solves - China will not honor international commitments Rajagopalan 5/12 (Dr Rajeswari (Raji) Pillai Rajagopalan is the Director of the Centre for Security, Strategy and Technology (CSST) at the Observer Research Foundation, New Delhi. Dr Rajagopalan was the Technical Advisor to the United Nations Group of Governmental Experts (GGE) on Prevention of Arms Race in Outer Space (PAROS) (July 2018-July 2019). She was also a Non-Resident Indo-Pacific Fellow at the Perth USAsia Centre from April-December 2020. As a senior Asia defence writer for The Diplomat, she writes a weekly column on Asian strategic issues. Dr Rajagopalan joined ORF after a five-year stint at the National Security Council Secretariat (2003-2007), Government of India, where she was an Assistant Director. Prior to joining the NSCS, she was Research Officer at the Institute of Defence Studies and Analyses, New Delhi. She was also a Visiting Professor at the Graduate Institute of International Politics, National Chung Hsing University, Taiwan in 2012. Dr Rajagopalan has authored or edited nine books including Global Nuclear Security: Moving Beyond the NSS (2018), Space Policy 2.0 (2017), Nuclear Security in India (2015), Clashing Titans: Military Strategy and Insecurity among Asian Great Powers (2012), The Dragon's Fire: Chinese Military Strategy and Its Implications for Asia (2009). She has published research essays in edited volumes, and in peer reviewed journals such as India Review, Strategic Studies Quarterly, Air and Space Power Journal, International Journal of Nuclear Law and Strategic Analysis. She has also contributed essays to newspapers such as The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, Times of India, and The Economic Times. She has been invited to speak at international fora including the United Nations Disarmament Forum (New York), the UN Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space (COPUOS) (Vienna), Conference on Disarmament (Geneva), ASEAN Regional Forum (ARF) and the European Union.) “China’s irresponsible behaviour: A threat to space security” Observer Research Foundation, 5/12/2021. https://www.orfonline.org/expert-speak/chinas-irresponsible-behaviour-a-threat-to-space-security/ BC With China planning an ambitious space programme that includes its own space station, it is likely that there will be more such risky incidents in the future as well. It is somewhat disturbing because China’s space programme has advanced to a degree that it undertakes missions including landing on the South Pole-Aitken Basin (on the far side of the Moon), returning rocks from the moon, and an interplanetary mission to Mars, which clearly demonstrates China has the technical capability to design and launch rockets whose spent stages can land without putting others at risk. That it has not done so is odd. It is not exactly what can be characterised as responsible behaviour in space. Another example of China breaking norms and engaging in irresponsible behaviour in space is its ASAT test. China’s first successful anti-satellite (ASAT) test in January 2007, at an altitude of 850 kilometres, resulted in creating around 3,000 pieces of space debris. More significantly, it broke the unwritten moratorium that was in place for two decades. Beijing also started developing various counterspace capabilities with the goal of competing with the US. Nevertheless, each of China’s actions have led to a spiral effect, with others seeking to match China’s actions, especially in the Indo-Pacific region, given the contested nature of Asian and global geopolitics. For example, China’s repeated ASAT tests have led to the US’ own ASAT test (Operation Burnt Frost in 2008), and India’s ASAT test (Mission Shakti in 2019). India had no plans to go down this path until China’s first ASAT test, which became a gamechanging moment for India. Even so, India did not react to it for more than a decade, but the final decision was a carefully calibrated and a direct response to China’s growing military space capabilities and its less-than responsible behaviour. Other countries like Japan and France are also contemplating moves in this direction. Australia may not be far behind either. Even though it may not be linked to the uncontrolled re-entry of the Chinese rocket, Jonathan McDowell, an astrophysicist at the Astrophysics Center at Harvard University noted that “about six minutes after Tianhe and the CZ-5B separated, they both came close to the ISS—under 300 km, which given uncertainties in trajectory is a tad alarming.” Making this point, he added “it’s *possible* that this ISS/Tianhe close encounter was one of those unlikely coincidences. I’m open to that possibility, but they should still have spotted the closeness and warned NASA (or better, called a collision avoidance hold in the count).” Rocket re-entries are not uncommon, but space powers have tried to avoid the freefalls by usually conducting controlled re-entries so that they may fall in the ocean, or they may be directed towards the so-called “graveyard” orbits that may lie there for decades. But Jonathan McDowell, an astrophysicist at the Astrophysics Center at Harvard University argues that the Chinese rocket was designed in a manner that “leaves these big stages in low orbit.” And even in the case of controlled re-entries, there are failures sometimes and they can be dangerous too. SpaceX’s rocket debris landing on a farm in Washington in March this year is a case in point. Moriba Jah, an Associate Professor at The University of Texas at Austin argues in a media interview that such events are going to become more common, and will happen more frequently and, therefore, humanity should come together to “jointly manage near earth space as a commons in need of coordination, protocols, and practices to maximise safety, security, and sustainability.” On the NASA Administrator’s statement, Jah said this should not be “singling out China.” Certainly, this is not about apportioning blame, but China’s actions cannot be condoned either. What can be done? Given that usable orbits in space are finite in nature, there will need to be steps taken by all the space players to ensure that their actions do not contribute to further pollution of space and make it unusable in the near term. States have to invest in technologies that would aid in cleaning up and getting rid of some of the debris. States also need to come together in developing norms, rules of the road, and legally binding and political instruments on large rocket body re-entries. The Long March 5B episode has yet again rekindled the debate on the need for rules for rocket and large body re-entries. Brian Weeden of the Secure World Foundation, for instance, questioned why, despite all ranting about China’s rocket re-entry issues, the US State Department has “consistently opposed anything stronger than voluntary guidelines.” Weeden has provided a useful Twitter thread on the US hesitancy to get on board with legal agreements on outer space. One problem is that while the US abides by international obligations, other do not. This is a concern that Weeden notes “has a grain of truth” but adds the caveat that “reality is not that definitive”. While he is correct to note that the issue is complicated, it is also true that countries like China have a terrible track record when it comes to meeting their treaty commitments. China’s violation of its own commitments with respect to nuclear non-proliferation, or in the South China Sea and East China Sea are well-known. Given this history, it is difficult to believe that China will allow itself to be bound by any restraints on its space programme, even if it signs any of these agreements. But given the US’ almost allergic reaction to signing legal agreements that others like China may violate, it doesn’t hurt China to keep bringing up PPWT-like (Prevention of the Placement of Weapons in Outer Space, the Threat or Use of Force Against Outer Space Objects) measures every now and then. This puts the whole international community in a bind. If we have to ensure safe and uninterrupted access to space, creating a secure, sustainable, and predictable outer space framework is essential. But unless all states demonstrate a commitment to living up to existing rules and norms, creating new ones will be difficult. Chinese ASAT development emboldens Taiwan invasion – either US doesn’t follow through on its defense commitments, which kills alliances, or it defends Taiwan, which goes nuclear Chow and Kelley 8/21 (Brian G., policy analyst for the Institute of World Politics, Ph.D in physics from Case Western Reserve University, MBA and Ph.D in finance from the University of Michigan, and Brandon, graduate of Georgetown’s School of Foreign Service ) “China’s Anti-Satellite Weapons Could Conquer Taiwan—Or Start a War,” National Interest, 8/21/2021 JL If current trends hold, then China’s Strategic Support Force will be capable by the late 2020s of holding key U.S. space assets at risk. Chinese military doctrine, statements by senior officials, and past behavior all suggest that China may well believe threatening such assets to be an effective means of deterring U.S. intervention. If so, then the United States would face a type of “Sophie’s Choice”: decline to intervene, potentially leading allies to follow suit and Taiwan to succumb without a fight, thereby enabling Xi to achieve his goal of “peacefully” snuffing out Taiwanese independence; or start a war that would at best be long and bloody and might well even cross the nuclear threshold. This emerging crisis has been three decades in the making. In 1991, China watched from afar as the United States used space-enabled capabilities to obliterate the Iraqi military from a distance in the first Gulf War. The People’s Liberation Army quickly set to work developing capabilities targeted at a perceived Achilles’ heel of this new American way of war: reliance on vulnerable space systems. This project came to fruition with a direct ascent ASAT weapons test in 2007, but the test was limited in two key respects. First, it only reached low Earth orbit. Second, it generated thousands of pieces of long-lasting space junk, provoking immense international ire. This backlash appears to have taken China by surprise, driving it to seek new, more usable ASAT types with minimal debris production. Now, one such ASAT is nearing operational status: spacecraft capable of rendezvous and proximity operations (RPOs). Such spacecraft are inevitable and cannot realistically be limited. The United States, European Union, China, and others are developing them to provide a range of satellite services essential to the new space economy, such as in situ repairs and refueling of satellites and active removal of space debris. But RPO capabilities are dual-use: if a satellite can grapple space objects for servicing, then it might well be capable of grappling an adversary’s satellite to move it out of its servicing orbit. Perhaps it could degrade or disable it by bending or disconnecting its solar panels and antennas all while producing minimal debris. This is a serious threat, primarily because no international rules presently exist to limit close approaches in space. Left unaddressed, this lacuna in international law and space policy could enable a prospective attacker to pre-position, during peacetime, as many spacecraft as they wish as close as they wish to as many high-value targets as they wish. The result would be an ever-present possibility of sudden, bolt-from-the-blue attacks on vital space assets—and worse, on many of them at once. China has conducted at least half a dozen tests of RPO capabilities in space since 2008, two of which went on for years. Influential space experts have noted that these tests have plausible peaceful purposes and are in many cases similar to those conducted by the United States. This, however, does not make it any less important to establish effective legal, policy, and technical counters to their offensive use. Even if it were certain that these capabilities are intended purely for peaceful applications—and it is not at all clear that that is the case—China (or any other country) could at any time decide to repurpose these capabilities for ASAT use. There is still time to get out ahead of this threat, but likely not for much longer. China’s RPO capabilities have, thus far, lagged about five years behind those of the United States. There are reasons to believe this gap may close, but even assuming that it holds, we should expect to see China demonstrate an operational dual-use rendezvous spacecraft by around 2025. (The first instance of a U.S. commercial satellite docking with another satellite to change its orbit occurred in February 2020.) At the same time, China is expanding its capacity for rapid spacecraft manufacturing. The Global Times reported in January that China’s first intelligent mass production line is set to produce 240 small satellites per year. In April, Andrew Jones at SpaceNews reported that China is developing plans to quickly produce and loft a thirteen thousand-satellite national internet megaconstellation. It is not unreasonable to assume that China could manufacture two hundred small rendezvous ASAT spacecraft by 2029, possibly more. If this happens, and Beijing was to decide in 2029 to launch these two hundred small RPO spacecraft and position them in close proximity to strategically vital assets, then China would be able to simultaneously threaten disablement of the entire constellations of U.S. satellites for missile early warning (about a dozen satellites with spares included); communications in a nuclear-disrupted environment (about a dozen); and positioning, navigation, and timing (about three dozen); along with several dozen key communications, imagery, and meteorology satellites. Losing these assets would severely degrade U.S. deterrence and warfighting capabilities, yet once close pre-positioning has occurred such losses become almost impossible to prevent. For this reason, such pre-positioning could conceivably deter the United States from coming to Taiwan’s aid due to the prospect that intervention would spur China to disable these critical space systems. Without their support, the war would be much bloodier and costlier—a daunting proposition for any president. Should the United States fail to intervene, the consequences would be disastrous for both Washington and its allies in East Asia, and potentially the credibility of U.S. defense commitments around the globe. Worse yet, however, might be what could happen if China believes that such a threat will succeed but proves to be wrong. History is rife with examples of major wars arising from miscalculations such as this, and there are many pathways by which such a situation could easily escalate out of control to a full-scale conventional conflict or even to nuclear use. Space dominance is key to US hegemony Weichert 17 (Brandon J., a former Congressional staff member who holds a Master of Arts in Statecraft and National Security Affairs from the Institute of World Politics in Washington, D.C. He is the founder of The Weichert Report: An Online Journal of Geopolitics, and is currently completing a book on national security space policy.) “The High Ground: The Case for U.S. Space Dominance,” Science Direct, 2017. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0030438717300108 RR The global order is currently disordered. New states with completely different values from the United States are rising to prominence. Many of those states possess strategic cultures opposed to the American hegemony that has defined the post-Cold War order. Yet, the United States still maintains greater power, wealth, and capabilities than the other states seeking to displace her. For the United States to maintain its hegemonic position, it must also maintain a dominant position in space. As has been noted before, space is the ultimate high ground from which a state can dominate all of the other strategic domains (land, air, sea, and cyberspace). The United States has enjoyed the benefits from dominating this region. Yet, states like China and Russia are moving forward with their own plans not only to deny America access to space, but also to dominate this realm. These states would then benefit from commanding the high ground of space at America’s expense. Since at least the Nixon Administration, space has come to be viewed in a militarized light. By the end of the Cold War, space had not only been militarized, but many were searching for a way to weaponize it. Just as the drift toward militarization of space was inexorable, so too is the desire for weaponization. As rival states begin to hone their space skills, the United States should seek to obtain the first move advantage by capitalizing on its already sizable lead in space by weaponizing it first. The placing of weapons in orbit would not only increase the costs of attacking existing U.S. space architecture, but it would also lend itself to increasing global stability by raising the costs of aggressive behavior on belligerents. Whatever negatives the weaponization of space may have, nothing is more negative for America than to find itself losing its dominance of space to a state that has placed weapons in orbit first. To be passive and allow temporary budgetary constraints to dictate longterm space strategy will damage irrevocably the U.S. position in orbit. Our enemies are aware of our shortsighted preference for space superiority over dominance and are moving toward degrading the American advantage in space.23 Space dominance will not only rebuff rising states from challenging the United States, but it will also lend stability to the world order. This proactive stance was the goal of Ronald Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative. It must be the goal of U.S. policymakers today.24 US leadership in this decade solves global war and results in a peaceful end to Chinese revisionism Erickson and Collins 10/21 (Andrew, A professor of strategy in the U.S. Naval War College’s China Maritime Studies Institute)(Gabriel, Baker Botts fellow in energy and environmental regulatory affairs at Rice University’s Baker Institute for Public Policy) “A Dangerous Decade of Chinese Power Is Here,” Foreign Policy, 10/18/2021 U.S. and allied policymakers are facing the most important foreign-policy challenge of the 21st century. China’s power is peaking; so is the political position of Chinese President Xi Jinping and the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) domestic strength. In the long term, China’s likely decline after this peak is a good thing. But right now, it creates a decade of danger from a system that increasingly realizes it only has a short time to fulfill some of its most critical, long-held goals. Within the next five years, China’s leaders are likely to conclude that its deteriorating demographic profile, structural economic problems, and technological estrangement from global innovation centers are eroding its leverage to annex Taiwan and achieve other major strategic objectives. As Xi internalizes these challenges, his foreign policy is likely to become even more accepting of risk, feeding on his nearly decadelong track record of successful revisionist action against the rules-based order. Notable examples include China occupying and militarizing sub-tidal features in the South China Sea, ramping up air and maritime incursions against Japan and Taiwan, pushing border challenges against India, occupying Bhutanese and Tibetan lands, perpetrating crimes against humanity in Xinjiang, and coercively enveloping Hong Kong. The relatively low-hanging fruit is plucked, but Beijing is emboldened to grasp the biggest single revisionist prize: Taiwan. Beijing’s actions over the last decade have triggered backlash, such as with the so-called AUKUS deal, but concrete constraints on China’s strategic freedom of action may not fully manifest until after 2030. It’s remarkable and dangerous that China has paid few costs for its actions over the last 10 years, even as its military capacities have rapidly grown. Beijing will likely conclude that under current diplomatic, economic, and force postures for both “gray zone” and high-end scenarios, the 2021 to late 2020s timeframe still favors China—and is attractive for its 68-year-old leader, who seeks a historical achievement at the zenith of his career. U.S. planners must mobilize resources, effort, and risk acceptance to maximize power and thereby deter Chinese aggression in the coming decade—literally starting now—and innovatively employ assets that currently exist or can be operationally assembled and scaled within the next several years. That will be the first step to pushing back against China during the 2020s—a decade of danger—before what will likely be a waning of Chinese power. As Beijing aggressively seeks to undermine the international order and promotes a narrative of inevitable Chinese strategic domination in Asia and beyond, it creates a dangerous contradiction between its goals and its medium-term capacity to achieve them. China is, in fact, likely nearing the apogee of its relative power; and by 2030 to 2035, it will cross a tipping point from which it may never recover strategically. Growing headwinds constraining Chinese growth, while not publicly acknowledged by Beijing, help explain Xi’s high and apparently increasing risk tolerance. Beijing’s window of strategic opportunity is sliding shut. China’s skyrocketing household debt levels exemplify structural economic constraints that are emerging much earlier than they did for the United States when it had similar per capita GDP and income levels. Debt is often a wet blanket on consumption growth. A 2017 analysis published by the Bank for International Settlements found that once the household debt-to-GDP ratio in a sample of 54 countries exceeded 60 percent, “the negative long-run effects on consumption tend to intensify.” China’s household debt-to-GDP ratio surpassed that empirical danger threshold in late 2020. Rising debt service burdens thus threaten Chinese consumers’ capacity to sustain the domestic consumption-focused “dual circulation” economic model that Xi and his advisors seek to build. China’s growth record during the past 30 years has been remarkable, but past exceptionalism does not confer future immunity from fundamental demographic and economic headwinds. As debt levels continue to rise at an absolute level that has accelerated almost continuously for the past decade, China also faces a hollowing out of its working-age population. This critical segment peaked in 2010 and has since declined, with the rate from 2015 to 2020 nearing 0.6 percent annually—nearly twice the respective pace in the United States. While the United States faces demographic challenges of its own, the disparity between the respective paces of decline highlights its relative advantage compared to its chief geopolitical competitor. Moreover, the United States can choose to access a global demographic and talent dividend via immigration in a way China simply will not be able to do. Atop surging debt and worsening demographics, China also faces resource insecurity. China’s dependence on imported food and energy has grown steadily over the past two decades. Projections from Tsinghua University make a compelling case that China’s oil and gas imports will peak between 2030 and 2035. As China grapples with power shortages, Beijing has been reminded that supply shortfalls equal to even a few percentage points of total demand can have outsized negative impacts. Domestic resource insufficiency by itself does not hinder economic growth—as the Four Asian Tigers’ multi-decade boom attests. But China is in a different position. Japan and South Korea never had to worry about the U.S. Navy interdicting inbound tankers or grain ships. In fact, the United States was avowedly willing to use military force to protect energy flows from the Persian Gulf region to its allies. Now, as an increasingly energy-secure United States pivots away from the Middle East toward the Indo-Pacific, there is a substantial probability that energy shipping route protection could be viewed in much more differentiated terms—with oil and liquefied natural gas cargoes sailing under the Chinese flag viewed very differently than cargoes headed to buyers in other regional countries. Each of these dynamics—demographic downshifts, rising debts, resource supply insecurity—either imminently threatens or is already actively interfering with the CCP’s long-cherished goal of achieving a “moderately prosperous society.” Electricity blackouts, real estate sector travails (like those of Evergrande) that show just how many Chinese investors’ financial eggs now sit in an unstable $52 trillion basket, and a solidifying alignment of countries abroad concerned by aggressive Chinese behavior all raise questions about Xi’s ability to deliver. With this confluence of adverse events only a year before the next party congress, where personal ambition and survival imperatives will almost drive him to seek anointment as the only Chinese “leader for life” aside from former leader Mao Zedong, the timing only fuels his sense of insecurity. Xi’s anti-corruption campaigns and ruthless removal of potential rivals and their supporters solidified his power but likely also created a quiet corps of opponents who may prove willing to move against him if events create the perception he’s lost the “mandate of heaven.” Accordingly, the baseline assumption should be that Xi’s crown sits heavy and the insecurity induced is thereby intense enough to drive high-stake, high-consequence posturing and action. While Xi is under pressure to act, the external risks are magnified because so far, he has suffered few consequences from taking actions on issues his predecessors would likely never have gambled on. Reactions to party predations in Xinjiang and Hong Kong have been restricted to diplomatic-signaling pinpricks, such as sanctioning responsible Chinese officials and entities, most of whom lack substantial economic ties to the United States. Whether U.S. restraint results from a fear of losing market access or a belief that China’s goals are ultimately limited is not clear at this time. While the CCP issues retaliatory sanctions against U.S. officials and proclaims a triumphant outcome to its hostage diplomacy, these tactical public actions mask a growing private awareness that China’s latitude for irredentist action is poised to shrink. Not knowing exactly when domestic and external constraints will come to bite—but knowing that when Beijing sees the tipping point in its rearview mirror, major rivals will recognize it too—amplifies Xi and the party’s anxiety to act on a shorter timeline. Hence the dramatic acceleration of the last few years. Just as China is mustering its own strategic actions, so the United States must also intensify its focus and deployment of resources. The United States has taken too long to warm up and confront the central challenge, but it retains formidable advantages, agility, and the ability to prevail—provided it goes all-in now. Conversely, if Washington fails to marshal its forces promptly, its achievements after 2030 or 2035 will matter little. Seizing the 2020s would enable Beijing to cripple destroy the free and open rules-based order and entrench its position by economically subjugating regional neighbors (including key U.S. treaty allies) to a degree that could offset the strategic headwinds China now increasingly grapples with. Deterrence is never certain. But it offers the highest probability of avoiding the certainty that an Indo-Pacific region dominated by a CCP-led China would doom treaty allies, threaten the U.S. homeland, and likely set the stage for worse to come. Accordingly, U.S. planners should immediately mobilize resources and effort as well as accept greater risks to deter Chinese action over the critical next decade. The greatest threat is armed conflict over Taiwan, where U.S. and allied success or failure will be fundamental and reverberate for the remainder of the century. There is a high chance of a major move against Taiwan by the late 2020s—following an extraordinary ramp-up in People’s Liberation Army capabilities and before Xi or the party state’s power grasp has ebbed or Washington and its allies have fully regrouped and rallied to the challenge. So how should policymakers assess the potential risk of Chinese action against Taiwan reaching dangerous levels by 2027 or possibly even earlier—as emphasized in the testimonies of Adms. Philip Davidson and John Aquilino? In June, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Gen. Mark Milley testified to the House of Representatives that Xi had “challenged the People’s Liberation Army to accelerate their modernization programs to develop capabilities to seize Taiwan and move it from 2035 to 2027,” although China does not currently have the capabilities or intentions to conduct an all-out invasion of mainland Taiwan. U.S. military leaders’ assessments are informed by some of the world’s most extensive and sophisticated internal information. But what’s striking is open-source information available to everyone suggests similar things. Moving forward, a number of open-source indicators offer valuable “early warning lights” that can help policymakers more accurately calibrate both potential timetables and risk readings as the riskiest period of relations—from 2027 onward—approaches. Semiconductors supply self-sufficiency. Taiwan is the “OPEC+” of semiconductors, accounting for approximately two-thirds of global chip foundry capacity. A kinetic crisis would almost certainly disrupt—and potentially even completely curtail—semiconductor supplies. China presently spends even more each year on semiconductor imports (around $380 billion) than it does on oil, but much of the final products are destined for markets abroad. Taiwan is producing cutting-edge 5-nanometer and 7-nanometer chips, but China produces around 80 percent of the rest of the chips in the world. The closer China comes to being able to secure “good enough” chips for “inside China-only” needs, the less of a constraint this becomes. Crude oil, grain, strategic metals stockpiles—the commercial community (Planet Labs, Ursa Space Systems, etc.) has developed substantial expertise in cost-effectively tracking inventory changes for key input commodities needed to prepare for war. Electric vehicle fleet size—the amount of oil demand displaced by electric vehicles varies depending on miles driven, but the more of China’s car fleet that can be connected to the grid (and thus powered by blockade-resistant coal), the less political burden Beijing will face if it has to weather a maritime oil blockade imposed in response to actions it took against Taiwan or other major revisionist adventures. China’s passenger vehicle fleet, now approximately 225 million units strong, counts nearly 6.5 million electric vehicles among its ranks, the lion’s share of which are full-battery electrics. China’s State Council seeks to have 20 percent of new vehicles sold in China be electric vehicles by 2025. This target has already basically been achieved over the last few months, meaning at least 3.5 to 4 million (and eventually many more) new elective vehicles will enter China’s car fleet each year from now on. Local concentration of maritime vessels—snap exercises with warships, circumnavigations, and midline tests with swarms of aircraft highlight the growing scale of China’s threat to Taiwan. But these assets alone cannot invade the island. To capture and garrison, Beijing would need not only air, missile, naval, and special operations forces but also the ability to move lots of equipment and—at the very least—tens of thousands of personnel across the Taiwan Strait. As such, Beijing would have to amass maritime transport assets. And given the scale required, this would alter ship patterns elsewhere along China’s coast in ways detectable with artificial intelligence-facilitated imagery analysis from firms like Planet Labs (or national assets). Only the most formidable, agile American and allied deterrence can kick the can down the road long enough for China’s slowdown to shut the window of vulnerability. Holding the line is likely to require frequent and sustained proactive enforcement actions to disincentivize full-frontal Chinese assaults on the rules-based order in the Indo-Pacific. Chinese probing behavior and provocations must be met with a range of symmetric and asymmetric responses that impose real costs, such as publishing assets owned by Chinese officials abroad, cyber interference with China’s technological social control apparatus, “hands on” U.S. Navy and Coast Guard enforcement measures against Maritime Militia-affiliated vessels in the South China Sea, intensified air and maritime surveillance of Chinese naval bases, and visas and resettlement options to Hong Kongers, Uyghurs, and other threatened Chinese citizens—including CCP officials (and their families) who seek to defect and/or leave China. U.S. policymakers must make crystal clear to their Chinese counterparts that the engagement-above-all policies that dominated much of the past 25 years are over and the risks and costs of ongoing—and future—adventurism will fall heaviest on China. Bombastic Chinese reactions to emerging cohesive actions verify the approach’s effectiveness and potential for halting—and perhaps even reversing—the revisionist tide China has unleashed across the Asian region. Consider the recent nuclear submarine deal among Australia, the United States, and the United Kingdom. Beijing’s strong public reaction (including toleration of nuclear threats made by the state-affiliated Global Times) highlights the gap between its global information war touting China’s irresistible power and deeply insecure internal self-perception. Eight nuclear submarines will ultimately represent formidable military capacity, but for a bona fide superpower that believes in its own capabilities, they would not be a game-changer. Consider the U.S.-NATO reaction to the Soviet Union’s commissioning of eight Oscar I/II-class cruise missile subs during the late Cold War. These formidable boats each carried 24 SS-N-19 Granit missiles specifically designed to kill U.S. carrier battle groups, yet NATO never stooped to public threats. With diplomatic proofs of concepts like the so-called AUKUS deal, the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue, and hard security actions like the Pacific Deterrence Initiative now falling into place, it is time to comprehensively peak the non-authoritarian world’s protective action to hold the line in the Indo-Pacific. During this decade, U.S. policymakers must understand that under Xi’s strongman rule, personal political survival will dictate Chinese behavior. Xi’s recreation of a “one-man” system is a one-way, high-leverage bet that decisions he drives will succeed. If Xi miscalculates, a significant risk given his suppression of dissenting voices while China raises the stakes in its confrontation with the United States, the proverbial “leverage” that would have left him with outsized returns on a successful bet would instead amplify the downside, all of which he personally and exclusively signed for. Resulting tensions could very realistically undermine his status and authority, embolden internal challengers, and weaken the party. They could also foreseeably drive him to double down on mistakes, especially if those led to—or were made in the course of—a kinetic conflict. Personal survival measures could thus rapidly transmute into regional or even global threats. If Xi triggered a “margin call” on his personal political account through a failed high-stakes gamble, it would likely be paid in blood. Washington must thus prepare the U.S. electorate and its institutional and physical infrastructure as well as that of allies and partners abroad for the likelihood that tensions will periodically ratchet up to uncomfortable levels—and that actual conflict is a concrete possibility. Si vis pacem, para bellum (“if you want peace, prepare for war”) must unfortunately serve as a central organizing principle for a variety of U.S. and allied decisions during the next decade with China. Given these unforgiving dynamics and stakes, implications for U.S. planners are stark: Do whatever remains possible to “peak” for deterrent competition against China by the mid-to-late 2020s, and accept whatever trade-offs are available for doing so. Nothing we might theoretically achieve in 2035 and beyond is worth pursuing at the expense of China-credible capabilities we can realistically achieve no later than the mid-to-late 2020s. Be highly skeptical of heg bad arguments – their evidence is epistemologically suspect Gilsinan 20 (Kathy, a St. Louis-based contributing writer at The Atlantic. Her book, The Helpers: Profiles From the Front Lines of the Pandemic, comes out in March 2022. She was previously an editor at World Politics Review.) “How China Is Planning to Win Back the World” The Atlantic, 5/28/2020. https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2020/05/china-disinformation-propaganda-united-states-xi-jinping/612085/ BC This was a bizarre salvo in China’s propaganda war with the United States over the coronavirus, and it showcased Beijing’s latest information weaponry. Misleading spin, obfuscation, concealment, and hyperbole have been hallmarks of the Chinese Communist Party’s propaganda campaign, before and during the coronavirus era. But the pandemic appears to have given rise to more forceful attacks on foreign governments, as well as a new level of flirtation with outright disinformation. The party has never waged a global struggle quite like this one—and its battle with the U.S. over where the virus came from and whose failures made the pandemic worse have marked a serious deterioration in the two countries’ ties. Just months ago, Trump was praising Xi Jinping for how he handled the outbreak; now Trump is toying with cutting off relations with the Chinese government altogether. Seven decades ago, Mao Zedong publicly embraced a benevolent view of propaganda, as if he were a latter-day prophet spreading the communist gospel: “We should carry on constant propaganda among the people on the facts of world progress and the bright future ahead so that they will build their confidence in victory,” he mused in 1945. Just a few months ago, Xi Jinping urged state journalists to spread “positive propaganda” for the “correct guidance of public opinion.” Indeed, Beijing’s global propaganda efforts in recent years have been more about promoting China’s virtues than about spreading acrimony and confusion, à la Russian information ops and election meddling. Moscow wants a weakened and divided West, one that leaves Russia free to dominate its self-appointed sphere of influence—but Russia in 2016 was also an economically sluggish, oil-dependent nation with an economy a tenth the size of America’s, and lacked the resources to remake the world in its image. Beijing has a much bigger prize in mind and a much longer-term plan to get it: The contest isn’t about who gets to run the U.S. It’s about who deserves to run the world. And China, with its economy poised to overtake that of the United States, has already plowed billions into crafting an image as a responsible global leader, and billions more into cultivating global dependence on Chinese investments and Chinese markets. “While the Chinese Communist Party has long sought to be a global influencer, their efforts today are aggressive and sophisticated,” Bill Evanina, the director of the National Counterintelligence and Security Center, wrote in an email. “In short, they’re looking to reshape the history of coronavirus and protect their reputation at home and around the world.” Before the coronavirus hit, the party was becoming bolder in its propaganda efforts overseas as China grew richer and more powerful, trying to promote around the world the orthodoxy it enforced at home, about the beneficence and goodness of the CCP. This involved publicizing Chinese investments in the developing world, arm-twisting diplomats to toe a pro-China line, ruthlessly trying to stifle even other countries’ freedom to dissent—to the point of sanctioning Norway in 2010 when the Norwegian Nobel Committee awarded its peace prize to the imprisoned democracy activist Liu Xiaobo, who died in 2017. Xi has elevated the role of propaganda even further as he has vowed to build China’s power and prosperity, declaring, “The superiority of our system will be fully demonstrated through a brighter future.” The coronavirus outbreak and the global outcry against China’s failures of transparency and containment were not part of the plan. They sparked an international backlash that, by Beijing’s reported reckoning, was worse than anything it had faced since the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989. So Beijing leaped to seize, or at least confuse, the global story of the virus and its cast of heroes and villains. This has involved unleashing techniques Russia perfected during the U.S. presidential election in 2016. “We’ve seen China adopt Russian-style social media manipulation tactics like using bots and trolls to amplify disinformation on COVID-19,” Lea Gabrielle, the special envoy and coordinator for the State Department’s Global Engagement Center, wrote to me in an email. “Both countries repress information within their countries while taking advantage of the open and free information environments in democracies to push conspiracy theories that seek to undermine those environments.” As the world realized the virus was spreading out of control, Chinese diplomats, official media, and Twitter influencers launched an aggressive frenzy of defense, scrambling to preserve the Chinese Communist Party’s cratering reputation at home and overseas. And then they went on offense, with an assist from perhaps thousands of fake or hacked Twitter accounts, according to the investigative site ProPublica. The result was a coordinated campaign of attacks on the United States, and the spread of disinformation and confusion about where the virus really came from and whose screwup it was, really, that led to so much death. Other countries’ faltering responses to the virus have only bolstered this narrative, and the CCP has gleefully trumpeted America’s failures in particular. “Loose political system in the US allows more than 4000 people to die of pandemic every day,” Hu Xijin, the editor in chief of the Global Times newspaper, tweeted in April. “Americans are so good tempered.” Beyond the immediate crisis, this kind of narrative also serves the longer-term goal. In the words of Matt Schrader, a former China analyst with the Alliance for Securing Democracy at the German Marshall Fund: “Ultimately it’s about the Chinese Communist Party being the most powerful political entity on the planet.” The CCP has evolved in its themes and tactics over the course of the coronavirus information war so far, as it battles to bolster its own reputation and degrade that of the United States. The campaign has been widespread and highly focused at the same time. And the party has grown even more emboldened in the belief that it’s too big to fail, and that the reeling world may condemn it but still depends on it.
