Opponent: Holy Ghost Prep JM | Judge: Brixz Gonzaba
1AR Fairness FW wo justifications Access AD 1N Cap K basic line by line
Bronx
4
Opponent: Thomas Edison EnergySmart Charter VG | Judge: Jack Morgenstein
1AC Insulin - Generics good Covid 1N Innovation DA Biotech DA US Covid Leadership CP Generics bad extinction ow 1AR Covid disproves Innovation Biotech nonunique US Leadership CP can't work Evergreening frivolous Dropped 2nd contention 2N Covid is unique to the Innovation impact Biotech still stands US leadership extension 2AR Innovation turn biotech non unique RFD Neg on biotech
Glenbrooks
1
Opponent: Northview MS | Judge: Vennelakanti, Vishnu
1AC Util DemocracyClimate Cap 1N Econ DA Tech DA
Harvard
3
Opponent: American Heritage Broward MC | Judge: Kurian, Michael
1AC Mars colonizaiton 1N T no spec T celestial bodies XI DA case 1AR everything 2N xi case 2AR xi case
Yale
2
Opponent: Dr Phillips AI | Judge: Gina Pisciotta
1AC Evergreening and Bioterror 1N Innovation DA and Biotech DA turn evergreening impact delink bioterror 1AR Outweigh accesability delinked innovation 2N Linked innovation back it's solvency and ow accesability 2AR Voters and lied to judge extended ac args
Yale
4
Opponent: American Heritage Broward JW | Judge: John Paul Leonardi
1AC Util opioid crisis biodiversity wto cred 1N Innovation DA Biotech DA turned opioid crisis neg controls biodiversity solvency wto cred delinl solvency 1AR Extended opiod crisis biodiversity wto creds Delinked innovation and biotech but conceded impacts 2N Turned opiod crisis delinked wto cred solvency extended neg biodiversity solvency Extend Innovation and biotech das 2AR Dropped opioid crisis wto cred Went for biodiversity Conceded biotech tried to delink innovation again
Yale
5
Opponent: Durham JH | Judge: Eva Lamberson
1AC Covid Aff Wto cred util 1N Innovation DA Biotech DA Infrastructure DA no solvency for wto and covid aff 1AR Yes solvency infrastructure non unique biotech impact block innovation non unique 2N No solvency extend infrastructure biotech impact innovation 2AR No solvency access ow plus plus innovation turn
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Entry
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0 - Contact infoDisclosureNavigation
Tournament: Boring | Round: Finals | Opponent: You | Judge: Me Hey, I'm Harris If you're trying to contact me: 1.) Messenger: Harris Layson, the one w/ the picture wearing a poncho 2.) Text: 4072422633 3.) Email: laysonha@lhprep.org, but I might not check this until before round so your best shot is text or messenger. If for some reason I don't meet your cite standards i.e. forgetting page numbers, just ask me and I'll fix it as soon as i can 4.) IMPORTANT: any rounds I dont have disclosed I probably read the same thing as the round before! Every position I have ever read on this topic is disclosed! 5.) For navigation, every position read on JF22 is marked as such
3/15/22
0 - Contact infoDisclosureNavigation
Tournament: Boring | Round: Finals | Opponent: You | Judge: Me Hey, I'm Harris If you're trying to contact me: 1.) Messenger: Harris Layson, the one w/ the picture wearing a poncho 2.) Text: 4072422633 3.) Email: laysonha@lhprep.org, but I might not check this until before round so your best shot is text or messenger. If for some reason I don't meet your cite standards i.e. forgetting page numbers, just ask me and I'll fix it as soon as i can 4.) IMPORTANT: any rounds I dont have disclosed I probably read the same thing as the round before! Every position I have ever read on this topic is disclosed! 5.) For navigation, every position read on JF22 is marked as such
3/15/22
1 - T - Negative Action
Tournament: Woodward | Round: 1 | Opponent: Jonathan Hsu | Judge: Marlborough Stoller cites aren't working
3/18/22
1 - T - Negative Action
Tournament: Woodward | Round: 1 | Opponent: Jonathan Hsu | Judge: Marlborough Stoller cites aren't working
1~ Interp – Unjust refers to a negative action – it means contrary.
Black Laws No Date "What is Unjust?" https://thelawdictionary.org/unjust/Elmer Contrary to right and justice, or to the enjoyment of his rights by another, or to the standards of conduct furnished by the laws.
2~ Violation – The Aff is a positive action – it creates a new concept for Space i.e. the treating of Space as a "Global Commons".
3~ Standards –
a~ Precision – they eliminate a topical stasis point, justifying the aff talking about anything which explodes neg prep burden and nullifies any engagement. Nowhere does the resolution prescribe active action, so there’s no basis for reasonable negative ground – hold the line.
b~ Limits – making the topic bi-directional explodes predictability – it means that Aff’s can both increase non-exist property regimes in space AND decrease appropriation by private actors – makes the topic untenable.
c~ Ground – wrecks Neg Generics – we can’t say appropriation good since the 1AC can create new views on Outer Space Property Rights that circumvent our Links since they can say "Global Commons" approach solves.
4~ TVA – just defend that space appropriation is bad.
a~ Fairness is a voter – debate’s a game that requires fair evaluation and rigorous testing – otherwise we can’t test if your arguments are true
b~ Topicality is Drop the Debater – it’s a fundamental baseline for debate-ability and we can’t get new 2nr da’s so the debate’s permanently skewed.
c~ Use Competing Interps – 1~ Topicality is a yes/no question, you can’t be reasonably topical and 2~ Reasonability invites arbitrary judge intervention and a race to the bottom of questionable argumentation.
d~ No RVI’s - 1~ Forces the 1NC to go all-in on Theory which kills substance education, 2~ Encourages Baiting since the 1AC will purposely be abusive, and 3~ Illogical – you shouldn’t win for not being abusive, which is a litmus test for argumentation
3/19/22
1 - Theory - No Nib Framework
Tournament: Woodward | Round: 5 | Opponent: Apple Valley Willingham | Judge: Johnstone 22, Graham Interp: Delineated criteria must be sufficient for both debaters, in other words I should be able to win by turning their offense or proving its consistent with the law Violation: their standards stays its necessary but insufficient 1 reciprocity: they put me in a 2-1 skew, can win from their fwrk or mine but I can’t win through theirs 2 Shiftiness: this functionally makes the entire AC offense conditional, even if I turn it they can go for anything else 3 Substance ed, nibs don’t engage in substance of the aff, even if you win the substance its not enough to win the round. a Fairness is a voter – debate’s a game that requires fair evaluation and rigorous testing – otherwise we can’t test if your arguments are true b Drop the Debater – deter future abuse, and skewed the entire round c Use Competing Interps – 1 Norm setting 2 Reasonability invites arbitrary judge intervention and a race to the bottom of questionable argumentation. d No RVI’s - 1 Forces the 1NC to go all-in on Theory which kills substance education, 2 Encourages Baiting since the 1AC will purposely be abusive, and 3 Illogical – you shouldn’t win for not being abusive, which is a litmus test for argumentation
3/19/22
Biotech DA
Tournament: Yale | Round: 2 | Opponent: Dr Phillips AI | Judge: Gina Pisciotta SO21 – DA – Biotech US dominance is secured in biotech now, but China’s closing the gap fast – that allows geopolitical and economic advantages Scott Moore 2020 (Director of the Penn Global China Program at the University of Pennsylvania. Previously, Moore was a Young Professional and Water Resources Management Specialist at the World Bank Group, and Environment, Science, Technology, and Health Officer for China at the U.S.) “China’s Role In The Global Biotechnology Sector And Implications For U.S. Policy” https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/FP_20200427_china_biotechnology_moore.pdf TDI Recut NChu EXECUTIVE SUMMARY Even by the standards of emerging technologies, biotechnology has the potential to utterly transform geopolitics, economics, and society in the 21st century. Yet while the United States has long been the world leader in most segments of the global biotechnology sector, China is fast becoming a significant player. This brief assesses the implications of China’s changing role in biotechnology for the United States, which span national security, data security, and economic competitiveness. On current trends the United States is likely to remain the world leader in most biotechnology areas. However, the gap between China and the U.S. is narrowing in the biotechnology sector, and U.S. policymakers must boost public investment, liberalize immigration and foreign student visa policies, and enact regulatory reforms to ensure America remains competitive. At the same time, areas like vaccine development and regulation of emerging technologies like synthetic biology present rich opportunities for Sino-U.S. cooperation. INTRODUCTION Thanks to extensive government funding for biomedical research, an unparalleled ability to translate basic research into commercial products and applications, and strong intellectual property protections, the United States has been the dominant global player in developing and commercializing biotechnology for decades.1 This dominance is reflected in the fact that United States accounted for almost half of all biotechnology patents filed worldwide from 1999 to 2013.2 However, in the intervening years, and just as in the case of artificial intelligence and other emerging technologies, other nations, including South Korea and Singapore, have invested heavily in developing their biotechnology sectors and industries. These efforts pale, however, in comparison to those of China, and the sheer size and scale of the Chinese biotechnology industry pose a range of economic, security, and regulatory issues for American policymakers. The determination of China’s one-party state to become a leading player in biotechnology is reflected by the rapid growth in investment in the sector. Some estimates claim that collectively, China’s central, local, and provincial governments have invested over $100 billion in life sciences research and development. Regardless of the true figure, official encouragement has led to a torrid place of investment. In just the two-year period from 2015 to 2017, venture capital and private equity investment in the sector totaled some $45 billion.3 The value of commercial deals concluded in the fields of biology, medicine and medical machine technology, meanwhile increased from 25.8 billion renminbi (RMB), or $3.6 billion, in 2011 to over 75 billion RMB ($10.6 billion) in 2017.4 Annual research and development expenditures by Chinese pharmaceutical firms, the foundation of the biotechnology sector, rose from some 39 billion RMB in 2014 ($5.5 billion) to over 53 billion RMB (US$7.5 billion) by 2017. Expenditure on new product development among these firms, an important indicator of future growth potential, increased from just over 40 billion RMB ($5.6 billion) to almost 60 billion ($8.4 billion).5 By Western standards, some of these figures are still low. Swiss drugmaker Roche, the world leader in biotechnology research and development, spent some $11 billion in 2018 alone.6 As these figures suggest, the development of China’s biotechnology sector paints a nuanced picture for U.S. policymakers. On one hand, the sector’s rapid growth, and high-level commitment to continued investment, means that China will inevitably become an increasingly important player in the global biotechnology sector, with implications for national security, economic competitiveness, and regulation. An executive from In-Q-Tel, the U.S. government’s inhouse national security venture capital fund, warned Congress in a November 2019 hearing, for example, that China “intends to own the biorevolution… and they are building the infrastructure, the talent pipeline, the regulatory system, and the financial system they need to do that.”7 The CEO of European drugmaker AstraZeneca has similarly opined that “Much of China’s innovation in the last three to four years has been ‘me too,’ but now on the horizon we can see firstin-class innovation.”8 Yet on the other hand, while China’s biotechnology sector will almost certainly continue to grow in scale, sophistication, and competitiveness, there is little reason to believe on current trends that the United States will lose its edge in the sector. Indeed, the biggest risk to the global competitiveness of the U.S. biotechnology industry likely comes from the prospect of declining public investment and reduced mobility for world-class researchers and industry professionals. Moreover, the COVID-19 crisis underscores both the importance of continued investment in biotechnology and the many challenges to promoting effective international cooperation on global health security. This brief first examines the key policies and actors in China’s biotechnology sector, then offers an assessment of the sector’s current capabilities and future trends, and finally further explores the implications of developments in Chinese biotechnology for U.S. policy. The aff’s waiving of IP doesn’t solve but it does give away sensitive national security information that allows China to lead ahead in biotech Josh Rogin 4-8. (Washington Post Columnist covering National Security Issues.) “Opinion: The wrong way to fight vaccine nationalism” https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/global-opinions/the-wrong-way-to-fight-vaccine-nationalism/2021/04/08/9a65e15e-98a8-11eb-962b-78c1d8228819_story.html TDI Recut NChu Americans will not be safe from covid-19 until the entire world is safe. That basic truth shows why vaccine nationalism is not only immoral but also counterproductive. But the simplest solutions are rarely the correct ones, and some countries are using the issue to advance their own strategic interests. The Biden administration must reject the effort by some nations to turn our shared crisis into their opportunity. As the inequities of vaccine distribution worldwide grow, a group of more than 50 developing countries led by India and South Africa is pushing the World Trade Organization to dissolve all international intellectual property protections for pandemic-related products, which would include vaccine research patents, manufacturing designs and technological know-how. The Trump administration rejected the proposal to waive the agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) for the pandemic when it was introduced in October. Now, hundreds of nongovernmental organizations and dozens of Democratic lawmakers are pushing the Biden administration to support the proposal. But many warn the move would result in the United States handing over a generation of advanced research — much of it funded by the U.S. taxpayer — to our country’s greatest competitors, above all China. In Congress, there’s justified frustration with the United States’ failure to respond to China’s robust vaccine diplomacy, in which Beijing has conditioned vaccine offers to pandemic-stricken countries on their ignoring security concerns over Chinese telecom companies or abandoning diplomatic recognition of Taiwan. There’s also a lot of anger at Big Pharma among progressives for profiting from the pandemic. “We are in a race against time, and unfortunately Big Pharma is standing in the way of speedily addressing this problem,” Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-Ill.), who supports the effort to waive intellectual property protections, told me in an interview. “I think the real security issue is that while the United States balks in making sure that we help ourselves, that these adversaries will just jump right in.” Schakowsky argued that alternative measures for helping poor countries manufacture vaccines are simply not moving fast enough to save lives and that the United States has a duty to respond. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) personally conveyed her support for the waiver to President Biden, Schakowsky said. But Big Pharma is just one piece of the puzzle. Countries such as India and South Africa have been trying to weaken WTO intellectual property protections for decades. The mRNA technology that underpins the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines was funded initially by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and has national security implications. Inside the Biden administration, the National Security Council has already convened several meetings on the issue. The waiver is supported by many global health officials in the White House and at the U.S. Agency for International Development, who believe the United States’ international reputation is suffering from its perceived “America First” vaccine strategy. On Wednesday, U.S. Trade Representative Katherine Tai spoke with WTO Director General Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala about the waiver issue. USTR is convening its own interagency meetings on the issue, which many see as a move to reassert its jurisdiction over WTO matters. If and when this does get to Biden’s desk, he will also hear from national security officials who believe that waiving TRIPS would result in the forced transfer of national security-sensitive technology to China, a country that strives to dominate the biotechnology field as part of its Made in China 2025 strategy. Once countries such as China have this technology, they will apply their mercantilist industrial models to ensure their companies dominate these strategically important industries, potentially erasing thousands of U.S. jobs. “We would be delivering a competitive advantage to countries that are increasingly viewed as our adversaries, at taxpayer expense, when there are other ways of doing this,” said Mark Cohen, senior fellow at the University of California at Berkeley Law School. A preferable approach would be to build more vaccine-manufacturing capacity in the United States and then give those vaccines to countries in need, said Cohen. The U.S. pharmaceutical industry would surely benefit, but that’s preferable to being dependent on other countries when the next pandemic hits. “If there’s anything that the pandemic has taught us, it’s that we need to have a robust supply chain, for ourselves and for the world generally,” Cohen said. What’s more, it’s not clear that waiving the TRIPS agreement for the pandemic would work in the first place. Bill Gates and others involved in the current vaccine distribution scheme have argued that it would not result in more vaccines, pointing out that licensing agreements are already successfully facilitating cooperation between patent-holding vaccine-makers and foreign manufacturers. Critics respond that such cooperation is still failing to meet the urgent needs in the developing world. Vaccine equity is a real problem, but waiving intellectual property rights is not the solution. If the current system is not getting shots into the arms of people in poor countries, we must fix that for their sake and ours. But the pandemic and our responses to it have geopolitical implications, whether we like it or not. That means helping the world and thinking about our strategic interests at the same time. China will convert biotechnology gains to military advantages, undermining US primacy – specifically true in the context of vaccines Mercy A. Kuo 2017 (Executive Vice President at Pamir Consulting.) “The Great US-China Biotechnology and Artificial Intelligence Race” https://thediplomat.com/2017/08/the-great-us-china-biotechnology-and-artificial-intelligence-race/ TDI Recut NChu Trans-Pacific View author Mercy Kuo regularly engages subject-matter experts, policy practitioners, and strategic thinkers across the globe for their diverse insights into the U.S. Asia policy. This conversation with Eleonore Pauwels – Director of Biology Collectives and Senior Program Associate, Science and Technology Innovation Program at the Wilson Center in Washington D.C. – is the 104th in “The Trans-Pacific View Insight Series.” Explain the motivation behind Chinese investment in U.S. genomics and artificial intelligence (AI). With large public and private investments inland and in the U.S., China plans to become the next AI-Genomics powerhouse, which indicates that these technologies will soon converge in China. China’s ambition is to lead the global market for precision medicine, which necessitates acquiring strategic technological and human capital in both genomics and AI. And the country excels at this game. A sharp blow in this U.S.-China competition happened in 2013 when BGI purchased Complete Genomics, in California, with the intent to build its own advanced genomic sequencing machines, therefore securing a technological knowhow mainly mastered by U.S. producers. There are significant economic incentives behind China’s heavy investment in the increasing convergence of AI and genomics. This golden combination will drive precision medicine to new heights by developing a more sophisticated understanding of how our genomes function, leading to precise, even personalized, cancer therapeutics and preventive diagnostics, such as liquid biopsies. By one estimate, the liquid biopsy market is expected to be worth $40 billion in 2017. Assess the implications of iCarbonX of Shenzhen’s decision to invest US$100 million in U.S.