12/19/21
NovDec- Brazil adv 1
Tournament: UT | Round: 2 | Opponent: Dripping Springs CD | Judge: Das, Sreyaash Advantage one is Inequality— Strikes in Brazil are increasing— but they get shut down before they become effective Castanheira 11/12 (Tomas, a leading member of the Socialist Equality Group, which is fighting to build a Brazilian section of the International Committee of the Fourth International. He gave these remarks to the 2021 International May Day Online Rally held by the World Socialist Web Site and the ICFI on May 1.) “Brutal repression against striking public employees in São Paulo, Brazil” World Socialist Web Site, 11/12/21. https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2021/11/13/braz-n13.html RR On Wednesday afternoon, teachers and municipal workers in São Paulo faced violent repression by the police as they protested against a City Council vote on a “pension reform” that dramatically slashes their pensions. The area in front of the City Council building was turned into a battlefield, with the police firing a barrage of tear gas canisters and rubber bullets at the thousands of workers gathered there. Several were wounded by the gunfire, and one worker fractured her foot, remaining on the ground for hours without medical care as tear gas bombs landed by her side. The councillors proceeded with their session, which extended into the early morning hours, when they passed the criminal bill. Municipal workers had been on strike since October 15 against the austerity measures introduced by Mayor Ricardo Nunes of the Brazilian Democratic Movement (MDB). As soon as the vote ended, “at midnight and forty minutes,” declared SINPEEM, the largest union of municipal teachers, the unions declared the strike over. This was the second strike this year by São Paulo’s municipal educators, the largest section of public service workers. In February, they struck for four months against the unsafe reopening of schools. The large support for the new strike movement, which gathered tens of thousands in several demonstrations over the last month, is an expression of the growing opposition of the working class to the intolerable conditions being imposed by capitalism. In the last months, in addition to public employees in São Paulo, workers at General Motors in São Caetano do Sul went on strike against the company’s proposed contract and rejected the agreement presented by the union, which buried the strike against the will of the workers. More recently, truck drivers held a strike in protest over the increase in fuel prices that affected the operations of Brazil’s largest port in the city of Santos, on São Paulo’s coast. In the south of the country they were joined by demonstrations of app delivery and oil workers. The living standards of Brazilian workers have been seriously affected in the last two years. Brazil and the entire Latin American region were hit by the COVID-19 pandemic while already in the midst of a prolonged economic crisis, which has severely deepened. Unemployment levels have reached historic highs, more than 20 million have been thrown below the poverty line, and hunger has returned as a widespread social issue. Brazil’s working families struggle to make ends meet in the face of rampant inflation that has already reached 10.67 percent over the past 12 months. Economic desperation is compounded by the catastrophic results of the COVID-19 pandemic policies of fascistic President Jair Bolsonaro and the capitalist ruling class as a whole. The country already has more than 610,000 recorded deaths from the coronavirus and continues to record about 230 deaths daily, with significant levels of under-reporting. But across the country, local governments of all political parties are promoting an end to minimal mitigation measures, including an end to mask mandates in public places and the imposition of mandatory face-to-face education for all children. As the WSWS reported, there was a widespread revolt against these inhumane conditions imposed by Brazil’s ruling class on the part of São Paulo’s municipal workers. Their anger was even greater in the face of the insistent and voracious attacks by the São Paulo City Hall and the endless betrayals by the unions that claim to represent them. Workers have been fighting attempts to scrap their pensions since at least 2016, when a proposed pension reform was presented by then-Mayor Fernando Haddad of the Workers Party (PT). The attacks were intensified by his successor, João Doria of the Brazilian Social Democracy Party (PSDB), now governor of São Paulo, who brought the pension reform known as “ Sampaprev ” to a vote in March 2018. Public employees responded with a strike and massive street demonstrations, which led to the postponement of the vote on the bill. At that time, the unions called for a “suspension” of the strike, knowing that sooner or later the bill would be brought to a vote again. The lifelong president of the SINPEEM union, Claudio Fonseca of the Citizenship party, a successor to the Stalinist Communist Party, was then a city councillor. The unions waited for Fonseca’s colleagues in the Council to convene, amid the 2018 Christmas celebrations, a new session to approve Sampaprev to call for new demonstrations. Just like this week, the public employees were barbarically repressed while the project was being approved by the councillors. Amid a rebellious mood among the workers, the unions held an assembly that voted to call a strike at the beginning of the 2019 school year. The 2019 strike, which fought for the repeal of the recently approved pension reform, once again assumed massive proportions and was ended in a rigged vote by SINPEEM and its allies, who trampled on the decision of the majority of workers who voted to continue the movement. The same scam was applied by the unions in the strike against the unsafe reopening of schools, this time in an online meeting. After increasing the retirement contribution rates for active employees in 2018, thus eroding their salaries, the MDB government extended the attack to already retired employees, who will have 14 percent of benefits that exceed the minimum wage ripped off. The unions, for their part, repeated their sordid strategy to disorient the workers. They subjected the powerful force of more than 100,000 São Paulo public employees to the powerlessness of the “allied” PT and PSOL councillors to reverse the vote. The failure of this strategy was demonstrated immediately, when the entire PT caucus voted in favor of one of the bills that made up Mayor Ricardo Nunes’s austerity package. The justification of the PT councillors was that the bill would be approved anyway, and they advanced its approval to discuss mitigating amendments. In reality, the Workers Party had already carried out attacks of the same character against the pensions of public employees in the states they rule, such as Ceará and Bahia. Tired of these theatrics and recognizing the impotence of these methods to respond to the attacks of the capitalist state, many workers talked about radicalizing their struggle, with actions ranging from blocking the city streets to occupying the City Council building to prevent the vote. This mood was definitely present in Wednesday’s demonstration. As the beginning of the session approached, tensions grew between the workers and the shock troops. Demonstrators threw eggs and other harmless objects at the police, who promptly started firing tear gas grenades. The response of the union officials, perched on the top of sound trucks, was to immediately denounce workers opposed to the union’s capitulation as “divisive” and “infiltrators” and spread lies that people with “backpacks full of bombs” had been seen among the crowd. SINPEEM’s directors claimed that the police, ready to savagely repress the workers, were there “working” and that they were their allies, since the police would also be harmed by the austerity measures. The president of SEDIN (Union of Childhood Educators), Claudete Alves of the PT, on the other hand, declared that confronting the police would mean using “fascist methods” that would equate the workers with far-right supporters of President Bolsonaro. Fonseca then stated that “the last thing we need today is to invade the City Council building,” since “our goal is to convince the councillors” to change their vote. These fraudulent and deeply reactionary arguments reveal the class character of the unions. Having degenerated decades ago, they have turned into empty bureaucratic husks that support a privileged bureaucracy opposed to workers’ interests. They are not only rabid opponents of socialism but of any form of class struggle. Their real role is that of policemen of the working-class movement, and therefore they identify with and respect the “work” of the shock troops. The mood of the workers who sought to radicalize their struggle and break the straitjacket imposed by the unions is entirely legitimate. However, these goals will not be achieved by simply changing the tactics of struggle. Workers need to break politically with the unions and the pseudo-leftist parties that seek to submit them to the capitalist state. They must fight for the mobilization of an independent working-class movement, unified internationally. Workers willing to take up this struggle should immediately contact the Rank-and-File Committee for Safe Education in Brazil and set up in their own workplace bodies for the direct representation of rank-and-file workers, independent of the unions. This struggle is inseparable from the building of a truly revolutionary internationalist leadership within the working class, a Brazilian section of the International Committee of the Fourth International. Income inequality in Brazil destroys potential for economic growth Tornaghi 7/19 (Cecilia, managing editor at AQ) “Inequality Is Brazil’s Achilles Heel,” Americas Quarterly, 7/19/21. https://www.americasquarterly.org/article/inequality-is-brazils-achilles-heel/ RR Brazil’s social gap, which had seemed almost bridgeable in the 2010s, is now a widening fault line that threatens the country’s potential for growth unless long-term structural and educational reforms are undertaken. The pandemic wreaked havoc on the lives of the world’s poor, turning a bad situation worse. For the rich across the globe the story was different. And in Brazil, the country that already boasted the title of the most unequal in Latin America, the World Bank’s Gini coefficient measuring inequality reached its highest number on record, 0.674, in the first quarter of 2021. While earnings for the poorest 40 shrunk by a third in 2020, the top 10 of earners lost just 3 of their income. In the meantime, the stock market hit record highs, and commodity prices drove up measures of economic growth. “It is a paradox,” said Marcelo Nery, director of the Center for Social Policies at the Fundação Getúlio Vargas, a Brazilian think tank and higher education institution. “GDP was better than expected, the currency appreciated, the stock market is up. Even formal job creation has improved.” Only these indicators hide deeper problems. “Globally, we see investors’ risk appetite coming back, while investing is also getting cheaper in Brazil, bringing more people to capital markets,” said Laura Karpuska, an economics professor at FGV-São Paulo. “But the economic fundamentals have been worsening, and markedly so.” A milder-than expected 4.1 contraction in GDP in 2020 was followed by a 1.2 increase in the first quarter of 2021 (comparing to the previous quarter), bringing Brazil’s economy back to where it was in 2016 — at the bottom of a deep recession. Unemployment is at a record high of 14.7, and nearly 20 million Brazilians can’t find work or have given up looking. Even informal work is in short supply as COVID continues to spread across the country. “The bulk of low-income jobs are in high-contact services, where we have yet to see a recovery,” said Otaviano Canuto, a former executive director at the World Bank and the IMF. “And there is a risk that changes in behavior, such as entertaining at home, could last much longer than the pandemic.” Much of the optimism in Brazilian capital markets and in macroeconomic projections is being propelled by the agricultural and mining sectors. According to CEPEA, a research institute, the agribusiness sector grew 24 in 2020, and now represents slightly over a quarter of Brazil’s GDP. Brazilian exports of crops and meat totaled $100 billion last year, while mining exports increased by 31. But experts warn that the agroindustry does not have a multiplying effect on the economy as a whole. Commodity production is not labor intensive, and the more job-rich manufacturing sector has been shrinking since 2009. Meanwhile, inflation is on the rise, driving down the debt-to-GDP ratio — a measure observed by financial investors — but exacting a toll on consumers, especially the poor. Emergency cash transfers of about $100, authorized by President Jair Bolsonaro’s administration, helped informal workers and the poor navigate the COVID-19 crisis—but hope evaporated when, despite the still-raging pandemic, the payments were discontinued at the end of 2020. “We saw poverty levels fall by half last year, to 4.5,” said Nery, “only to triple after the transfers stopped.” By March 2021, 16 of Brazilians were at or below the poverty line. “We were generous, but not wise,” said Nery. “We did not prioritize testing or vaccines, and basically dismissed education altogether.” The government’s spending on transfer programs reflects, for Nery, a predictable pattern in the lead-up to presidential elections. “Poverty numbers always fall, followed by a rapid increase,” said Nery, adding that the risk now is government attempting “grandiose solutions beyond our fiscal capacity.” The diverging realities in the Brazilian economy—improving macroeconomic numbers and income at the top while more Brazilians fall into low-income classifications, including extreme poverty—are compromising future growth potential. “The multidimensional reality of this gap in income, wealth, access and representation is a major cause of our existing vulnerabilities,” said Karpuska. Inequality has even made an appearance on Brazil’s happiness index, which suffered the largest drop between 2019 and 2020 in a comparative study of 40 countries around the world — pushed by a sharp decrease of wellbeing among the poor. Today, even the IMF warns that inequality severely impacts long-term growth and economic stability. “There is a direct link between masses that are able to consume and economic growth,” said Canuto. Inequality’s social cost Social gaps breed social unrest, as Chile and Colombia can attest. They also rob countries of the creative and productive potential of citizens that is a vital source of future wealth. “Less human capital will mean less productivity and capacity to grow without triggering inflation,” said Karpuska. Future discrepancies are also likely to get a boost from pandemic-related school closings and education budget cuts, which primarily affected poor children. The percentage of young Brazilians neither working nor studying jumped from 20 at the start of the decade to 29 during the pandemic. Experts say that this pandemic generation, deprived of the benefits of education, will bring down productivity and impact the economy as a whole. Strikes are key to strengthening unions and increasing the minimum wage Boito et al 11 (Armando, is Professor at the State University of Campinas, Brazil. He is author of several books on Marxist political theory and Brazilian politics. He is editor of the Brazilian journal Critica Marxista.) (Paula Marcelino, Department of Sociology in São Paulo.) (Laurence Hallewell, Portuguese Literature educator.) “Decline in Unionism? An Analysis of the New Wave of Strikes in Brazil,” JSTOR, September 2011. https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/23060121.pdf?refreqid=excelsior3Ac90e15c12fee1b9a485edf8dfd02f696. Graphs omitted RR At least since 2004, Brazil has been seeing renewed union activity. At the bottom, the frequency of strikes has been rather high, and the vast majority of strikes have been achieving real wage increases. At the top, political contro versy has been stirred up by the emergence of new union federations.3 This recovery of union activity may be taken as an indication of the vitality of union ism as a social movement: striking is not the only important and pertinent activity of unions, but it certainly is one of the most drastic and the one that gives them the most political and social visibility. Strikes tend to occur in cycles, with phases of growth, stabilization, and decline. These cycles present their own characteristic profiles and determining factors. The profile of the strikes within each cycle and the factors that shape it are, in most cases, related. One cycle may be characterized by mass strikes, another by local strikes; one may attain unusually high numbers, while another may follow a much more modest pattern; this one could be a politically motivated move against a dictatorial government, that one could be reacting to the ero sion of the purchasing value of wages through a high rate of monetary inflation in the economy. The cycle of strikes that occurred in Brazil between 1978 and 1992, for example, reached unusually high rates of activity (number of strikes, number of hours lost, total and average number of strikers, etc.) and may be considered quite exceptional (Noronha, Gebrin, and Elias Jr., 1998).5 It was similar to the one in Spain during the same period. Brazil and Spain were countries sharing unusual conditions, and they had both become world champions, so to speak, of strike activity. Both had just emerged from a period of strong and prolonged capitalist growth under dictatorial regimes in crisis that were suffering a return to high inflation rates. In this situation, the working classes were able to broaden and reenergize their union and party organizations, and union actions, widely regarded as part of the fight for a return to democracy, could count on the sympathy or tolerance of the mass of the population. The first decade of the new century also saw a cycle of strikes, despite the difference in the economic and political situation. In saying this we must warn the reader that the exceptional strike cycle of 1978-1992 cannot be taken as a measure of the size and nature of the union crisis that began in 1990 or the recovery of unionism at the opening of the new century.6 The greater part of the 1980s and the first half of the 1990s were marked by a very high inflation rate that more than once bordered on hyperinflation. By 2000 the inflation rate had fallen, and it has stayed low ever since. Nevertheless, we cannot consider the increase in strikes caused by the impact of inflation on the purchasing power of wages or their decrease in response to price stability in themselves as indicating the strength or weakness of the union movement. With these reservations, we still believe that, taking the frequency and severity of strikes as an indicator, we can assert that Brazilian unionism in these early years of the twenty-first century is in a phase of full recovery.7 Among the probable reasons for this recovery are the following: (1) a return to economic growth; (2) a recovery in the number of available jobs; (3) inflation of food prices, which weighs more heavily on working-class budgets, well above the overall inflation rate; (4) the existence of a democratic system of government; (5) the fact that during the two presidencies of Lula da Silva the state appara tus, the chairmanships, and the management of state-run enterprises were all made up of people who came largely from the union movement (between 2004 and 2007, the federal government and the state-run enterprises dealt with over 90 percent of the strikes launched by civil servants and by workers in state-run enterprises); (6) the breakdown of the influence of neoliberalism indicated by Lula's reelection and by the new left-wing and center-left gov ernments in Latin America; (7) the political rivalry among the various union federations, whose number and variety of political and ideological orientations increased in this period; and (8) the unions' 10 years of experience of the so-called flexibility of the restructuring of capitalist production and the construction of alternative responses to it (Marcelino, 2008). In other words, our hypothesis is that changes in the economic, political, and ideological background have favored the recovery of union activity. If this is so, then clearly there can remain little justification for the idea of an inevitable historic decline of unionism. With a change in the environment, the situation of the union movement has changed too. A number of features of the profile of the contemporary strike cycle are worth emphasizing:
The number of strikes and of strikers has been significant: between 2004 and 2009 there was a yearly average of 360 strikes involving 1.5 million strikers. In 2008, the year of the economic crisis, there were 411 strikes and 2 million strikers. The predominance in these years of the public sector (civil servants and employees of state enterprises) is worth noting. Only in 2008 were there more strikes in the private sector than in the public sector (224 as opposed to 184). The number of both strikes and strikers in the private sector had been high even before 2008, however, and had in fact been increasing throughout the 2004-2008 quinquennium (Tables 1 and 2).8 2. Most of the strikes have been offensive,9 seeking to improve the workers' wages and conditions rather than just to defend what had already been won or win back what had been lost. The most frequent demands in this new cycle have been for a real increase in wages and a share of the profits or an increase in that share. The number of defensive strikes—those to recover arrears in wage payments, to get existing rights enforced, etc.—has declined. The frequency of offensive strikes has varied by industry; in the private sector they have been in manufacturing plants, whereas stoppages in the service industry have far more often been defensive (DIEESE, 2006: 37). In 2004 and 2005, almost half the strikes were over wage rates. Disputes over late payment of wages were in third place in 2004, accounting for 19 percent of strikes, but in 2005 they had fallen to fifth place, accounting for only 12 percent. It was only in the service industries that disputes over late payment remained as important as those over wage rates. In the period 2004 to 2008 as a whole, the majority of strikes—65 percent or more—were offensive. This contrasts with what hap pened in the 1990s, when, according to the DIEESE (2009: 4), although there were more strikes, most of them were defensive. It seems that in the 1990s work ers had to run hard just to stay in the same place, whereas in the following decade they were managing, with less effort, to advance and make new conquests despite 3. These strikes have been, for the most part, wholly or partly successful in achieving their employers to negotiate, and in 75 percent of these cases they were wholly or partly successful. The number of strikes that ended without success was quite low: only 7 percent of all strikes in 2004 and only 6 percent in 2005. The overall proportions of successful or partly successful strikes over the quinquennium were 2004, 70 percent; 2005, 75 percent; 2006, 75 percent; 2007, 60 percent; and 2008, 73 percent (DIEESE, 2009). Data on wage rate increases (Table 4) are also instructive. In 2004, the number of wage agreements above the Index of Consumer Prices increased markedly, from 18 percent to 54 percent of strike results. Since then, this pro portion has continued to grow, reaching an impressive 87 percent of strikes ending with wage settlements above inflation in 2007. In 2008, some 88 percent managed to achieve increases equaling or exceeding the inflation rate (DIEESE, 2009).11 4. Although most of these strikes were purely local, there were also quite a few mass strikes, and the strikers used public actions to put pressure on the employers. In 2005 there were some 25 strikes involving more than 10,000 workers each, and 9 of these involved over 50,000. In 2007 some 14 strikes involved more than 10,000 strikers each. Many of these mass strikes were by civil servants, mainly those in education or health, but there were mass strikes in the private sector and in state-owned enterprises. There was a national strike of automotive-industry workers involving 170,000, a statewide one in Sao Paulo involving 190,000, another Sao Paulo state strike of construction workers involving 130,000, a strike of 80,000 postal workers, one of 100,000 oil workers, and mass strikes of bank employees and others. These mass strikes were almost all offensive actions. A considerable number of strikes employed activities that required a higher level of organizing and mobilizing and gave union activity greater visibility, such as public demonstrations, marches, picketing, and the occupation of workplaces. In 2005 such activities accompanied 66 strikes (22 percent of all strikes in that year). Thirty-nine of these were accompanied by public demon strations, 25 by street marches, 20 by picketing to enforce the strike, 8 by workplace occupations, 5 by camping out, and 3 by mounting of a watch. In 2007 the number of strikes with public demonstrations was 83, those with street marches 42, those with picketing 20, those with workplace occupations 19, those where the strikers camped out 12, and those for which watches were mounted 2. In other words, actions that gave political and social visibility to strikes and hardened the struggle with employers increased significantly between 2005 and 2007.
Raising the minimum wage solves income inequality Moser and Engbom 20 (Christian, an Assistant Professor within the Economics Division and Chazen Senior Scholar at Columbia Business School and an affiliated faculty member within the Department of Economics at Columbia University.) (Niklas,an assistant professor at New York University Stern School of Business focusing on issues in macroeconomics and labor economics. He is also a Faculty Research Fellow at the NBER, a Research Affiliate at CEPR and an affiliated researcher at UCLS.) “How a rising minimum wage reduced earnings inequality in Brazil,” VoxDev, 3/2/20. https://voxdev.org/topic/labour-markets-migration/how-rising-minimum-wage-reduced-earnings-inequality-brazil. Graphs omitted. RR In two recent studies, we chose Brazil as a real-life laboratory for examining the effects of a rising minimum wage (Alvarez et al. 2018, Engbom and Moser 2018). While Brazil has around one sixth of the per-capita income of the US, both countries have a highly unequal income distribution. Importantly, the results for South America’s largest economy are striking and some of these lessons could indeed carry over elsewhere. What happened in Brazil? In addition to its large economy and inequality levels, we chose Brazil because administrative government records and household surveys provide a trove of useful microdata on employer- and employee-related drivers of earnings differences. We took a first look at these microdata through the lens of an econometric model based on the method developed by Abowd et al. (1999), which controls for key dimensions of worker and firm differences in pay. This high-dimensional econometric model allowed us to separately account for worker and firm heterogeneity in pay within rolling time windows. We find that between 1996 and 2012, the earnings gap between the upper and lower earnings levels in Brazil decreased by 11. This sizeable decline in earnings inequality resembles the experience of other Latin American economies during this period, but stands in stark contrast to that of the US and many developed countries, which saw steady increases in inequality over the past two decades. To be sure, Brazil has experienced many societal, regulatory and economic changes since the early 1990s, ranging from high rates of inflation and a financial crisis to the expansion of various social programmes. Notably, the country also increased the real minimum wage by 119 during this period, which our analysis indicates was the main catalyst in decreasing income discrepancies. Figure 1 shows the evolution of earnings inequality, measured as the variance of log earnings, and that of the real minimum wage over the period 1988-2012. Figure 1 We concluded that: The increase in the minimum wage accounts for more than half (55) of the decline in Brazil’s earnings inequality among formal sector employees. Although earnings growth is most pronounced amongst earners at the lowest levels, the direct contribution by minimum wage workers explains less than one-third (25-30) of the total reduction in inequality. ‘Spillover’ effects that also raise earnings of employees above the minimum wage level increased paychecks up to the 80th percentile of the earnings distribution. The large increase in the minimum wage was associated with little additional unemployment and a negligible shift of workers to the informal sector. This is corroborated by the fact that Brazil’s overall labor force participation rate has remained roughly stable at 64 over this period.1 Brazilian firms’ response to the rising minimum wage Raising the minimum wage affected both specific worker skill groups and the businesses hiring them. This is important because narrowing the pay gap across companies has contributed to a substantial decline in Brazil’s earnings inequality since 1990. The share of adult male workers employed at the minimum wage level is well below 10 in Brazil. But employers bumped up earnings for all employees up to the 80th percentile once the floor was raised. The reason for such wide-ranging action was to maintain a competitive edge in the jobs market, particularly among specific industries or skill sets. Once the lowest paying employers complied with minimum wage hikes, higher-paying counterparts reacted by pushing up their pay scale to maintain employment at equilibrium. Pay discrepancies between Brazilian firms tended to be substantial in the early 1990s, which allowed for ample room for such pay spillovers between employers. The impact of a higher minimum wage was disproportionately felt in those areas of Brazil and in industries with initially lower average income levels. This led to a pronounced rise in average earnings at the bottom of the national income distribution and a sharp decline in lower-tail earnings inequality (e.g. the 50-10 earnings percentile ratio). As companies increased their pay, they allotted a higher percentage of their budget to payroll. This cut into firm profits, particularly for small and less productive enterprises. Consequently, as the share of their budgets earmarked for labour increased, some companies responded by reducing their hiring. At the same time, however, workers gravitated to better paying (and more productive) companies, where workers always receive a lower share of their productive value. As a result, the overall increase in labour’s share of profits, as well as the negative employment response, was dampened. How the Brazilian workforce changed The profile of Brazilian workers evolved as well in the 16 years between 1996 and 2012, which may have also contributed to the decline in earnings inequality. One example being that employees became more likely to change jobs. While still less frequent than in the US, migration between jobs became a powerful engine for individual earnings growth. Over time, the average education level of Brazilian workers increased. However, our results do not support the often-articulated view that a better educated workforce spurred Brazil’s inequality squeeze. Companies tended to discount the premium previously placed on high school and college degrees, at the same time as educational attainment soared over this period. Simply put, education became more of a commodity. The age structure of the workforce went through a transition as well with the age distribution tilting towards older workers. As with education, the rise in the minimum wage led employers to discount relative experience levels of an older workforce. We estimate that demographics and changes in worker input contributed about 29 to the narrowing of Brazil’s income gap. Our findings attribute a bigger share (40) of the reduction to the minimum wage hikes and employer responses to raising that wage floor. We attribute two thirds of the change in between-firm inequality to firms’ equilibrium response of raising pay even if the minimum wage was not binding for them, resulting in ‘trickle-up’ wage hikes to higher-paid individuals. Concluding remarks: The effect of a rising minimum wage on inequality depends on the economic context To be sure, notable differences exist between emerging and developed markets. The increase in the minimum wage may have had an outsized effect on reducing earnings inequality in Brazil because the income gap was initially very high. The effects of a rising minimum wage on inequality could be much smaller and the impact on employment more negative under different labour market conditions, such as those in more developed countries. For example, previous work on the effects of the minimum wage on the earnings distribution in the US indicates spillovers up to only the 20th percentile of earnings distribution (Autor et al. 2016). However, the striking results that Brazil achieved in narrowing its inequality gap may offer lessons that could carry over to the US and OECD countries. Further work is needed to assess the size and determinants of spillovers of the minimum wage in different economies. Brazil is key to the global economy— continued economic recession causes collapse Lachman 20 (Desmond, a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. He was formerly a deputy director in the International Monetary Fund's Policy Development and Review Department and the chief emerging market economic strategist at Salomon Smith Barney.) “Brazil's dark cloud over the global economy,” The Hill, 5/28/20. https://thehill.com/opinion/international/499817-brazils-dark-cloud-over-the-global-economy RR For the global economy, it would never be a good time for an economy as large as that of Brazil to have a political and economic crisis. But now is a particularly inopportune time for such a crisis. The world is in its deepest economic recession in the past 90 years, and other major emerging market economies too are facing severe coronavirus-induced economic challenges that would be exacerbated by a Brazilian crisis. Brazil is not just another emerging market economy; rather, it accounts for around half of South America’s overall output, and it currently ranks as the world’s eighth largest economy. It also is a highly indebted country with a government debt that now totals around $2 trillion. With Brazilian debt being a major component of most emerging bond portfolios, a Brazilian economic crisis has the potential to roil world financial markets. Even before the coronavirus crisis, the Brazilian economy was in the midst of a lost economic decade as its economy struggled to recover from its very deep 2014-2016 economic recession. Despite initial hopes that Jair Bolsonaro’s ascension to the presidency in October 2018 might bring much needed economic reform to the country, last year the Brazilian economy grew by barely 1 percent. That left Brazilian output well below its level some 10 years earlier. Brazil’s sclerotic economy, coupled with its long delay in addressing its chronic public pension problem, has not been good for its public finances. Already before the pandemic, the persistence of large budget deficits raised serious questions about the country’s public debt sustainability. By the end of 2019, Brazil’s public debt had reached 80 percent of GDP, which is a very high level for an emerging market economy. It would be a gross understatement to say that the coronavirus pandemic has considerably darkened an already gloomy Brazilian economic outlook. This has not least been because of the total state of denial in which Mr. Bolsonaro finds himself as to the seriousness of the pandemic and because of his gross incompetence in meeting this major health challenge. Lacking any plan to address the pandemic’s spread, Brazil has now become the country with the third-largest number of coronavirus fatalities in the world with every indication that matters will get a lot worse before they get any better. It is also troubling that the pandemic seems set to further delay any meaningful economic reform in Brazil as the country’s domestic political crisis deepens and as calls for Bolsonaro’s impeachment grow ever louder. All of this has heightened market doubts about Brazil’s ability to meet its debt service payments and has led to a 30 percent plunge in the Brazilian currency since the start of the year. It has also led the IMF to substantially downgrade its forecast of the Brazilian economy. The IMF now expects that the Brazilian economy will contract by more than 5 percent in 2020. That in turn will cause the Brazilian budget deficit to balloon to almost 10 percent of GDP and will contribute to a rise in the public debt to GDP ratio to almost 100 percent by the end of 2020. A full-blown Brazilian debt crisis would be the last thing that a fragile global economy now needs. This would especially seem to be the case at time when other emerging market economies like Argentina, Ecuador, Lebanon and Venezuela have either defaulted or are well on their way to defaulting on their debt. It would also seem to be the case at a time when serious questions are being raised about debt sustainability in Italy, South Africa and Turkey. With Brazil’s coronavirus pandemic showing every sign of spinning out of control and with Bolsonaro’s government showing every sign of crumbling, global economic policymakers would ignore Brazil’s troubling political and economic outlook at their peril. A Brazilian economic and financial crisis has the real potential of triggering a very much broader emerging market crisis by accelerating the rapid pace at which capital is already being withdrawn from the emerging market economies. Economic decline causes global nuclear war Tønnesson 15 (Stein, Research Professor, Peace Research Institute Oslo; Leader of East Asia Peace program, Uppsala University) “Deterrence, interdependence and Sino–US peace,” International Area Studies Review, Vol. 18, No. 3, p. 297-311, 2015 SJDI Several recent works on China and Sino–US relations have made substantial contributions to the current understanding of how and under what circumstances a combination of nuclear deterrence and economic interdependence may reduce the risk of war between major powers. At least four conclusions can be drawn from the review above: first, those who say that interdependence may both inhibit and drive conflict are right. Interdependence raises the cost of conflict for all sides but asymmetrical or unbalanced dependencies and negative trade expectations may generate tensions leading to trade wars among inter-dependent states that in turn increase the risk of military conflict (Copeland, 2015: 1, 14, 437; Roach, 2014). The risk may increase if one of the interdependent countries is governed by an inward-looking socio-economic coalition (Solingen, 2015); second, the risk of war between China and the US should not just be analysed bilaterally but include their allies and partners. Third party countries could drag China or the US into confrontation; third, in this context it is of some comfort that the three main economic powers in Northeast Asia (China, Japan and South Korea) are all deeply integrated economically through production networks within a global system of trade and finance (Ravenhill, 2014; Yoshimatsu, 2014: 576); and fourth, decisions for war and peace are taken by very few people, who act on the basis of their future expectations. International relations theory must be supplemented by foreign policy analysis in order to assess the value attributed by national decision-makers to economic development and their assessments of risks and opportunities. If leaders on either side of the Atlantic begin to seriously fear or anticipate their own nation’s decline then they may blame this on external dependence, appeal to anti-foreign sentiments, contemplate the use of force to gain respect or credibility, adopt protectionist policies, and ultimately refuse to be deterred by either nuclear arms or prospects of socioeconomic calamities. Such a dangerous shift could happen abruptly, i.e. under the instigation of actions by a third party – or against a third party. Yet as long as there is both nuclear deterrence and interdependence, the tensions in East Asia are unlikely to escalate to war. As Chan (2013) says, all states in the region are aware that they cannot count on support from either China or the US if they make provocative moves. The greatest risk is not that a territorial dispute leads to war under present circumstances but that changes in the world economy alter those circumstances in ways that render inter-state peace more precarious. If China and the US fail to rebalance their financial and trading relations (Roach, 2014) then a trade war could result, interrupting transnational production networks, provoking social distress, and exacerbating nationalist emotions. This could have unforeseen consequences in the field of security, with nuclear deterrence remaining the only factor to protect the world from Armageddon, and unreliably so. Deterrence could lose its credibility: one of the two great powers might gamble that the other yield in a cyber-war or conventional limited war, or third party countries might engage in conflict with each other, with a view to obliging Washington or Beijing to intervene. Solvency Plan: The Federative Republic of Brazil should recognize an unconditional right of workers to strike. The plan revitalizes labor in Brazil and makes a general strike possible Armengol 15 (Pedro, Deputy Secretary of Labour Relations with the CUT in Sao Paulo, Brazil.) “The right to strike in the public sector in Brazil,” World PSI, 2/14/15. https://www.world-psi.org/en/right-strike-public-sector-brazil RR Workers in the public service in Brazil were not entitled to a collective working relationship with the public administration until the promulgation of the 1988 Constitution. Nor could they: without the right to organise and no right to strike, they could not join trade unions, and thus act jointly or articulate as social partners. They were denied any form of expression of their common interests and desires, as well as the practical means to struggle for them. The 1988 Constitution no longer regards public sector workers as mere subjects, but as collective actors, able to relate effectively with each other and with third parties, notably with the public administration. However, after the recognition of the trade union rights of public servants, the lack of regulation of the right to collective bargaining and the exercise of the right to strike became apparent, even though it is recognised as a collateral instrument and legitimate tool to regulate working conditions. At the same time, the right to collective bargaining is addressed in Convention 151 and Recommendation 159 of the International Labour Organisation (‘ILO’), which have already been ratified and approved by the Brazilian National Congress. Convention 151 and Recommendation 159 of the ILO were approved (with reservations) by the Federal Senate of Brazil, and Legislative Decree 206 of 08 April 2010 guarantees the right to strike to civil servants in item VII Article 37 of the Federal Constitution of 1988, but no specific regulation has been adopted, despite the extension of trade union rights and guarantees that earlier were applicable only to the private sector. As a result, public sector workers continue to be denied their full rights. Two observations should be made in relation to the text of ILO Convention 151. In the first place, the rights laid down in favour of public servants in Brazil have been recognised constitutionally. The second is that the Constitution, which deals with fundamental rights of the individual, has predominance over the legal system, and defines the Supreme Court of Brazil. This should also have an impact on the interpretation of national legislation on the subject, including the application of Law 7,783 / 89 in 2007, which regulates the right to strike in the private sector in Brazil. In turn, the lack of regulation on the right to strike for public servants also has a severe impact on public service users (citizens who are faced by long strikes). Civil servants are often compelled to return to work on the basis of legal judgments that point to the illegality of the strike, because of the lack of appropriate legal rules. The result is cyclic strike action. Currently, even with the incorporation into national law of the principles of ILO Convention 151 in Brazilian jurisprudence we can note an excessive restriction of the right to strike of public servants, with judgements that not only expand the list of essential services, but also raise the minimum percentage of service maintenance. This makes it practically impossible for them to exercise the right to strike. Despite the institutional recognition of the right to strike, workers increasingly organise protests in the form of work stoppages whereas public administrations refuse to negotiate. On 11 November 2014, the Conservative party of the Brazilian parliament, without any prior dialogue or negotiation with public employees’ organisations, adopted a draft bill that deals with the ‘regulation of the right to strike of public servants’ in the Joint Committee for Federal Law Consolidation and Regulation of the Constitution. We would like to highlight the following aspects on the aforementioned draft bill: The draft seeks to restrict the possibility of a general strike. Obviously, trade unions of public servants do not accept this restriction. The workers should define if the shutdown will be partial or total, including by evaluating the characteristics of each activity. If the action is considered urgent, it will be defined by the workers, meeting the minimum attendance percentage. In Brazil, nowadays, even without a regulation in a specific law, unions already exercise this concept with responsibility. The draft wants to define ‘ways to break strikes’ which entail a clear intervention in the form of organisation and mobilisation dynamics impacting on the principle of freedom and organisational autonomy, constitutionally guaranteed. The strike is not an ‘end’ for the union, but a means and instrument of struggle. The draft foresees that workers must inform the government at least 10 days before the beginning of the strike. Unions consider that 72 hours is a reasonable time; The draft defines the strike, ‘as partial paralysis, prescribes non-payment of days off, considers the days on strike not worked, and intends to penalise workers on probation, forcing them to compensate the days not worked so as to complete the service time required by law. For unions, this is the deliberate construction of a precedent to break the strength of joint positions, and opens space for summary dismissals. The draft requires a minimum attendance percentage ranging from 40 to 60 percent, and at the same time the proposal considers 90 percent of public services as ‘essential services’, that will have to ensure at least 60 percent coverage . This would means the consolidation of the total restriction policy to exercise the right to strike of public employees in Brazil, which for now is recognised in the constitution. The draft includes the replacement of workers on strike by contract workers. This is an antidemocratic proposal. Depending on the activity, this may be unconstitutional when applied to exclusive state activities which may not be exercised by contract workers, for example fiscal services. Such an attempt already occurred in 2012 in Brazil, when Decree 7777 / 12 was issued and subsequently denounced as an anti-union practice by the ILO. The draft includes the provision to ‘prohibit conducting strikes sixty days before the elections of the president, governors, senators, state and federal Deputies, Mayors and Councillors’. In a country where we have two elections every two years, this is another intervention in the freedom and autonomy of organisation and struggle of civil servants in Brazil. It is clear that there is no intention on behalf of these law-makers to improve the current system and to favour the resolution of conflicts. At the moment strikes occur in Brazil for lack of space of the treatment and resolution of conflicts, since the claims of workers are treated in a non-uniform way, generating different approaches in relation to identical claims, thus clashing with the constitutional principle of non-discrimination. It is therefore necessary to establish a contractual system, in line with constitutional principles, that foresees the object and scope of legal negotiations, defines the levels of coverage and articulation, the legal effects of the agreements at each level, solutions for deadlocks as well as the definition of possibility and contours of arbitration and / or mediation, and immediate regulation in law according to the principles of C151. This will allow Brazil to depart from an ideological vision that looks at the public servant as a part of a large machine, unable to link his work to the social role. PSI affiliates in Brazil have been campaigning for the implementation of C151 in law for the last 10 years. It is unacceptable that the parliament will now debate further restrictions and anti-union measures that will only further exacerbate social tensions in public services, instead of making a contribution to a social environment of dialogue and negotiation. The case of Brazil shows that the right to strike and the right to collective bargaining are intrinsically linked to each other. There has to be a willingness on behalf of both parties to come to the negotiating table otherwise no results can be achieved. The current situation of cyclic strikes without any clear outcome is detrimental for the workers and to all public service users. Most employees work in the public sector and is key to the economy Romero 8/26 (Teresa, author for Statistia) “Brazil: number of employees in the public administration sector 2010-2019” Statistia, 8/26/21. https://www.statista.com/statistics/763742/number-employees-public-administration-sector-brazil/ RR In 2019, the public administration sector in Brazil employed around 7.75 million people. This represents an increase when compared to the sector's workforce reported in the previous year. During that period, the public administration area ranked second as one of the leading economic sectors in the Portuguese speaking country.
12/19/21
NovDec- Workforce Adv
Tournament: Damus | Round: 4 | Opponent: Harvard Westlake NL | Judge: Gottfried, Sophia Plan Plan: The United States should recognize an unconditional right of workers to strike.