-company PatientsLikeMe relative to AI and genomic data collection. iCarbonX is a pioneer in AI software that learns to recognize useful relationships between large amounts of individuals’ biological, medical, behavioral and psychological data. Such a data-ecosystem will deliver insights into how an individual’s genome is mutating over time, and therefore critical information about this individual’s susceptibilities to rare, chronic and mental illnesses. In 2017, iCarbonX invested $100 million in PatientsLikeMe, getting a hold over data from the biggest online network of patients with rare and chronic diseases. If successful, this effort could turn into genetic gold, making iCarbonX one of the wealthiest healthcare companies in China and beyond. The risk factor is that iCarbonX is handling more than personal data, but potentially vulnerable data as the company uses a smartphone application, Meum, for customers to consult for health advice. Remember that the Chinese nascent genomics and AI industry relies on cloud computing for genomics data-storage and exchange, creating, in its wake, new vulnerabilities associated with any internet-based technology. This phenomenon has severe implications. How much consideration has been given to privacy and the evolving notion of personal data in this AI-powered health economy? And is our cyberinfrastructure ready to protect such trove of personal health data from hackers and industrial espionage? In this new race, will China and the U.S. have to constantly accelerate their rate of cyber and bio-innovation to be more resilient? Refining our models of genomics data protection will become a critical biosecurity issue. Why is Chinese access to U.S. genomic data a national security concern? Genomics and computing research is inherently dual-use, therefore a strategic advantage in a nation’s security arsenal. Using AI systems to understand how the functioning of our genomes impacts our health is of strategic importance for biodefense. This knowledge will lead to increasing developments at the forefront of medical countermeasures, including vaccines, antibiotics, and targeted treatments relying on virus-engineering and microbiome research. Applying deep learning to genomics data-sets could help geneticists learn how to use genome-editing (CRISPR) to efficiently engineer living systems, but also to treat and, even “optimize,” human health, with potential applications in military enhancements. A $15 million partnership between a U.S. company, Gingko Bioworks, and DARPA aims to genetically design new probiotics as a protection for soldiers against a variety of stomach bugs and illnesses. China could be using the same deep learning techniques on U.S. genomics data to better comprehend how to develop, patent and manufacture tailored cancer immunotherapies in high demand in the United States. Yet, what if Chinese efforts venture into understanding how to impact key genomics health determinants relevant to the U.S. population? Gaining access to increasingly large U.S. genomic data-sets gives China a knowledge advantage into leading the next steps in bio-military research. Could biomedical data be used to develop bioweapons? Explain. Personalized medicine advances mean that personalized bio-attacks are increasingly possible. The combination of AI with biomedical data and genome-editing technologies will help us predict genes most important to particular functions. Such insights will contribute to knowing how a particular disease occurs, how a newly-discovered virus has high transmissibility, but also why certain populations and individuals are more susceptible to it. Combining host susceptibility information with pathogenic targeted design, malicious actors could engineer pathogens that are tailored to overcome the immune system or the microbiome of specific populations. Maintenance of the US-led LIO is key to reduce a host of existential threats – establishes great-power peace. Brands 18. (Hal Brands is a Henry Kissinger Distinguished Professor at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies, Scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. “America’s Global Order Is Worth Fighting For, Bloomberg Opinion, Politics and Policy,” August 14, 2018, Bloomberg. https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2018-08-14/america-s-global-order-is-worth-fighting-for TDI Recut NChu The first argument is easily disposed of. Yes, the postwar world has been thoroughly imperfect, featuring nuclear arms races, genocides, widespread poverty and other scourges. But the world has always been imperfect, and by any meaningful comparison, the last seven decades have been a veritable golden age. The liberal international economic order has led to an explosion of domestic and global prosperity: According to World Bank data, both U.S. and global per capita income have increased roughly three-fold (in inflation-adjusted terms) since 1960, with U.S. gross domestic product increasing nearly six-fold. The U.S. system of alliances and forward military deployments has contributed critically to the longest period of great-power peace in modern history, and the incidence of war and conquest more broadly have dropped dramatically. The number of democracies in the world has increased from perhaps a dozen during World War II to well over 100 today; respect for basic human rights has also reached impressive levels. As a bevy of scholarship has shown, the policies that the U.S. has pursued and the international order it has built have contributed enormously and directly to these outcomes. If the liberal international order can’t be considered a smashing success, no international order could be. The second critique is also overstated. It is true that Washington, like all great powers throughout history, has been willing to bend the rules to get its way. It is hard to reconcile Cold War-era interventions in Guatemala, Chile and other countries with a professed solicitude for human rights and democracy; the Iraq War of 2003 is only one instance in which the U.S. brushed aside the concerns of international organizations such as the U.N. Security Council. Likewise, when the U.S. government determined that the Bretton Woods system of monetary relations no longer suited its interests in the 1970s, it terminated that scheme and insisted on creating a more favorable one. But again, the proper standard here is not sainthood but reality. And the U.S. has generally enlisted its power in the service of universal values such as democracy and human rights; it has, more often than not, promoted a positive-sum international system in which like-minded nations can be secure and wealthy. This goes back to the very beginning of the liberal order: Washington did not seek to hold its defeated adversaries in subjugation after World War II; it rebuilt Japan and western Germany into thriving, democratic allies that became fierce economic competitors to the U.S. The U.S. has taken this approach not simply because it wanted to do good in the world — powerful as this motivation is — but because of a hard-headed desire to do good for itself. In an interdependent global environment, American officials have long calculated, the U.S. cannot divorce its own well-being from that of the wider world. And in contrast to how other great powers — Imperial Japan, for instance, or the Soviet Union — ruled their spheres of influence, American behavior has been positively enlightened. It is this relatively benign behavior that has convinced so many countries to tolerate American leadership — and it is the emergence of a darker form of U.S. hegemony under the Trump administration that so profoundly worries them today. As for the third critique, the premise is right, but the conclusion can easily go too far. It is always dangerous to become so enraptured by past achievements that one loses sight of the need for adaptation in the future. This is particularly true today, because the strength of the liberal order is being tested from within and without, by issues ranging from unequal burden-sharing among American allies to the ambivalence of the American people themselves. There is little evidence to suggest, however, that either American power or the liberal order it supports have eroded so dramatically that Washington’s postwar project cannot be sustained. Quite the contrary — the U.S. is likely to remain the world’s strongest power for decades to come.
9/18/21
Biotech DA
Tournament: Yale | Round: 4 | Opponent: American Heritage Broward JW | Judge: John Paul Leonardi SO21 – DA – Biotech US dominance is secured in biotech now, but China’s closing the gap fast – that allows geopolitical and economic advantages Scott Moore 2020 (Director of the Penn Global China Program at the University of Pennsylvania. Previously, Moore was a Young Professional and Water Resources Management Specialist at the World Bank Group, and Environment, Science, Technology, and Health Officer for China at the U.S.) “China’s Role In The Global Biotechnology Sector And Implications For U.S. Policy” https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/FP_20200427_china_biotechnology_moore.pdf TDI Recut NChu EXECUTIVE SUMMARY Even by the standards of emerging technologies, biotechnology has the potential to utterly transform geopolitics, economics, and society in the 21st century. Yet while the United States has long been the world leader in most segments of the global biotechnology sector, China is fast becoming a significant player. This brief assesses the implications of China’s changing role in biotechnology for the United States, which span national security, data security, and economic competitiveness. On current trends the United States is likely to remain the world leader in most biotechnology areas. However, the gap between China and the U.S. is narrowing in the biotechnology sector, and U.S. policymakers must boost public investment, liberalize immigration and foreign student visa policies, and enact regulatory reforms to ensure America remains competitive. At the same time, areas like vaccine development and regulation of emerging technologies like synthetic biology present rich opportunities for Sino-U.S. cooperation. INTRODUCTION Thanks to extensive government funding for biomedical research, an unparalleled ability to translate basic research into commercial products and applications, and strong intellectual property protections, the United States has been the dominant global player in developing and commercializing biotechnology for decades.1 This dominance is reflected in the fact that United States accounted for almost half of all biotechnology patents filed worldwide from 1999 to 2013.2 However, in the intervening years, and just as in the case of artificial intelligence and other emerging technologies, other nations, including South Korea and Singapore, have invested heavily in developing their biotechnology sectors and industries. These efforts pale, however, in comparison to those of China, and the sheer size and scale of the Chinese biotechnology industry pose a range of economic, security, and regulatory issues for American policymakers. The determination of China’s one-party state to become a leading player in biotechnology is reflected by the rapid growth in investment in the sector. Some estimates claim that collectively, China’s central, local, and provincial governments have invested over $100 billion in life sciences research and development. Regardless of the true figure, official encouragement has led to a torrid place of investment. In just the two-year period from 2015 to 2017, venture capital and private equity investment in the sector totaled some $45 billion.3 The value of commercial deals concluded in the fields of biology, medicine and medical machine technology, meanwhile increased from 25.8 billion renminbi (RMB), or $3.6 billion, in 2011 to over 75 billion RMB ($10.6 billion) in 2017.4 Annual research and development expenditures by Chinese pharmaceutical firms, the foundation of the biotechnology sector, rose from some 39 billion RMB in 2014 ($5.5 billion) to over 53 billion RMB (US$7.5 billion) by 2017. Expenditure on new product development among these firms, an important indicator of future growth potential, increased from just over 40 billion RMB ($5.6 billion) to almost 60 billion ($8.4 billion).5 By Western standards, some of these figures are still low. Swiss drugmaker Roche, the world leader in biotechnology research and development, spent some $11 billion in 2018 alone.6 As these figures suggest, the development of China’s biotechnology sector paints a nuanced picture for U.S. policymakers. On one hand, the sector’s rapid growth, and high-level commitment to continued investment, means that China will inevitably become an increasingly important player in the global biotechnology sector, with implications for national security, economic competitiveness, and regulation. An executive from In-Q-Tel, the U.S. government’s inhouse national security venture capital fund, warned Congress in a November 2019 hearing, for example, that China “intends to own the biorevolution… and they are building the infrastructure, the talent pipeline, the regulatory system, and the financial system they need to do that.”7 The CEO of European drugmaker AstraZeneca has similarly opined that “Much of China’s innovation in the last three to four years has been ‘me too,’ but now on the horizon we can see firstin-class innovation.”8 Yet on the other hand, while China’s biotechnology sector will almost certainly continue to grow in scale, sophistication, and competitiveness, there is little reason to believe on current trends that the United States will lose its edge in the sector. Indeed, the biggest risk to the global competitiveness of the U.S. biotechnology industry likely comes from the prospect of declining public investment and reduced mobility for world-class researchers and industry professionals. Moreover, the COVID-19 crisis underscores both the importance of continued investment in biotechnology and the many challenges to promoting effective international cooperation on global health security. This brief first examines the key policies and actors in China’s biotechnology sector, then offers an assessment of the sector’s current capabilities and future trends, and finally further explores the implications of developments in Chinese biotechnology for U.S. policy. The aff’s waiving of IP doesn’t solve but it does give away sensitive national security information that allows China to lead ahead in biotech Josh Rogin 4-8. (Washington Post Columnist covering National Security Issues.) “Opinion: The wrong way to fight vaccine nationalism” https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/global-opinions/the-wrong-way-to-fight-vaccine-nationalism/2021/04/08/9a65e15e-98a8-11eb-962b-78c1d8228819_story.html TDI Recut NChu Americans will not be safe from covid-19 until the entire world is safe. That basic truth shows why vaccine nationalism is not only immoral but also counterproductive. But the simplest solutions are rarely the correct ones, and some countries are using the issue to advance their own strategic interests. The Biden administration must reject the effort by some nations to turn our shared crisis into their opportunity. As the inequities of vaccine distribution worldwide grow, a group of more than 50 developing countries led by India and South Africa is pushing the World Trade Organization to dissolve all international intellectual property protections for pandemic-related products, which would include vaccine research patents, manufacturing designs and technological know-how. The Trump administration rejected the proposal to waive the agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) for the pandemic when it was introduced in October. Now, hundreds of nongovernmental organizations and dozens of Democratic lawmakers are pushing the Biden administration to support the proposal. But many warn the move would result in the United States handing over a generation of advanced research — much of it funded by the U.S. taxpayer — to our country’s greatest competitors, above all China. In Congress, there’s justified frustration with the United States’ failure to respond to China’s robust vaccine diplomacy, in which Beijing has conditioned vaccine offers to pandemic-stricken countries on their ignoring security concerns over Chinese telecom companies or abandoning diplomatic recognition of Taiwan. There’s also a lot of anger at Big Pharma among progressives for profiting from the pandemic. “We are in a race against time, and unfortunately Big Pharma is standing in the way of speedily addressing this problem,” Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-Ill.), who supports the effort to waive intellectual property protections, told me in an interview. “I think the real security issue is that while the United States balks in making sure that we help ourselves, that these adversaries will just jump right in.” Schakowsky argued that alternative measures for helping poor countries manufacture vaccines are simply not moving fast enough to save lives and that the United States has a duty to respond. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) personally conveyed her support for the waiver to President Biden, Schakowsky said. But Big Pharma is just one piece of the puzzle. Countries such as India and South Africa have been trying to weaken WTO intellectual property protections for decades. The mRNA technology that underpins the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines was funded initially by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and has national security implications. Inside the Biden administration, the National Security Council has already convened several meetings on the issue. The waiver is supported by many global health officials in the White House and at the U.S. Agency for International Development, who believe the United States’ international reputation is suffering from its perceived “America First” vaccine strategy. On Wednesday, U.S. Trade Representative Katherine Tai spoke with WTO Director General Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala about the waiver issue. USTR is convening its own interagency meetings on the issue, which many see as a move to reassert its jurisdiction over WTO matters. If and when this does get to Biden’s desk, he will also hear from national security officials who believe that waiving TRIPS would result in the forced transfer of national security-sensitive technology to China, a country that strives to dominate the biotechnology field as part of its Made in China 2025 strategy. Once countries such as China have this technology, they will apply their mercantilist industrial models to ensure their companies dominate these strategically important industries, potentially erasing thousands of U.S. jobs. “We would be delivering a competitive advantage to countries that are increasingly viewed as our adversaries, at taxpayer expense, when there are other ways of doing this,” said Mark Cohen, senior fellow at the University of California at Berkeley Law School. A preferable approach would be to build more vaccine-manufacturing capacity in the United States and then give those vaccines to countries in need, said Cohen. The U.S. pharmaceutical industry would surely benefit, but that’s preferable to being dependent on other countries when the next pandemic hits. “If there’s anything that the pandemic has taught us, it’s that we need to have a robust supply chain, for ourselves and for the world generally,” Cohen said. What’s more, it’s not clear that waiving the TRIPS agreement for the pandemic would work in the first place. Bill Gates and others involved in the current vaccine distribution scheme have argued that it would not result in more vaccines, pointing out that licensing agreements are already successfully facilitating cooperation between patent-holding vaccine-makers and foreign manufacturers. Critics respond that such cooperation is still failing to meet the urgent needs in the developing world. Vaccine equity is a real problem, but waiving intellectual property rights is not the solution. If the current system is not getting shots into the arms of people in poor countries, we must fix that for their sake and ours. But the pandemic and our responses to it have geopolitical implications, whether we like it or not. That means helping the world and thinking about our strategic interests at the same time. China will convert biotechnology gains to military advantages, undermining US primacy – specifically true in the context of vaccines Mercy A. Kuo 2017 (Executive Vice President at Pamir Consulting.) “The Great US-China Biotechnology and Artificial Intelligence Race” https://thediplomat.com/2017/08/the-great-us-china-biotechnology-and-artificial-intelligence-race/ TDI Recut NChu Trans-Pacific View author Mercy Kuo regularly engages subject-matter experts, policy practitioners, and strategic thinkers across the globe for their diverse insights into the U.S. Asia policy. This conversation with Eleonore Pauwels – Director of Biology Collectives and Senior Program Associate, Science and Technology Innovation Program at the Wilson Center in Washington D.C. – is the 104th in “The Trans-Pacific View Insight Series.” Explain the motivation behind Chinese investment in U.S. genomics and artificial intelligence (AI). With large public and private investments inland and in the U.S., China plans to become the next AI-Genomics powerhouse, which indicates that these technologies will soon converge in China. China’s ambition is to lead the global market for precision medicine, which necessitates acquiring strategic technological and human capital in both genomics and AI. And the country excels at this game. A sharp blow in this U.S.-China competition happened in 2013 when BGI purchased Complete Genomics, in California, with the intent to build its own advanced genomic sequencing machines, therefore securing a technological knowhow mainly mastered by U.S. producers. There are significant economic incentives behind China’s heavy investment in the increasing convergence of AI and genomics. This golden combination will drive precision medicine to new heights by developing a more sophisticated understanding of how our genomes function, leading to precise, even personalized, cancer therapeutics and preventive diagnostics, such as liquid biopsies. By one estimate, the liquid biopsy market is expected to be worth $40 billion in 2017. Assess the implications of iCarbonX of Shenzhen’s decision to invest US$100 million in U.S.-company PatientsLikeMe relative to AI and genomic data collection. iCarbonX is a pioneer in AI software that learns to recognize useful relationships between large amounts of individuals’ biological, medical, behavioral and psychological data. Such a data-ecosystem will deliver insights into how an individual’s genome is mutating over time, and therefore critical information about this individual’s susceptibilities to rare, chronic and mental illnesses. In 2017, iCarbonX invested $100 million in PatientsLikeMe, getting a hold over data from the biggest online network of patients with rare and chronic diseases. If successful, this effort could turn into genetic gold, making iCarbonX one of the wealthiest healthcare companies in China and beyond. The risk factor is that iCarbonX is handling more than personal data, but potentially vulnerable data as the company uses a smartphone application, Meum, for customers to consult for health advice. Remember that the Chinese nascent genomics and AI industry relies on cloud computing for genomics data-storage and exchange, creating, in its wake, new vulnerabilities associated with any internet-based technology. This phenomenon has severe implications. How much consideration has been given to privacy and the evolving notion of personal data in this AI-powered health economy? And is our cyberinfrastructure ready to protect such trove of personal health data from hackers and industrial espionage? In this new race, will China and the U.S. have to constantly accelerate their rate of cyber and bio-innovation to be more resilient? Refining our models of genomics data protection will become a critical biosecurity issue. Why is Chinese access to U.S. genomic data a national security concern? Genomics and computing research is inherently dual-use, therefore a strategic advantage in a nation’s security arsenal. Using AI systems to understand how the functioning of our genomes impacts our health is of strategic importance for biodefense. This knowledge will lead to increasing developments at the forefront of medical countermeasures, including vaccines, antibiotics, and targeted treatments relying on virus-engineering and microbiome research. Applying deep learning to genomics data-sets could help geneticists learn how to use genome-editing (CRISPR) to efficiently engineer living systems, but also to treat and, even “optimize,” human health, with potential applications in military enhancements. A $15 million partnership between a U.S. company, Gingko Bioworks, and DARPA aims to genetically design new probiotics as a protection for soldiers against a variety of stomach bugs and illnesses. China could be using the same deep learning techniques on U.S. genomics data to better comprehend how to develop, patent and manufacture tailored cancer immunotherapies in high demand in the United States. Yet, what if Chinese efforts venture into understanding how to impact key genomics health determinants relevant to the U.S. population? Gaining access to increasingly large U.S. genomic data-sets gives China a knowledge advantage into leading the next steps in bio-military research. Could biomedical data be used to develop bioweapons? Explain. Personalized medicine advances mean that personalized bio-attacks are increasingly possible. The combination of AI with biomedical data and genome-editing technologies will help us predict genes most important to particular functions. Such insights will contribute to knowing how a particular disease occurs, how a newly-discovered virus has high transmissibility, but also why certain populations and individuals are more susceptible to it. Combining host susceptibility information with pathogenic targeted design, malicious actors could engineer pathogens that are tailored to overcome the immune system or the microbiome of specific populations. Maintenance of the US-led LIO is key to reduce a host of existential threats – establishes great-power peace. Brands 18. (Hal Brands is a Henry Kissinger Distinguished Professor at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies, Scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. “America’s Global Order Is Worth Fighting For, Bloomberg Opinion, Politics and Policy,” August 14, 2018, Bloomberg. https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2018-08-14/america-s-global-order-is-worth-fighting-for TDI Recut NChu The first argument is easily disposed of. Yes, the postwar world has been thoroughly imperfect, featuring nuclear arms races, genocides, widespread poverty and other scourges. But the world has always been imperfect, and by any meaningful comparison, the last seven decades have been a veritable golden age. The liberal international economic order has led to an explosion of domestic and global prosperity: According to World Bank data, both U.S. and global per capita income have increased roughly three-fold (in inflation-adjusted terms) since 1960, with U.S. gross domestic product increasing nearly six-fold. The U.S. system of alliances and forward military deployments has contributed critically to the longest period of great-power peace in modern history, and the incidence of war and conquest more broadly have dropped dramatically. The number of democracies in the world has increased from perhaps a dozen during World War II to well over 100 today; respect for basic human rights has also reached impressive levels. As a bevy of scholarship has shown, the policies that the U.S. has pursued and the international order it has built have contributed enormously and directly to these outcomes. If the liberal international order can’t be considered a smashing success, no international order could be. The second critique is also overstated. It is true that Washington, like all great powers throughout history, has been willing to bend the rules to get its way. It is hard to reconcile Cold War-era interventions in Guatemala, Chile and other countries with a professed solicitude for human rights and democracy; the Iraq War of 2003 is only one instance in which the U.S. brushed aside the concerns of international organizations such as the U.N. Security Council. Likewise, when the U.S. government determined that the Bretton Woods system of monetary relations no longer suited its interests in the 1970s, it terminated that scheme and insisted on creating a more favorable one. But again, the proper standard here is not sainthood but reality. And the U.S. has generally enlisted its power in the service of universal values such as democracy and human rights; it has, more often than not, promoted a positive-sum international system in which like-minded nations can be secure and wealthy. This goes back to the very beginning of the liberal order: Washington did not seek to hold its defeated adversaries in subjugation after World War II; it rebuilt Japan and western Germany into thriving, democratic allies that became fierce economic competitors to the U.S. The U.S. has taken this approach not simply because it wanted to do good in the world — powerful as this motivation is — but because of a hard-headed desire to do good for itself. In an interdependent global environment, American officials have long calculated, the U.S. cannot divorce its own well-being from that of the wider world. And in contrast to how other great powers — Imperial Japan, for instance, or the Soviet Union — ruled their spheres of influence, American behavior has been positively enlightened. It is this relatively benign behavior that has convinced so many countries to tolerate American leadership — and it is the emergence of a darker form of U.S. hegemony under the Trump administration that so profoundly worries them today. As for the third critique, the premise is right, but the conclusion can easily go too far. It is always dangerous to become so enraptured by past achievements that one loses sight of the need for adaptation in the future. This is particularly true today, because the strength of the liberal order is being tested from within and without, by issues ranging from unequal burden-sharing among American allies to the ambivalence of the American people themselves. There is little evidence to suggest, however, that either American power or the liberal order it supports have eroded so dramatically that Washington’s postwar project cannot be sustained. Quite the contrary — the U.S. is likely to remain the world’s strongest power for decades to come.