Advantage 1 — Workforce Advantage one is the workforce Labor unrest is increasing and there is momentum to strike, but current laws leave workers powerless. Semuels 10/8 (Alana, Journalist and currently senior economics correspondent at TIME magazine, previously The Atlantic, The Los Angeles Times, The Boston Globe.) “U.S. Workers Are Realizing It’s the Perfect Time to Go on Strike,” TIME, 10/8/21. https://time.com/6105109/workers-strike-unemployment/ RR Thousands of workers have gone on strike across the country, showing their growing power in a tightening economy. The leverage U.S. employees have over the people signing their paychecks was amplified in Friday’s jobs report, which showed that employers added workers at a much slower-than-expected pace in September. The unemployment rate fell 0.4 percentage points during the month, to 4.8 percent, the government said Friday, and wages are continuing to tick up across industries as employers become more desperate to hire and retain workers. In the first five days of October alone, there were 10 strikes in the U.S., including workers at Kellogg plants in Nebraska, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Tennessee; school bus drivers in Annapolis, Md.; and janitors at the Denver airport. That doesn’t include the nearly 60,000 union members in film and television production who nearly unanimously voted to grant their union’s president the authority to call a strike. Jess Deyo is one of nearly 700 nurses who have been on strike as part of the longest healthcare strike in Massachusetts history. For the past seven months, Deyo has reported for duty at the hospital in Worcester, Mass. where she worked as a nurse for more than 15 years, sometimes bringing her daughters, and standing outside through the chills of spring and the heat of summer. The nurses are demanding higher nurse-to-patient ratios after a harrowing 19 months of working during a pandemic. “There’s no choice to give up on the strike,” she says. “It’s bigger than us—it’s for everyone.” Most of these strikes aren’t counted by the federal government, which in the 1980s started only tracking strikes that involved 1,000 or more workers and that lasted one full shift or longer. There have only been 11 of those so far this year, according to government data, at places like Volvo Trucks and Nabisco. But academics at Cornell University launched a strike database on May 1 that uses social media and Google alerts to keep track of all the strikes and protests happening in the U.S., even if they involve just a few workers. The database shows a picture of growing worker activism, of small actions that tell a story of how people at workplaces small and large are feeling after 19 months of a global pandemic, says Johnnie Kallas, a PhD student who is the director of Cornell’s Labor Action Tracker. It has documented 169 strikes so far in 2021. “Workers are fed up with low pay and understaffing, and they have more labor market leverage with employers needing to hire right now,” he says. “You are seeing a little bit more labor unrest.” Of course, compared to half a century ago, there still aren’t many strikes in the U.S. There were 5,716 strikes in 1971 alone, according to government data from when the government tracked smaller strikes. And the share of unionized workers in the U.S. is near an all-time low, with just 12.1 of workers represented by unions last year. But the activism comes at a time when approval of labor unions—even among Republicans—is trending upwards—and when a low unemployment rate is giving leverage to workers who have long put up with poor conditions and pay. A Gallup poll released in the beginning of July showed that 68 of Americans approve of labor unions, higher than it had been in years and up significantly from the 48 approval in 2009 during the throes of the Great Recession. The poll also showed that 47 of Republicans said they approved of unions—the highest share since 2003—and that 90 of Democrats did. Greater income inequality, more strikes Part of the support of unions and organizing may come from Americans’ discontent with growing inequality, much as inequality a century ago galvanized a labor movement then, says Tom Kochan, a professor of work and employment research at MIT. There are a growing number of billionaires in America–708 as of August—with a net worth of $4.7 trillion as of August 17. That’s more than the total net worth of the bottom 50 of Americans. “I think the accumulated effects of the loss of good jobs in manufacturing, stagnant wages, growing inequality, and the growing disparity between executives and managers and the workforce—all of that is fueling increases in organizing,” he says. Some of this labor activism was happening before the pandemic, Kochan says, when even the government’s strike tracker showed an uptick in unrest. Teachers in states like Arizona and Oklahoma started striking in 2018 because of low pay and a lack of public funding. In 2020, NBA athletes walked out of a playoff game to protest the shooting of Jacob Blake in Kenosha, Wisc. The year 2019 saw 25 work stoppages involving 1,000 or more workers, the most since 2001. In 2017, 48 of non-unionized workers said they would vote to join a union if given the chance, higher than the share who said that in 1995 (32) and 1977 (33), according to Kochan’s research. The pandemic worsened working conditions for thousands of workers like Deyo. Kellogg workers at a plant in Battle Creek, Mich., told the local news that they were lauded as heroes for working 16 hour days, seven days a week during the pandemic, and rather than reward them, the company recently decided to offshore some of their jobs. They went on strike on Oct. 5. Musicians at the San Antonio Symphony say they voluntarily accepted an 80 pay cut last season, and that the symphony then proposed first to permanently cut their pay by 50 and then to cut the number of full-time members from 72 to 42. They went on strike on Sept. 27. Do strikes work? For their part, employers say that they’re being fair, and that workers are being unreasonable. Kellogg provides workers with benefits and compensation that are among the industry’s best, a company spokesman, Kris Bahner, said in a statement. The company says it has not proposed moving any jobs from the Ready to Eat Cereal plants, which are the plants where the workers are striking, as part of negotiations. The San Antonio Symphony said, in a statement, that the union and the symphony agreed to a 25 reduction in weekly salary for the 2020-2021 season, but that because there were fewer performances and because fewer musicians could fit on stage because of social distancing guidelines, some musicians did make 80 less than they would have made in a normal season. The symphony needs to make “fundamental changes,” a spokesperson said, and it cannot afford to spend more than it makes through ticket sales and donations. Carolyn Jackson, the CEO of St. Vincent’s, where Deyo and hundreds of other nurses are striking, says that the nurses are trying to push a 1:4 nurse to patient ratio that Massachusetts voters rejected by a large margin in 2018. The hospital has done research and decided its staffing is appropriate, and that its staffing ratios are in fact better than most other hospitals in the state, she says. Ryan says the hospital announced it was hiring 100 permanent replacement nurses in May during a COVID-19 surge, and that the striking nurses are insisting on getting their old positions back. That the hospital is not budging speaks to the fact that despite this increase in worker activism, workers may not gain much more power in the long run. Over the last 40 years, the government has made it much more difficult for workers to both form unions and to strike, says Heidi Shierholz, the president of the Economic Policy Institute, a progressive think tank. Amazon was able to effectively interfere in a union vote among its workers this spring, she says, preventing the union from succeeding. Of course, a hearing officer at the National Labor Relations Board has recommended that the board throw out the results of the Amazon election and do it over, which speaks to a resurgence of government support for labor. President Joe Biden said he wanted to be “the most pro-union President leading the most pro-union administration in American history.” Labor has support at the state and local levels too: California Gov. Gavin Newsom recently signed a packet of pro-worker bills, including one that prohibits companies from imposing quotas on warehouse workers that prevent them from following health and safety law, and another that prohibits employers from paying workers with disabilities less than the state’s minimum wage. And in January, New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio signed a bill that forbids fast food restaurants from firing workers unless the employer has just cause, making New York City the first jurisdiction in the country that essentially ended at-will employment. But even that support may not be enough to force a widespread change of working conditions in an economy where employees haven’t had much leverage since before the Great Recession, or earlier. Even some of the recent strikes haven’t led to workers’ desired outcomes. A five-week Nabisco strike recently ended with many of workers’ demands met, for instance, but the company still won the ability to pay weekend workers less than they do currently. As for Jess Deyo and the Worcester nurses, many have been forced to move on. After Deyo’s unemployment benefits ended and her health insurance premiums spiked, she decided she needed to find another job so that she could support her family. She’s a single mother. She found a job working as a nurse at a doctor’s office, where she says she feels more appreciated than she’s ever felt at work. The hours are better and she finally feels respected. But she makes $13 less an hour. Strikes are key to revitalizing labor unions. Bahn 19 (Kate, the director of labor market policy and interim chief economist at the Washington Center for Equitable Growth) “The once and future role of strikes in ensuring U.S. worker power” Washington Center for Equitable Growth, 8/29/19. https://equitablegrowth.org/the-once-and-future-role-of-strikes-in-ensuring-u-s-worker-power/ RR At the same time, there is an increasing consensus today that unions are a positive force for increasing worker power and balancing against economic inequality. In polling of support for unions and specific aspects of collective bargaining, Equitable Growth grantee Alex Hertel-Fernandez of Columbia University, along with William Kimball and Thomas Kochan of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, find that support for unions has grown overall, with nearly half of U.S. workers in 2018 saying they would vote for a union if given the opportunity. This is a significant increase from one-third of workers supporting unionization in 1995. According to their research, workers primarily value unions’ role in collective bargaining and ensuring access to benefits such as healthcare, retirement, and unemployment insurance. Strikes have historically been one of the strongest tools used by unions to ensure they have power to engage in collective bargaining. But striking was viewed as a negative attribute in the survey done by Hertel-Fernandez, Kimball, and Kochan. Yet, when they presented workers with the hypothetical choice of a union exercising strike power with other attributes of unions, such as collective bargaining, support increased. But strikes, of course, do not take place in a bubble. The wider climate of worker bargaining power and institutions that support labor organizing plays a role in making this historically crucial tool effective again. So, too, does the power of employers to resist these organizing efforts when the labor market lacks competition that would increase worker bargaining power. Labor shortages now are because of low wages— unions reverse that by allowing for bargaining. Lopezlira and Jacobs 9/3 (Enrique, is the director of the Low-Wage Work program at the UC Berkeley Labor Center. He is a labor economist, directing and conducting research on how policies affect working families, with a particular focus on how these policies impact racial and gender equity. Doctorate in Economics from Howard University) (Ken, the chair of the University of California, Berkeley Center for Labor Research and Education, where he has been a labor specialist since 2002.) “Don’t Mistake the Disappointing Jobs Numbers for a Labor Shortage,” Barron’s, 9/3/21. https://www.barrons.com/articles/dont-mistake-the-disappointing-jobs-numbers-for-a-labor-shortage-51630698151 RR Today’s jobs report shows a complicated picture for workers. The economy added only 235,000 jobs in August, despite near-record vacancies, while hourly wages grew faster than expected. But hold off a moment before calling it a labor shortage. Yes, some employers are experiencing difficulty filling jobs as the economy begins to recover from the effects of the pandemic. But this alone is just one part of the picture. A labor shortage means there aren’t enough workers, and that is simply not the current case. While there are plenty of workers available, there are far fewer available, willing, and able to work at the current wages being offered. In other words, it isn’t that demand for workers is too high, it’s that wages are too low. While it is true that wages have increased recently for some workers, it would be incorrect to believe that all workers now enjoy higher wages and greater bargaining power with employers. Unfortunately, the truth is millions of workers continue to earn low wages that make it nearly impossible for them to make ends meet. The pandemic has made the economic situation for low-wage workers more dire, but typical workers’ pay has been growing very slowly over the last 40 years. Economic theory states wages are tied to productivity, but this is only in theory. The reality is that since 1979 the gap between pay and worker productivity has widened significantly, with productivity growing 62 over this period, while wages only grew by 18. But if workers are more productive than ever before, why have they received few of the benefits of this increased productivity? The answer is that a greater share of the gains are going to those at the top—through higher salaries at the high end of the income distribution, as well as ever-larger corporate profits. And this has been made even worse by the pandemic, during which the net worth of billionaires in the U.S. increased by $1 trillion at the same time that 20 million workers lost their jobs. Summer 2021 has seen some welcomed wage growth at the middle and bottom of the wage distribution. In terms of industries, the highest wage growth has been in leisure and hospitality (in restaurants and bars, for instance), which traditionally pays some of the lowest wages, and which saw the largest wage drops when Covid-19 hit. Even with these wage increases, real wages for these service-sector workers have rebounded only to prepandemic trends. For workers in these sectors to experience real improvements in earnings, wages need to grow even further. However, there is no guarantee that the recent wage growth will last, let alone that further increases will materialize. One way to help ensure a strong wage floor is by increasing the federal minimum wage, which has been stuck at $7.25 an hour since 2009. Twenty-nine states and the District of Columbia have higher minimum wages than the federal level, but that means there are 21 other states that do not. Increasing the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour, and indexing it to inflation, would help make sure all workers, regardless of where they live, receive decent pay—and that the value of their wages does not again erode over time. While the minimum wage raises the floor, more is needed to improve wages and working conditions for the rest of America’s workers. Central to achieving a broad-based improvement in pay is enabling workers who wish to do so to form unions and engage in collective bargaining. Unions have been shown to improve not just wages and benefits, but also to reduce socioeconomic disparities. Unions raise wages and increase access to benefits for all workers, with the largest gains for those who earn the least in nonunion workplaces: women and workers of color. Unions don’t only benefit their members. When more workers in an industry are unionized, pay rises across the industry. Unions also play an important role in promoting worker health and safety. As the Covid-19 crisis began, unionized workers were more likely to have access to personal protective equipment and paid sick days. Throughout the crisis, unions fought for strong worker protections on the job to reduce the spread of Covid-19 and to get the economy going again. While support for unions is high, America’s labor laws make it extremely difficult for workers to organize and win collective bargaining. In just one egregious example, currently if an employer violates the National Labor Relations Act, there are no financial penalties. The Protecting the Right to Organize Act (PRO Act), which has now passed the House of Representatives and is waiting to be heard in the Senate, would change that. The PRO Act would create stronger remedies, expand bargaining rights, and put the decision over whether or not to join a union in the hands of the workers, where it belongs. Many workers at the bottom have received raises over the last year. A growing body of evidence finds that policies which improve wages and family incomes help reduce racial disparities while having long-term, positive effects on a wide range of societal outcomes–from child and adult health to civic participation. These structural and legal factors provide an important roadmap for us to ensure a robust and sustainable recovery that works for all Americans. Whether wage increases for the majority of workers continue depends on the decisions we make as a society. Industrial workforce shortages are happening now— Covid and inability to compete. Scull and Stone 8/28 (John, an associate in the Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, office of Jackson Lewis P.C. His practice focuses on representing employers in workplace law matters, including preventive advice and counseling.) (James, a principal of the Cleveland, Ohio, office of Jackson Lewis P.C. From the opening of the office in 2006 until early 2020, Jim served as office managing principal in Cleveland. At that time, he stepped down to focus on his busy practice and increased task force activities within practice groups and serving as co-leader of the firm’s Manufacturing industry group.) “Manufacturing Labor Shortage: Cultivating Skilled Labor By Engaging Local Communities,” JDSupra, 8/28/21. https://www.jdsupra.com/legalnews/manufacturing-labor-shortage-1463687/ RR The worker shortage in manufacturing has been exacerbated by the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic, which erased over a decade of job gains in the manufacturing sector, eliminating more than 1.4 million positions, according to a report by Deloitte and the Manufacturing Institute (MI). To counter the trend, manufacturers should consider working with local schools and youth programs to develop a sustainable pipeline of talent. While approximately 820,000 of the jobs lost in the COVID-19 pandemic have since been backfilled, nearly 500,000 positions remain open and manufacturing employers have had difficulty filling these roles. According to the MI report, manufacturing employers say it is currently 36 percent harder to find talent than it was in 2018, even though the unemployment rate today is much higher. This manufacturing employment shortage is likely to intensify as the number of unfilled manufacturing positions in the United States is expected to grow to approximately 2.1 million by 2030 — damaging the U.S. economy by up to $1 trillion. While the pandemic certainly played a large role in damaging the U.S. manufacturing sector’s employment numbers, the worker shortage is nothing new. There are approximately five million fewer Americans employed in the manufacturing sector today than 20 years ago. Employers hope to reverse this trend and are under pressure to do so quickly as the median age of an American working in manufacturing is 44 years old, and older workers are retiring faster than they are being replaced. A strong industrial workforce is key to US military primacy Bloomberg Editorial Board 4/7 (Members of the editorial board will write and edit in other capacities within Bloomberg Opinion. Because our columnists have always spoken for themselves, they will continue as before — though columnists will still refrain from endorsing candidates, a policy we have had in place since we started in 2011.) “America’s Depleted Industrial Base Is a National Security Crisis,” Bloomberg, 4/7/21. https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-04-07/america-s-depleted-industrial-base-is-a-national-security-crisis RR President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s farewell address is most famous for its warning against the “unwarranted influence” of the military-industrial complex. But Eisenhower also stressed the defense industry’s importance to the country’s security: After all, it helped the U.S. maintain superiority over its rivals, forestall great-power conflict and win the Cold War. Six decades on, America’s military remains the most advanced in the world — but the industrial base supporting it has deteriorated. Industry consolidation, domestic manufacturing decline and dysfunctional federal budgeting have combined to reduce competition throughout the defense supply chain, eroding military readiness and potentially jeopardizing national security. As Congress considers the Defense Department’s next budget, investing in a more nimble, innovative and resilient defense-industrial base should be among its highest priorities. Some parts of the defense industry, to be sure, continue to flourish. The U.S. spends more on its military than the next 10 countries combined, with the Pentagon’s budget consuming more than half of all federal discretionary spending. Revenue for defense contractors has increased by 83 since 2011, with annual spending per company doubling in the past five years alone. That money, however, is flowing to a reduced cast of contractors. An analysis by Bloomberg Government found that the number of Pentagon “prime vendors” — those that receive contracts directly from the government — has dropped by 36 in the last decade. An even smaller handful has reaped the most gains. According to the Government Accountability Office, nearly half of the 183 major contracts awarded by the Pentagon in 2018 went to just five contractors and their subsidiaries. Such concentration imposes costs on both the military and the public. The first is financial. More than two-thirds of major Defense Department contracts are awarded without a competitive bidding process, according to the GAO; most of the rest receive bids from two or fewer companies. Fewer bidders means pricier contracts: Between 2008 and 2018, the average acquisition cost of a U.S. weapons program, in constant dollars, increased by 12.5. A lack of suppliers also undermines America’s ability to respond to crises. The Pentagon has identified a “staggering” number of cases where it relies on a single vendor for critical components. It’s down to a lone domestic source of both ammonium perchlorate, a key ingredient for warship propulsion systems, and chaff, a material that fighter jets release to evade enemy radar systems. A sole manufacturer provides all of the Army’s gun and howitzer barrels and mortar tubes. Meanwhile, offshoring has made the supply chain more vulnerable to trade disruptions, cyberattacks and sabotage. This attenuation of the U.S.’s military supply chain poses a growing national security risk — and it demands a bold response. President Joe Biden’s $2.25 trillion infrastructure plan includes $180 billion in investments to strengthen U.S. supply chains. The administration should use the Defense Production Act and other authorities to boost support for smaller domestic suppliers of critical goods and services. The Pentagon should also streamline its cumbersome contracting and acquisition process, which discourages innovation and crowds out nontraditional vendors. Initiatives like the Trusted Capital program, which connects investors with companies developing new military technologies, should be expanded. Finally, the Federal Trade Commission and the Justice Department should increase scrutiny of defense-industry mergers and acquisitions to limit excessive consolidation. A well-functioning supply chain depends on a diverse array of private-sector companies. The viability of those companies, in turn, depends on a sufficient supply of skilled labor. Upgrading the skills of both service members and the civilian workforce that supports the military is critical. The Pentagon should expand digital training for current employees and offer promotions and higher pay to civilian staff with advanced technical skills. Congress should boost funding for the department’s Skills Imperative initiative, which brings together schools and employers to address defense-industry workforce needs. It should also encourage apprenticeship programs in key sectors, such as shipbuilding, that lack qualified workers. As Eisenhower recognized, America’s influence abroad depends on its strength at home. Revitalizing the defense-industrial base is essential not only for national security, but also for the preservation of peace around the world. US primacy prevents great-power conflict — multipolar revisionism fragments the global order and causes nuclear war Brands and Edel, 19 — Hal Brands; PhD, Henry A. Kissinger Distinguished Professor of Global Affairs at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. Charles Edel; PhD, Senior Fellow and Visiting Scholar at the United States Studies Centre at the University of Sydney. (“The Lessons of Tragedy: Statecraft and World Order;” Ch. 6: Darkening Horizon; Published by Yale University Press; GrRv) Each of these geopolitical challenges is different, and each reflects the distinctive interests, ambitions, and history of the country undertaking it. Yet there is growing cooperation between the countries that are challenging the regional pillars of the U.S.-led order. Russia and China have collaborated on issues such as energy, sales and development of military technology, opposition to additional U.S. military deployments on the Korean peninsula, and naval exercises from the South China Sea to the Baltic. In Syria, Iran provided the shock troops that helped keep Russia’s ally, Bashar al-Assad, in power, as Moscow provided the air power and the diplomatic cover. “Our cooperation can isolate America,” supreme leader Ali Khamenei told Putin in 2017. More broadly, what links these challenges together is their opposition to the constellation of power, norms, and relationships that the U.S.-led order entails, and in their propensity to use violence, coercion, and intimidation as means of making that opposition effective. Taken collectively, these challenges constitute a geopolitical sea change from the post-Cold War era. The revival of great-power competition entails higher international tensions than the world has known for decades, and the revival of arms races, security dilemmas, and other artifacts of a more dangerous past. It entails sharper conflicts over the international rules of the road on issues ranging from freedom of navigation to the illegitimacy of altering borders by force, and intensifying competitions over states that reside at the intersection of rival powers’ areas of interest. It requires confronting the prospect that rival powers could overturn the favorable regional balances that have underpinned the U.S.-led order for decades, and that they might construct rival spheres of influence from which America and the liberal ideas it has long promoted would be excluded. Finally, it necessitates recognizing that great-power rivalry could lead to great-power war, a prospect that seemed to have followed the Soviet empire onto the ash heap of history. Both Beijing and Moscow are, after all, optimizing their forces and exercising aggressively in preparation for potential conflicts with the United States and its allies; Russian doctrine explicitly emphasizes the limited use of nuclear weapons to achieve escalation dominance in a war with Washington. In Syria, U.S. and Russian forces even came into deadly contact in early 2018. American airpower decimated a contingent of government-sponsored Russian mercenaries that was attacking a base at which U.S. troops were present, an incident demonstrating the increasing boldness of Russian operations and the corresponding potential for escalation. The world has not yet returned to the epic clashes for global dominance that characterized the twentieth century, but it has returned to the historical norm of great-power struggle, with all the associated dangers. Those dangers may be even greater than most observers appreciate, because if today’s great-power competitions are still most intense at the regional level, who is to say where these competitions will end? By all appearances, Russia does not simply want to be a “regional power” (as Obama cuttingly described it) that dominates South Ossetia and Crimea.37 It aspires to the deep European and extra-regional impact that previous incarnations of the Russian state enjoyed. Why else would Putin boast about how far his troops can drive into Eastern Europe? Why else would Moscow be deploying military power into the Middle East? Why else would it be continuing to cultivate intelligence and military relationships in regions as remote as Latin America? Likewise, China is today focused primarily on securing its own geopolitical neighborhood, but its ambitions for tomorrow are clearly much bolder. Beijing probably does not envision itself fully overthrowing the international order, simply because it has profited far too much from the U.S.-anchored global economy. Yet China has nonetheless positioned itself for a global challenge to U.S. influence. Chinese military forces are deploying ever farther from China’s immediate periphery; Beijing has projected power into the Arctic and established bases and logistical points in the Indian Ocean and Horn of Africa. Popular Chinese movies depict Beijing replacing Washington as the dominant actor in sub-Saharan Africa—a fictional representation of a real-life effort long under way. The Belt and Road Initiative bespeaks an aspiration to link China to countries throughout Central Asia, the Middle East, and Europe; BRI, AIIB, and RCEP look like the beginning of an alternative institutional architecture to rival Washington’s. In 2017, Xi Jinping told the Nineteenth National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party that Beijing could now “take center stage in the world” and act as an alternative to U.S. leadership.38 These ambitions may or may not be realistic. But they demonstrate just how significantly the world’s leading authoritarian powers desire to shift the global environment over time. The revisionism we are seeing today may therefore be only the beginning. As China’s power continues to grow, or if it is successful in dominating the Western Pacific, it will surely move on to grander endeavors. If Russia reconsolidates control over the former Soviet space, it may seek to bring parts of the former Warsaw Pact to heel. Historically, this has been a recurring pattern of great-power behavior—interests expand with power, the appetite grows with the eating, risk-taking increases as early gambles are seen to pay off.39 This pattern is precisely why the revival of great-power competition is so concerning—because geopolitical revisionism by unsatisfied major powers has so often presaged intensifying international conflict, confrontation, and even war. The great-power behavior occurring today represents the warning light flashing on the dashboard. It tells us there may be still-greater traumas to come. The threats today are compelling and urgent, and there may someday come a time when the balance of power has shifted so markedly that the postwar international system cannot be sustained. Yet that moment of failure has not yet arrived, and so the goal of U.S. strategy should be not to hasten it by giving up prematurely, but to push it off as far into the future as possible. Rather than simply acquiescing in the decline of a world it spent generations building, America should aggressively bolster its defenses, with an eye to preserving and perhaps even selectively advancing its remarkable achievements. Retrenchment causes nationalism, war, and protectionism – optimists falsely assume current cooperative trends will continue without the US security guarantee Matthew Fay 17, Director of Defense and Foreign Policy Studies @ The Niskanen Center, 11/16/17, “America Unrestrained?: Engagement, Retrenchment, and Libertarian Foreign Policy,” https://niskanencenter.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/America-Unrestrained.pdf A number of the arguments libertarians make in favor of retrenchment have merit, but the cost-benefit analysis derived from them is based on a deterministic view of international politics. Libertarian retrenchers assume that international politics would remain more or less the same absent American engagement and that America’s domestic politics would remain the same even if the international system become more conflict-prone. Given the inherent uncertainty of forecasting, the costs and benefits of engagement and retrenchment need to be considered in a more probabilistic fashion.86 This section begins by exploring a number of scenarios that could occur should the United States adopt a grand strategy of retrenchment. It then reassesses the costs and benefits of retrenchment for a free society. In a system with more independent states balancing against one another, is war more or less likely? Libertarians are placing a bet that all else would remain equal in international politics if the United States retrenches. While they assume a world where an increased number of states are balancing against one another would remain peaceful, the reality is not entirely clear. Using basic realist premises about state behavior under international anarchy, it is easy to identify a number of scenarios less rosy than the one libertarians assume would occur should the United States retrench. These scenarios might include a world of increased nationalism, eroding norms against military aggression, increased economic autarky, and the further spread of nuclear weapons as states look to produce security for themselves. Some states may also fail to balance against threats in the wake of American retrenchment, increasing the likelihood the United States will be drawn into a major war. Libertarians assume that in the absence of an alliance with the United States, other countries would simply increase their defense spending if they felt threatened. However, internal balancing is not a mechanical process. According to John Mearsheimer, leaders of states facing security competition are likely to use nationalism to garner support from their populations for the necessary regeneration of military capabilities.87 Writing at the end of the Cold War, Mearsheimer suggested that Europe would revert to a pattern of recurrent warfare. The absence of the United States and the Soviet Union would leave Europe, once again, an anarchic multipolar system. The structure of the system would force the states to compete with one another, as they had prior to the Cold War. Mearsheimer argued that pre-1945 “hypernationalism” was a product of “security competition among the European states, which compelled elites to mobilize public support for national defense efforts.”88 American retrenchment could similarly lead to an anarchic, multipolar Europe—thus increasing the chances of war on the continent. Such a system could engender nationalist sentiments among the populations of Europe, heightening animosities between national groups. These heightened animosities could help erode norms against military aggression that have facilitated the decline in interstate war. Nationalist groups within a country can seize on these sentiments to pursue confrontational and expansionist policies.89 Encouraging support for increased military capabilities through nationalism might lead populations to see war as once again a means to national glory or maintaining national honor. Matters of national prestige and honor can lead to the initiation of wars when bound up in territorial claims, while at the same time increasing the intensity and duration of a conflict.90 Nationalism and security competition might also erode the pacifying effects of economic openness. Realism suggests states are concerned about relative gains.91 States in security competition might be wary of trading with one another due to concerns about how a potential rival’s economic gains might provide it with an advantage if translated into military power. They may also adopt autarkic policies for fear of undermining their economic and military self-sufficiency.92 Territorial conquest has become increasing anachronistic in international politics. However, the proliferation of protectionist policies might once again make aggression and preventive war seem like strategically sensible ways for states to secure the resources necessary to reduce the ability of potential rivals to cut them off economically. If the risk of territorial aggression increases, the possession of nuclear weapons would become an attractive option for some states whose security was previously guaranteed by the United States. Nuclear weapons are most useful for deterring major territorial aggression, meaning their potential utility increases as the potential for war does.93 A number of U.S. allies have either previously pursued nuclear weapons or have the capability to do so. They might choose to obtain a nuclear arsenal once responsible for their own security. Pursuit is inevitable Wright 20 (Thomas, director of the Center on the United States and Europe and a senior fellow in the Project on International Order and Strategy at the Brookings Institution, former lecturer at the University of Chicago's Harris School for Public Policy, PhD from Georgetown University and M.Phil. from Cambridge University) “The Folly of Retrenchment: Why America Can’t Withdraw From the World,” Foreign Affairs, 4/2020 JL A fifth problem with retrenchment is that it lacks domestic support. The American people may favor greater burden sharing, but there is no evidence that they are onboard with a withdrawal from Europe and Asia. As a survey conducted in 2019 by the Chicago Council on Global Affairs found, seven out of ten Americans believe that maintaining military superiority makes the United States safer, and almost three-quarters think that alliances contribute to U.S. security. A 2019 Eurasia Group Foundation poll found that over 60 percent of Americans want to maintain or increase defense spending. As it became apparent that China and Russia would benefit from this shift toward retrenchment, and as the United States’ democratic allies objected to its withdrawal, the domestic political backlash would grow. One result could be a prolonged foreign policy debate that would cause the United States to oscillate between retrenchment and reengagement, creating uncertainty about its commitments and thus raising the risk of miscalculation by Washington, its allies, or its rivals. Heg is sustainable – America has strong bones Ikenberry 18 (John, Professor of Politics and International Affairs in the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University) reviewing book by Beckley (Michael, Fellow in the International Security Program at Harvard Kennedy School's Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs) “Unrivaled: Why America Will Remain the World’s Sole Superpower,” Foreign Affairs, November/December 2018 It has become conventional wisdom that the United States is in decline, the uni-polar era is ending, and China is on the rise. In this smart and sophisticated book, Beckley tackles this thesis head-on. He does not dispute that the United States has its problems or that misguided leaders often squander its advantages. But he points out that the United States’ deep geographic, demographic, and institutional reserves give the country unique resilience. The United States is the only great power without regional rivals. Its companies and universities dominate the world. And most important, Beckley argues that it has by far the best fundamentals for future economic growth, thanks to its abundant natural resources, favorable demographics, secure property rights, and lasting political institutions. China’s growth prospects, in contrast, are “dismal.” Beckley also thinks the declinists use the wrong measures of power. GDP, for example, exaggerates the influence of populous but poor countries, such as China, while overlooking problems that drain those countries’ economic and military resources. He does not argue that the United States can—or should—try to preserve the unipolar era, but he does think that it will long remain the world’s leading power.