9/18/21
Biotech v3
Tournament: Yale | Round: 5 | Opponent: Durham JH | Judge: Eva Lamberson US dominance is secured in biotech now, but China’s closing the gap fast – that allows geopolitical and economic advantages Scott Moore 2020 (Director of the Penn Global China Program at the University of Pennsylvania. Previously, Moore was a Young Professional and Water Resources Management Specialist at the World Bank Group, and Environment, Science, Technology, and Health Officer for China at the U.S.) “China’s Role In The Global Biotechnology Sector And Implications For U.S. Policy” https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/FP_20200427_china_biotechnology_moore.pdf TDI Recut NChu EXECUTIVE SUMMARY Even by the standards of emerging technologies, biotechnology has the potential to utterly transform geopolitics, economics, and society in the 21st century. Yet while the United States has long been the world leader in most segments of the global biotechnology sector, China is fast becoming a significant player. This brief assesses the implications of China’s changing role in biotechnology for the United States, which span national security, data security, and economic competitiveness. On current trends the United States is likely to remain the world leader in most biotechnology areas. However, the gap between China and the U.S. is narrowing in the biotechnology sector, and U.S. policymakers must boost public investment, liberalize immigration and foreign student visa policies, and enact regulatory reforms to ensure America remains competitive. At the same time, areas like vaccine development and regulation of emerging technologies like synthetic biology present rich opportunities for Sino-U.S. cooperation. INTRODUCTION Thanks to extensive government funding for biomedical research, an unparalleled ability to translate basic research into commercial products and applications, and strong intellectual property protections, the United States has been the dominant global player in developing and commercializing biotechnology for decades.1 This dominance is reflected in the fact that United States accounted for almost half of all biotechnology patents filed worldwide from 1999 to 2013.2 However, in the intervening years, and just as in the case of artificial intelligence and other emerging technologies, other nations, including South Korea and Singapore, have invested heavily in developing their biotechnology sectors and industries. These efforts pale, however, in comparison to those of China, and the sheer size and scale of the Chinese biotechnology industry pose a range of economic, security, and regulatory issues for American policymakers. The determination of China’s one-party state to become a leading player in biotechnology is reflected by the rapid growth in investment in the sector. Some estimates claim that collectively, China’s central, local, and provincial governments have invested over $100 billion in life sciences research and development. Regardless of the true figure, official encouragement has led to a torrid place of investment. In just the two-year period from 2015 to 2017, venture capital and private equity investment in the sector totaled some $45 billion.3 The value of commercial deals concluded in the fields of biology, medicine and medical machine technology, meanwhile increased from 25.8 billion renminbi (RMB), or $3.6 billion, in 2011 to over 75 billion RMB ($10.6 billion) in 2017.4 Annual research and development expenditures by Chinese pharmaceutical firms, the foundation of the biotechnology sector, rose from some 39 billion RMB in 2014 ($5.5 billion) to over 53 billion RMB (US$7.5 billion) by 2017. Expenditure on new product development among these firms, an important indicator of future growth potential, increased from just over 40 billion RMB ($5.6 billion) to almost 60 billion ($8.4 billion).5 By Western standards, some of these figures are still low. Swiss drugmaker Roche, the world leader in biotechnology research and development, spent some $11 billion in 2018 alone.6 As these figures suggest, the development of China’s biotechnology sector paints a nuanced picture for U.S. policymakers. On one hand, the sector’s rapid growth, and high-level commitment to continued investment, means that China will inevitably become an increasingly important player in the global biotechnology sector, with implications for national security, economic competitiveness, and regulation. An executive from In-Q-Tel, the U.S. government’s inhouse national security venture capital fund, warned Congress in a November 2019 hearing, for example, that China “intends to own the biorevolution… and they are building the infrastructure, the talent pipeline, the regulatory system, and the financial system they need to do that.”7 The CEO of European drugmaker AstraZeneca has similarly opined that “Much of China’s innovation in the last three to four years has been ‘me too,’ but now on the horizon we can see firstin-class innovation.”8 Yet on the other hand, while China’s biotechnology sector will almost certainly continue to grow in scale, sophistication, and competitiveness, there is little reason to believe on current trends that the United States will lose its edge in the sector. Indeed, the biggest risk to the global competitiveness of the U.S. biotechnology industry likely comes from the prospect of declining public investment and reduced mobility for world-class researchers and industry professionals. Moreover, the COVID-19 crisis underscores both the importance of continued investment in biotechnology and the many challenges to promoting effective international cooperation on global health security. This brief first examines the key policies and actors in China’s biotechnology sector, then offers an assessment of the sector’s current capabilities and future trends, and finally further explores the implications of developments in Chinese biotechnology for U.S. policy. The aff’s waiving of IP doesn’t solve but it does give away sensitive national security information that allows China to lead ahead in biotech Josh Rogin 4-8. (Washington Post Columnist covering National Security Issues.) “Opinion: The wrong way to fight vaccine nationalism” https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/global-opinions/the-wrong-way-to-fight-vaccine-nationalism/2021/04/08/9a65e15e-98a8-11eb-962b-78c1d8228819_story.html TDI Recut NChu Americans will not be safe from covid-19 until the entire world is safe. That basic truth shows why vaccine nationalism is not only immoral but also counterproductive. But the simplest solutions are rarely the correct ones, and some countries are using the issue to advance their own strategic interests. The Biden administration must reject the effort by some nations to turn our shared crisis into their opportunity. As the inequities of vaccine distribution worldwide grow, a group of more than 50 developing countries led by India and South Africa is pushing the World Trade Organization to dissolve all international intellectual property protections for pandemic-related products, which would include vaccine research patents, manufacturing designs and technological know-how. The Trump administration rejected the proposal to waive the agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) for the pandemic when it was introduced in October. Now, hundreds of nongovernmental organizations and dozens of Democratic lawmakers are pushing the Biden administration to support the proposal. But many warn the move would result in the United States handing over a generation of advanced research — much of it funded by the U.S. taxpayer — to our country’s greatest competitors, above all China. In Congress, there’s justified frustration with the United States’ failure to respond to China’s robust vaccine diplomacy, in which Beijing has conditioned vaccine offers to pandemic-stricken countries on their ignoring security concerns over Chinese telecom companies or abandoning diplomatic recognition of Taiwan. There’s also a lot of anger at Big Pharma among progressives for profiting from the pandemic. “We are in a race against time, and unfortunately Big Pharma is standing in the way of speedily addressing this problem,” Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-Ill.), who supports the effort to waive intellectual property protections, told me in an interview. “I think the real security issue is that while the United States balks in making sure that we help ourselves, that these adversaries will just jump right in.” Schakowsky argued that alternative measures for helping poor countries manufacture vaccines are simply not moving fast enough to save lives and that the United States has a duty to respond. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) personally conveyed her support for the waiver to President Biden, Schakowsky said. But Big Pharma is just one piece of the puzzle. Countries such as India and South Africa have been trying to weaken WTO intellectual property protections for decades. The mRNA technology that underpins the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines was funded initially by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and has national security implications. Inside the Biden administration, the National Security Council has already convened several meetings on the issue. The waiver is supported by many global health officials in the White House and at the U.S. Agency for International Development, who believe the United States’ international reputation is suffering from its perceived “America First” vaccine strategy. On Wednesday, U.S. Trade Representative Katherine Tai spoke with WTO Director General Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala about the waiver issue. USTR is convening its own interagency meetings on the issue, which many see as a move to reassert its jurisdiction over WTO matters. If and when this does get to Biden’s desk, he will also hear from national security officials who believe that waiving TRIPS would result in the forced transfer of national security-sensitive technology to China, a country that strives to dominate the biotechnology field as part of its Made in China 2025 strategy. Once countries such as China have this technology, they will apply their mercantilist industrial models to ensure their companies dominate these strategically important industries, potentially erasing thousands of U.S. jobs. “We would be delivering a competitive advantage to countries that are increasingly viewed as our adversaries, at taxpayer expense, when there are other ways of doing this,” said Mark Cohen, senior fellow at the University of California at Berkeley Law School. A preferable approach would be to build more vaccine-manufacturing capacity in the United States and then give those vaccines to countries in need, said Cohen. The U.S. pharmaceutical industry would surely benefit, but that’s preferable to being dependent on other countries when the next pandemic hits. “If there’s anything that the pandemic has taught us, it’s that we need to have a robust supply chain, for ourselves and for the world generally,” Cohen said. What’s more, it’s not clear that waiving the TRIPS agreement for the pandemic would work in the first place. Bill Gates and others involved in the current vaccine distribution scheme have argued that it would not result in more vaccines, pointing out that licensing agreements are already successfully facilitating cooperation between patent-holding vaccine-makers and foreign manufacturers. Critics respond that such cooperation is still failing to meet the urgent needs in the developing world. Vaccine equity is a real problem, but waiving intellectual property rights is not the solution. If the current system is not getting shots into the arms of people in poor countries, we must fix that for their sake and ours. But the pandemic and our responses to it have geopolitical implications, whether we like it or not. That means helping the world and thinking about our strategic interests at the same time. China will convert biotechnology gains to military advantages, undermining US primacy – specifically true in the context of vaccines Mercy A. Kuo 2017 (Executive Vice President at Pamir Consulting.) “The Great US-China Biotechnology and Artificial Intelligence Race” https://thediplomat.com/2017/08/the-great-us-china-biotechnology-and-artificial-intelligence-race/ TDI Recut NChu Trans-Pacific View author Mercy Kuo regularly engages subject-matter experts, policy practitioners, and strategic thinkers across the globe for their diverse insights into the U.S. Asia policy. This conversation with Eleonore Pauwels – Director of Biology Collectives and Senior Program Associate, Science and Technology Innovation Program at the Wilson Center in Washington D.C. – is the 104th in “The Trans-Pacific View Insight Series.” Explain the motivation behind Chinese investment in U.S. genomics and artificial intelligence (AI). With large public and private investments inland and in the U.S., China plans to become the next AI-Genomics powerhouse, which indicates that these technologies will soon converge in China. China’s ambition is to lead the global market for precision medicine, which necessitates acquiring strategic technological and human capital in both genomics and AI. And the country excels at this game. A sharp blow in this U.S.-China competition happened in 2013 when BGI purchased Complete Genomics, in California, with the intent to build its own advanced genomic sequencing machines, therefore securing a technological knowhow mainly mastered by U.S. producers. There are significant economic incentives behind China’s heavy investment in the increasing convergence of AI and genomics. This golden combination will drive precision medicine to new heights by developing a more sophisticated understanding of how our genomes function, leading to precise, even personalized, cancer therapeutics and preventive diagnostics, such as liquid biopsies. By one estimate, the liquid biopsy market is expected to be worth $40 billion in 2017. Assess the implications of iCarbonX of Shenzhen’s decision to invest US$100 million in U.S.-company PatientsLikeMe relative to AI and genomic data collection. iCarbonX is a pioneer in AI software that learns to recognize useful relationships between large amounts of individuals’ biological, medical, behavioral and psychological data. Such a data-ecosystem will deliver insights into how an individual’s genome is mutating over time, and therefore critical information about this individual’s susceptibilities to rare, chronic and mental illnesses. In 2017, iCarbonX invested $100 million in PatientsLikeMe, getting a hold over data from the biggest online network of patients with rare and chronic diseases. If successful, this effort could turn into genetic gold, making iCarbonX one of the wealthiest healthcare companies in China and beyond. The risk factor is that iCarbonX is handling more than personal data, but potentially vulnerable data as the company uses a smartphone application, Meum, for customers to consult for health advice. Remember that the Chinese nascent genomics and AI industry relies on cloud computing for genomics data-storage and exchange, creating, in its wake, new vulnerabilities associated with any internet-based technology. This phenomenon has severe implications. How much consideration has been given to privacy and the evolving notion of personal data in this AI-powered health economy? And is our cyberinfrastructure ready to protect such trove of personal health data from hackers and industrial espionage? In this new race, will China and the U.S. have to constantly accelerate their rate of cyber and bio-innovation to be more resilient? Refining our models of genomics data protection will become a critical biosecurity issue. Why is Chinese access to U.S. genomic data a national security concern? Genomics and computing research is inherently dual-use, therefore a strategic advantage in a nation’s security arsenal. Using AI systems to understand how the functioning of our genomes impacts our health is of strategic importance for biodefense. This knowledge will lead to increasing developments at the forefront of medical countermeasures, including vaccines, antibiotics, and targeted treatments relying on virus-engineering and microbiome research. Applying deep learning to genomics data-sets could help geneticists learn how to use genome-editing (CRISPR) to efficiently engineer living systems, but also to treat and, even “optimize,” human health, with potential applications in military enhancements. A $15 million partnership between a U.S. company, Gingko Bioworks, and DARPA aims to genetically design new probiotics as a protection for soldiers against a variety of stomach bugs and illnesses. China could be using the same deep learning techniques on U.S. genomics data to better comprehend how to develop, patent and manufacture tailored cancer immunotherapies in high demand in the United States. Yet, what if Chinese efforts venture into understanding how to impact key genomics health determinants relevant to the U.S. population? Gaining access to increasingly large U.S. genomic data-sets gives China a knowledge advantage into leading the next steps in bio-military research. Could biomedical data be used to develop bioweapons? Explain. Personalized medicine advances mean that personalized bio-attacks are increasingly possible. The combination of AI with biomedical data and genome-editing technologies will help us predict genes most important to particular functions. Such insights will contribute to knowing how a particular disease occurs, how a newly-discovered virus has high transmissibility, but also why certain populations and individuals are more susceptible to it. Combining host susceptibility information with pathogenic targeted design, malicious actors could engineer pathogens that are tailored to overcome the immune system or the microbiome of specific populations. Maintenance of the US-led LIO is key to reduce a host of existential threats – establishes great-power peace. Brands 18. (Hal Brands is a Henry Kissinger Distinguished Professor at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies, Scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. “America’s Global Order Is Worth Fighting For, Bloomberg Opinion, Politics and Policy,” August 14, 2018, Bloomberg. https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2018-08-14/america-s-global-order-is-worth-fighting-for TDI Recut NChu The first argument is easily disposed of. Yes, the postwar world has been thoroughly imperfect, featuring nuclear arms races, genocides, widespread poverty and other scourges. But the world has always been imperfect, and by any meaningful comparison, the last seven decades have been a veritable golden age. The liberal international economic order has led to an explosion of domestic and global prosperity: According to World Bank data, both U.S. and global per capita income have increased roughly three-fold (in inflation-adjusted terms) since 1960, with U.S. gross domestic product increasing nearly six-fold. The U.S. system of alliances and forward military deployments has contributed critically to the longest period of great-power peace in modern history, and the incidence of war and conquest more broadly have dropped dramatically. The number of democracies in the world has increased from perhaps a dozen during World War II to well over 100 today; respect for basic human rights has also reached impressive levels. As a bevy of scholarship has shown, the policies that the U.S. has pursued and the international order it has built have contributed enormously and directly to these outcomes. If the liberal international order can’t be considered a smashing success, no international order could be. The second critique is also overstated. It is true that Washington, like all great powers throughout history, has been willing to bend the rules to get its way. It is hard to reconcile Cold War-era interventions in Guatemala, Chile and other countries with a professed solicitude for human rights and democracy; the Iraq War of 2003 is only one instance in which the U.S. brushed aside the concerns of international organizations such as the U.N. Security Council. Likewise, when the U.S. government determined that the Bretton Woods system of monetary relations no longer suited its interests in the 1970s, it terminated that scheme and insisted on creating a more favorable one. But again, the proper standard here is not sainthood but reality. And the U.S. has generally enlisted its power in the service of universal values such as democracy and human rights; it has, more often than not, promoted a positive-sum international system in which like-minded nations can be secure and wealthy. This goes back to the very beginning of the liberal order: Washington did not seek to hold its defeated adversaries in subjugation after World War II; it rebuilt Japan and western Germany into thriving, democratic allies that became fierce economic competitors to the U.S. The U.S. has taken this approach not simply because it wanted to do good in the world — powerful as this motivation is — but because of a hard-headed desire to do good for itself. In an interdependent global environment, American officials have long calculated, the U.S. cannot divorce its own well-being from that of the wider world. And in contrast to how other great powers — Imperial Japan, for instance, or the Soviet Union — ruled their spheres of influence, American behavior has been positively enlightened. It is this relatively benign behavior that has convinced so many countries to tolerate American leadership — and it is the emergence of a darker form of U.S. hegemony under the Trump administration that so profoundly worries them today. As for the third critique, the premise is right, but the conclusion can easily go too far. It is always dangerous to become so enraptured by past achievements that one loses sight of the need for adaptation in the future. This is particularly true today, because the strength of the liberal order is being tested from within and without, by issues ranging from unequal burden-sharing among American allies to the ambivalence of the American people themselves. There is little evidence to suggest, however, that either American power or the liberal order it supports have eroded so dramatically that Washington’s postwar project cannot be sustained. Quite the contrary — the U.S. is likely to remain the world’s strongest power for decades to come.
9/18/21
Biotechv4
Tournament: Bronx | Round: 4 | Opponent: Thomas Edison EnergySmart Charter VG | Judge: Jack Morgenstein SO21 – DA – Biotech (1:26) US dominance is secured in biotech now, but China’s closing the gap fast – that allows geopolitical and economic advantages Scott Moore 2020 (Director of the Penn Global China Program at the University of Pennsylvania. Previously, Moore was a Young Professional and Water Resources Management Specialist at the World Bank Group, and Environment, Science, Technology, and Health Officer for China at the U.S.) “China’s Role In The Global Biotechnology Sector And Implications For U.S. Policy” https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/FP_20200427_china_biotechnology_moore.pdf TDI Recut NChu EXECUTIVE SUMMARY Even by the standards of emerging technologies, biotechnology has the potential to utterly transform geopolitics, economics, and society in the 21st century. Yet while the United States has long been the world leader in most segments of the global biotechnology sector, China is fast becoming a significant player. This brief assesses the implications of China’s changing role in biotechnology for the United States, which span national security, data security, and economic competitiveness. On current trends the United States is likely to remain the world leader in most biotechnology areas. However, the gap between China and the U.S. is narrowing in the biotechnology sector, and U.S. policymakers must boost public investment, liberalize immigration and foreign student visa policies, and enact regulatory reforms to ensure America remains competitive. At the same time, areas like vaccine development and regulation of emerging technologies like synthetic biology present rich opportunities for Sino-U.S. cooperation. INTRODUCTION Thanks to extensive government funding for biomedical research, an unparalleled ability to translate basic research into commercial products and applications, and strong intellectual property protections, the United States has been the dominant global player in developing and commercializing biotechnology for decades.1 This dominance is reflected in the fact that United States accounted for almost half of all biotechnology patents filed worldwide from 1999 to 2013.2 However, in the intervening years, and just as in the case of artificial intelligence and other emerging technologies, other nations, including South Korea and Singapore, have invested heavily in developing their biotechnology sectors and industries. These efforts pale, however, in comparison to those of China, and the sheer size and scale of the Chinese biotechnology industry pose a range of economic, security, and regulatory issues for American policymakers. The determination of China’s one-party state to become a leading player in biotechnology is reflected by the rapid growth in investment in the sector. Some estimates claim that collectively, China’s central, local, and provincial governments have invested over $100 billion in life sciences research and development. Regardless of the true figure, official encouragement has led to a torrid place of investment. In just the two-year period from 2015 to 2017, venture capital and private equity investment in the sector totaled some $45 billion.3 The value of commercial deals concluded in the fields of biology, medicine and medical machine technology, meanwhile increased from 25.8 billion renminbi (RMB), or $3.6 billion, in 2011 to over 75 billion RMB ($10.6 billion) in 2017.4 Annual research and development expenditures by Chinese pharmaceutical firms, the foundation of the biotechnology sector, rose from some 39 billion RMB in 2014 ($5.5 billion) to over 53 billion RMB (US$7.5 billion) by 2017. Expenditure on new product development among these firms, an important indicator of future growth potential, increased from just over 40 billion RMB ($5.6 billion) to almost 60 billion ($8.4 billion).5 By Western standards, some of these figures are still low. Swiss drugmaker Roche, the world leader in biotechnology research and development, spent some $11 billion in 2018 alone.6 As these figures suggest, the development of China’s biotechnology sector paints a nuanced picture for U.S. policymakers. On one hand, the sector’s rapid growth, and high-level commitment to continued investment, means that China will inevitably become an increasingly important player in the global biotechnology sector, with implications for national security, economic competitiveness, and regulation. An executive from In-Q-Tel, the U.S. government’s inhouse national security venture capital fund, warned Congress in a November 2019 hearing, for example, that China “intends to own the biorevolution… and they are building the infrastructure, the talent pipeline, the regulatory system, and the financial system they need to do that.”7 The CEO of European drugmaker AstraZeneca has similarly opined that “Much of China’s innovation in the last three to four years has been ‘me too,’ but now on the horizon we can see firstin-class innovation.”8 Yet on the other hand, while China’s biotechnology sector will almost certainly continue to grow in scale, sophistication, and competitiveness, there is little reason to believe on current trends that the United States will lose its edge in the sector. Indeed, the biggest risk to the global competitiveness of the U.S. biotechnology industry likely comes from the prospect of declining public investment and reduced mobility for world-class researchers and industry professionals. Moreover, the COVID-19 crisis underscores both the importance of continued investment in biotechnology and the many challenges to promoting effective international cooperation on global health security. This brief first examines the key policies and actors in China’s biotechnology sector, then offers an assessment of the sector’s current capabilities and future trends, and finally further explores the implications of developments in Chinese biotechnology for U.S. policy. The aff’s waiving of IP doesn’t solve but it does give away sensitive national security information that allows China to lead ahead in biotech Josh Rogin 4-8. (Washington Post Columnist covering National Security Issues.) “Opinion: The wrong way to fight vaccine nationalism” https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/global-opinions/the-wrong-way-to-fight-vaccine-nationalism/2021/04/08/9a65e15e-98a8-11eb-962b-78c1d8228819_story.html TDI Recut NChu Americans will not be safe from covid-19 until the entire world is safe. That basic truth shows why vaccine nationalism is not only immoral but also counterproductive. But the simplest solutions are rarely the correct ones, and some countries are using the issue to advance their own strategic interests. The Biden administration must reject the effort by some nations to turn our shared crisis into their opportunity. As the inequities of vaccine distribution worldwide grow, a group of more than 50 developing countries led by India and South Africa is pushing the World Trade Organization to dissolve all international intellectual property protections for pandemic-related products, which would include vaccine research patents, manufacturing designs and technological know-how. The Trump administration rejected the proposal to waive the agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) for the pandemic when it was introduced in October. Now, hundreds of nongovernmental organizations and dozens of Democratic lawmakers are pushing the Biden administration to support the proposal. But many warn the move would result in the United States handing over a generation of advanced research — much of it funded by the U.S. taxpayer — to our country’s greatest competitors, above all China. In Congress, there’s justified frustration with the United States’ failure to respond to China’s robust vaccine diplomacy, in which Beijing has conditioned vaccine offers to pandemic-stricken countries on their ignoring security concerns over Chinese telecom companies or abandoning diplomatic recognition of Taiwan. There’s also a lot of anger at Big Pharma among progressives for profiting from the pandemic. “We are in a race against time, and unfortunately Big Pharma is standing in the way of speedily addressing this problem,” Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-Ill.), who supports the effort to waive intellectual property protections, told me in an interview. “I think the real security issue is that while the United States balks in making sure that we help ourselves, that these adversaries will just jump right in.” Schakowsky argued that alternative measures for helping poor countries manufacture vaccines are simply not moving fast enough to save lives and that the United States has a duty to respond. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) personally conveyed her support for the waiver to President Biden, Schakowsky said. But Big Pharma is just one piece of the puzzle. Countries such as India and South Africa have been trying to weaken WTO intellectual property protections for decades. The mRNA technology that underpins the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines was funded initially by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and has national security implications. Inside the Biden administration, the National Security Council has already convened several meetings on the issue. The waiver is supported by many global health officials in the White House and at the U.S. Agency for International Development, who believe the United States’ international reputation is suffering from its perceived “America First” vaccine strategy. On Wednesday, U.S. Trade Representative Katherine Tai spoke with WTO Director General Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala about the waiver issue. USTR is convening its own interagency meetings on the issue, which many see as a move to reassert its jurisdiction over WTO matters. If and when this does get to Biden’s desk, he will also hear from national security officials who believe that waiving TRIPS would result in the forced transfer of national security-sensitive technology to China, a country that strives to dominate the biotechnology field as part of its Made in China 2025 strategy. Once countries such as China have this technology, they will apply their mercantilist industrial models to ensure their companies dominate these strategically important industries, potentially erasing thousands of U.S. jobs. “We would be delivering a competitive advantage to countries that are increasingly viewed as our adversaries, at taxpayer expense, when there are other ways of doing this,” said Mark Cohen, senior fellow at the University of California at Berkeley Law School. A preferable approach would be to build more vaccine-manufacturing capacity in the United States and then give those vaccines to countries in need, said Cohen. The U.S. pharmaceutical industry would surely benefit, but that’s preferable to being dependent on other countries when the next pandemic hits. “If there’s anything that the pandemic has taught us, it’s that we need to have a robust supply chain, for ourselves and for the world generally,” Cohen said. What’s more, it’s not clear that waiving the TRIPS agreement for the pandemic would work in the first place. Bill Gates and others involved in the current vaccine distribution scheme have argued that it would not result in more vaccines, pointing out that licensing agreements are already successfully facilitating cooperation between patent-holding vaccine-makers and foreign manufacturers. Critics respond that such cooperation is still failing to meet the urgent needs in the developing world. Vaccine equity is a real problem, but waiving intellectual property rights is not the solution. If the current system is not getting shots into the arms of people in poor countries, we must fix that for their sake and ours. But the pandemic and our responses to it have geopolitical implications, whether we like it or not. That means helping the world and thinking about our strategic interests at the same time. China will convert biotechnology gains to military advantages, undermining US primacy – specifically true in the context of vaccines Mercy A. Kuo 2017 (Executive Vice President at Pamir Consulting.) “The Great US-China Biotechnology and Artificial Intelligence Race” https://thediplomat.com/2017/08/the-great-us-china-biotechnology-and-artificial-intelligence-race/ TDI Recut NChu Trans-Pacific View author Mercy Kuo regularly engages subject-matter experts, policy practitioners, and strategic thinkers across the globe for their diverse insights into the U.S. Asia policy. This conversation with Eleonore Pauwels – Director of Biology Collectives and Senior Program Associate, Science and Technology Innovation Program at the Wilson Center in Washington D.C. – is the 104th in “The Trans-Pacific View Insight Series.” Explain the motivation behind Chinese investment in U.S. genomics and artificial intelligence (AI). With large public and private investments inland and in the U.S., China plans to become the next AI-Genomics powerhouse, which indicates that these technologies will soon converge in China. China’s ambition is to lead the global market for precision medicine, which necessitates acquiring strategic technological and human capital in both genomics and AI. And the country excels at this game. A sharp blow in this U.S.-China competition happened in 2013 when BGI purchased Complete Genomics, in California, with the intent to build its own advanced genomic sequencing machines, therefore securing a technological knowhow mainly mastered by U.S. producers. There are significant economic incentives behind China’s heavy investment in the increasing convergence of AI and genomics. This golden combination will drive precision medicine to new heights by developing a more sophisticated understanding of how our genomes function, leading to precise, even personalized, cancer therapeutics and preventive diagnostics, such as liquid biopsies. By one estimate, the liquid biopsy market is expected to be worth $40 billion in 2017. Assess the implications of iCarbonX of Shenzhen’s decision to invest US$100 million in U.S.-company PatientsLikeMe relative to AI and genomic data collection. iCarbonX is a pioneer in AI software that learns to recognize useful relationships between large amounts of individuals’ biological, medical, behavioral and psychological data. Such a data-ecosystem will deliver insights into how an individual’s genome is mutating over time, and therefore critical information about this individual’s susceptibilities to rare, chronic and mental illnesses. In 2017, iCarbonX invested $100 million in PatientsLikeMe, getting a hold over data from the biggest online network of patients with rare and chronic diseases. If successful, this effort could turn into genetic gold, making iCarbonX one of the wealthiest healthcare companies in China and beyond. The risk factor is that iCarbonX is handling more than personal data, but potentially vulnerable data as the company uses a smartphone application, Meum, for customers to consult for health advice. Remember that the Chinese nascent genomics and AI industry relies on cloud computing for genomics data-storage and exchange, creating, in its wake, new vulnerabilities associated with any internet-based technology. This phenomenon has severe implications. How much consideration has been given to privacy and the evolving notion of personal data in this AI-powered health economy? And is our cyberinfrastructure ready to protect such trove of personal health data from hackers and industrial espionage? In this new race, will China and the U.S. have to constantly accelerate their rate of cyber and bio-innovation to be more resilient? Refining our models of genomics data protection will become a critical biosecurity issue. Why is Chinese access to U.S. genomic data a national security concern? Genomics and computing research is inherently dual-use, therefore a strategic advantage in a nation’s security arsenal. Using AI systems to understand how the functioning of our genomes impacts our health is of strategic importance for biodefense. This knowledge will lead to increasing developments at the forefront of medical countermeasures, including vaccines, antibiotics, and targeted treatments relying on virus-engineering and microbiome research. Applying deep learning to genomics data-sets could help geneticists learn how to use genome-editing (CRISPR) to efficiently engineer living systems, but also to treat and, even “optimize,” human health, with potential applications in military enhancements. A $15 million partnership between a U.S. company, Gingko Bioworks, and DARPA aims to genetically design new probiotics as a protection for soldiers against a variety of stomach bugs and illnesses. China could be using the same deep learning techniques on U.S. genomics data to better comprehend how to develop, patent and manufacture tailored cancer immunotherapies in high demand in the United States. Yet, what if Chinese efforts venture into understanding how to impact key genomics health determinants relevant to the U.S. population? Gaining access to increasingly large U.S. genomic data-sets gives China a knowledge advantage into leading the next steps in bio-military research. Could biomedical data be used to develop bioweapons? Explain. Personalized medicine advances mean that personalized bio-attacks are increasingly possible. The combination of AI with biomedical data and genome-editing technologies will help us predict genes most important to particular functions. Such insights will contribute to knowing how a particular disease occurs, how a newly-discovered virus has high transmissibility, but also why certain populations and individuals are more susceptible to it. Combining host susceptibility information with pathogenic targeted design, malicious actors could engineer pathogens that are tailored to overcome the immune system or the microbiome of specific populations. Maintenance of the US-led LIO is key to reduce a host of existential threats – establishes great-power peace. Brands 18. (Hal Brands is a Henry Kissinger Distinguished Professor at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies, Scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. “America’s Global Order Is Worth Fighting For, Bloomberg Opinion, Politics and Policy,” August 14, 2018, Bloomberg. https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2018-08-14/america-s-global-order-is-worth-fighting-for TDI Recut NChu The first argument is easily disposed of. Yes, the postwar world has been thoroughly imperfect, featuring nuclear arms races, genocides, widespread poverty and other scourges. But the world has always been imperfect, and by any meaningful comparison, the last seven decades have been a veritable golden age. The liberal international economic order has led to an explosion of domestic and global prosperity: According to World Bank data, both U.S. and global per capita income have increased roughly three-fold (in inflation-adjusted terms) since 1960, with U.S. gross domestic product increasing nearly six-fold. The U.S. system of alliances and forward military deployments has contributed critically to the longest period of great-power peace in modern history, and the incidence of war and conquest more broadly have dropped dramatically. The number of democracies in the world has increased from perhaps a dozen during World War II to well over 100 today; respect for basic human rights has also reached impressive levels. As a bevy of scholarship has shown, the policies that the U.S. has pursued and the international order it has built have contributed enormously and directly to these outcomes. If the liberal international order can’t be considered a smashing success, no international order could be. The second critique is also overstated. It is true that Washington, like all great powers throughout history, has been willing to bend the rules to get its way. It is hard to reconcile Cold War-era interventions in Guatemala, Chile and other countries with a professed solicitude for human rights and democracy; the Iraq War of 2003 is only one instance in which the U.S. brushed aside the concerns of international organizations such as the U.N. Security Council. Likewise, when the U.S. government determined that the Bretton Woods system of monetary relations no longer suited its interests in the 1970s, it terminated that scheme and insisted on creating a more favorable one. But again, the proper standard here is not sainthood but reality. And the U.S. has generally enlisted its power in the service of universal values such as democracy and human rights; it has, more often than not, promoted a positive-sum international system in which like-minded nations can be secure and wealthy. This goes back to the very beginning of the liberal order: Washington did not seek to hold its defeated adversaries in subjugation after World War II; it rebuilt Japan and western Germany into thriving, democratic allies that became fierce economic competitors to the U.S. The U.S. has taken this approach not simply because it wanted to do good in the world — powerful as this motivation is — but because of a hard-headed desire to do good for itself. In an interdependent global environment, American officials have long calculated, the U.S. cannot divorce its own well-being from that of the wider world. And in contrast to how other great powers — Imperial Japan, for instance, or the Soviet Union — ruled their spheres of influence, American behavior has been positively enlightened. It is this relatively benign behavior that has convinced so many countries to tolerate American leadership — and it is the emergence of a darker form of U.S. hegemony under the Trump administration that so profoundly worries them today. As for the third critique, the premise is right, but the conclusion can easily go too far. It is always dangerous to become so enraptured by past achievements that one loses sight of the need for adaptation in the future. This is particularly true today, because the strength of the liberal order is being tested from within and without, by issues ranging from unequal burden-sharing among American allies to the ambivalence of the American people themselves. There is little evidence to suggest, however, that either American power or the liberal order it supports have eroded so dramatically that Washington’s postwar project cannot be sustained. Quite the contrary — the U.S. is likely to remain the world’s strongest power for decades to come.