Nuclear war causes extinction – famine and climate change Starr 15 (Steven, Director of the University of Missouri’s Clinical Laboratory Science Program and a senior scientist at the Physicians for Social Responsibility) “Nuclear War, Nuclear Winter, and Human Extinction,” Federation of American Scientists, 10/14/2015 DD
While it is impossible to precisely predict all the human impacts that would result from a nuclear winter, it is relatively simple to predict those which would be most profound. That is, a nuclear winter would cause most humans and large animals to die from nuclear famine in a mass extinction event similar to the one that wiped out the dinosaurs. Following the detonation (in conflict) of US and/or Russian launch-ready strategic nuclear weapons, nuclear firestorms would burn simultaneously over a total land surface area of many thousands or tens of thousands of square miles. These mass fires, many of which would rage over large cities and industrial areas, would release many tens of millions of tons of black carbon soot and smoke (up to 180 million tons, according to peer-reviewed studies), which would rise rapidly above cloud level and into the stratosphere. For an explanation of the calculation of smoke emissions, see Atmospheric effects and societal consequences of regional scale nuclear conflicts. The scientists who completed the most recent peer-reviewed studies on nuclear winter discovered that the sunlight would heat the smoke, producing a self-lofting effect that would not only aid the rise of the smoke into the stratosphere (above cloud level, where it could not be rained out), but act to keep the smoke in the stratosphere for 10 years or more. The longevity of the smoke layer would act to greatly increase the severity of its effects upon the biosphere. Once in the stratosphere, the smoke (predicted to be produced by a range of strategic nuclear wars) would rapidly engulf the Earth and form a dense stratospheric smoke layer. The smoke from a war fought with strategic nuclear weapons would quickly prevent up to 70 of sunlight from reaching the surface of the Northern Hemisphere and 35 of sunlight from reaching the surface of the Southern Hemisphere. Such an enormous loss of warming sunlight would produce Ice Age weather conditions on Earth in a matter of weeks. For a period of 1-3 years following the war, temperatures would fall below freezing every day in the central agricultural zones of North America and Eurasia. For an explanation of nuclear winter, see Nuclear winter revisited with a modern climate model and current nuclear arsenals: Still catastrophic consequences. Nuclear winter would cause average global surface temperatures to become colder than they were at the height of the last Ice Age. Such extreme cold would eliminate growing seasons for many years, probably for a decade or longer. Can you imagine a winter that lasts for ten years? The results of such a scenario are obvious. Temperatures would be much too cold to grow food, and they would remain this way long enough to cause most humans and animals to starve to death. Global nuclear famine would ensue in a setting in which the infrastructure of the combatant nations has been totally destroyed, resulting in massive amounts of chemical and radioactive toxins being released into the biosphere. We don’t need a sophisticated study to tell us that no food and Ice Age temperatures for a decade would kill most people and animals on the planet. Would the few remaining survivors be able to survive in a radioactive, toxic environment?
12/19/21
NovDec- Workforce Adv
Tournament: Damus | Round: 4 | Opponent: Harvard Westlake NL | Judge: Gottfried, Sophia Plan Plan: The United States should recognize an unconditional right of workers to strike.
Advantage 1 — Workforce Advantage one is the workforce Labor unrest is increasing and there is momentum to strike, but current laws leave workers powerless. Semuels 10/8 (Alana, Journalist and currently senior economics correspondent at TIME magazine, previously The Atlantic, The Los Angeles Times, The Boston Globe.) “U.S. Workers Are Realizing It’s the Perfect Time to Go on Strike,” TIME, 10/8/21. https://time.com/6105109/workers-strike-unemployment/ RR Thousands of workers have gone on strike across the country, showing their growing power in a tightening economy. The leverage U.S. employees have over the people signing their paychecks was amplified in Friday’s jobs report, which showed that employers added workers at a much slower-than-expected pace in September. The unemployment rate fell 0.4 percentage points during the month, to 4.8 percent, the government said Friday, and wages are continuing to tick up across industries as employers become more desperate to hire and retain workers. In the first five days of October alone, there were 10 strikes in the U.S., including workers at Kellogg plants in Nebraska, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Tennessee; school bus drivers in Annapolis, Md.; and janitors at the Denver airport. That doesn’t include the nearly 60,000 union members in film and television production who nearly unanimously voted to grant their union’s president the authority to call a strike. Jess Deyo is one of nearly 700 nurses who have been on strike as part of the longest healthcare strike in Massachusetts history. For the past seven months, Deyo has reported for duty at the hospital in Worcester, Mass. where she worked as a nurse for more than 15 years, sometimes bringing her daughters, and standing outside through the chills of spring and the heat of summer. The nurses are demanding higher nurse-to-patient ratios after a harrowing 19 months of working during a pandemic. “There’s no choice to give up on the strike,” she says. “It’s bigger than us—it’s for everyone.” Most of these strikes aren’t counted by the federal government, which in the 1980s started only tracking strikes that involved 1,000 or more workers and that lasted one full shift or longer. There have only been 11 of those so far this year, according to government data, at places like Volvo Trucks and Nabisco. But academics at Cornell University launched a strike database on May 1 that uses social media and Google alerts to keep track of all the strikes and protests happening in the U.S., even if they involve just a few workers. The database shows a picture of growing worker activism, of small actions that tell a story of how people at workplaces small and large are feeling after 19 months of a global pandemic, says Johnnie Kallas, a PhD student who is the director of Cornell’s Labor Action Tracker. It has documented 169 strikes so far in 2021. “Workers are fed up with low pay and understaffing, and they have more labor market leverage with employers needing to hire right now,” he says. “You are seeing a little bit more labor unrest.” Of course, compared to half a century ago, there still aren’t many strikes in the U.S. There were 5,716 strikes in 1971 alone, according to government data from when the government tracked smaller strikes. And the share of unionized workers in the U.S. is near an all-time low, with just 12.1 of workers represented by unions last year. But the activism comes at a time when approval of labor unions—even among Republicans—is trending upwards—and when a low unemployment rate is giving leverage to workers who have long put up with poor conditions and pay. A Gallup poll released in the beginning of July showed that 68 of Americans approve of labor unions, higher than it had been in years and up significantly from the 48 approval in 2009 during the throes of the Great Recession. The poll also showed that 47 of Republicans said they approved of unions—the highest share since 2003—and that 90 of Democrats did. Greater income inequality, more strikes Part of the support of unions and organizing may come from Americans’ discontent with growing inequality, much as inequality a century ago galvanized a labor movement then, says Tom Kochan, a professor of work and employment research at MIT. There are a growing number of billionaires in America–708 as of August—with a net worth of $4.7 trillion as of August 17. That’s more than the total net worth of the bottom 50 of Americans. “I think the accumulated effects of the loss of good jobs in manufacturing, stagnant wages, growing inequality, and the growing disparity between executives and managers and the workforce—all of that is fueling increases in organizing,” he says. Some of this labor activism was happening before the pandemic, Kochan says, when even the government’s strike tracker showed an uptick in unrest. Teachers in states like Arizona and Oklahoma started striking in 2018 because of low pay and a lack of public funding. In 2020, NBA athletes walked out of a playoff game to protest the shooting of Jacob Blake in Kenosha, Wisc. The year 2019 saw 25 work stoppages involving 1,000 or more workers, the most since 2001. In 2017, 48 of non-unionized workers said they would vote to join a union if given the chance, higher than the share who said that in 1995 (32) and 1977 (33), according to Kochan’s research. The pandemic worsened working conditions for thousands of workers like Deyo. Kellogg workers at a plant in Battle Creek, Mich., told the local news that they were lauded as heroes for working 16 hour days, seven days a week during the pandemic, and rather than reward them, the company recently decided to offshore some of their jobs. They went on strike on Oct. 5. Musicians at the San Antonio Symphony say they voluntarily accepted an 80 pay cut last season, and that the symphony then proposed first to permanently cut their pay by 50 and then to cut the number of full-time members from 72 to 42. They went on strike on Sept. 27. Do strikes work? For their part, employers say that they’re being fair, and that workers are being unreasonable. Kellogg provides workers with benefits and compensation that are among the industry’s best, a company spokesman, Kris Bahner, said in a statement. The company says it has not proposed moving any jobs from the Ready to Eat Cereal plants, which are the plants where the workers are striking, as part of negotiations. The San Antonio Symphony said, in a statement, that the union and the symphony agreed to a 25 reduction in weekly salary for the 2020-2021 season, but that because there were fewer performances and because fewer musicians could fit on stage because of social distancing guidelines, some musicians did make 80 less than they would have made in a normal season. The symphony needs to make “fundamental changes,” a spokesperson said, and it cannot afford to spend more than it makes through ticket sales and donations. Carolyn Jackson, the CEO of St. Vincent’s, where Deyo and hundreds of other nurses are striking, says that the nurses are trying to push a 1:4 nurse to patient ratio that Massachusetts voters rejected by a large margin in 2018. The hospital has done research and decided its staffing is appropriate, and that its staffing ratios are in fact better than most other hospitals in the state, she says. Ryan says the hospital announced it was hiring 100 permanent replacement nurses in May during a COVID-19 surge, and that the striking nurses are insisting on getting their old positions back. That the hospital is not budging speaks to the fact that despite this increase in worker activism, workers may not gain much more power in the long run. Over the last 40 years, the government has made it much more difficult for workers to both form unions and to strike, says Heidi Shierholz, the president of the Economic Policy Institute, a progressive think tank. Amazon was able to effectively interfere in a union vote among its workers this spring, she says, preventing the union from succeeding. Of course, a hearing officer at the National Labor Relations Board has recommended that the board throw out the results of the Amazon election and do it over, which speaks to a resurgence of government support for labor. President Joe Biden said he wanted to be “the most pro-union President leading the most pro-union administration in American history.” Labor has support at the state and local levels too: California Gov. Gavin Newsom recently signed a packet of pro-worker bills, including one that prohibits companies from imposing quotas on warehouse workers that prevent them from following health and safety law, and another that prohibits employers from paying workers with disabilities less than the state’s minimum wage. And in January, New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio signed a bill that forbids fast food restaurants from firing workers unless the employer has just cause, making New York City the first jurisdiction in the country that essentially ended at-will employment. But even that support may not be enough to force a widespread change of working conditions in an economy where employees haven’t had much leverage since before the Great Recession, or earlier. Even some of the recent strikes haven’t led to workers’ desired outcomes. A five-week Nabisco strike recently ended with many of workers’ demands met, for instance, but the company still won the ability to pay weekend workers less than they do currently. As for Jess Deyo and the Worcester nurses, many have been forced to move on. After Deyo’s unemployment benefits ended and her health insurance premiums spiked, she decided she needed to find another job so that she could support her family. She’s a single mother. She found a job working as a nurse at a doctor’s office, where she says she feels more appreciated than she’s ever felt at work. The hours are better and she finally feels respected. But she makes $13 less an hour. Strikes are key to revitalizing labor unions. Bahn 19 (Kate, the director of labor market policy and interim chief economist at the Washington Center for Equitable Growth) “The once and future role of strikes in ensuring U.S. worker power” Washington Center for Equitable Growth, 8/29/19. https://equitablegrowth.org/the-once-and-future-role-of-strikes-in-ensuring-u-s-worker-power/ RR At the same time, there is an increasing consensus today that unions are a positive force for increasing worker power and balancing against economic inequality. In polling of support for unions and specific aspects of collective bargaining, Equitable Growth grantee Alex Hertel-Fernandez of Columbia University, along with William Kimball and Thomas Kochan of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, find that support for unions has grown overall, with nearly half of U.S. workers in 2018 saying they would vote for a union if given the opportunity. This is a significant increase from one-third of workers supporting unionization in 1995. According to their research, workers primarily value unions’ role in collective bargaining and ensuring access to benefits such as healthcare, retirement, and unemployment insurance. Strikes have historically been one of the strongest tools used by unions to ensure they have power to engage in collective bargaining. But striking was viewed as a negative attribute in the survey done by Hertel-Fernandez, Kimball, and Kochan. Yet, when they presented workers with the hypothetical choice of a union exercising strike power with other attributes of unions, such as collective bargaining, support increased. But strikes, of course, do not take place in a bubble. The wider climate of worker bargaining power and institutions that support labor organizing plays a role in making this historically crucial tool effective again. So, too, does the power of employers to resist these organizing efforts when the labor market lacks competition that would increase worker bargaining power. Labor shortages now are because of low wages— unions reverse that by allowing for bargaining. Lopezlira and Jacobs 9/3 (Enrique, is the director of the Low-Wage Work program at the UC Berkeley Labor Center. He is a labor economist, directing and conducting research on how policies affect working families, with a particular focus on how these policies impact racial and gender equity. Doctorate in Economics from Howard University) (Ken, the chair of the University of California, Berkeley Center for Labor Research and Education, where he has been a labor specialist since 2002.) “Don’t Mistake the Disappointing Jobs Numbers for a Labor Shortage,” Barron’s, 9/3/21. https://www.barrons.com/articles/dont-mistake-the-disappointing-jobs-numbers-for-a-labor-shortage-51630698151 RR Today’s jobs report shows a complicated picture for workers. The economy added only 235,000 jobs in August, despite near-record vacancies, while hourly wages grew faster than expected. But hold off a moment before calling it a labor shortage. Yes, some employers are experiencing difficulty filling jobs as the economy begins to recover from the effects of the pandemic. But this alone is just one part of the picture. A labor shortage means there aren’t enough workers, and that is simply not the current case. While there are plenty of workers available, there are far fewer available, willing, and able to work at the current wages being offered. In other words, it isn’t that demand for workers is too high, it’s that wages are too low. While it is true that wages have increased recently for some workers, it would be incorrect to believe that all workers now enjoy higher wages and greater bargaining power with employers. Unfortunately, the truth is millions of workers continue to earn low wages that make it nearly impossible for them to make ends meet. The pandemic has made the economic situation for low-wage workers more dire, but typical workers’ pay has been growing very slowly over the last 40 years. Economic theory states wages are tied to productivity, but this is only in theory. The reality is that since 1979 the gap between pay and worker productivity has widened significantly, with productivity growing 62 over this period, while wages only grew by 18. But if workers are more productive than ever before, why have they received few of the benefits of this increased productivity? The answer is that a greater share of the gains are going to those at the top—through higher salaries at the high end of the income distribution, as well as ever-larger corporate profits. And this has been made even worse by the pandemic, during which the net worth of billionaires in the U.S. increased by $1 trillion at the same time that 20 million workers lost their jobs. Summer 2021 has seen some welcomed wage growth at the middle and bottom of the wage distribution. In terms of industries, the highest wage growth has been in leisure and hospitality (in restaurants and bars, for instance), which traditionally pays some of the lowest wages, and which saw the largest wage drops when Covid-19 hit. Even with these wage increases, real wages for these service-sector workers have rebounded only to prepandemic trends. For workers in these sectors to experience real improvements in earnings, wages need to grow even further. However, there is no guarantee that the recent wage growth will last, let alone that further increases will materialize. One way to help ensure a strong wage floor is by increasing the federal minimum wage, which has been stuck at $7.25 an hour since 2009. Twenty-nine states and the District of Columbia have higher minimum wages than the federal level, but that means there are 21 other states that do not. Increasing the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour, and indexing it to inflation, would help make sure all workers, regardless of where they live, receive decent pay—and that the value of their wages does not again erode over time. While the minimum wage raises the floor, more is needed to improve wages and working conditions for the rest of America’s workers. Central to achieving a broad-based improvement in pay is enabling workers who wish to do so to form unions and engage in collective bargaining. Unions have been shown to improve not just wages and benefits, but also to reduce socioeconomic disparities. Unions raise wages and increase access to benefits for all workers, with the largest gains for those who earn the least in nonunion workplaces: women and workers of color. Unions don’t only benefit their members. When more workers in an industry are unionized, pay rises across the industry. Unions also play an important role in promoting worker health and safety. As the Covid-19 crisis began, unionized workers were more likely to have access to personal protective equipment and paid sick days. Throughout the crisis, unions fought for strong worker protections on the job to reduce the spread of Covid-19 and to get the economy going again. While support for unions is high, America’s labor laws make it extremely difficult for workers to organize and win collective bargaining. In just one egregious example, currently if an employer violates the National Labor Relations Act, there are no financial penalties. The Protecting the Right to Organize Act (PRO Act), which has now passed the House of Representatives and is waiting to be heard in the Senate, would change that. The PRO Act would create stronger remedies, expand bargaining rights, and put the decision over whether or not to join a union in the hands of the workers, where it belongs. Many workers at the bottom have received raises over the last year. A growing body of evidence finds that policies which improve wages and family incomes help reduce racial disparities while having long-term, positive effects on a wide range of societal outcomes–from child and adult health to civic participation. These structural and legal factors provide an important roadmap for us to ensure a robust and sustainable recovery that works for all Americans. Whether wage increases for the majority of workers continue depends on the decisions we make as a society. Industrial workforce shortages are happening now— Covid and inability to compete. Scull and Stone 8/28 (John, an associate in the Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, office of Jackson Lewis P.C. His practice focuses on representing employers in workplace law matters, including preventive advice and counseling.) (James, a principal of the Cleveland, Ohio, office of Jackson Lewis P.C. From the opening of the office in 2006 until early 2020, Jim served as office managing principal in Cleveland. At that time, he stepped down to focus on his busy practice and increased task force activities within practice groups and serving as co-leader of the firm’s Manufacturing industry group.) “Manufacturing Labor Shortage: Cultivating Skilled Labor By Engaging Local Communities,” JDSupra, 8/28/21. https://www.jdsupra.com/legalnews/manufacturing-labor-shortage-1463687/ RR The worker shortage in manufacturing has been exacerbated by the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic, which erased over a decade of job gains in the manufacturing sector, eliminating more than 1.4 million positions, according to a report by Deloitte and the Manufacturing Institute (MI). To counter the trend, manufacturers should consider working with local schools and youth programs to develop a sustainable pipeline of talent. While approximately 820,000 of the jobs lost in the COVID-19 pandemic have since been backfilled, nearly 500,000 positions remain open and manufacturing employers have had difficulty filling these roles. According to the MI report, manufacturing employers say it is currently 36 percent harder to find talent than it was in 2018, even though the unemployment rate today is much higher. This manufacturing employment shortage is likely to intensify as the number of unfilled manufacturing positions in the United States is expected to grow to approximately 2.1 million by 2030 — damaging the U.S. economy by up to $1 trillion. While the pandemic certainly played a large role in damaging the U.S. manufacturing sector’s employment numbers, the worker shortage is nothing new. There are approximately five million fewer Americans employed in the manufacturing sector today than 20 years ago. Employers hope to reverse this trend and are under pressure to do so quickly as the median age of an American working in manufacturing is 44 years old, and older workers are retiring faster than they are being replaced. A strong industrial workforce is key to US military primacy Bloomberg Editorial Board 4/7 (Members of the editorial board will write and edit in other capacities within Bloomberg Opinion. Because our columnists have always spoken for themselves, they will continue as before — though columnists will still refrain from endorsing candidates, a policy we have had in place since we started in 2011.) “America’s Depleted Industrial Base Is a National Security Crisis,” Bloomberg, 4/7/21. https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-04-07/america-s-depleted-industrial-base-is-a-national-security-crisis RR President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s farewell address is most famous for its warning against the “unwarranted influence” of the military-industrial complex. But Eisenhower also stressed the defense industry’s importance to the country’s security: After all, it helped the U.S. maintain superiority over its rivals, forestall great-power conflict and win the Cold War. Six decades on, America’s military remains the most advanced in the world — but the industrial base supporting it has deteriorated. Industry consolidation, domestic manufacturing decline and dysfunctional federal budgeting have combined to reduce competition throughout the defense supply chain, eroding military readiness and potentially jeopardizing national security. As Congress considers the Defense Department’s next budget, investing in a more nimble, innovative and resilient defense-industrial base should be among its highest priorities. Some parts of the defense industry, to be sure, continue to flourish. The U.S. spends more on its military than the next 10 countries combined, with the Pentagon’s budget consuming more than half of all federal discretionary spending. Revenue for defense contractors has increased by 83 since 2011, with annual spending per company doubling in the past five years alone. That money, however, is flowing to a reduced cast of contractors. An analysis by Bloomberg Government found that the number of Pentagon “prime vendors” — those that receive contracts directly from the government — has dropped by 36 in the last decade. An even smaller handful has reaped the most gains. According to the Government Accountability Office, nearly half of the 183 major contracts awarded by the Pentagon in 2018 went to just five contractors and their subsidiaries. Such concentration imposes costs on both the military and the public. The first is financial. More than two-thirds of major Defense Department contracts are awarded without a competitive bidding process, according to the GAO; most of the rest receive bids from two or fewer companies. Fewer bidders means pricier contracts: Between 2008 and 2018, the average acquisition cost of a U.S. weapons program, in constant dollars, increased by 12.5. A lack of suppliers also undermines America’s ability to respond to crises. The Pentagon has identified a “staggering” number of cases where it relies on a single vendor for critical components. It’s down to a lone domestic source of both ammonium perchlorate, a key ingredient for warship propulsion systems, and chaff, a material that fighter jets release to evade enemy radar systems. A sole manufacturer provides all of the Army’s gun and howitzer barrels and mortar tubes. Meanwhile, offshoring has made the supply chain more vulnerable to trade disruptions, cyberattacks and sabotage. This attenuation of the U.S.’s military supply chain poses a growing national security risk — and it demands a bold response. President Joe Biden’s $2.25 trillion infrastructure plan includes $180 billion in investments to strengthen U.S. supply chains. The administration should use the Defense Production Act and other authorities to boost support for smaller domestic suppliers of critical goods and services. The Pentagon should also streamline its cumbersome contracting and acquisition process, which discourages innovation and crowds out nontraditional vendors. Initiatives like the Trusted Capital program, which connects investors with companies developing new military technologies, should be expanded. Finally, the Federal Trade Commission and the Justice Department should increase scrutiny of defense-industry mergers and acquisitions to limit excessive consolidation. A well-functioning supply chain depends on a diverse array of private-sector companies. The viability of those companies, in turn, depends on a sufficient supply of skilled labor. Upgrading the skills of both service members and the civilian workforce that supports the military is critical. The Pentagon should expand digital training for current employees and offer promotions and higher pay to civilian staff with advanced technical skills. Congress should boost funding for the department’s Skills Imperative initiative, which brings together schools and employers to address defense-industry workforce needs. It should also encourage apprenticeship programs in key sectors, such as shipbuilding, that lack qualified workers. As Eisenhower recognized, America’s influence abroad depends on its strength at home. Revitalizing the defense-industrial base is essential not only for national security, but also for the preservation of peace around the world. US primacy prevents great-power conflict — multipolar revisionism fragments the global order and causes nuclear war Brands and Edel, 19 — Hal Brands; PhD, Henry A. Kissinger Distinguished Professor of Global Affairs at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. Charles Edel; PhD, Senior Fellow and Visiting Scholar at the United States Studies Centre at the University of Sydney. (“The Lessons of Tragedy: Statecraft and World Order;” Ch. 6: Darkening Horizon; Published by Yale University Press; GrRv) Each of these geopolitical challenges is different, and each reflects the distinctive interests, ambitions, and history of the country undertaking it. Yet there is growing cooperation between the countries that are challenging the regional pillars of the U.S.-led order. Russia and China have collaborated on issues such as energy, sales and development of military technology, opposition to additional U.S. military deployments on the Korean peninsula, and naval exercises from the South China Sea to the Baltic. In Syria, Iran provided the shock troops that helped keep Russia’s ally, Bashar al-Assad, in power, as Moscow provided the air power and the diplomatic cover. “Our cooperation can isolate America,” supreme leader Ali Khamenei told Putin in 2017. More broadly, what links these challenges together is their opposition to the constellation of power, norms, and relationships that the U.S.-led order entails, and in their propensity to use violence, coercion, and intimidation as means of making that opposition effective. Taken collectively, these challenges constitute a geopolitical sea change from the post-Cold War era. The revival of great-power competition entails higher international tensions than the world has known for decades, and the revival of arms races, security dilemmas, and other artifacts of a more dangerous past. It entails sharper conflicts over the international rules of the road on issues ranging from freedom of navigation to the illegitimacy of altering borders by force, and intensifying competitions over states that reside at the intersection of rival powers’ areas of interest. It requires confronting the prospect that rival powers could overturn the favorable regional balances that have underpinned the U.S.-led order for decades, and that they might construct rival spheres of influence from which America and the liberal ideas it has long promoted would be excluded. Finally, it necessitates recognizing that great-power rivalry could lead to great-power war, a prospect that seemed to have followed the Soviet empire onto the ash heap of history. Both Beijing and Moscow are, after all, optimizing their forces and exercising aggressively in preparation for potential conflicts with the United States and its allies; Russian doctrine explicitly emphasizes the limited use of nuclear weapons to achieve escalation dominance in a war with Washington. In Syria, U.S. and Russian forces even came into deadly contact in early 2018. American airpower decimated a contingent of government-sponsored Russian mercenaries that was attacking a base at which U.S. troops were present, an incident demonstrating the increasing boldness of Russian operations and the corresponding potential for escalation. The world has not yet returned to the epic clashes for global dominance that characterized the twentieth century, but it has returned to the historical norm of great-power struggle, with all the associated dangers. Those dangers may be even greater than most observers appreciate, because if today’s great-power competitions are still most intense at the regional level, who is to say where these competitions will end? By all appearances, Russia does not simply want to be a “regional power” (as Obama cuttingly described it) that dominates South Ossetia and Crimea.37 It aspires to the deep European and extra-regional impact that previous incarnations of the Russian state enjoyed. Why else would Putin boast about how far his troops can drive into Eastern Europe? Why else would Moscow be deploying military power into the Middle East? Why else would it be continuing to cultivate intelligence and military relationships in regions as remote as Latin America? Likewise, China is today focused primarily on securing its own geopolitical neighborhood, but its ambitions for tomorrow are clearly much bolder. Beijing probably does not envision itself fully overthrowing the international order, simply because it has profited far too much from the U.S.-anchored global economy. Yet China has nonetheless positioned itself for a global challenge to U.S. influence. Chinese military forces are deploying ever farther from China’s immediate periphery; Beijing has projected power into the Arctic and established bases and logistical points in the Indian Ocean and Horn of Africa. Popular Chinese movies depict Beijing replacing Washington as the dominant actor in sub-Saharan Africa—a fictional representation of a real-life effort long under way. The Belt and Road Initiative bespeaks an aspiration to link China to countries throughout Central Asia, the Middle East, and Europe; BRI, AIIB, and RCEP look like the beginning of an alternative institutional architecture to rival Washington’s. In 2017, Xi Jinping told the Nineteenth National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party that Beijing could now “take center stage in the world” and act as an alternative to U.S. leadership.38 These ambitions may or may not be realistic. But they demonstrate just how significantly the world’s leading authoritarian powers desire to shift the global environment over time. The revisionism we are seeing today may therefore be only the beginning. As China’s power continues to grow, or if it is successful in dominating the Western Pacific, it will surely move on to grander endeavors. If Russia reconsolidates control over the former Soviet space, it may seek to bring parts of the former Warsaw Pact to heel. Historically, this has been a recurring pattern of great-power behavior—interests expand with power, the appetite grows with the eating, risk-taking increases as early gambles are seen to pay off.39 This pattern is precisely why the revival of great-power competition is so concerning—because geopolitical revisionism by unsatisfied major powers has so often presaged intensifying international conflict, confrontation, and even war. The great-power behavior occurring today represents the warning light flashing on the dashboard. It tells us there may be still-greater traumas to come. The threats today are compelling and urgent, and there may someday come a time when the balance of power has shifted so markedly that the postwar international system cannot be sustained. Yet that moment of failure has not yet arrived, and so the goal of U.S. strategy should be not to hasten it by giving up prematurely, but to push it off as far into the future as possible. Rather than simply acquiescing in the decline of a world it spent generations building, America should aggressively bolster its defenses, with an eye to preserving and perhaps even selectively advancing its remarkable achievements. Retrenchment causes nationalism, war, and protectionism – optimists falsely assume current cooperative trends will continue without the US security guarantee Matthew Fay 17, Director of Defense and Foreign Policy Studies @ The Niskanen Center, 11/16/17, “America Unrestrained?: Engagement, Retrenchment, and Libertarian Foreign Policy,” https://niskanencenter.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/America-Unrestrained.pdf A number of the arguments libertarians make in favor of retrenchment have merit, but the cost-benefit analysis derived from them is based on a deterministic view of international politics. Libertarian retrenchers assume that international politics would remain more or less the same absent American engagement and that America’s domestic politics would remain the same even if the international system become more conflict-prone. Given the inherent uncertainty of forecasting, the costs and benefits of engagement and retrenchment need to be considered in a more probabilistic fashion.86 This section begins by exploring a number of scenarios that could occur should the United States adopt a grand strategy of retrenchment. It then reassesses the costs and benefits of retrenchment for a free society. In a system with more independent states balancing against one another, is war more or less likely? Libertarians are placing a bet that all else would remain equal in international politics if the United States retrenches. While they assume a world where an increased number of states are balancing against one another would remain peaceful, the reality is not entirely clear. Using basic realist premises about state behavior under international anarchy, it is easy to identify a number of scenarios less rosy than the one libertarians assume would occur should the United States retrench. These scenarios might include a world of increased nationalism, eroding norms against military aggression, increased economic autarky, and the further spread of nuclear weapons as states look to produce security for themselves. Some states may also fail to balance against threats in the wake of American retrenchment, increasing the likelihood the United States will be drawn into a major war. Libertarians assume that in the absence of an alliance with the United States, other countries would simply increase their defense spending if they felt threatened. However, internal balancing is not a mechanical process. According to John Mearsheimer, leaders of states facing security competition are likely to use nationalism to garner support from their populations for the necessary regeneration of military capabilities.87 Writing at the end of the Cold War, Mearsheimer suggested that Europe would revert to a pattern of recurrent warfare. The absence of the United States and the Soviet Union would leave Europe, once again, an anarchic multipolar system. The structure of the system would force the states to compete with one another, as they had prior to the Cold War. Mearsheimer argued that pre-1945 “hypernationalism” was a product of “security competition among the European states, which compelled elites to mobilize public support for national defense efforts.”88 American retrenchment could similarly lead to an anarchic, multipolar Europe—thus increasing the chances of war on the continent. Such a system could engender nationalist sentiments among the populations of Europe, heightening animosities between national groups. These heightened animosities could help erode norms against military aggression that have facilitated the decline in interstate war. Nationalist groups within a country can seize on these sentiments to pursue confrontational and expansionist policies.89 Encouraging support for increased military capabilities through nationalism might lead populations to see war as once again a means to national glory or maintaining national honor. Matters of national prestige and honor can lead to the initiation of wars when bound up in territorial claims, while at the same time increasing the intensity and duration of a conflict.90 Nationalism and security competition might also erode the pacifying effects of economic openness. Realism suggests states are concerned about relative gains.91 States in security competition might be wary of trading with one another due to concerns about how a potential rival’s economic gains might provide it with an advantage if translated into military power. They may also adopt autarkic policies for fear of undermining their economic and military self-sufficiency.92 Territorial conquest has become increasing anachronistic in international politics. However, the proliferation of protectionist policies might once again make aggression and preventive war seem like strategically sensible ways for states to secure the resources necessary to reduce the ability of potential rivals to cut them off economically. If the risk of territorial aggression increases, the possession of nuclear weapons would become an attractive option for some states whose security was previously guaranteed by the United States. Nuclear weapons are most useful for deterring major territorial aggression, meaning their potential utility increases as the potential for war does.93 A number of U.S. allies have either previously pursued nuclear weapons or have the capability to do so. They might choose to obtain a nuclear arsenal once responsible for their own security. Pursuit is inevitable Wright 20 (Thomas, director of the Center on the United States and Europe and a senior fellow in the Project on International Order and Strategy at the Brookings Institution, former lecturer at the University of Chicago's Harris School for Public Policy, PhD from Georgetown University and M.Phil. from Cambridge University) “The Folly of Retrenchment: Why America Can’t Withdraw From the World,” Foreign Affairs, 4/2020 JL A fifth problem with retrenchment is that it lacks domestic support. The American people may favor greater burden sharing, but there is no evidence that they are onboard with a withdrawal from Europe and Asia. As a survey conducted in 2019 by the Chicago Council on Global Affairs found, seven out of ten Americans believe that maintaining military superiority makes the United States safer, and almost three-quarters think that alliances contribute to U.S. security. A 2019 Eurasia Group Foundation poll found that over 60 percent of Americans want to maintain or increase defense spending. As it became apparent that China and Russia would benefit from this shift toward retrenchment, and as the United States’ democratic allies objected to its withdrawal, the domestic political backlash would grow. One result could be a prolonged foreign policy debate that would cause the United States to oscillate between retrenchment and reengagement, creating uncertainty about its commitments and thus raising the risk of miscalculation by Washington, its allies, or its rivals. Heg is sustainable – America has strong bones Ikenberry 18 (John, Professor of Politics and International Affairs in the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University) reviewing book by Beckley (Michael, Fellow in the International Security Program at Harvard Kennedy School's Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs) “Unrivaled: Why America Will Remain the World’s Sole Superpower,” Foreign Affairs, November/December 2018 It has become conventional wisdom that the United States is in decline, the uni-polar era is ending, and China is on the rise. In this smart and sophisticated book, Beckley tackles this thesis head-on. He does not dispute that the United States has its problems or that misguided leaders often squander its advantages. But he points out that the United States’ deep geographic, demographic, and institutional reserves give the country unique resilience. The United States is the only great power without regional rivals. Its companies and universities dominate the world. And most important, Beckley argues that it has by far the best fundamentals for future economic growth, thanks to its abundant natural resources, favorable demographics, secure property rights, and lasting political institutions. China’s growth prospects, in contrast, are “dismal.” Beckley also thinks the declinists use the wrong measures of power. GDP, for example, exaggerates the influence of populous but poor countries, such as China, while overlooking problems that drain those countries’ economic and military resources. He does not argue that the United States can—or should—try to preserve the unipolar era, but he does think that it will long remain the world’s leading power.
Nuclear war causes extinction – famine and climate change Starr 15 (Steven, Director of the University of Missouri’s Clinical Laboratory Science Program and a senior scientist at the Physicians for Social Responsibility) “Nuclear War, Nuclear Winter, and Human Extinction,” Federation of American Scientists, 10/14/2015 DD
While it is impossible to precisely predict all the human impacts that would result from a nuclear winter, it is relatively simple to predict those which would be most profound. That is, a nuclear winter would cause most humans and large animals to die from nuclear famine in a mass extinction event similar to the one that wiped out the dinosaurs. Following the detonation (in conflict) of US and/or Russian launch-ready strategic nuclear weapons, nuclear firestorms would burn simultaneously over a total land surface area of many thousands or tens of thousands of square miles. These mass fires, many of which would rage over large cities and industrial areas, would release many tens of millions of tons of black carbon soot and smoke (up to 180 million tons, according to peer-reviewed studies), which would rise rapidly above cloud level and into the stratosphere. For an explanation of the calculation of smoke emissions, see Atmospheric effects and societal consequences of regional scale nuclear conflicts. The scientists who completed the most recent peer-reviewed studies on nuclear winter discovered that the sunlight would heat the smoke, producing a self-lofting effect that would not only aid the rise of the smoke into the stratosphere (above cloud level, where it could not be rained out), but act to keep the smoke in the stratosphere for 10 years or more. The longevity of the smoke layer would act to greatly increase the severity of its effects upon the biosphere. Once in the stratosphere, the smoke (predicted to be produced by a range of strategic nuclear wars) would rapidly engulf the Earth and form a dense stratospheric smoke layer. The smoke from a war fought with strategic nuclear weapons would quickly prevent up to 70 of sunlight from reaching the surface of the Northern Hemisphere and 35 of sunlight from reaching the surface of the Southern Hemisphere. Such an enormous loss of warming sunlight would produce Ice Age weather conditions on Earth in a matter of weeks. For a period of 1-3 years following the war, temperatures would fall below freezing every day in the central agricultural zones of North America and Eurasia. For an explanation of nuclear winter, see Nuclear winter revisited with a modern climate model and current nuclear arsenals: Still catastrophic consequences. Nuclear winter would cause average global surface temperatures to become colder than they were at the height of the last Ice Age. Such extreme cold would eliminate growing seasons for many years, probably for a decade or longer. Can you imagine a winter that lasts for ten years? The results of such a scenario are obvious. Temperatures would be much too cold to grow food, and they would remain this way long enough to cause most humans and animals to starve to death. Global nuclear famine would ensue in a setting in which the infrastructure of the combatant nations has been totally destroyed, resulting in massive amounts of chemical and radioactive toxins being released into the biosphere. We don’t need a sophisticated study to tell us that no food and Ice Age temperatures for a decade would kill most people and animals on the planet. Would the few remaining survivors be able to survive in a radioactive, toxic environment?
12/19/21
SeptOct- Covid AC
Tournament: Meadows | Round: 1 | Opponent: Diamond Bar NC | Judge: Ribera, Claudia 1AC – Plan Plan – The member nations of the World Trade Organization ought to reduce intellectual property protections for COVID-19 medicines. 1AC – Inherency Contention 1 is Inherency.
Rich countries are blocking a WTO patent-waiver proposal necessary to boost global production of COVID vaccines. Meredith 21. (Sam Meredith is a Correspondent at CNBC in London, covering international politics, energy and business news) “Rich countries are refusing to waive the rights on Covid vaccines as global cases hit record levels,” CNBC, April 22, 2021. https://www.cnbc.com/2021/04/22/covid-rich-countries-are-refusing-to-waive-ip-rights-on-vaccines.html TDI LONDON — The U.S., Canada and U.K. are among some of the high-income countries actively blocking a patent-waiver proposal designed to boost the global production of Covid-19 vaccines. It comes as coronavirus cases worldwide surge to their highest level so far and the World Health Organization has repeatedly admonished a “shocking imbalance” in the distribution of vaccines amid the pandemic. Members of the World Trade Organization will meet virtually in Geneva, Switzerland on Thursday to hold informal talks on whether to temporarily waive intellectual property and patent rights on Covid vaccines and treatments. The landmark proposal, which was jointly submitted by India and South Africa in October, has been backed by more than 100 mostly developing countries. It aims to facilitate the manufacture of treatments locally and boost the global vaccination campaign. Six months on, the proposal continues to be stonewalled by a small number of governments — including the U.S., EU, U.K., Switzerland, Japan, Norway, Canada, Australia and Brazil. “In this Covid-19 pandemic, we are once again faced with issues of scarcity, which can be addressed through diversification of manufacturing and supply capacity and ensuring the temporary waiver of relevant intellectual property,” Dr. Maria Guevara, international medical secretary at Medecins Sans Frontieres, said in a statement on Wednesday. “It is about saving lives at the end, not protecting systems.” The urgency and importance of waiving certain intellectual property rights amid the pandemic have been underscored by the WHO, health experts, civil society groups, trade unions, former world leaders, international medical charities, Nobel laureates and human rights organizations. Why does it matter? The waiver, if adopted at the General Council, the WTO’s highest-level decision-making body, could help countries around the world overcome legal barriers preventing them from producing their own Covid vaccines and treatments. Advocates of the proposal have conceded the waiver is not a “silver bullet,” but argue that removing barriers toward the development, production and approval of vaccines is vital in the fight to prevent, treat and contain the coronavirus. The pandemic is raging through developing economies and inflicting loss on a horrific scale. Lindsey 21. (Brink Lindsey) “Why intellectual property and pandemics don’t mix,” Brookings Institution, June 3, 2021. https://www.brookings.edu/blog/up-front/2021/06/03/why-intellectual-property-and-pandemics-dont-mix/ TDI Although focusing on these immediate constraints is vital, we cannot confine our attention to the short term. First of all, the COVID-19 pandemic is far from over. Although Americans can now see the light at the end of the tunnel thanks to the rapid rollout of vaccines, most of the world isn’t so lucky. The virus is currently raging in India and throughout South America, overwhelming health care systems and inflicting suffering and loss on a horrific scale. And consider the fact that Australia, which has been successful in suppressing the virus, recently announced it was sticking to plans to keep its borders closed until mid-2022. Criticisms of the TRIPS waiver that focus only on the next few months are therefore short-sighted: this pandemic could well drag on long enough for elimination of patent restrictions to enable new vaccine producers to make a positive difference. 1AC – WTO Credibility Contention 2 is WTO Credibility.
The new head of the WTO is on track to push for reform and an increased role in the international arena, but is hindered now due to lack of vaccine agreement. Baschuk 4-27. (Bryce Baschuk is a Bloomberg Reporter) "WTO Chief Pursues a ‘Hectic’ Agenda to Fix World Trade’s Referee," Bloomberg, April 27, 2021. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-04-27/wto-chief-pursues-a-hectic-agenda-to-fix-world-trade-s-referee TDI The head of the World Trade Organization raised an alarm about the credibility of the multilateral trading system, urging leaders to act fast to bolster the global economy with steps like fairer vaccine distribution and cooperate to resolve longer-term problems like overfishing. During her first two months, WTO Director-General Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala has met with trade ministers around the globe to communicate a message that the WTO is important, it needs to be reformed and it needs to deliver results. So far, she says the reception from world leaders has been positive, but quickly translating that goodwill into substantive outcomes during a global pandemic is just as daunting as she anticipated. “The word I would use to describe it is absolutely hectic,” Okonjo-Iweala said in a phone interview on Tuesday when asked about her first few months in the job. “The challenges we thought were there are there and getting an agreement is not as easy because of longstanding ways of negotiating business positions.” Read More: Arcane WTO Pact Moves to Center of Vaccine Debate: Supply Lines Countries need to move past the notion that one country’s gain in international commerce is another’s loss, she said. “We need to break out of the zero-sum deadlock,” Okonjo-Iweala said. “We need to remind the countries and members that the WTO is here to deliver for people. We can’t take 20 years to negotiate something.” Okonjo-Iweala said her top priority is to use trade to alleviate the pandemic and said her recent meeting with trade ministers and vaccine manufacturers provided a positive step in the right direction. ‘More Pragmatism’ “That meeting yielded quite a lot,” she said. “I see more pragmatism on both sides.” An important component of the WTO’s trade and health agenda is a proposal from India and South Africa that seeks to temporarily waive enforcement of the WTO’s rules governing intellectual property for vaccines and other essential medical products. Read More: U.S. Trade Chief Meets Pfizer, AstraZeneca About Vaccine Supply As of this week there are fresh signals that the Biden administration, which currently opposes a waiver to the WTO agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights, wants vaccine manufacturers like Pfizer Inc. and AstraZeneca Plc to help ramp up U.S. pandemic assistance to the rest of the world. “There is movement,” Okonjo-Iweala said. “Are we there yet? No, but there is a little bit of change in the air among members. I think hopefully we will be able to come to some sort of a framework for the WTO ministers to bless.” “We don’t have time,” she added. “People are dying.” Okonjo-Iweala said this month’s vaccine meeting also revealed areas where the developing world can increase its capacity to produce more doses rather than waiting for rich countries to send them their excess supplies. She said various emerging markets such as India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Senegal, Indonesia and Egypt already have some capacity to begin producing vaccines for people living in developing economies. Patent waiver is necessary to revitalize WTO’s credibility as an international dispute mechanism – creates momentum for further reform. Meyer 6-18-21. (David Meyer is the Editor of CEO Daily and a senior writer on Fortune’s European team. Author of the digital rights primer, Control Shift: How Technology Affects You and Your Rights. “The WTO’s survival hinges on the COVID-19 vaccine patent debate, waiver advocates warn,” Fortune, June 18, 2021. https://fortune.com/2021/06/18/wto-covid-vaccines-patents-waiver-south-africa-trips/ TDI The World Trade Organization knows all about crises. Former U.S. President Donald Trump threw a wrench into its core function of resolving trade disputes—a blocker that President Joe Biden has not yet removed—and there is widespread dissatisfaction over the fairness of the global trade rulebook. The 164-country organization, under the fresh leadership of Nigeria's Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, has a lot to fix. However, one crisis is more pressing than the others: the battle over COVID-19 vaccines, and whether the protection of their patents and other intellectual property should be temporarily lifted to boost production and end the pandemic sooner rather than later. According to some of those pushing for the waiver—which was originally proposed last year by India and South Africa—the WTO's future rests on what happens next. "The credibility of the WTO will depend on its ability to find a meaningful outcome on this issue that truly ramps-up and diversifies production," says Xolelwa Mlumbi-Peter, South Africa's ambassador to the WTO. "Final nail in the coffin" The Geneva-based WTO isn't an organization with power, as such—it's a framework within which countries make big decisions about trade, generally by consensus. It's supposed to be the forum where disputes get settled, because all its members have signed up to the same rules. And one of its most important rulebooks is the Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights, or TRIPS, which sprang to life alongside the WTO in 1995. The WTO's founding agreement allows for rules to be waived in exceptional circumstances, and indeed this has happened before: its members agreed in 2003 to waive TRIPS obligations that were blocking the importation of cheap, generic drugs into developing countries that lack manufacturing capacity. (That waiver was effectively made permanent in 2017.) Consensus is the key here. Although the failure to reach consensus on a waiver could be overcome with a 75 supermajority vote by the WTO's membership, this would be an unprecedented and seismic event. In the case of the COVID-19 vaccine IP waiver, it would mean standing up to the European Union, and Germany in particular, as well as countries such as Canada and the U.K.—the U.S. recently flipped from opposing the idea of a waiver to supporting it, as did France. It's a dispute between countries, but the result will be on the WTO as a whole, say waiver advocates. "If, in the face of one of humanity's greatest challenges in a century, the WTO functionally becomes an obstacle as in contrast to part of the solution, I think it could be the final nail in the coffin" for the organization, says Lori Wallach, the founder of Public Citizen's Global Trade Watch, a U.S. campaigning group that focuses on the WTO and trade agreements. "If the TRIPS waiver is successful, and people see the WTO as being part of the solution—saving lives and livelihoods—it could create goodwill and momentum to address what are still daunting structural problems." Those problems are legion. Reform needs Top of the list is the WTO's Appellate Body, which hears appeals in members' trade disputes. It's a pivotal part of the international trade system, but Trump—incensed at decisions taken against the U.S. —blocked appointments to its seven-strong panel as judges retired. The body became completely paralyzed at the end of 2019, when two judges' terms ended and the panel no longer had the three-judge quorum it needs to rule on appeals. Anyone who hoped the advent of the Biden administration would change matters was disappointed earlier this year when the U.S. rejected a European proposal to fill the vacancies. "The United States continues to have systemic concerns with the appellate body," it said. "As members know, the United States has raised and explained its systemic concerns for more than 16 years and across multiple U.S. administrations." At her confirmation hearing in February, current U.S. Trade Representative Katherine Tai reiterated those concerns—she said the appellate body had "overstepped its authority and erred in interpreting WTO agreements in a number of cases, to the detriment of the United States and other WTO members," and accused it of dragging its heels in settling disputes. "Reforms are needed to ensure that the underlying causes of such problems do not resurface," Tai said. "While the U.S. has been engaging with the WTO it hasn't indicated it would move quickly on allowing appointments to the Appellate Body," says Bryan Mercurio, an economic-law professor at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, who opposes the vaccine waiver. "This is not a good sign. In terms of WTO governance, it's a much more important step than supporting negotiations on an intellectual property waiver." It's not just the U.S. that wants to see reform at the WTO. In a major policy document published in February, the EU said negotiations had failed to modernize the organization's rules, the dispute-resolution system was broken, the monitoring of countries' trade policies was ineffective, and—crucially—"the trade relationship between the U.S. and China, two of the three largest WTO members, is currently largely managed outside WTO disciplines." China is one of the key problems here. It became a WTO member in 2001 but, although this entailed significant liberalization of the Chinese economy, it did not become a full market economy. As the European Commission put it in February: "The level at which China has opened its markets does not correspond to its weight in the global economy, and the state continues to exert a decisive influence on China's economic environment with consequent competitive distortions that cannot be sufficiently addressed by current WTO rules." "China is operating from what it sees as a position of strength, so it will not be bullied into agreeing to changes which it sees as not in its interests," says Mercurio. China is at loggerheads with the U.S., the EU and others over numerous trade-related issues. Its rivals don't like its policy of demanding that Chinese citizens' data is stored on Chinese soil, nor do they approve of how foreign investors often have to partner with Chinese firms to access the country's market, in a way that leads to the transfer of technological knowhow. They also oppose China's industrial subsidies. Mercurio thinks China may agree to reforms on some of these issues, particularly regarding subsidies, but "only if it is offered something in return." All these problems won't go away if the WTO manages to come up with a TRIPS waiver for COVID-19 vaccines and medical supplies, Wallach concedes. "But," she adds, "the will and the good faith to tackle these challenges is increased enormously if the WTO has the experience of being part of the solution, not just an obstacle." Wallach points to a statement released earlier this month by Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) trade ministers, which called for urgent discussions on the waiver. "The WTO must demonstrate that global trade rules can help address the human catastrophe of the COVID-19 pandemic and facilitate the recovery," the statement read in its section about WTO reform. Okonjo-Iweala's role The WTO's new director general, whose route to the top was unblocked in early 2021 with the demise of the Trump administration, is certainly keen to fix the problems that contributed to the early departure of her predecessor, Brazil's Robert Azevedo. "We must act now to get all our ambassadors to the table to negotiate a text" on the issue of an IP waiver for COVID vaccines, Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, director general of the World Trade Organization, has said. Dursun Aydemir—Anadolu/Bloomberg/Getty Images Earlier this week, when the U.S. and EU agreed a five-year ceasefire in a long-running dispute over Boeing and Airbus aircraft subsidies, Okonjo-Iweala tweeted: "With political will, we can solve even the most intractable problems." However, Mercurio is skeptical about her stewardship having much of an effect on the WTO's reform process. "Upon taking over she stated it was time for delegations to speak to each other and not simply past each other, but at the recent General Counsel meeting delegations simply read prepared statements in what some have described as the worst meeting ever," he says. "On the other hand, Ngozi is very much someone who will actively seek solutions to problems, and in this way different to her predecessor. If the role of mediator is welcomed, she could have an impact not in starting discussions but in getting deals over the finish line." No alt causes – how the WTO acts now with Covid will shape its role in the international economy for decades to come. Evenett and Baldwin 20. (Simon J. Evenett is Professor of International Trade and Economic Development at the University of St. Gallen, Switzerland, and Co-Director of the CEPR Programme in International Trade and Regional Economics. Richard E. Baldwin is a professor of international economics at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva. “Revitalising multilateral trade cooperation: Why? Why Now? And How?” November 10, 2020. https://voxeu.org/content/revitalising-multilateralism-pragmatic-ideas-new-wto-director-general TDI Purposeful, pragmatic steps towards noble goals Archbishop Desmond Tutu, that tireless campaigner against Apartheid, once remarked that “there is only one way to eat an elephant: one bite at a time”. After a decade of drift and backsliding, the task of revitalising multilateral trade cooperation may seem daunting. It may seem even more so after the disruption of the COVID-19 pandemic and the attendant slump in world trade. Yet, in the same emergency lies the seeds of revival – especially, if trade diplomats can demonstrate the relevance of the WTO to national governments fighting this pandemic – ideally through an accord that eases the cross-border shipment of needed medical goods and medicines. Step by pragmatic step, the WTO can regain its centrality in the world trading system. Ultimately, the pandemic affords the opportunity to reframe discussions on multilateral trade cooperation away from the stalemate, frustration of recent years between governments, and the Uruguay Round mindset that ran into diminishing returns years ago. Rather, discussions between governments need to draw lessons from the second global economic shock in 15 years so as to rebuild a system of global trade arrangements capable of better tackling systemic crises and, more importantly, better able to contribute to the growing number of first-order challenges facing societies in the 21st century. Doing so will require revisiting the very purpose of the WTO. Specifically, action now over Covid creates goodwill to establish global trade as a norm and preserve the relevance of the trading system post-Covid. González 20. (Anabel Gonzalez is a nonresident senior fellow at the Peterson Institute and former Minister of Foreign Trade of Costa Rica “Revitalising multilateral trade cooperation: Why? Why Now? And How?” November 10, 2020. https://voxeu.org/content/revitalising-multilateralism-pragmatic-ideas-new-wto-director-general TDI EXTRAORDINARY TIMES DEMAND EXTRAORDINARY ACTION As of 2 November 2020, there are 46.9 million COVID-19 cases across all regions, with the number of deaths exceeding 1.2 million, and rising.2 The economic and social impacts of the pandemic and its containment measures are not less daunting. Global growth is estimated at -4.9 in 2020, with over 95 of countries projected to have negative per capita income growth (IMF 2020). Trade volumes are expected to decrease by between 13 and 32 from last year,3 while foreign direct investment flows could plunge by up to 40 (UNCTAD 2020). Is it estimated that the equivalent of 555 million jobs have been lost in the first half of this year (ILO 2020), which in turn could push up to 100 million more people into extreme poverty and would almost double the number of persons suffering from acute hunger (FAO 2020). While there is some evidence that goods trade may be rebounding and that the worst-case trade scenario projected in April could be averted (CPB 2020, WTO 2020a), the recovery from the deepest global recession since World War II will depend on the sustained and effective containment of the virus and the quality of government policies. The World Bank/IMF Development Committee warned that the pandemic has the potential to erase development gains for many countries (World Bank 2020a). Some consequences may also be long-lasting, such as lower investment, erosion of human capital, and a retreat from global trade and supply linkages (World Bank 2020b). It is no understatement to say these are extraordinary times. In many countries, governments are providing significant levels of fiscal support to try to stabilise their economies, sustain companies and minimise the impact on workers; in many others, limited fiscal space and informality constraint governments’ capacity to mitigate the damage. For advanced and developing economies alike, trade is a powerful, cost-effective tool to alleviate the devastating effects of COVID-19 on the health and economic fronts. And yet, protectionism is gaining an upper