10/16/21
CP - US Leadership
Tournament: Bronx | Round: 4 | Opponent: Thomas Edison EnergySmart Charter VG | Judge: Jack Morgenstein CP – US Leadership CP Text – The United States federal government ought to establish a global leadership role in production and distribution of COVID-19 vaccines and treatments by engaging in talks with NATO and the G-7 and expanding support of COVAX including at minimum, vaccinating one billion people around the globe by November 2021 and encourage public-private partnerships and facilitate overseas licensing agreements without reducing intellectual property rights. The CP solves vaccine distribution and re-vitalizes American influence BUT US leadership is key. Gayle et Al 21 Helene Gayle, Gordon LaForge, and Anne-Marie Slaughter 3-19-2021 "American Can-and Should-Vaccinate the World" https://archive.is/wtVC2#selection-1369.0-1369.54 (Helene D. Gayle, MD, MPH, has been president and CEO of The Chicago Community Trust, one of the nation’s oldest and largest community foundations, since October 2017. Under her leadership, the Trust has adopted a new strategic focus on closing the racial and ethnic wealth gap in the Chicago region. For almost a decade, Dr. Gayle was president and CEO of CARE, a leading international humanitarian organization. An expert on global development, humanitarian, and health issues, she spent 20 years with the Centers for Disease Control, working primarily on HIV/AIDS.)Elmer After a virtual “Quad summit” last Friday, the leaders of the United States, India, Japan, and Australia announced that they would cooperate to deliver one billion vaccine doses in the Indo-Pacific, directly countering China’s lead in distributing vaccines to the region. The agreement brings together Indian manufacturing and U.S., Japanese, and Australian financing, logistics, and technical assistance to help immunize hundreds of millions of people by the end of 2022. Headlines over the weekend proclaimed that the administration of U.S. President Joe Biden was preparing to catch up in global vaccine diplomacy. Yesterday the administration took a further step in this direction, leaking to reporters that it would lend four million AstraZeneca doses to Mexico and Canada. These initiatives come not a moment too soon. In tackling the worst global crisis of a lifetime, the United States has so far been upstaged. Russia and China have aggressively marketed and distributed their vaccines to foreign countries, largely to advance foreign policy goals. Russia is using the jab to bolster its image and investment prospects and to drive a wedge between EU countries. China is donating doses to gain leverage in territorial disputes and expand its influence under the Belt and Road Initiative. Both Moscow and Beijing have moved to undercut the United States in its own backyard by supplying vaccines to Latin America. The Biden administration is right to want to take the lead in vaccinating the world, for a host of reasons both self-interested and altruistic. But it should not fall into the trap of trying to beat Russia and China at their own game—handing out vaccines to specific countries based on their geostrategic importance and the amount of attention they are receiving from rival powers. Rather, Biden should pursue abroad the sort of “all in” unity approach that he has proclaimed at home. His administration should focus less on strategic advantage than on vaccinating the largest number of people worldwide in the shortest amount of time. In so doing, the United States would concentrate on what the world’s peoples have in common—susceptibility to this and many other viruses—regardless of the nature of their governments. ALL IN AND ALL OUT The United States has successfully mobilized its own and international resources to respond to regional crises in the past. In 2003, President George W. Bush started the U.S. President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, the largest global health program focused on a single disease in history. PEPFAR brought together U.S. agencies, private companies, and local civil society groups to help sub-Saharan Africa and Southeast Asia get the AIDS crisis under control, saving millions of lives. In 2004, a tsunami in the Indian Ocean caused more than 220,000 deaths and billions in damage, and the United States led an urgent, similarly inclusive humanitarian relief and recovery effort that rescued victims, hastened reconstruction, and built lasting goodwill in South and Southeast Asia. Biden can improve on Bush’s precedent by going global, and he has already taken steps toward doing so. Under President Donald Trump, the United States refused to participate in the COVID-19 Vaccine Global Access (COVAX) Facility, an international partnership that aims to guarantee COVID-19 vaccine access for the entire world. The Biden administration reversed this stance immediately and contributed $4 billion, making the United States the largest donor to the effort. Still, even if COVAX meets the ambitious target of delivering two billion doses to developing nations by the end of 2021, it will be able to vaccinate only 20 percent of those countries’ populations. Just imagine, however, what could happen if Washington were to treat COVID-19 as the equivalent of the enemy in a world war or the pandemic as a global version of the regional AIDS and Ebola epidemics of years past. Imagine, in other words, what all-out mobilization would look like if the United States treated the COVID-19 pandemic like the global threat that it is. Washington would lead a multilateral, whole-of-society effort to help COVAX vaccinate the world. The government would activate the military and call upon allies in the G-7 and NATO for a major assistance operation that speeds the flow of vaccine supplies and strengthens delivery systems. As it has pledged to do in the Quad summit deal, the U.S. government would use the State Department, U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and other civilian agencies and development programs to help countries with their national vaccination programs. And it would enlist companies, nonprofits, and civil society organizations to help increase vaccine production, raise funding, and provide technical assistance to foreign counterparts. The U.S. government should undertake exactly such an effort, right now: an all-out response for an all-in global vaccination campaign. Such a campaign would advance U.S. economic and security interests and reboot American global leadership after years of decline. Rather than perpetuate the transactional, friend-by-friend vaccine diplomacy of China and Russia, a U.S.-led vaccine effort could invigorate a new multilateralism that is more pragmatic and inclusive than the twentieth-century international order and better adapted to tackling twenty-first-century global threats. Washington would do well to remember that if COVID-19 does come back, authoritarian governments will be able to lock down their populations more quickly and effectively than democracies will, so even in competitive terms, America’s best bet really is to eradicate the novel coronavirus. The United States has a momentous opportunity to prove both that democracy can deliver and that American ideals truly are universal. By offering a model of global cooperation that draws on a far wider range of resources than any one government can provide, the United States can lead a vaccine effort that builds on the strengths of its open and pluralist society. President Biden would demonstrate unequivocally that the United States is not only “back” but looking—and leading—far ahead. THE CASE FOR GOING REALLY BIG The COVID-19 pandemic is the most extensive humanitarian and economic catastrophe of modern times. Though it lacks the cataclysmic impact of a natural disaster, its toll is far worse and more widespread. A reported 2.6 million have died from COVID-19, though that is certainly an undercount; one analysis of premature and excess mortality estimates 20.5 million years of life have been lost. According to the World Bank, the pandemic pushed as many as 124 million into extreme poverty in 2020, the first year of increase in two decades. The Economist estimates that two years of COVID-19 will cost the world $10.3 trillion—a downturn the World Bank says is twice as deep as the Great Recession. Ultimately, the only way to arrest, let alone reverse, this collapse is global vaccination. The Biden administration learned an important lesson from the government’s response to the 2008 financial crisis: do not be afraid to go big. The American Rescue Plan does just that, funneling $1.9 trillion into many different parts of the economy. The administration should heed the same advice when it comes to vaccinating the world. An all-out effort will have the greatest and quickest impact on the fight against COVID-19—and the impact it will have is squarely in America’s self-interest. The United States has much to gain from an accelerated recovery of the global economy. A study from the Eurasia Group estimated that vaccinating low- and middle-income nations would generate at least $153 billion for the United States and nine other developed economies in 2021 and up to $466 billion by 2025. Even if the United States vaccinates its entire population, its economic recovery will still drag so long as its trading partners don’t have full access to the vaccine and the pandemic continues. As Biden has said, “We’re not going to be ultimately safe until the world is safe.” Moreover, today’s pandemic will not be the last. The partnerships and public health infrastructure that the United States builds to inoculate the world from this coronavirus will also defend it against the next deadly pathogen or health threat. Protecting the nation against disease cannot be separated from protecting the world
10/16/21
Econ DA
Tournament: Glenbrooks | Round: 1 | Opponent: Northview MS | Judge: Vennelakanti, Vishnu Economy DA: 2:10, 1:50 The Global Economy is stabilizing and set for increases in 2021 but is still vulnerable to shocks World Bank 6-8 6-8-2021 "The Global Economy: on Track for Strong but Uneven Growth as COVID-19 Still Weighs" https://www.worldbank.org/en/news/feature/2021/06/08/the-global-economy-on-track-for-strong-but-uneven-growth-as-covid-19-still-weighs A year and a half since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, the global economy is poised to stage its most robust post-recession recovery in 80 years in 2021. But the rebound is expected to be uneven across countries, as major economies look set to register strong growth even as many developing economies lag. Global growth is expected to accelerate to 5.6 this year, largely on the strength in major economies such as the United States and China. And while growth for almost every region of the world has been revised upward for 2021, many continue to grapple with COVID-19 and what is likely to be its long shadow. Despite this year’s pickup, the level of global GDP in 2021 is expected to be 3.2 below pre-pandemic projections, and per capita GDP among many emerging market and developing economies is anticipated to remain below pre-COVID-19 peaks for an extended period. As the pandemic continues to flare, it will shape the path of global economic activity. Strikes kill the economy – Engineering News 18 Reporter, Creamer Media. “Strikes And Their Economic Consequences.” Engineering News, 2018, www.engineeringnews.co.za/article/strikes-and-their-economic-consequences-2018-10-01/rep_id:4136#::text=Strike20action20results20in20less,or20to20lost20production20time. LHP PS After conducting intensive research* into the topic of strikes and labour unrest, the Mandela Initiative came to several conclusions. One of these was that the right to strike is made up of a delicate balance between the power of firms and the rights of employees, and is considered a sign of a healthy democracy “Whilst there are potential benefits from strikes (e.g. better work morale, lower absenteeism, or improved labour productivity), strike action also brings about numerous direct and indirect economic costs that can be high, depending on duration, number of workers involved and divisions affected,” the Initiative confirmed. According to labour expert Suleyman Alley, there are seven key causes of labour unrest: health hazards in the workplace; excessive working hours; low wages; demand for leave with pay; discrimination; inadequate working tools; and aggressive behaviour of managers towards employees. While several activities can be taken in an effort to prevent strikes from occurring or escalating, in the South African context, the tendency towards violent outbursts seems to outweigh reasonable action. “Strikes and labour unrest have marked negative impacts on the employees themselves, the employers and their stakeholders, the government, consumers, and the economy,” advises Jacki Condon, Managing Director of Apache Security Services. “The negative effects on international trade include the hinderance of economic development, creating great economic uncertainty – especially as the global media continues to share details, images and videos of violence, damage to property and ferocious clashes between strikers and security.” Strike action results in less productivity, which in turn means less profits. Labour Law expert, Ivan Israelstam confirms that; “The employer is likely to lose money due to delayed service to clients or to lost production time. The employees will lose their pay due to the no work, no pay principle. If the strikers are dismissed they will lose their livelihoods altogether.” This year alone, Eskom, Prasa, various manufacturing plants, Sasol and the Post Office have faced crippling strikes – to name but a few. Condon argues that there are more immediate consequences to consider than loss of income. “As the socio-economic issues continue to affect South Africans across the board, tensions are constantly rising,” states Condon. “Businesses must protect themselves, their assets, business property, and their non-striking employees from violence and intimidation.” Condon believes that this requires the deft hand of well-trained and highly qualified close protection operatives. These operatives provide not only protection, but video evidence as well, ensuring those responsible for damage can be held to account. “The key is to create a strategic partnership with a reliable security provider. Plans must be put into place to protect businesses against vandalism, physical assault, property invasion and intimidation during labour unrest,” concludes Condon. Strikes skyrockets unemployment rates – kills the economy – empirically proven – Tenza 20 Tenza, Mlungisi. “The Effects of Violent Strikes on the Economy of a Developing Country: a Case of South Africa.” Obiter, Nelson Mandela University, 2020, www.scielo.org.za/scielo.php?script=sci_arttextandamp;pid=S1682-58532020000300004. Generally, South Africa's economy is on a downward scale. First, it fails to create employment opportunities for its people. The recent statistics on unemployment levels indicate that unemployment has increased from 26.5 to 27.2.28 The most prominent strike which nearly brought the platinum industries to its knees was the strike convened by AMCU in 2014. The strike started on 23 January 2014 and ended on 24 June 2014. It affected the three big platinum producers in the Republic, which are the Anglo American Platinum, Lonmin Plc and Impala Platinum. It was the longest strike since the dawn of democracy in 1994. As a result of this strike, the platinum industries lost billions of rands.29 According to the report by Economic Research Southern Africa, the platinum group metals industry is South Africa's second-largest export earner behind gold and contributes just over 2 of the country's Gross Domestic Product (GDP).30 The overall metal ores in the mining industry which include platinum sells about 70 of its output to the export market while sales to local manufacturers of basic metals, fabricated metal products and various other metal equipment and machinery make up to 20.31 The research indicates that the overall impact of the strike in 2014 was driven by a reduction in productive capital in the mining sector, accompanied by a decrease in labour available to the economy. This resulted in a sharp increase in the price of the output by 5.8 with a GDP declined by 0.72 and 0.78.32 South Africa's primary source of income is through employment; the state relies heavily on the income taxes it collects from employed people. The implication is that unemployment has a negative effect on the state while if more people are employed, their income tax will add to the government's coffers. Unemployment means that people are unable to support themselves and their families, conversely the state has an obligation of ensuring that such people sustainable means in the form of social assistance.33 The state, together with the private sector, bears the responsibility of alleviating poverty in society. Unemployment is a real contributor to poverty. Other factors that contribute to poverty include a general lack of education, lack of relevant skills in certain areas such as science, inequality, inherited past practices and structural problems such as low wages supporting big families, low domestic savings, the ongoing electricity shortage from 2013 to 2015 threatening investors, low levels of business confidence, severe drought, reduced fiscal capacity, and the growing risk of stagflation. In addition, a lengthy strike comes with a threat of job losses in vulnerable sectors such as mining, metals and agriculture. It is also believed that protracted strikes contribute towards weakening the country's local currency (the South African rand). All these factors put a strain on the already struggling economy of South Africa. Econ decline results in nuclear war through diplomacy decline. Tønnesson 15 Tønnesson Tønnesson, Stein Tønnesson is a research professor at the Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO) in Norway and the leader of the East Asia Peace program at Uppsala University in Sweden. “Deterrence, interdependence and Sino–US peace.” International Area Studies Review, Vol. 18, pgs. 297-311, 2015 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. Extinction – nuke war fallout creates Ice Age and mass starvation. Starr 15 Starr, Steven Steven Starr is the director of the University of Missouri's Clinical Laboratory Science Program, as well as a senior scientist at the Physicians for Social Responsibility. He has been published in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists and the Strategic Arms Reduction (STAR) website of the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology “Nuclear War: An Unrecognized Mass Extinction Event Waiting To Happen.” March 2015 AA A war fought with 21st century strategic nuclear weapons would be more than just a great catastrophe in human history. If we allow it to happen, such a war would be a mass extinction event that ends human history. There is a profound difference between extinction and “an unprecedented disaster,” or even “the end of civilization,” because even after such an immense catastrophe, human life would go on. But extinction, by definition, is an event of utter finality, and a nuclear war that could cause human extinction should really be considered as the ultimate criminal act. It certainly would be the crime to end all crimes. The world’s leading climatologists now tell us that nuclear war threatens our continued existence as a species. Their studies predict that a large nuclear war, especially one fought with strategic nuclear weapons, would create a post-war environment in which for many years it would be too cold and dark to even grow food. Their findings make it clear that not only humans, but most large animals and many other forms of complex life would likely vanish forever in a nuclear darkness of our own making. The environmental consequences of nuclear war would attack the ecological support systems of life at every level. Radioactive fallout produced not only by nuclear bombs, but also by the destruction of nuclear power plants and their spent fuel pools, would poison the biosphere. Millions of tons of smoke would act to destroy Earth’s protective ozone layer and block most sunlight from reaching Earth’s surface, creating Ice Age weather conditions that would last for decades. Yet the political and military leaders who control nuclear weapons strictly avoid any direct public discussion of the consequences of nuclear war. They do so by arguing that nuclear weapons are not intended to be used, but only to deter. Remarkably, the leaders of the Nuclear Weapon States have chosen to ignore the authoritative, long-standing scientific research done by the climatologists, research that predicts virtually any nuclear war, fought with even a fraction of the operational and deployed nuclear arsenals, will leave the Earth essentially uninhabitable.