hand, deepening some of pre-pandemic confrontations that were already threatening the global economy. The short-term response to the virus and longer-term growth prospects depend on strong multilateral cooperation to scale back obstacles to trade and investment, increase business certainty and leverage opportunities which the pandemic has accelerated in areas like the digital economy. It is also needed to preserve stable and coordinated international relations to avoid that heavy threats implicit in the pandemic could result in catastrophic disorders or conflicts (Jean 2020). But it will not happen automatically. Unless governments accelerate their efforts to collaborate, growing protectionism and increased distortions to global value chains (GVCs) risk being a by-product of the virus, at the same time further exacerbating its negative implications. This demands extraordinary action. This chapter addresses the question of what role for trade ministers at the WTO in times of crises with a view to activating global cooperation to overcome COVID-19. In addition to the introductory section, the second section explores the need to reactivate the WTO to underpin collaboration among governments, the third section argues that trade ministers should call the shots during crisis, the fourth section suggests eight actions for ministers to rein in protectionism and mitigate further damage, the fifth section refers to the mechanics on how and when to do it, and a final section offers concluding remarks. REACTIVATE THE WTO Trade needs to be part of the response to COVID-19 and its upshots, and countries cannot afford the WTO, hobbled as it has been lately, to muddle through. Moreover, as the world confronts more frequent and severe profound shocks such as financial crises, terrorism, extreme weather and pandemics (McKinsey Global Institute 2020), the WTO needs to step up its role during systemic crises. The fact that the organisation has been faltering, that there is a leadership vacuum and that distrust runs high among major traders will not make it any easier. Exacerbated tensions related to the pandemic can only add to the feeling that WTO rules have been conceived for a very different context, increasing the risk of a loss of legitimacy (Jean 2020). This is not about a major reset of the WTO. It is about (re)activating the organisation to serve its members as they combat the devastating impact of the pandemic and the global recession. The WTO needs broader reform, in particular to address structural changes in the global economy. While extremely important, this discussion should not hamper the ability of the WTO to deliver at times of systemic crisis. Moreover, should the WTO – or more accurately, its members – demonstrate they can actually rise to the occasion in the context of COVID-19, they will also contribute to increasing trust levels on the ability of the organisation to produce results. The starting point is a shift in mindset: governments need to understand that international trade is not a problem in the crisis, but rather a core element of the solution (Baldwin and Evenett 2020). Take the shortages of medical supplies. There are three methods of assuring supply: stockpiling, investments in manufacturing capacity and trade. Of these options, relying on international trade is the most efficient and economic choice, provided the WTO can help assure security of this method of supply (Wolff 2020a). To be sure, many nations have taken unilateral steps to facilitate trade, especially in medical supplies and medicines. The Global Trade Alert reports that while 91 jurisdictions have adopted a total of 202 export controls on these goods since the beginning of 2020, 106 jurisdictions have executed 229 import policy reforms on these goods over the same period.4 After initial border closures, some neighbouring countries are beginning to facilitate the cross-border flow of goods. At the regional level and among subsets of countries, governments have issued different statements to keep trade lanes open and supply chains moving (see Table A1 in the Annex). After a tepid declaration from G20 leaders, trade ministers reaffirmed their determination to cooperate and coordinate to mitigate the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on trade and investment and to lay a solid foundation for a global economic recovery. They also endorsed a set of short-term collective actions on trade regulation, trade facilitation, transparency, operation of logistics networks and support for small enterprises, and a group of longer-term actions on WTO reform, GVC resilience and investment; monitoring of implementation was left to senior officials (G20 2020). These actions are positive and reflect the political will of governments to collaborate to some extent – even if they have not fully countered the flurry of barriers and restrictions surrounding trade in critical medical gear. They are no substitute for trade cooperation at the global level, either. In the case of medical products, for example, the EU, the US and China account for almost three-quarters of world exports (WTO 2020b); cooperation initiatives that do not include these members would fall short on impact. The venue for cooperation should be global and open to all, even if not all 164 WTO members opt to engage in all initiatives. TRADE MINISTERS SHOULD CALL THE SHOTS DURING CRISES Challenges notwithstanding, governments need to act now to empower the WTO to play an active part in coordinating the response to the pandemic. The WTO is more than an organisation immersed in myriad drama on the shores of Lake Geneva; it is a solid framework for global trade cooperation. It is in countries’ interest to preserve the relevance of the WTO; its role can be critical in helping members help themselves. In a member-driven organisation such as the WTO, the role of the Director-General and the Secretariat is important and can and should be enhanced, for example with greater power of initiative and strengthened monitoring and analytics capabilities. The WTO dedicated page on the pandemic is a step in the right direction.5 But the ultimate responsibility to provide direction and act rests with governments. The WTO is nothing more and nothing less than the collectivity of its members (Steger 2020), a point that is frequently forgotten in the public discourse. Without strong leadership, frequent engagement and serious interest among members in addressing its challenges, the WTO itself cannot deliver results (Cutler 2020). Paraphrasing VanGrasstek (2013), the multilateral trading system receives its inspiration from economists and is shaped primarily by lawyers, but it can only operate within the limits set by politicians. Post Covid WTO legitimacy and credibility re necessary to prevent a downward spiral of protectionism. Solís 20. (Mireya Solís is director of the Center for East Asia Policy Studies, Philip Knight Chair in Japan Studies, and a senior fellow in the Foreign Policy program at Brookings. “The post COVID-19 world: Economic nationalism triumphant?” July 10, 2020. https://www.brookings.edu/blog/order-from-chaos/2020/07/10/the-post-covid-19-world-economic-nationalism-triumphant/ TDI The damage caused by the worst global health crisis in a century is vast. The new coronavirus has traveled far and fast, infecting more than 8.7 million people and killing more than 460,000. One after another, economies have gone into lockdown to slow down the spread of the disease. The combined supply and demand shocks have ravaged the world economy with the most severe downturn since the Great Depression; anticipated drops to international trade and investment flows of 30 and 40, respectively; and unemployment spikes in many countries. The pandemic has cost lives and livelihoods and has erased the chances of returning to the status quo ante, but it has also brought little clarity regarding what kind of international order it will usher in. Is the future one of deglobalization, decoupling, and reshoring of economic activity? The pandemic hit an already wounded multilateral trading system. The chances that the World Trade Organization (WTO) can deliver a multilateral round of trade negotiations to slash tariffs across the board and update the trade and investment rulebook are nil. But the WTO has also lost its central role as arbiter of trade disputes among its members. In December 2019, the Appellate Body ceased to function due to the U.S. block of new appointments, citing judicial overreach. At a time of rising protectionism, the erosion of a rules-based mechanism to adjudicate disputes bodes ill. Longstanding challenges to the WTO have been exacerbated by an abdication of leadership from the great powers to ensure its survival. China has been the godchild of globalization, leveraging its accession to the WTO to become workshop for the world and a huge domestic market coveted by foreign firms. But China lost its appetite for economic reform, reinvesting on a state capitalism model that imposes heavy costs on other nations. Unchecked subsidies and privileges awarded to its state-owned enterprises, insufficient protection of intellectual property, foreign investment restrictions, forced technology transfers, and cyber protectionism all make the Chinese government’s self-proclamation as champion of global free trade ring hollow. The Trump administration judges the WTO incapable of tackling the China challenge, but instead of creating coalitions of like-minded countries to bring about effective multilateral trade governance, it appears determined to further harm cripple the international organization. It has offered no blueprint to fix the dispute settlement mechanism, has abused the national security exemption to raise tariffs against allies, and is gearing up for its most fundamental assault to date on the WTO: a tariff reset through which the U.S. may unilaterally abandon its commitments on bound tariffs and apply larger duties to force other countries to open their markets. Trade spats as other countries retaliate in kind is a more likely result. Tariff wars and the battle for technology supremacy have come to define U.S.-China great power competition. After a grueling trade conflict, the United States and China reached a limited trade agreement in January 2020. The deal marked a pause in the tariff war and addressed some non-tariff barriers on foreign direct investment and intellectual property; but it left intact the core of Chinese industrial policy (public subsidies and state-owned enterprises) and retained U.S. duties on $360 billion worth of Chinese products. China’s massive purchase commitments ($200 billion) were quickly rendered unattainable by the severe economic downturn in China due to COVID-19. In fighting for the new economic order, setting standards on cutting-edge technologies will be at the forefront. China is using all the levers of industrial policy to gain technological primacy in areas like AI and quantum computing. Telecom and the battle over 5G offer a preview of quarrels to come. Deeply concerned with the cybersecurity risks that Chinese telecom giants like Huawei pose, the U.S. government placed the company on its Entity List, banning American exports without a license. It has since tightened the restrictions by barring foreign companies from supplying Huawei with products manufactured with American equipment and technology. National security concerns are increasingly encroaching on existing webs of economic interdependence. Wary of China’s acquisition of critical technology, countries like the United States, Australia, and Japan have tightened their screening of foreign direct investment. The pandemic has only exacerbated concerns that weakened companies in strategic sectors are at risk of foreign takeover. COVID-19’s impact on the international trading system is twofold. It has reinforced existing trends such as the deceleration and now drop in the volume of international trade, the rise of economic security as governments expand their toolkit to restrict trade and investment flows, and it has laid bare the fallout in U.S.-China relations. But the pandemic also brought new challenges that exposed the extent to which trade cooperation is in short supply. Export protectionism has risen in prominence with national restrictions on shipments of essential medical supplies and personal protective equipment. The WTO allows for such curbs for public health purposes – provided the measures are temporary and transparent. Few countries, however, have bothered to comply with their notification commitments. The blow comes at a time when the WTO is adrift with the decision of Director General Roberto Azevedo to step down early, opening the search for new leadership in a climate of divisiveness. Graph detailing the number of countries that imposed export restrictions on various categories of medical supplies and devices in response to the coronavirus pandemic. Are we on the eve of a renationalized world economy? That is the aspiration of several American and European public officials who fault extended global supply chains and overdependence on China for the current mishaps in tackling the pandemic. But the view that economic nationalism and reshoring of manufacturing is a fail-safe path to security and prosperity is wrong. For one, it skirts the responsibility of governments to properly stockpile essential medical supplies. Furthermore, the export curbs will be counterproductive, eliminating incentives for producers to expand capacity and increasing the cost of much needed medicines and medical devices. If the recent lockdowns have taught us anything, it is that exclusive reliance on the domestic market is too risky. Diversification of supply, redundancies in the manufacturing chain, and stockpiling programs are better alternatives. In this endeavor, global supply chains are part of the solution, not the problem. COVID-19 will not produce an exodus of foreign companies from the Chinese market. Recent surveys of American companies with operations in China show that most firms intend to stay put. A February survey of Japanese companies conducted by Tokyo Shoko Research shows that only a fraction (4) are considering exit from China. Therefore, the Japanese government’s $2.2 billion fund to restructure supply chains should be understood as risk management, not decoupling. When international companies map out their business strategies, they must factor in heightened risks – protectionism, national security controls, and economic lockdowns. Hence, efforts by middle powers to offer an interim arbitration mechanism at the WTO to handle trade disputes and to commit to maintaining open supply chains in essential medical goods are the right antidote to rising economic nationalism. As a staunch supporter of rules-based trade and with its decision to forego export protectionism in the current crisis, Japan has much to contribute to these efforts. Trade solves great power competition – regionalism causes militarized crises. Lake 18. (David Lake is a Professor of Social Sciences and Distinguished Professor of Political Science at the University of California, San Diego. "Economic Openness and Great Power Competition: Lessons for China and the United States,” April 30, 2018. https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3171196/ TDI I develop two central arguments. First, historically, great power competition has been driven primarily by exclusion or fears of exclusion from each power’s international economic zone, including its domestic market. Great powers in the past have often used their international influence to build zones in which subordinate polities – whether these be colonies or simply states within a sphere of influence – are integrated into their economies. These economic zones, in turn, are typically biased in favor of the great power’s firms and investors, with the effect of excluding (in whole or part) the economic agents of other great powers. These other great powers, in response, are then compelled to develop or expand their own exclusive economic zones. The “race” for economic privilege can quickly divide the world up into economic blocs. Like the security dilemma, great powers need not actually exclude one another from their zones; the fear of exclusion alone is enough to ignite the process of division. The race for privilege then draws great powers into over-expanding into unprofitable regions and, more important, militarized competition. Economic and military competition are thus linked, with the former usually driving the latter. The most significant military crises have, historically, been over where to draw the boundaries between economic zones and subsequent challenges to those boundaries. Economic closure and fear of closure have been consistent sources of great power conflict in the past – and possibly will be in the future. The major exception to this trend was the peaceful transfer of dominance in Latin America from Britain to the United States in the late nineteenth century. This suggests that economic closure and great power competition is not inevitable, but a choice of the great powers themselves. Second, this international competition is driven, in turn, by domestic, rent-seeking groups and their economic interests. In all countries, scarce factors of production, import competing sectors, and domestically-oriented firms have concentrated and intense preferences for market restricting policies, including tariffs and the formation of exclusive economic zones. Consumers and free trade-oriented groups have diffuse preferences for market enhancing policies, and thus tend to lose at the ballot box and in the making of national policy. This inequality in preference intensity does not mean protectionists always win; after 1934, the United States insulated itself by shifting authority to the executive and negotiating reductions through broad, multi-product international agreements.8 Yet, as the recent return to economic nationalism of the Trump administration suggests, protectionism often wins out. Rent-seeking is a central tendency, not an inevitable success. Contemporary great power relations are at a critical juncture. As China’s influence expands, the role of special economic interests in China is especially worrisome. In pursuit of stability, political support, or private gains, the government will always be tempted to create economic zones that favor its nationals. In this way, China will be no different than the majority of great powers before it. But, given the expansive role of the state in the Chinese economy, especially its backing of outward foreign investments by its state-owned enterprises (SOEs), and the close ties between business elites and its authoritarian political leaders, however, it will be even harder for China to resist biasing any future economic zone to benefit its own firms. Although China has gained greatly from economic openness, its domestic political system will be prone to rent-seeking demands by important constituents in areas of future influence. Critically, the United States is also moving toward economic closure with the election of President Trump on a platform of economic nationalism. Demands for protection against Chinese goods have been growing over time.9 The “China shock” that followed Beijing’s joining the World Trade Organization was a huge disruption to the international division of labor, U.S. comparative advantage, and especially U.S. industry.10 The Trans-Pacific Partnership, though now defunct, was “marketed” by President Barak Obama as a means of “containing” China, both economically and militarily, but was opposed by virtually all of the candidates in the 2016 presidential election for its trade-enhancing potential. President Trump has already signaled a much more hostile and protectionist stance toward China – as well as calling for the repeal of NAFTA and even questioning the utility of the European Union. Not only has he imposed tariffs on washing machines, solar panels, steel and aluminum, dangerously declaring the latter two issues of national security, he is making exceptions on these tariffs for friends and allies. 11 Implicitly targeting China, these protectionist moves by the administration risk creating preferential trading blocs not seen since the 1930s. He has also now proposed punitive tariffs on over $60 billions of imports from China into the United States.12 Acknowledging his inconsistencies on many policy issues, Trump’s economic nationalism has remained the core of his political agenda. The threat to the liberal international economy is not only that China might seek an economic bloc in the future, but that the United States itself is turning more exclusionary. For each great power to fear that the other might seek to exclude it from its economic zone is not unreasonable. If so, great power competition could break out in the twenty-first century not because of bipolarity or any inevitable tendency toward conflict, but because neither great power can control its own protectionist forces nor signal to the other that it would not exclude it from its economic zone. The British-U.S. case, again, suggests that exclusion and competition are not inevitable, but the current danger of economic closure is real and increasing. This article is synthetic in its theory and merely suggestive in its use of historical evidence. The theory aims to integrate current work on political economy and national security, not to develop a completely original take on this relationship. In turn, rather than testing the theory in any rigorous sense or delving into particular cases to show the theoretical mechanisms at work, so to speak, it surveys selected historical episodes to illustrate central tendencies. It is the recurring pattern across multiple cases that suggests why we should worry today. The remainder of this essay is divided in three primary sections. Section I briefly outlines the analytics of economic openness and great power competition. Section II focuses on historical instances of great power competition, highlighting the role of economic openness as a central cleavage in international politics. Section III examines contemporary policies in and between China and the United States. The conclusion suggests ways that the potential for conflict may be mitigated. The Open Economy Politics of Great Power Competition All states have a tendency towards protectionism at home and exclusive economic zones abroad. A tendency, though, is not an inevitability. The pursuit of protection and economic zones by domestic interests is conditioned by the political coalition in power at any given time and institutions that aggregate and bias the articulation of social groups. 13 The tendency is also influenced, however, by the actions of other countries. Protectionism can sour great power relations, but it is the desire for exclusive economic zones that drives great power competition and, given the possibility of coercion, influences grand strategy. Thus, the theory sketched here integrates insights from international political economy (see below), the literature on domestic politics and grand strategy,14 and systemic theories of international relations.15 Independently, WTO cred solves nuclear war – allows an off-track for nuclear weapons. Hamann 09. (Georgia Hamann is a J.D. Candidate, Vanderbilt University Law School, “Replacing Slingshots with Swords: Implications of the Antigua-Gambling 22.6 Panel Report for Developing Countries and the World Trading System,” 2009. TDI Voluntary compliance with WTO rules and procedures is of the utmost importance to the international trading system.'0 0 Given the increasingly globalized market, the coming years will see an increase in the importance of the WTO as a cohesive force and arbiter of disputes that likely will become more frequent and injurious. 01' The work of the WTO cannot be overstated in a nuclear-armed world, as the body continues to promote respect and even amity among nations with opposing philosophical goals or modes of governance. 10 2 Demagogues in the Unites States may decry the rise of China as a geopolitical threat, 0 3 and extremists in Russia may play dangerous games of brinksmanship with other great powers, but trade keeps politicians' fingers off "the button. ' 10 4 The WTO offers an astounding rate of compliance for an organization with no standing army and no real power to enforce its decisions, suggesting that governments recognize the value of maintaining the international construct of the WTO. 105 In order to promote voluntary compliance, the WTO must maintain a high level of credibility. 106 Nations must perceive the WTO as the most reasonable option for dispute resolution or fear that the WTO wields enough influence to enforce sanctions. 10 7 The arbitrators charged with performing the substantive work of the WTO by negotiating, compromising, and issuing judgments are keenly aware of the responsibility they have to uphold the organization's credibility. 108 1AC – Developing Economies Contention 3 is Developing Economies.
Scenario 1 is India. India is in crisis – the recent COVID surge is fundamentally different from that of the past. Khullar 21. (Dhruv Khullar is a contributing writer at The New Yorker, where he writes primarily about medicine, health care, and politics. He is also a practicing physician and an assistant professor at Weill Cornell Medical College) “India’s Crisis Marks a New Phase in the Pandemic,” The New Yorker, May 13, 2021. https://www.newyorker.com/science/medical-dispatch/indias-crisis-marks-a-new-phase-in-the-pandemic TDI Laxminarayan’s walks have changed in recent weeks. Coronavirus deaths in India have skyrocketed, and a frightening atmosphere has descended. New Delhi is roughly as dense as New York City, with some thirty thousand residents per square mile. But now Laxminarayan passes just a few scattered people; almost everyone stays inside if they can, venturing out only in search of food, medication, or medical care. Before the surge, mask-wearing had declined, but now everyone’s face is covered again. “You need public-health enforcement when the pandemic is invisible,” Laxminarayan told me. “Now fear is the dominant force changing people’s behavior.” Government statistics indicate that the virus is newly infecting millions of Indians each week, and that some twenty thousand or thirty thousand people are dying weekly. But most experts, including Laxminarayan, believe that those numbers capture a fraction of the true covid-19 toll. “It’s a war zone,” Laxminarayan said. “It’s worse than what you’re reading in the papers or seeing on TV. Whatever the numbers are, they don’t tell the full story. The human toll is devastating.” The current surge differs fundamentally from India’s experience last year. “This is truly a national wave,” Laxminarayan said. “It’s not urban. It’s not rural. It’s not north or south. It’s everywhere.” He went on, “During the first wave, the poor suffered the bulk of the health and economic toll. Now everyone is affected. I personally don’t know a single family that doesn’t have covid in it right now. I don’t mean in their extended family. I mean in their nuclear family.” In late April, after his dentist’s parents both died and after a colleague fell ill and couldn’t get oxygen, Laxminarayan decided to shift from covid research to covid relief. He and his team at C.D.D.E.P. decided to focus on India’s oxygen-supply problem, which has fundamentally limited the nation’s hospital capacity. They launched an initiative called OxygenForIndia, raising eight and a half million dollars in two weeks; with the help of corporate partners, among them Verizon Media, Logitech, and UiPath, they have secured more than two thousand oxygen concentrators—portable devices that remove nitrogen from the air to produce purified oxygen—and thirty thousand cylinders to store gaseous oxygen. By some estimates, those cylinder donations add up to more gaseous oxygen than India has received through foreign aid to date. “Right now, no one wants to leave a hospital bed they’re in,” Laxminarayan said. “It’s the only place they know perhaps they can get oxygen. We want to assure people they will have oxygen at home, so that hospital capacity is freed up for the sickest patients.” Laxminarayan thinks that bolstering critical-care capacity is a long-term proposition—“You can’t make doctors and nurses overnight”—and that India is better served today by making more efficient use of its existing infrastructure. OxygenForIndia has already started delivering oxygen to people’s homes, but the organization’s larger goal is to partner with hospitals in urban areas: Delhi, Bangalore, and Kolkata, among others. Doctors, along with algorithms, will triage patients upon presentation or as they improve before discharge. Those deemed safe to go home with supportive oxygen will be given a Q.R. code to be scanned at a nearby warehouse, where they can collect an oxygen cylinder or concentrator to keep as long as they need. (Cylinders must be refilled at the warehouse each day; concentrators can be used continuously at home.) “I’m hoping this is a scalable model that can be used by other countries when they face their big covid wave,” Laxminarayan said. “Because there’s no reason to believe they won’t.” The air around us, which contains twenty-one-per-cent oxygen, must be concentrated and purified to produce the medical-grade gas that people need when the coronavirus besieges their lungs. The most efficient way to accomplish this—the default in wealthy countries—is for factories to produce liquid oxygen, which tanker trucks then deliver to hospitals, where it can be stored in large containers and then piped into patients’ rooms. Many hospitals in poor countries, however, aren’t equipped to store liquid oxygen, and must rely on an external supply. If a hospital is in a remote location, this can be a serious logistical challenge. Another option is to install on-site plants that extract oxygen from the air. These systems, which use a technology known as pressure swing adsorption, or P.S.A., are expensive, and require maintenance. In October, the Indian government announced plans to build a hundred and sixty-two such plants around the country; thus far, thirty-three have been installed. Laxminarayan’s organization also hopes to create dozens of oxygen-generation plants at Indian hospitals. For now, many hospitals rely on simpler, decentralized technology, which comes with disadvantages: the gaseous oxygen contained in cylinders can cost ten times as much as its liquid equivalent, and oxygen concentrators are usually intended for only one or a few patients at a time. Whatever the process, it’s clear that too many Indians are going without the oxygen they need. Since this February, India’s oxygen requirements have increased fifteenfold; it now needs nearly three times as much medical-grade oxygen as it did during the height of its first wave. Some hospitals have run out of oxygen, and others are on the precipice. Hospitals won’t admit patients whom they can’t treat; many Indians therefore suffer a suffocating illness at home. The government is doing what it can: granting oxygen-transport vehicles an ambulance-like status on roads; leveraging the national railway service to move tankers around the country; enlisting the air force to transport empty containers back to factories to be refilled. On Wednesday, India’s Supreme Court ordered the federal government to present a more comprehensive plan to meet New Delhi’s oxygen needs. Meanwhile, foreign governments and international aid organizations are sending ventilators, concentrators, and cylinders. Still, each day brings fresh reports of people dying because they can’t get oxygen. (The shortage is likely to spread: globally, the deficit of medical oxygen—the gap between what’s needed and what’s being produced—has tripled in recent months, in part owing to the unmet need in India but also because of growing demand in South America and the Middle East.) Technically, Indians have access to universal health coverage: the country’s constitution guarantees everyone a “right to life,” and people can receive care at government facilities free of charge. But, over decades, low levels of public financing have led to poor quality and severe staff and supply shortages. India’s federal government spends around one per cent of G.D.P. on health care—far less than most large economies. Moreover, states share responsibility with the federal government for health-care delivery, and that has resulted in a large variation in funding and quality. Many Indians therefore opt to pay for private health care, if they can afford it, and the private sector now provides most care in India, even though commercial health insurance is available to only a fraction of the population and out-of-pocket costs can be devastating. In 2018, the central government launched a major effort aimed at insuring that low-income people could receive care at private facilities. But relatively few Indians have a regular place of care where they can receive ongoing management of their medical conditions or outpatient testing and treatment for covid-19. The coronavirus has severely strained India’s critical-care capacity, which was lacking even before the pandemic: during normal times, the country has around fifteen per cent of the critical-care specialists it needs. More generally, India has nine doctors for every ten thousand people—about half the global average, and only a third as many as the U.S. There’s also the issue of maldistribution: two-thirds of India’s population lives in rural areas, where only twenty per cent of the nation’s doctors work. (Shortages of nurses and other clinicians can be even worse.) VIDEO FROM THE NEW YORKER The Pandemic Through the Eyes of a Three-Year-Old Still, India’s physician-to-patient ratio is higher than that of Bangladesh, Nepal, or any nation in sub-Saharan Africa. Many of the globe’s myriad health-care systems share the fundamental constraints that have transformed India’s second wave into a humanitarian crisis—including an oxygen-delivery infrastructure that is unable to meet the demands of a vast viral surge. Many Indians have experienced the current surge as a surprise. But the forces driving it are fundamentally familiar. “Society opened up without restraint,” K. Srinath Reddy, the president of the Public Health Foundation of India and the former chair of cardiology at the All India Institute of Medical Sciences, told me. “It was widely perceived that the pandemic is behind us, that we are unlikely to have a second wave. We didn’t just return to 2019—we entered 2021 with an extra degree of exuberance.” Politicians encouraged people to gather at massive rallies; cricket stadiums filled with fans; malls opened to shoppers and weddings welcomed guests. The government sanctioned the Kumbh Mela, a Hindu religious festival, and millions of people made the pilgrimage to Haridwar, in the northern state of Uttarakhand, to wash in the River Ganges. The festival started on April 1st and continued for nearly three weeks before the coronavirus toll became unbearable and undeniable. Afterward, people carried the virus back to far-flung cities and villages. “The euphoria of putting the pandemic behind us was a widely prevalent emotion, and it suited everyone,” Reddy said. “Industry wanted to get back to full production. Small traders wanted to get back to business. Ordinary citizens wanted to get back to their lives.” Many countries have engaged in wishful thinking during the pandemic; all have struggled to fight the virus while avoiding economic collapse. The Indian experience speaks specifically to the problem of endurance, and raises the question of how long low- and middle-income countries can maintain pandemic protocols absent a clear time line for widespread vaccination. The U.S. and much of Europe have navigated the pandemic while looking forward to early and reliable access to vaccines; if we didn’t have a firm end date, we at least knew that an end was approaching. Under such conditions, politicians and the public can examine, debate, and accept the costs of restrictions. But that calculus is harder, perhaps impossible, without some assurance that pandemic life is temporary. ADVERTISEMENT The global vaccination effort has faltered, with poor countries receiving a fraction of the vaccines they had expected. covax, the world’s primary initiative to promote vaccine equity, had planned to deliver two billion doses in 2021; so far, it’s sent out about fifty million. Less than half of one per cent of all covid-19 vaccines have been administered in poor nations. “We’re now in this very strange situation where we’re talking about fourteen-year-olds in America getting vaccinated, while older people around the world remain vulnerable and entire countries are devastated,” Ashish Jha, the dean of Brown’s public-health school, told me. “It’s a moral issue, but it’s also an epidemiological one. We’re placing everyone at risk when we let the virus run rampant. It creates a huge substrate for new variants. We need to quadruple our efforts to get the world vaccinated. That has to be the No. 1 priority for the Biden Administration going forward.” The U.S. has committed four billion dollars to covax, which still faces a funding shortfall of tens of billions of dollars. Last week, the Biden Administration also announced its support for waiving intellectual-property protections for covid-19 vaccines. The proposed waiver—it must be approved by the World Trade Organization—has been hailed by many public-health practitioners; the director-general of the W.H.O., Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, called Biden’s support for the proposal “a monumental moment” in the fight against the pandemic. But others have sounded a cautionary note, raising the possibility that the spectre of patent waivers will disincentivize companies from investing in vaccine and drug development in the future. “I wonder whether we want to send potential firms the message that the larger the health crisis, the less we will respect and protect your I.P.,” Craig Garthwaite, a professor at Northwestern University, tweeted, after the Biden Administration’s announcement. “That’s a great system if you think this is the last pandemic we’ll face.” That causes Indo-Pak conflict escalation. Somos 20. Christy Somos is a CTVNews.ca Writer) “COVID-19 has escalated armed conflict in India, Pakistan, Iraq, Libya and the Philippines, study finds,” CTV News, December 17, 2020. https://www.ctvnews.ca/world/covid-19-has-escalated-armed-conflict-in-india-pakistan-iraq-libya-and-the-philippines-study-finds-1.5236738 TDI INDIA India saw a rise in armed conflict during the study period, with violent clashes in the Kashmir region between Kashmiri separatists facing off against the Indian military, as well as conflicts between Pakistan and India. “So what mostly drove the increase in conflict intensity…were basically due to two factors,” Ide said. “The first being that there is some evidence that Pakistan sponsors or supports these insurgents in Kashmir, to encourage them to increase their attacks on Indian forces because they perceived them to be weak and struggling with the pandemic.” The second factor, Ide explained, was that while Indian government enacted a “pretty comprehensive lockdown in Kashmir, and sealing it way from international media attention…launched more intense counter-insurgency efforts and…cracked down on any pro-Pakistani sympathy expressions.” IRAQ Iraq had an increase in armed conflict, but Ide noted that the overall intensity did not change that much – a “very slight upward trend” in scale that was not linear. What did increase were attacks by ISIS in April, May, and June. “The Iraqi government was really in trouble,” he said. “They had enormous economic loss, they had to go head-to-head and use troops and funds to combat the pandemic – the international coalition supporting the government partially withdrew troops or stopped their activities.” “The Iraqi government was really in a position of weakness.” Ide said the Islamic State exploited the pandemic and the thin resources at hand to the government to expand territorial control, conquer new areas and to stage more attacks. LIBYA The civil war in Libya between the Government of National Accord’s (GNA) forces and the Libyan National Army escalated during the study period, after a ceasefire brokered in January was broken, Ide said. “As soon as international attention shifted to the pandemic…they really escalated the conflict, tried to make gains while hoping the other side is weakened because of the pandemic, hoping to score an easy military victory” Ide said. “It didn’t happen.” The UN Security Council noted in a May report that the pandemic was bolstering the 15-month conflict, citing the history of more than 850 broken ceasefire agreements and “a tide of civilian deaths” on top of a worsening outbreak. PAKISTAN The ongoing conflict with India saw a rise in armed conflict in Pakistan during the study period – which were unrelated to the pandemic, but also a rise in Taliban-affiliated groups and anti-government sentiments due to pandemic restrictions, Ide said. “There were a lot of anti-government grievances,” Ide said. “There were restrictions on religious gatherings, which religious groups did not like, and there were some negative economic impacts which affected the local people.” Ide said those two factors could have been exploited by the Taliban in a quest to recruit more followers. Later in the study period, a swath Pakistani government officials were struck with COVID-19, leaving the country with a leadership crisis, which saw an increase of attacks by Taliban groups in May. Extinction. Roblin 21. (Sébastien Roblin holds a master’s degree in Conflict Resolution from Georgetown University and served as a university instructor for the Peace Corps in China, "If the Next India-Pakistan War Goes Nuclear, It Will Destroy the World," The National Interest, March 26, 2021. https://nationalinterest.org/blog/reboot/if-next-india-pakistan-war-goes-nuclear-it-will-destroy-world-181134 TDI Here's What You Need to Remember: India and Pakistan account for over one-fifth world’s population, and therefore a significant share of economic activity. Should their major cities become irradiated ruins with their populations decimated, a tremendous disruption would surely result. Between February 26 and 27 in 2019, Indian and Pakistani warplanes launched strikes on each other’s territory and engaged in aerial combat for the first time since 1971. Pakistan ominously hinted it was convening its National Command Authority, the institution which can authorize a nuclear strike. The two states, which have retained an adversarial relationship since their founding in 1947, between them deploy nuclear warheads that can be delivered by land, air and sea. However, those weapons are inferior in number and yield to the thousands of nuclear weapons possessed by Russia and the United States, which include megaton-class weapons that can wipe out a metropolis in a single blast. Some commenters have callously suggested that means a “limited regional nuclear war” would remain an Indian and Pakistani problem. People find it difficult to assess the risk of rare but catastrophic events; after all, a full-scale nuclear war has never occurred before, though it has come close to happening. Such assessments are not only shockingly callous but shortsighted. In fact, several studies have modeled the global impact of a “limited” ten-day nuclear war in which India and Pakistan each exchange fifty 15-kiloton nuclear bombs equivalent in yield to the Little Boy uranium bomb dropped on Hiroshima. Their findings concluded that spillover would in no way be “limited,” directly impacting people across the globe that would struggle to locate Kashmir on a map. And those results are merely a conservative baseline, as India and Pakistan are estimated to possess over 260 warheads. Some likely have yields exceeding 15-kilotons, which is relatively small compared to modern strategic warheads. Casualties Recurring terrorist attacks by Pakistan-sponsored militant groups over the status of India’s Muslim-majority Jammu and Kashmir state have repeatedly led to threats of a conventional military retaliation by New Delhi. Pakistan, in turn, maintains it may use nuclear weapons as a first-strike weapon to counter-balance India’s superior conventional forces. Triggers could involve the destruction of a large part of Pakistan’s military or penetration by Indian forces deep into Pakistani territory. Islamabad also claims it might authorize a strike in event of a damaging Indian blockade or political destabilization instigated by India. India’s official policy is that it will never be first to strike with nuclear weapons—but that once any nukes are used against it, New Dehli will unleash an all-out retaliation. The Little Boy bomb alone killed around 100,000 Japanese—between 30 to 40 percent of Hiroshima’s population—and destroyed 69 percent of the buildings in the city. But Pakistan and India host some of the most populous and densely populated cities on the planet, with population densities of Calcutta, Karachi and Mumbai at or exceeding 65,000 people per square mile. Thus, even low-yield bombs could cause tremendous casualties. A 2014 study estimates that the immediate effects of the bombs—the fireball, over-pressure wave, radiation burns etc.—would kill twenty million people. An earlier study estimated a hundred 15-kiloton nuclear detonations could kill twenty-six million in India and eighteen million in Pakistan—and concluded that escalating to using 100-kiloton warheads, which have greater blast radius and overpressure waves that can shatter hardened structures, would multiply death tolls four-fold. Moreover, these projected body counts omit the secondary effects of nuclear blasts. Many survivors of the initial explosion would suffer slow, lingering deaths due to radiation exposure. The collapse of healthcare, transport, sanitation, water and economic infrastructure would also claim many more lives. A nuclear blast could also trigger a deadly firestorm. For instance, a firestorm caused by the U.S. napalm bombing of Tokyo in March 1945 killed more people than the Fat Man bomb killed in Nagasaki. Refugee Outflows The civil war in Syria caused over 5.6 million refugees to flee abroad out of a population of 22 million prior to the conflict. Despite relative stability and prosperity of the European nations to which refugees fled, this outflow triggered political backlashes that have rocked virtually every major Western government. Now consider likely population movements in event of a nuclear war between India-Pakistan, which together total over 1.5 billion people. Nuclear bombings—or their even their mere potential—would likely cause many city-dwellers to flee to the countryside to lower their odds of being caught in a nuclear strike. Wealthier citizens, numbering in tens of millions, would use their resources to flee abroad. Should bombs beginning dropping, poorer citizens many begin pouring over land borders such as those with Afghanistan and Iran for Pakistan, and Nepal and Bangladesh for India. These poor states would struggle to supports tens of millions of refugees. China also borders India and Pakistan—but historically Beijing has not welcomed refugees. Some citizens may undertake risky voyages at sea on overloaded boats, setting their sights on South East Asia and the Arabian Peninsula. Thousands would surely drown. Many regional governments would turn them back, as they have refugees of conflicts in Vietnam, Cambodia and Myanmar in the past. Fallout Radioactive fallout would also be disseminated across the globe. The fallout from the Chernobyl explosion, for example, wounds its way westward from Ukraine into Western Europe, exposing 650,000 persons and contaminating 77,000 square miles. The long-term health effects of the exposure could last decades. India and Pakistan’s neighbors would be especially exposed, and most lack healthcare and infrastructure to deal with such a crisis. Nuclear Winter Studies in 2008 and 2014 found that of one hundred bombs that were fifteen-kilotons were used, it would blast five million tons of fine, sooty particles into the stratosphere, where they would spread across the globe, warping global weather patterns for the next twenty-five years. The particles would block out light from the sun, causing surface temperatures to decrease an average of 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit across the globe, or 4.5 degrees in North American and Europe. Growing seasons would be shortened by ten to forty days, and certain crops such as Canadian wheat would simply become unviable. Global agricultural yields would fall, leading to rising prices and famine. The particles may also deplete between 30 to 50 percent of the ozone layer, allowing more of the sun’s radiation to penetrate the atmosphere, causing increased sunburns and rates of cancer and killing off sensitive plant-life and marine plankton, with the spillover effect of decimating fishing yields. To be clear, these are outcomes for a “light” nuclear winter scenario, not a full slugging match between the Russian and U.S. arsenals. Global Recession Any one of the factors above would likely suffice to cause a global economic recession. All of them combined would guarantee one. India and Pakistan account for over one-fifth world’s population, and therefore a significant share of economic activity. Should their major cities become irradiated ruins with their populations decimated, a tremendous disruption would surely result. A massive decrease in consumption and production would obviously instigate a long-lasting recessionary cycle, with attendant deprivations and political destabilization slamming developed and less-developed countries alike. Taken together, these outcomes mean even a “limited” India-Pakistan nuclear war would significantly affect every person on the globe, be they a school teacher in Nebraska, a factory-worker in Shaanxi province or a fisherman in Mombasa. Unfortunately, the recent escalation between India and Pakistan is no fluke, but part of a long-simmering pattern likely to continue escalating unless New Delhi and Islamabad work together to change the nature of their relationship. Scenario 2 is South Africa. The third wave of the pandemic is fueling instability in South Africa. Egwu 21. (Patrick Egwu is a Nigerian freelance journalist currently based in Johannesburg, where he is an Open Society Foundations fellow at the University of the Witwatersrand) “South Africa’s Twin Crises Are Feeding Each Other,” Foreign Policy, July 20, 2021. https://foreignpolicy.com/2021/07/20/south-africa-covid-19-struggles-deadly-third-wave-zuma-violence/ TDI South Africa is coping with two crises at once—a political storm caused by the imprisonment of former President Jacob Zuma, whose followers have caused chaos on the streets, and a deadly new wave of COVID-19 that’s hospitalizing thousands of people a day. On July 3, South Africa hit a record 26,000 cases of COVID-19, one of the highest new daily totals reported since the pandemic started over a year ago. The country has been battling a deadly third wave of the pandemic, following previous peaks during the first and second waves between April and December 2020. As of July 19, South Africa has recorded 2.3 million cases and 67,000 deaths since the pandemic started, according to the country’s Department of Health. On June 27, President Cyril Ramaphosa announced that the country would move to adjusted alert level 4 of lockdown for 14 days as the country faced a rising number of COVID-19 infections. After the end of the two-week lockdown and with a continuous spike in cases, Ramaphosa addressed the nation again on July 11 and announced an additional 14 days of restrictions. Ramaphosa was facing both the COVID-19 situation and the violence across the country by pro-Zuma supporters.. Banks and government buildings temporarily closed to avoid attacks. On July 12, Ramaphosa addressed the nation over persistent public violence and announced the deployment of soldiers to two provinces—Gauteng and KwaZulu-Natal, the hometown of Zuma, where the violence started. As of July 13, more than 70 people had been killed and about 1,200 arrested. “This violence may indeed have its roots in the pronouncements and activities of individuals with a political purpose and in expressions of frustration and anger,” Ramaphosa said, but added that no grievance or political cause could justify the violence and destruction. The violence has affected access to health services, with front-line workers unable to reach vaccination stations and pharmacies often shuttered to avoid vandalism and looting. The unemployment and visible inequalities in the country exacerbated the violence. Thousands of South Africans have lost their jobs following lockdown restrictions, and there has been little government support for the economy. The violence created an opportunity to explore illegal options of survival. On top of this, the brutal police enforcement of the lockdown last year has aggravated existing tensions around police brutality, contributing to the unrest. Ramaphosa acknowledged this in his address: “This moment has thrown into stark relief what we already knew: that the level of unemployment, poverty, and inequality in our society is unsustainable.” As in so many other countries, the delta variant of COVID-19 now appears to be dominant, although the government has not published separate statistics for the different variants yet. Hospitals and front-line workers in the country are overwhelmed with the number of patients they are receiving each day. In some provinces, such as Gauteng and KwaZulu-Natal, many hospitals are operating above capacity, with shortage of spaces and oxygen for patients. Front-line health care workers have been hit hard. As of December 2020, over 38,000 health care workers in South Africa had tested positive for the virus, with more than 390 dead, according to data cited by Ramaphosa. Dozens Killed in South Africa Protests COLM QUINN The government is responding by calling for massive recruitment of health volunteers to beef up the staff strength at public hospitals. Earlier on in the pandemic, African countries made some gains against the virus through precautionary measures such as border closures. For instance, in March 2020, South Africa was the first country on the continent to declare a state of national disaster on the pandemic, and stiffer restrictions were announced. But these initial successes are gradually being lost with the new wave of infections and growing death rate. The gradual relaxation of restrictions to save South Africa’s ailing economy, which started last June, has worsened the situation. The World Bank says South Africa is among the most unequal countries in the world—something the pandemic has only inflamed. The unemployment rate in the country stood at 33 percent at the end of March and is highest among youth aged 15 to 24. As the third wave continues to ravage the country, just 4 million people—about 7 percent of South Africa’s population of 60 million—have received at least one dose of the vaccine, according to the Department of Health. COVID is pummeling South Africa’s fragile economy and fueling the worst rioting since 1994. Steinhauser and Parkinson 21. (Gabriele Steinhauser writes about politics and economics in southern Africa and beyond and helps manage The Wall Street Journal's reporters on the continent. Joe Parkinson is the Wall Street Journal’s Africa Bureau Chief, leading a team of correspondents chronicling business, policy and geopolitical trends across the continent. “Third Covid Wave Upends Fragile South Africa, a Warning for Developing World,” The Wall Street Journal, July 19, 2021. https://www.wsj.com/articles/covid-pandemic-south-africa-riots-a-warning-for-developing-world-11626711622 TDI Wave after wave of coronavirus is pummeling South Africa’s fragile economy and its largely unvaccinated population, creating a spiral of death, lockdowns and anger that has fueled the country’s worst rioting since the collapse of white minority rule in 1994. At least 215 people died in the violence across South Africa’s two most populous provinces, and more than 3,400 have been arrested. While the looting had quieted by Monday, the situation remains tense in parts of the country. Saaberie Chishty paramedic Farah Williams said that after weeks of back-to-back calls from patients, the phones went quiet last week during the riots. The violence was initially sparked by the arrest of former President Jacob Zuma earlier this month, and has exacerbated a power struggle within the African National Congress, South Africa’s ruling party since Nelson Mandela’s election as the country’s first Black president 27 years ago. President Cyril Ramaphosa has said the unrest was an attempted insurrection against South Africa’s democracy and intended to sabotage its economy. The political protest quickly devolved, becoming an outlet for the frustrations of an impoverished majority long shut out of the country’s economy. South Africa is struggling to emerge from a record contraction of 7 last year. Each surge of Covid-19 and the subsequent lockdowns are putting more pressure on the divided nation, where 43 of workers were without a job at the end of March. “We were sitting on a dormant volcano here, where all of us might perish if it erupts,” said Xolani Dube, a political analyst with the Xubera Institute for Research and Development, a nonpartisan think tank in the southeastern city of Durban. “Now the volcano has erupted.” The human and economic dislocation in South Africa, where just 2.8 of people have been fully vaccinated against Covid-19, shows how difficult it will be for many emerging economies to recover from the pandemic. The violence in South Africa—as well as in countries including Colombia and Sudan—offers a stark example of how diminishing incomes and the rising cost of food are adding to more than a year of pandemic suffering, exacerbating political instability. The World Bank estimates that more than 160 million people will have been pushed into poverty as a result of Covid by the end of 2021, widening the gap between the world’s richest and poorest nations. The pandemic has led 41 million people to the brink of famine, according to the World Food Program. Africa instability goes nuclear. Mead 13. (Walter Mead is a James Clarke Chace Professor of Foreign Affairs and Humanities, Bard College) “Peace in The Congo? Why the World Should Care,” The American Interest, December 15, 2013. https://www.the-american-interest.com/2013/12/15/peace-in-the-congo-why-the-world-should-care/ One of the biggest questions of the 21st century is whether this destructive dynamic can be contained, or whether the demand for ethnic, cultural and/or religious homogeneity will continue to convulse world politics, drive new generations of conflict, and create millions more victims. The Congo conflict is a disturbing piece of evidence suggesting that, in Africa at least, there is potential for this kind of conflict. The Congo war (and the long Hutu-Tutsi conflict in neighboring countries) is not, unfortunately alone. The secession of South Sudan from Sudan proper, the wars in what remains of that unhappy country, the secession of Eritrea from Ethiopia and the rise of Christian-Muslim tension right across Africa (where religious conflict often is fed by and intensifies “tribal”—in Europe we would say “ethnic” or “national”—conflicts) are strong indications that the potential for huge and destructive conflict across Africa is very real. But one must look beyond Africa. The Middle East of course is aflame in religious and ethnic conflict. The old British Raj including India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Burma and Sri Lanka offers countless examples of ethnic and religious conflict that sometimes is contained, and sometimes boils to the surface in horrendous acts of violence. Beyond that, rival nationalisms in East and Southeast Asia are keeping the world awake at night. The Congo war should be a reminder to us all that the foundations of our world are dynamite, and that the potential for new conflicts on the scale of the horrific wars of the 20th century is very much with us today. The second lesson from this conflict stems from the realization of how much patience and commitment from the international community (which in this case included the Atlantic democracies and a coalition of African states working as individual countries and through various international institutions) it has taken to get this far towards peace. Particularly at a time when many Americans want the US to turn inwards, there are people who make the argument that it is really none of America’s business to invest time and energy in the often thankless task of solving these conflicts. That might be an ugly but defensible position if we didn’t live in such a tinderbox world. Someone could rationally say, yes, it’s terrible that a million plus people are being killed overseas in a horrific conflict, but the war is really very far away and America has urgent needs at home and we should husband the resources we have available for foreign policy on things that have more power to affect us directly. The problem is that these wars spread. They may start in places that we don’t care much about (most Americans didn’t give a rat’s patootie about whether Germany controlled the Sudetenland in 1938 or Danzig in 1939) but they tend to spread to places that we do care very much about. This can be because a revisionist great power like Germany in 1938-39 needs to overturn the balance of power in Europe to achieve its goals, or it can be because instability in a very remote place triggers problems in places that we care about very much. Out of Afghanistan in 2001 came both 9/11 and the waves of insurgency and instability that threaten to rip nuclear-armed Pakistan apart or with trigger wider conflict India. Out of the mess in Syria a witches’ brew of terrorism and religious conflict looks set to complicate the security of our allies in Europe and the Middle East and even the security of the oil supply on which the world economy so profoundly depends. Africa, and the potential for upheaval there, is of more importance to American security than many people may understand. The line between Africa and the Middle East is a soft one. The weak states that straddle the southern approaches of the Sahara are ideal petri dishes for Al Qaeda type groups to form and attract local support. There are networks of funding and religious contact that give groups in these countries potential access to funds, fighters, training and weapons from the Middle East. A war in the eastern Congo might not directly trigger these other conflicts, but it helps to create the swirling underworld of arms trading, money transfers, illegal commerce and the rise of a generation of young men who become experienced fighters—and know no other way to make a living. It destabilizes the environment for neighboring states (like Uganda and Kenya) that play much more direct role in potential crises of greater concern to us. The plan solves both scenarios and WTO IP rules are a barrier to scaled-up vaccine production. Pandey 21. (Ashutosh Pandey) “Rich countries block India, South Africa's bid to ban COVID vaccine patents,” DW, April 2, 2021. https://www.dw.com/en/rich-countries-block-india-south-africas-bid-to-ban-covid-vaccine-patents/a-56460175 The World Trade Organization (WTO) talks on a proposal by India and South Africa to temporarily suspend intellectual property (IP) rules related to COVID-19 vaccines and treatments hit a roadblock on Thursday after wealthy countries balked at the idea, Germany's dpa news agency reported. The two developing countries say the IP waiver will allow drugmakers in poor countries to start production of effective vaccines sooner. India and South Africa had approached the global trade body in October, calling on it to waive parts of the Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS Agreement). The suspension of rights such as patents, industrial designs, copyright and protection of undisclosed information would ensure "timely access to affordable medical products including vaccines and medicines or to scaling-up of research, development, manufacturing and supply of medical products essential to combat COVID-19," they said. The proposal was vehemently opposed by wealthy nations like the US and Britain as well as the European Union, who said that a ban would stifle innovation at pharmaceutical companies by robbing them of the incentive to make huge investments in research and development. This would be especially counterproductive during the current pandemic which needs the drugmakers to remain on their toes to deal with a mutating virus, they argue. The WTO talks are taking place as some wealthy countries face criticism for cornering billions of COVID shots — many times the size of their populations — while leaving poor countries struggling for supplies. Experts say the global scramble for vaccines, or vaccine nationalism, risks prolonging the pandemic. "We have to recognize that this virus knows no boundaries, it travels around the globe and the response to it should also be global. It should be based on international solidarity," said Ellen 't Hoen, the director of Medicines Law and Policy — a nonprofit campaigning for greater access to medicines. "Many of the large-scale vaccine manufacturers are based in developing countries. All the production capacity that exists should be exploited…and that does require the sharing of Not enough production capacity Supporters of the waiver, which include dozens of developing and least-developed countries and NGOs, said the WTO's IP rules were acting as a barrier to urgent scale-up of production of vaccines and other much needed medical equipment in poor countries.