11/20/21
Infrastructure DA v1
Tournament: Yale | Round: 5 | Opponent: Durham JH | Judge: Eva Lamberson Biden’s infrastructure bill will pass through reconciliation but absolute Dem Unity is key. • Turns Structural Violence Pramuk and Franck 8-25 Jacob Pramuk and Thomas Franck 8-25-2021 "Here’s what happens next as Democrats try to pass Biden’s multitrillion-dollar economic plans" https://www.cnbc.com/2021/08/25/what-happens-next-with-biden-infrastructure-budget-bills-in-congress.html (Staff Reporter at CNBC)Elmer WASHINGTON — House Democrats just patched up a party fracture to take a critical step forward with a mammoth economic agenda. But the path ahead could get trickier as party leaders try to thread a legislative needle to pass more than $4 trillion in new spending. In the coming weeks, Democrats aim to approve a $1 trillion bipartisan infrastructure plan and up to $3.5 trillion in investments in social programs. Passing both will require a heavy lift, as leaders will need to satisfy competing demands of centrists wary of spending and progressives who want to reimagine government’s role in American households. The House is leaving Washington until Sept. 20 after taking key steps toward pushing through the sprawling economic plans. The chamber on Tuesday approved a $3.5 trillion budget resolution and advanced the infrastructure bill, as House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., promised centrist Democrats to take up the bipartisan plan by Sept. 27. The Senate already passed the infrastructure legislation, so a final House vote would send it to Biden’s desk for his signature. Now that both chambers have passed the budget measure, Democrats can move without Republicans to push through their spending plan via reconciliation. Party leaders want committees to write their pieces of the bill by Sept. 15 before budget committees package them into one massive measure that can move through Congress. Committees could start marking up legislation in early September. Party leaders face a challenge in coming up with a bill that will satisfy centrists who want to trim back the $3.5 trillion price tag and progressives who consider it the minimum Congress should spend. As one defection in the Senate — and four in the House — would sink legislation, Democrats have to satisfy a diverse range of views to pass their agenda. “We write a bill with the Senate because it’s no use doing a bill that’s not going to pass the Senate, in the interest of getting things done,” Pelosi told reporters on Wednesday. Given the magnitude of the legislation, passing it quickly could prove difficult. To appease congressional progressives who have prioritized passage of the budget bill, Democrats could move to pass both proposals at about the same time. While Pelosi gave a Sept. 27 target date to approve the infrastructure plan, the commitment is not binding. Still, she noted Wednesday that Congress needs to pass the bill before surface transportation spending authorization expires Sept. 30. “We have long had an eye to having the infrastructure bill on the President’s desk by the October 1, the effective date of the legislation,” she wrote in a separate letter to Democrats on Wednesday. Democrats say the bills combined will provide a jolt to the economy and a lifeline for households. Supporters of the Democratic spending plan, including Pelosi and Senate Budget Committee Chair Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., have cast it as the biggest expansion of the U.S. social safety net in decades. “This is a truly historic opportunity to pass the most transformative and consequential legislation for families in a century, and will stand alongside the New Deal and Great Society as pillars of economic security,” Pelosi wrote to colleagues Wednesday. The plan would expand Medicare, paid leave and child care, extend enhanced household tax credits and encourage green energy adoption, while hiking taxes on corporations and the wealthy. Democrats hope to sell a wave of new support for families as they campaign to keep control of Congress in next year’s midterms. Those elections, though, have helped to generate staunch opposition on the other side of the aisle. The GOP has cited the trillions in new spending and the proposed reversal of some of its 2017 tax cuts in trying to take down the Democratic budget bill. Republicans and some Democrats have in recent weeks said that another $4.5 trillion in fiscal stimulus could not only boost economic growth but have the adverse effect of fueling inflation. Pharma backlashes to the Plan – they’re aggressive lobbyists and will do anything to preserve patent rights. • Turns Case – Waters down the Plan due to lobbying • Optional Card – still thinking on if its necessary note from Elmer Huetteman 19 Emmarie Huetteman 2-26-2019 “Senators Who Led Pharma-Friendly Patent Reform Also Prime Targets For Pharma Cash” https://khn.org/news/senators-who-led-pharma-friendly-patent-reform-also-prime-targets-for-pharma-cash/ (former NYT Congressional correspondent with an MA in public affairs reporting from Northwestern University’s Medill School)Elmer Early last year, as lawmakers vowed to curb rising drug prices, Sen. Thom Tillis was named chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee’s subcommittee on intellectual property rights, a committee that had not met since 2007. As the new gatekeeper for laws and oversight of the nation’s patent system, the North Carolina Republican signaled he was determined to make it easier for American businesses to benefit from it — a welcome message to the drugmakers who already leverage patents to block competitors and keep prices high. Less than three weeks after introducing a bill that would make it harder for generic drugmakers to compete with patent-holding drugmakers, Tillis opened the subcommittee’s first meeting on Feb. 26, 2019, with his own vow. “From the United States Patent and Trademark Office to the State Department’s Office of Intellectual Property Enforcement, no department or bureau is too big or too small for this subcommittee to take interest,” he said. “And we will.” In the months that followed, tens of thousands of dollars flowed from pharmaceutical companies toward his campaign, as well as to the campaigns of other subcommittee members — including some who promised to stop drugmakers from playing money-making games with the patent system, like Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas). Tillis received more than $156,000 from political action committees tied to drug manufacturers in 2019, more than any other member of Congress, a new analysis of KHN’s Pharma Cash to Congress database shows. Sen. Chris Coons (D-Del.), the top Democrat on the subcommittee who worked side by side with Tillis, received more than $124,000 in drugmaker contributions last year, making him the No. 3 recipient in Congress. No. 2 was Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), who took in about $139,000. As the Senate majority leader, he controls what legislation gets voted on by the Senate. Neither Tillis nor Coons sits on the Senate committees that introduced legislation last year to lower drug prices through methods like capping price increases to the rate of inflation. Of the four senators who drafted those bills, none received more than $76,000 from drug manufacturers in 2019. Tillis and Coons spent much of last year working on significant legislation that would expand the range of items eligible to be patented — a change that some experts say would make it easier for companies developing medical tests and treatments to own things that aren’t traditionally inventions, like genetic code. They have not yet officially introduced a bill. As obscure as patents might seem in an era of public outrage over drug prices, the fact that drugmakers gave most to the lawmakers working to change the patent system belies how important securing the exclusive right to market a drug, and keep competitors at bay, is to their bottom line. “Pharma will fight to the death to preserve patent rights,” said Robin Feldman, a professor at the UC Hastings College of the Law in San Francisco who is an expert in intellectual property rights and drug pricing. “Strong patent rights are central to the games drug companies play to extend their monopolies and keep prices high.” Campaign contributions, closely tracked by the Federal Election Commission, are among the few windows into how much money flows from the political groups of drugmakers and other companies to the lawmakers and their campaigns. Private companies generally give money to members of Congress to encourage them to listen to the companies, typically through lobbyists, whose activities are difficult to track. They may also communicate through so-called dark money groups, which are not required to report who gives them money. Over the past 10 years, the pharmaceutical industry has spent about $233 million per year on lobbying, according to a new study published in JAMA Internal Medicine. That is more than any other industry, including the oil and gas industry. Why Patents Matter Developing and testing a new drug, and gaining approval from the Food and Drug Administration, can take years and cost hundreds of millions of dollars. Drugmakers are generally granted a six- or seven-year exclusivity period to recoup their investments. But drugmakers have found ways to extend that period of exclusivity, sometimes accumulating hundreds of patents on the same drug and blocking competition for decades. One method is to patent many inventions beyond a drug’s active ingredient, such as patenting the injection device that administers the drug. Keeping that arrangement intact, or expanding what can be patented, is where lawmakers come in. Lawmakers Dig In Tillis’ home state of North Carolina is also home to three major research universities and, not coincidentally, multiple drugmakers’ headquarters, factories and other facilities. From his swearing-in in 2015 to the end of 2018, Tillis received about $160,000 from drugmakers based there or beyond. He almost matched that four-year total in 2019 alone, in the midst of a difficult reelection campaign to be decided this fall. He has raised nearly $10 million for his campaign, with lobbyists among his biggest contributors, according to OpenSecrets. Daniel Keylin, a spokesperson for Tillis, said Tillis and Coons, the subcommittee’s top Democrat, are working to overhaul the country’s “antiquated intellectual property laws.” Keylin said the bipartisan effort protects the development and access to affordable, lifesaving medication for patients,” adding: “No contribution has any impact on how Tillis votes or legislates.” Tillis signaled his openness to the drug industry early on. The day before being named chairman, he reintroduced a bill that would limit the options generic drugmakers have to challenge allegedly invalid patents, effectively helping brand-name drugmakers protect their monopolies. Former Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah), whose warm relationship with the drug industry was well-known, had introduced the legislation, the Hatch-Waxman Integrity Act, just days before his retirement in 2018. At his subcommittee’s first hearing, Tillis said the members would rely on testimony from private businesses to guide them. He promised to hold hearings on patent eligibility standards and “reforms to the Patent Trial and Appeal Board.” In practice, the Hatch-Waxman Integrity Act would require generics makers challenging another drugmaker’s patent to either take their claim to the Patent Trial and Appeal Board, which acts as a sort of cheaper, faster quality check to catch bad patents, or file a lawsuit. A study released last year found that, since Congress created the Patent Trial and Appeal Board in 2011, it has narrowed or overturned about 51 of the drugmaker patents that generics makers have challenged. Feldman said the drug industry “went berserk” over the number of patents the board changed and has been eager to limit use of the board as much as possible. Patent reviewers are often stretched thin and sometimes make mistakes, said Aaron Kesselheim, a Harvard Medical School professor who is an expert in intellectual property rights and drug development. Limiting the ways to challenge patents, as Tillis’ bill would, does not strengthen the patent system, he said. “You want overlapping oversight for a system that is as important and fundamental as this system is,” he said. As promised, Tillis and Coons also spent much of the year working on so-called Section 101 reform regarding what is eligible to be patented — “a very major change” that “would overturn more than a century of Supreme Court law,” Feldman said. Sean Coit, Coons’ spokesperson, said lowering drug prices is one of the senator’s top priorities and pointed to Coon’s support for legislation the pharmaceutical industry opposes. “One of the reasons Senator Coons is leading efforts in Congress to fix our broken patent system is so that life-saving medicines can actually be developed and produced at affordable prices for every American,” Coit wrote in an email, adding that “his work on Section 101 reform has brought together advocates from across the spectrum, including academics and health experts.” In August, when much of Capitol Hill had emptied for summer recess, Tillis and Coons held closed-door meetings to preview their legislation to stakeholders, including the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, or PhRMA, the brand-name drug industry’s lobbying group. “We regularly engage with members of Congress in both parties to advance practical policy solutions that will lower medicine costs for patients,” said Holly Campbell, a PhRMA spokesperson. Neither proposal has received a public hearing. In the 30 days before Tillis and Coons were named leaders of the revived subcommittee, drug manufacturers gave them $21,000 from their political action committees. In the 30 days following that first hearing, Tillis and Coons received $60,000. Among their donors were PhRMA; the Biotechnology Innovation Organization, the biotech lobbying group; and five of the seven drugmakers whose executives — as Tillis laid out a pharma-friendly agenda for his new subcommittee — were getting chewed out by senators in a different hearing room over patent abuse. Cornyn Goes After Patent Abuse Richard Gonzalez, chief executive of AbbVie Inc., the company known for its top-selling drug, Humira, had spent the morning sitting stone-faced before the Senate Finance Committee as, one after another, senators excoriated him and six other executives of brand-name drug manufacturers over how they price their products. Cornyn brought up AbbVie’s more than 130 patents on Humira. Hadn’t the company blocked its competition? Cornyn asked Gonzalez, who carefully explained how AbbVie’s lawsuit against a generics competitor and subsequent licensing deal was not what he would describe as anti-competitive behavior. “I realize it may not be popular,” Gonzalez said. “But I think it is a reasonable balance.” A minute later, Cornyn turned to Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), who, like Cornyn, was also a member of the revived intellectual property subcommittee. This is worth looking into with “our Judiciary Committee authorities as well,” Cornyn said, effectively threatening legislation on patent abuse. The next day, Mylan, one of the largest producers of generic drugs, gave Cornyn $5,000, FEC records show. The company had not donated to Cornyn in years. By midsummer, every drug company that sent an executive to that hearing had given money to Cornyn, including AbbVie. Cornyn, who faces perhaps the most difficult reelection fight of his career this fall, ranks No. 6 among members of Congress in drugmaker PAC contributions last year, KHN’s analysis shows. He received about $104,000. Cornyn has received about $708,500 from drugmakers since 2007, KHN’s database shows. According to OpenSecrets, he has raised more than $17 million for this year’s reelection campaign. Cornyn’s office declined to comment. On May 9, Cornyn and Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) introduced the Affordable Prescriptions for Patients Act, which proposed to define two tactics used by drug companies to make it easier for the Federal Trade Commission to prosecute them: “product-hopping,” when drugmakers withdraw older versions of their drugs from the market to push patients toward newer, more expensive ones, and “patent-thicketing,” when drugmakers amass a series of patents to drag out their exclusivity and slow rival generics makers, who must challenge those patents to enter the market once the initial exclusivity ends. PhRMA opposed the bill. The next day, it gave Cornyn $1,000. Cornyn and Blumenthal’s bill would have been “very tough on the techniques that pharmaceutical companies use to extend patent protections and to keep prices high,” Feldman said. “The pharmaceutical industry lobbied tooth and nail against it,” she said. “And when the bill finally came out of committee, the strongest provisions — the patent-thicketing provisions — had been stripped.” In the months after the bill cleared committee and waited to be taken up by the Senate, Cornyn blamed Senate Democrats for blocking the bill while trying to secure votes on legislation with more direct controls on drug prices. The Senate has not voted on the bill. They choose Infrastructure as backlash – they bill costs Pharma millions – lobbyists can derail the Agenda. Brennan 8-2 Zachary Brennan 8-2-2021 "How the biopharma industry is helping to pay for the bipartisan infrastructure bill" https://endpts.com/how-the-biopharma-industry-is-helping-to-pay-for-the-bipartisan-infrastructure-bill/ (Senior Editor at Endpoint News)Elmer Senators on Sunday finalized the text of a massive, bipartisan infrastructure bill that contains little that might impact the biopharma industry other than two ways the legislators are planning to pay for the $1.2 trillion deal. On the one hand, senators are seeking to further delay a Trump-era Medicare Part D rule related to drug rebates, this time until 2026. Senators claim the rule could end up saving about $49 billion (and that number increased this week to $51 billion), but the PBM industry has attacked it as it would remove rebates from a safe harbor that provides protection from federal anti-kickback laws. The pharmaceutical industry, however, is in favor of the rule and opposes this latest delay as it continues to point its finger at the PBM industry for the rising cost of out-of-pocket expenses. Debra DeShong, EVP of public affairs at PhRMA, said via email: Despite railing against high drug costs on the campaign trail, lawmakers are threatening to gut a rule that would provide patients meaningful relief at the pharmacy. If it is included in the infrastructure package, this proposal will provide health insurers and drug middlemen a windfall and turn Medicare into a piggybank to fund projects that have nothing to do with lowering out-of-pocket costs for medicines. This would be an unconscionable move that robs patients of the prescription drug savings they deserve to help fill potholes and fund other infrastructure projects. The other provision in the infrastructure bill, which is estimated to save about $3 billion, would save money for Medicare on discarded medications from large, single-use drug vials. Manufacturers will be required to pay refunds for such discarded drugs, and each manufacturer will be subject to periodic audits on the refunds issued. If manufacturers don’t comply, HHS can fine them the refund amount that they would have paid plus 25. Drugs that will be excluded from these refund payments include radiopharmaceuticals or imaging agents, as well as those that require filtration during the drug preparation process. So do these two pay-fors mean that the pharma industry is getting off without any serious drug pricing reforms? Not quite, according to Alex Lawson, executive director of Social Security Works. Lawson told Endpoints News in an interview that he still fully expects major drug pricing reforms to make their way through Congress between now and the end of September as Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) refines his plan, part of an early fall spending package. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer has promised both the infrastructure and spending package will pass before the Senate leaves for August recess. At the very least in terms of drug pricing provisions, expect to see a combination of the Wyden bill he co-wrote with Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) last year, alongside further Medicare negotiations, Lawson said. “Talk is still optimistic,” Lawson said on the prospects of a drug pricing deal getting done, while noting that pharmaceutical company lobbyists are swarming Capitol Hill at the moment because of not just drug pricing plans, but tax provisions and the TRIPS waiver that the biopharma industry is worried about. “These are challenges to their entire existence, so they’re willing to protect them at any cost,” Lawson said, noting the target for drug pricing is about $500 billion in savings. As the House has jetted off to enjoy what might be an abbreviated summer recess, the Senate has just this week to get its work done, unless its recess is cut short too. “There’s a real possibility that the whole thing blows up and we get nothing on either side,” Lawson said. Democrat Senators in Big Pharma’s pocket derails the Plan. Sirota 8-23 David Sirota 8-23-2021 "Dem Obstructionists Are Bankrolled By Pharma And Oil" https://www.dailyposter.com/dem-obstructionists-are-bankrolled-by-pharma-and-oil/ (an American journalist, columnist at The Guardian, and editor for Jacobin. He is also a political commentator and radio host based in Denver. He is a nationally syndicated newspaper columnist, political spokesperson, and blogger)Elmer The small group of conservative Democratic lawmakers that has been threatening to help Republicans halt Democrats’ budget package have raked in more than $3 million from donors in the pharmaceutical and fossil fuel industries that could see reduced profits if the plan passes. As the House reconvenes today to tackle the budget reconciliation process, nine Democrats legislators have been promising to kill their party’s $3.5 trillion budget bill until Congress first passes a separate, smaller infrastructure spending measure, which has garnered some Republican support and which some environmental advocates say would exacerbate the climate crisis. Indeed, an ExxonMobil lobbyist was recently caught on tape saying the company had worked to strip climate measures out of the infrastructure bill. “We will vote against a budget resolution if the infrastructure package isn’t brought up first,” Democratic Rep. Josh Gottheimer told the Washington Post this weekend, though the American Prospect reported on Sunday that “several” of the legislators now indicated they could back down. In the narrowly divided House, obstructionism from these conservative Democrats could decouple the infrastructure and budget measures from one another. Many believe that would kill the latter by letting conservative Democrats in the Senate such as Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.) and Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) get the infrastructure bill they want without having to provide the votes necessary to enact the much larger and more progressive budget measure. “If we were to pass the bipartisan infrastructure bill first, then we lose leverage,” Democratic Rep. Ritchie Torres (NY) told the Wall Street Journal. Along with Gottheimer, the eight other Democrats who have threatened to obstruct the budget bill are Carolyn Bordeaux (Ga.), Ed Case (Hawaii), Jim Costa (Calif.), Henry Cuellar (Texas), Jared Golden (Maine), Vicente Gonzalez (Texas), Kurt Schrader (Ore.), and Filemon Vela (TX). The U.S. Chamber of Commerce — Washington’s most powerful corporate lobby group — has been airing digital ads thanking the nine Democrats for their maneuvers. Eight of the nine Democrats represent congressional districts won by President Joe Biden, who supports the reconciliation package. Big Pharma’s Big Allies The reconciliation bill is still being negotiated, and many Democratic lawmakers — including those in key swing districts — are pushing for it to include long-promised legislation to allow Medicare to use its enormous purchasing power to negotiate lower prices for prescription drugs. The pharmaceutical industry has aggressively lobbied against the initiative, which the Congressional Budget Office has estimated would save Medicare $345 billion in medicine costs. The nine House Democrats threatening to derail the reconciliation bill have raked in nearly $1.2 million from donors in the pharmaceutical and health products industries, according to data compiled by OpenSecrets. Among them are two of the Democratic Party’s top recipients of health care industry money: Gottheimer ($228,186) and Schrader ($614,830). Schrader’s third biggest career donor is Pfizer’s political action committee, and his former chief of staff is now a registered lobbyist for the Pharmaceutical Researchers and Manufacturers Association, the pharmaceutical industry’s main lobbying group. Both Gottheimer and Schrader signed a letter earlier this year slamming Democratic leaders’ legislation to lower prescription drug prices. Eight out of the nine Democrats threatening to kill the budget bill also declined to sponsor Democrats’ standalone legislation to let Medicare negotiate lower drug prices. In the Senate, Sinema’s renewed threat to vote down a final reconciliation bill came after she received $519,000 from donors in the pharmaceutical and health products industries. Infrastructure reform solves Existential Climate Change – it results in spill-over. USA Today 7-20 7-20-2021 "Climate change is at 'code red' status for the planet, and inaction is no longer an option" https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/todaysdebate/2021/07/20/climate-change-biden-infrastructure-bill-good-start/7877118002/Elmer Not long ago, climate change for many Americans was like a distant bell. News of starving polar bears or melting glaciers was tragic and disturbing, but other worldly. Not any more. Top climate scientists from around the world warned of a "code red for humanity" in a report issued Monday that says severe, human-caused global warming is become unassailable. Proof of the findings by the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is a now a factor of daily life. Due to intense heat waves and drought, 107 wildfires – including the largest ever in California – are now raging across the West, consuming 2.3 million acres. Earlier this summer, hundreds of people died in unprecedented triple-digit heat in Oregon, Washington and western Canada, when a "heat dome" of enormous proportions settled over the region for days. Some victims brought by stretcher into crowded hospital wards had body temperatures so high, their nervous systems had shut down. People collapsed trying to make their way to cooling shelters. Heat-trapping greenhouse gases Scientists say the event was almost certainly made worse and more intransigent by human-caused climate change. They attribute it to a combination of warming Arctic temperatures and a growing accumulation of heat-trapping greenhouse gases caused by the burning of fossil fuels. The consequences of what mankind has done to the atmosphere are now inescapable. Periods of extreme heat are projected to double in the lower 48 states by 2100. Heat deaths are far outpacing every other form of weather killer in a 30-year average. A persistent megadrought in America's West continues to create tinder-dry conditions that augur another devastating wildfire season. And scientists say warming oceans are fueling ever more powerful storms, evidenced by Elsa and the early arrival of hurricane season this year. Increasingly severe weather is causing an estimated $100 billion in damage to the United States every year. "It is honestly surreal to see your projections manifesting themselves in real time, with all the suffering that accompanies them. It is heartbreaking," said climate scientist Katharine Hayhoe. Rising seas from global warming Investigators are still trying to determine what led to the collapse of a Miami-area condominium that left more than 100 dead or missing. But one concerning factor is the corrosive effect on reinforced steel structures of encroaching saltwater, made worse in Florida by a foot of rising seas from global warming since the 1900s. The clock is ticking for planet Earth. While the U.N. report concludes some level of severe climate change is now unavoidable, there is still a window of time when far more catastrophic events can be mitigated. But mankind must act soon to curb the release of heat-trapping gases. Global temperature has risen nearly 2 degrees Fahrenheit since the pre-industrial era of the late 19th century. Scientists warn that in a decade, it could surpass a 2.7-degree increase. That's enough warming to cause catastrophic climate changes. After a brief decline in global greenhouse gas emissions during the pandemic, pollution is on the rise. Years that could have been devoted to addressing the crisis were wasted during a feckless period of inaction by the Trump administration. Congress must act Joe Biden won the presidency promising broad new policies to cut America's greenhouse gas emissions. But Congress needs to act on those ideas this year. Democrats cannot risk losing narrow control of one or both chambers of Congress in the 2022 elections to a Republican Party too long resistant to meaningful action on the climate. So what's at issue? A trillion dollar infrastructure bill negotiated between Biden and a group of centrist senators (including 10 Republicans) is a start. In addition to repairing bridges, roads and rails, it would improve access by the nation's power infrastructure to renewable energy sources, cap millions of abandoned oil and gas wells spewing greenhouse gases, and harden structures against climate change. It also offers tax credits for the purchase of electric vehicles and funds the construction of charging stations. (The nation's largest source of climate pollution are gas-powered vehicles.) Senate approval could come very soon. Much more is needed if the nation is going to reach Biden's necessary goal of cutting U.S. climate pollution in half from 2005 levels by 2030. His ideas worth considering include a federal clean electricity standard for utilities, federal investments and tax credits to promote renewable energy, and tens of billions of dollars in clean energy research and development, including into ways of extracting greenhouse gases from the skies. Another idea worth considering is a fully refundable carbon tax. The vehicle for these additional proposals would be a second infrastructure bill. And if Republicans balk at the cost of such vital investment, Biden is rightly proposing to pass this package through a process known as budget reconciliation, which allows bills to clear the Senate with a simple majority vote. These are drastic legislative steps. But drastic times call for them. And when Biden attends a U.N. climate conference in November, he can use American progress on climate change as a mean of persuading others to follow our lead. Further delay is not an option.
9/18/21
Innovation DA
Tournament: Yale | Round: 2 | Opponent: Dr Phillips AI | Judge: Gina Pisciotta SO21 – DA – Innovation (1:05-1:15) Pharma innovation is strong now – patent incentives are key to maintaining progress, Austin and Hayford 21: David Austin, an Analyst in CBO’s Microeconomics Studies Division and Tamara Hayford, a principal analyst in the Health, Retirement, and Long-Term Analysis Division, Congressional Budget Office prepared the report with guidance from Joseph Kile, Lyle Nelson, and Julie Topoleski. Christopher Adams, Pranav Bhandarkar, and David Wylie (formerly of CBO) contributed to the analysis., April 2021, “Research and Development in the Pharmaceutical Industry” https://www.cbo.gov/publication/57126LHP AV DOA: 9/8/21 At a Glance This report examines research and development (RandD) by the pharmaceutical industry. Spending on RandD and Its Results. Spending on RandD and the introduction of new drugs have both increased in the past two decades. In 2019, the pharmaceutical industry spent $83 billion dollars on RandD. Adjusted for inflation, that amount is about 10 times what the industry spent per year in the 1980s. Between 2010 and 2019, the number of new drugs approved for sale increased by 60 percent compared with the previous decade, with a peak of 59 new drugs approved in 2018. Factors Influencing RandD Spending. The amount of money that drug companies devote to RandD is determined by the amount of revenue they expect to earn from a new drug, the expected cost of developing that drug, and policies that influence the supply of and demand for drugs. The expected lifetime global revenues of a new drug depends on the prices that companies expect to charge for the drug in different markets around the world, the volume of sales they anticipate at those prices, and the likelihood the drug-development effort will succeed. The expected cost to develop a new drug—including capital costs and expenditures on drugs that fail to reach the market—has been estimated to range from less than $1 billion to more than $2 billion. The federal government influences the amount of private spending on RandD through programs (such as Medicare) that increase the demand for prescription drugs, through policies (such as spending for basic research and regulations on what must be demonstrated in clinical trials) that affect the supply of new drugs, and through policies (such as recommendations for vaccines) that affect both supply and demand. Notes Research and Development in the Pharmaceutical Industry Summary Every year, the U.S. pharmaceutical industry develops a variety of new drugs that provide valuable medical benefits. Many of those drugs are expensive and contribute to rising health care costs for the private sector and the federal government. Policymakers have considered policies that would lower drug prices and reduce federal drug expenditures. Such policies would probably reduce the industry’s incentive to develop new drugs. In this report, the Congressional Budget Office assesses trends in spending for drug research and development (RandD) and the introduction of new drugs. CBO also examines factors that determine how much drug companies spend on RandD: expected global revenues from a new drug; cost to develop a new drug; and federal policies that affect the demand for drug therapies, the supply of new drugs, or both. What Are Recent Trends in Pharmaceutical RandD and New Drug Approvals? The pharmaceutical industry devoted $83 billion to RandD expenditures in 2019. Those expenditures covered a variety of activities, including discovering and testing new drugs, developing incremental innovations such as product extensions, and clinical testing for safety-monitoring or marketing purposes. That amount is about 10 times what the industry spent per year in the 1980s, after adjusting for the effects of inflation. The share of revenues that drug companies devote to RandD has also grown: On average, pharmaceutical companies spent about one-quarter of their revenues (net of expenses and buyer rebates) on RandD expenses in 2019, which is almost twice as large a share of revenues as they spent in 2000. That revenue share is larger than that for other knowledge-based industries, such as semiconductors, technology hardware, and software. The number of new drugs approved each year has also grown over the past decade. On average, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved 38 new drugs per year from 2010 through 2019 (with a peak of 59 in 2018), which is 60 percent more than the yearly average over the previous decade. Many of the drugs that have been approved in recent years are “specialty drugs.” Specialty drugs generally treat chronic, complex, or rare conditions, and they may also require special handling or monitoring of patients. Many specialty drugs are biologics (large-molecule drugs based on living cell lines), which are costly to develop, hard to imitate, and frequently have high prices. Previously, most drugs were small-molecule drugs based on chemical compounds. Even while they were under patent, those drugs had lower prices than recent specialty drugs have. Information about the kinds of drugs in current clinical trials indicates that much of the industry’s innovative activity is focused on specialty drugs that would provide new cancer therapies and treatments for nervous-system disorders, such as Alzheimer’s disease and Parkinson’s disease. What Factors Influence Spending for RandD? Drug companies’ RandD spending decisions depend on three main factors: Anticipated lifetime global revenues from a new drug, Expected costs to develop a new drug, and Policies and programs that influence the supply of and demand for prescription drugs. Various considerations inform companies’ expectations about a drug’s revenue stream, including the anticipated prices it could command in different markets around the world and the expected global sales volume at those prices (given the number of people who might use the drug). The prices and sales volumes of existing drugs provide information about consumers’ and insurance plans’ willingness to pay for drug treatments. Importantly, when drug companies set the prices of a new drug, they do so to maximize future revenues net of manufacturing and distribution costs. A drug’s sunk RandD costs—that is, the costs already incurred in developing that drug—do not influence its price. Developing new drugs is a costly and uncertain process, and many potential drugs never make it to market. Only about 12 percent of drugs entering clinical trials are ultimately approved for introduction by the FDA. In recent studies, estimates of the average RandD cost per new drug range from less than $1 billion to more than $2 billion per drug. Those estimates include the costs of both laboratory research and clinical trials of successful new drugs as well as expenditures on drugs that do not make it past the laboratory-development stage, that enter clinical trials but fail in those trials or are withdrawn by the drugmaker for business reasons, or that are not approved by the FDA. Those estimates also include the company’s capital costs—the value of other forgone investments—incurred during the RandD process. Such costs can make up a substantial share of the average total cost of developing a new drug. The development process often takes a decade or more, and during that time the company does not receive a financial return on its investment in developing that drug. The federal government affects RandD decisions in three ways. First, it increases demand for prescription drugs, which encourages new drug development, by fully or partially subsidizing the purchase of prescription drugs through a variety of federal programs (including Medicare and Medicaid) and by providing tax preferences for employment-based health insurance. Second, the federal government increases the supply of new drugs. It funds basic biomedical research that provides a scientific foundation for the development of new drugs by private industry. Additionally, tax credits—both those available to all types of companies and those available to drug companies for developing treatments of uncommon diseases—provide incentives to invest in RandD. Similarly, deductions for RandD investment can be used to reduce tax liabilities immediately rather than over the life of that investment. Finally, the patent system and certain statutory provisions that delay FDA approval of generic drugs provide pharmaceutical companies with a period of market exclusivity, when competition is legally restricted. During that time, they can maintain higher prices on a patented product than they otherwise could, which makes new drugs more profitable and thereby increases drug companies’ incentives to invest in RandD. Third, some federal policies affect the number of new drugs by influencing both demand and supply. For example, federal recommendations for specific vaccines increase the demand for those vaccines and provide an incentive for drug companies to develop new ones. Additionally, federal regulatory policies that influence returns on drug RandD can bring about increases or decreases in both the supply of and demand for new drugs. Trends in RandD Spending and New Drug Development Private spending on pharmaceutical RandD and the approval of new drugs have both increased markedly in recent years, resuming a decades-long trend that was interrupted in 2008 as generic versions of some top-selling drugs became available and as the 2007–2009 recession occurred. In particular, spending on drug RandD increased by nearly 50 percent between 2015 and 2019. Many of the drugs approved in recent years are high-priced specialty drugs for relatively small numbers of potential patients. By contrast, the top-selling drugs of the 1990s were lower-cost drugs with large patient populations. RandD Spending RandD spending in the pharmaceutical industry covers a variety of activities, including the following: Invention, or research and discovery of new drugs; Development, or clinical testing, preparation and submission of applications for FDA approval, and design of production processes for new drugs; Incremental innovation, including the development of new dosages and delivery mechanisms for existing drugs and the testing of those drugs for additional indications; Product differentiation, or the clinical testing of a new drug against an existing rival drug to show that the new drug is superior; and Safety monitoring, or clinical trials (conducted after a drug has reached the market) that the FDA may require to detect side effects that may not have been observed in shorter trials when the drug was in development. In real terms, private investment in drug RandD among member firms of the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA), an industry trade association, was about $83 billion in 2019, up from about $5 billion in 1980 and $38 billion in 2000.1 Although those spending totals do not include spending by many smaller drug companies that do not belong to PhRMA, the trend is broadly representative of RandD spending by the industry as a whole.2 A survey of all U.S. pharmaceutical RandD spending (including that of smaller firms) by the National Science Foundation (NSF) reveals similar trends.3 Intellectual property protections are key to pharmaceutical innovation – laundry of list of studies – that solves access better, Ezeli and Cory 19: Stephen Ezell, vice president, global innovation policy, at the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation (ITIF). He focuses on science and technology policy, international competitiveness, trade, manufacturing, and services issues. and Nigel Cory, an associate director covering trade policy at the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation. He focuses on cross-border data flows, data governance, intellectual property, and how they each relate to digital trade and the broader digital economy. Cory has provided in-person testimony and written submissions and has published reports and op-eds relating to these issues in the United States, the European Union, Australia, China, India, and New Zealand, among other countries and regions, and he has completed research projects for international bodies such as the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation and the World Trade Organization. “The Way Forward for Intellectual Property Internationally” April 25, 2019, https://itif.org/publications/2019/04/25/way-forward-intellectual-property-internationallyLHP AV INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY UNDERPINS INNOVATION AND GROWTH Intellectual property rights arrangements are well recognized, going back to the Middle Ages, as enabling innovators to earn the returns necessary to continue to innovate and promote the availability of leading-edge technologies. Nobel laureate economist Douglas North, one of the foremost scholars of economic history, argues that the introduction of intellectual property rights had one of the most profound impacts on spurring economic growth in human history. North points out that average global economic growth rates for about one and a half millennia prior to the Industrial Revolution were essentially zero. Eighteenth-century elites in England had practically the same per capita income as their counterparts in third-century Rome.21 North has shown that the inflection point toward greater economic growth was the widespread development of patent systems in the 19th century.22 Gregory Clark, in his seminal book, Farewell to Alms: A Brief Economic History of the World, reached a similar conclusion that the introduction of IPRs was catalytic to turbo-charging global economic growth.23 Robust intellectual property rights spur innovative activity by increasing the appropriability of the returns to innovation, enabling innovators to capture enough of the benefits of their own innovative activity to justify taking considerable risks. By raising the private rate of return closer to the social rate of return, intellectual property rights address the knowledge-asset incentive problem, allowing inventors to realize economic gain from their inventions, thereby catalyzing investment in knowledge creation. If innovators know that most of the benefits from their innovations would go to others without compensation, they would be much less likely and capable of engaging in future innovations. In addition, as they capture a larger portion of the benefits of their innovative activity, innovating companies obtain the resources to pursue the next generation of innovative activities. IP thus produces a number of positive benefits, including: 1) creating powerful incentives for domestic innovation; 2) inducing knowledge spillovers that help others to innovate; 3) ensuring a country’s companies can focus on operating productively and innovating, instead of having to devote an undue amount of their time and resources to protecting their IP in an environment where it’s at risk; 4) promoting the international diffusion of technology, innovation, and knowhow; and 5) boosting a country’s levels of research and development, inbound foreign direct investment (FDI), and exports of goods and services.24 Robust intellectual property rights spur innovative activity by increasing the appropriability of the returns to innovation, enabling innovators to capture enough of the benefits of their own innovative activity to justify taking considerable risks. The evidence shows that strong intellectual property rights protections are vitally important for both developed and developing countries alike. As the definitive 2010 OECD review of the effects of intellectual property rights protections on developing countries, “Policy Complements to the Strengthening of IPRs in Developing Countries” found, “The results point to a tendency for IPR reform to deliver positive economic results.”25 The OECD study found that developing-country IPR reforms concerning patent protection have tended to deliver the most substantial results, although the results for copyright reform and trademark reform are also positive and significant. But to have the greatest impact on economic growth, IPR reforms must occur concomitantly with other positive complements, particularly ones regarding inputs for innovative and productive processes and the ability to conduct business. These include policies that influence the macro-environment for firms as well as the availability of resources (e.g., related to education), a country’s legal and institutional conditions, and fiscal incentives.26 The evidence shows that strong intellectual property rights protections are vitally important for both developed and developing countries alike. The following section details the broad swath of academic literature reviewing the relationships between IPR strengthening and trade, FDI, and technology transfer; IPR reform and innovation and RandD; and IPR reform and exports and industry growth, revealing the benefits of stronger IPR protections for developed and developing countries alike. IPRs Strengthen Trade, FDI, and Technology Transfer A wealth of academic research has documented the relationship between the strength of a country’s intellectual property protections and the extent of trade, foreign direct investment, and technology transfer it enjoys. Strengthening IPR protection has been shown to correlate with increased trade.27 For instance, Fink and Primo Braga found that IPR protection is positively associated with international trade flows, in particular of manufactured, non-fuel imports.28 Other studies have found a positive association between IPR protection and trade flows in high-technology products.29 Likewise, strengthening of IPR protection has also been connected with increased inflows of FDI. Cavazos Cepeda et al. found that a 1 percent increase in the protection of IPRs as measured by the Patent Rights Index (a measure of the strength of countries’ IPR regimes) is associated with a 2.8 percent increase in the inflow of FDI.30 Similarly, a 1 percent increase in trademark protection levels is associated with a 3.8 percent increase in incoming FDI; and a 1 percent increase in copyright protection yields a 6.8 percent increase in FDI.31 Moreover, the researchers identified a virtuous cycle between FDI and protection of IP, whereby improvements in the IPR environment are associated with improved economic performance—in particular with respect to FDI—and, in turn, further improvements in the IPR environment. Park and Lippoldt showed that stronger IPRs in developing countries are associated with an increase of technology-intensive FDI, while Awokuse and Yin provided a concrete example concerning the relationship of IPR protection in China to FDI inflows, concluding that IPR reforms in China have had a positive and significant effect on inbound FDI.32 There is also evidence that countries with similar levels of intellectual property protection trade more with one another.33 Academic research also signals a strong correlation between IPR and technology transfer. Lippoldt showed that IPR strengthening in countries—particularly with respect to patents—is associated with increased technology transfer via trade and investment.34 Research has revealed that a country’s level of intellectual property protection considerably affects whether foreign firms will transfer technology into it.35 That matters because the welfare gains from the importation of technology via innovative products, while differing across countries, can be substantial.36 For instance, foreign sources of technology account for over 90 percent of domestic productivity growth in all but a handful of countries.37 The research on this matter is clear and consistent. For example, a 1986 United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) study found that direct investment in new technology areas such as computer software, semiconductors, and biotechnology is supported by stronger intellectual property rights policy regimes.38 (However, as this report later clarifies, subsequent UNCTAD reports have lamentably taken a more skeptical view toward IP.) A 1989 study by the United Nations Commission on Transnational Corporations (UNCTC) found that weak IP rights reduce computer software direct investment; and a 1990 study by UNCTC found that weak IP rights reduce pharmaceutical investment.39 Mansfield conducted firm-level surveys and found that perceptions of strong IP rights abroad have a positive effect on incentives to transfer technologies abroad. Likewise, survey research by the World Bank’s International Finance Corporation found that, with variations by sector, country, and technology, at least 25 percent of American and Japanese high-tech firms refuse to directly invest, or enter into a joint venture, in developing countries with weak intellectual property rights; and a later study confirmed those survey findings with actual foreign direct investment data.40 And an Institute for International Economics study of World Bank data concluded that weak intellectual property rights reduce flows of all these commercial activities, regardless of nations’ levels of economic development.41 A wealth of academic research has documented the relationship between the strength of a country’s intellectual property protections and the extent of trade, foreign direct investment, and technology transfer it enjoys. Studies have also shown how the benefits of intellectual property extend to developing countries. Diwan and Rodrik demonstrated that stronger patent rights in developing countries give enterprises from developed countries a greater incentive to research and introduce technologies appropriate to developing countries.42 Similarly, Taylor showed that weak patent rights in developing countries lead enterprises from developed countries to introduce less-than-best-practice technologies to developing countries.43 Interestingly, the relationship goes in both directions. Branstetter and Saggi showed that strengthened IPR protection not only improves the investment climate in the implementing countries, but also leads to increased FDI in the country producing the original innovation.44 They concluded that IPR reform in the “global South” (e.g., developing countries) may be associated with FDI increases in the “global North” (e.g., developed countries). As northern firms shift their production to southern affiliates, this FDI accelerates southern industrial development, creating a cyclical feedback mechanism that also benefits the North. Another study by Liao and Wong, which focused on firm-level analysis, highlights the inter-relationship of IPR reform in developed and developing countries. Their study concluded that developing countries can entice technology transfer from the North by providing IPR protection for incoming products (although they note there is a need for redoubled RandD efforts in developed countries to spur needed innovations).45 IPRs Strengthen Innovation Intellectual property rights power innovation. For instance, analyzing the level of intellectual property protections (via the World Economic Forum’s Global Competitiveness reports) and creative outputs (via the Global Innovation Index) shows that counties with stronger IP protection have more creative outputs (in terms of intangible assets and creative goods and services in a nation’s media, printing and publishing, and entertainment industries, including online), even at varying levels of development.46 IPR reforms also introduce strong incentives for domestic innovation. Sherwood, using case studies from 18 developing countries, concluded that poor provision of intellectual property rights deters local innovation and risk-taking.47 In contrast, IPR reform has been associated with increased innovative activity, as measured by domestic patent filings, albeit with some variation across countries and sectors.48 For example, Ryan, in a study of biomedical innovations and patent reform in Brazil, found that patents provided incentives for innovation investments and facilitated the functioning of technology markets.49 Park and Lippoldt also observed that the provision of adequate protection for IPRs can help to stimulate local innovation, in some cases building on the transfer of technologies that provide inputs and spillovers.50 In other words, local innovators are introduced to technologies first through the technology transfer that takes place in an environment wherein protection of IPRs is assured; then, they may build on those ideas to create an evolved product or develop alternate approaches (i.e., to innovate). Related research finds that trade in technology—through channels including imports, foreign direct investment, and technology licensing—improves the quality of developing-country innovation by increasing the pool of ideas and efficiency of innovation by encouraging the division of innovative labor and specialization.51 However, Maskus notes that without protection from potential abuse of their newly developed technologies, foreign enterprises may be less willing to reveal technical information associated with their innovations.52 The protection of patents and trade secrets provides necessary legal assurances for firms wishing to reveal proprietary characteristics of technologies to subsidiaries and licensees via contracts. Counties with stronger IP protection have more creative outputs (in terms of intangible assets and creative goods and services in a nation’s media, printing and publishing, and entertainment industries, including online), even at varying levels of development. The relationship between IPR rights and innovation can also be seen in studies of how the introduction of stronger IPR laws, with regard to patents, copyrights, and trademarks, affect RandD activity in an economy. Studies by Varsakelis and by Kanwar and Evenson found that RandD to GDP ratios are positively related to the strength of patent rights, and are conditional on other factors.53 Cavazos Cepeda et al. found a positive influence of IPRs on the level of RandD in an economy, with each 1 percent increase in the level of protection of IPRs in an economy (as measured by improvements to a country’s score in the Patent Rights Index) equating to, on average, a 0.7 percent increase in the domestic level of RandD.54 Likewise, a 1 percent increase in copyright protection was associated with a 3.3 percent increase in domestic RandD. Similarly, when trademark protection increased by 1 percent, there was an associated RandD increase of 1.4 percent. As the authors concluded, “Increases in the protection of the IPRs carried economic benefits in the form of higher inflows of FDI, and increases in the levels of both domestically conducted RandD and service imports as measured by licensing fees.”55 As Jackson summarized, regarding the relationship between IPR reform and both innovation and RandD, and FDI, “In addition to spurring domestic innovation, strong intellectual property rights can increase incentives for foreign direct investment which in turn also leads to economic growth.”56 BOX 1: INNOVATE FOR HEALTH: IP IS NOT THE PROBLEM, BUT PART OF THE SOLUTION Many opponents of robust IPR rights view them as antithetical to the interests of developing countries in terms of access to medicines or the provision of national health care services. Yet the reality is that stronger IPR rights in developing nations actually unleash the power of developing-country innovators to contribute to solving health challenges both in their own nations and across the global economy. First, opponents of IP fail to recognize that intellectual property rights matter for health care innovation in emerging economies. An Information Technology and Innovation Foundation (ITIF) and George Mason University Center for Intellectual Property Protection report, “How Innovators Are Solving Global Health Challenges,” provides 25 case studies that show innovators in developing countries relying on IP to invent and bring solutions to market.57 The 25 case studies revealed a number of key themes, including that there is opportunity in adapting health care interventions for developing-country environments where resources and infrastructure are scarce, and that local innovation and IP can contribute substantially toward providing both affordable and robust tests for diagnosing diseases and affordable interventions to meet basic needs in challenging environments. Second, opponents of IP tend to ignore broader systemic issues that contribute to poor health care outcomes in developing countries. While cost is a central factor for policymakers in all countries, given resource scarcity, these trade-offs are not unique to health. The greater the resource scarcity, the greater the need for innovation. One of the biggest challenges policymakers and innovators in developing countries confront again and again is scarcity—in access to trained professionals, in transportation, and in other infrastructure. For example, reports estimate that as many as 1 billion people lack access to essential health care because of a shortage of trained health professionals.58 A 2014 World Health Organization study estimated a shortage of 7 million public health care workers, with that number expected to rise to 13 million by 2035.59 More than 80 countries currently fail to meet the basic threshold of 23 skilled health professionals per 10,000 citizens.60 The challenge is even more daunting when it comes to specialists. For instance, Cameroon has fewer than 50 cardiologists supporting a population of over 23 million citizens.61 And Ethiopia, a country of some 90 million residents, is served by a single radiation-treatment center located in the capital of Addis Ababa.62 In other instances, individuals lack access to essential medicines, with cost being a relatively small part of the problem. For instance, in 2014, researchers at the University of Utrecht in the Netherlands found that, on average, essential medicines are available in public-sector facilities in developing countries only 40 percent of the time.63 Again, the cost of medicines is far from the most serious problem in the provision of health care services in developing nations. Indeed, the vast majority of drugs—at least 95 percent—on the World Health Organization’s Essential Medicines list are off-patent, and thus potentially available in generic versions.64 The problem, in much larger part, stems from countries’ underdeveloped health systems and the fact that many people live in rural areas far from care. Stronger IP rights create an environment wherein entrepreneurs can innovate to meet health challenges in their own nations, the benefits thereof spilling over to benefit the entire international community. IPRs Strengthen Exports and Industry Growth Academic research has also found that stronger IPR protections support exports from developing countries and faster growth rates of certain industries. Yang and Kuo argue that stronger IPR protection improves the export performance of firms benefitting from technology transfer. And in their research, Cavazos Cepeda et al. found that trademark protection has a statistically significant association in relation to the export turnover, sales, and total assets of firms studied. They also found a significant association between copyrights and export turnover. Moreover, they found “a positive influence of patent right protection on export turnover (e.g., sales) under certain specifications with respect to complementary policies.”65 In cross-country studies, researchers have found that stronger patent rights are associated with faster company growth in IP-intensive industries such as pharmaceuticals. In fact, during the early 1990s, a one-standard-deviation increase in patent rights was associated with an increase in firm growth of 0.69 percent (an advantage amounting to nearly one-fifth of the average industry growth rate of 3.7 percent).66 Consequences of Countries Not Enacting Robust IPR Protections and Enforcement Nations that have not implemented—or do not enforce—robust intellectual property rights protections end up harming their economic development in at least three principle ways. First, they deter future innovative activity. Second, they discourage trade and foreign direct investment, which only hurts their own consumers and businesses, by both limiting their choices and inhibiting their enterprises’ ability to access best-of-breed technologies that are vital to boosting domestic productivity. Third, in countries with weak IP protections, firms are forced to invest undue amounts of resources in protection rather than invention. Ironically, developing countries’ own economic development opportunities and intellectual property development potential are inhibited by their own weak intellectual property protections. For instance, the lack of effective protection for intellectual property rights in China has limited the introduction of advanced technology and innovation investments by foreign companies, thereby reducing potential benefits to local innovation capacity.67 As Cavazos Cepeda et al. found in a case study of IPR protections in that economy, “China has made progress in strengthening the protection of intellectual property over the past two decades, as attested to by indicators such as the Patent Rights Index…. However, uncertainty around the protection of intellectual property remains an important deterrent for foreign as well as domestic firms engaging in RandD-related activities.”68 Ironically, developing countries’ own economic development opportunities and intellectual property development potential are inhibited by their own weak intellectual property protections. Pharma Innovation prevents Extinction – checks new diseases. Engelhardt 8, H. Tristram. Innovation and the pharmaceutical industry: critical reflections on the virtues of profit. M and M Scrivener Press, 2008 (doctorate in philosophy (University of Texas at Austin), M.D. (Tulane University), professor of philosophy (Rice University), and professor emeritus at Baylor College of Medicine) Many are suspicious of, or indeed jealous of, the good fortune of others. Even when profit is gained in the market without fraud and with the consent of all buying and selling goods and services, there is a sense on the part of some that something is wrong if considerable profit is secured. There is even a sense that good fortune in the market, especially if it is very good fortune, is unfair. One might think of such rhetorically disparaging terms as "wind-fall profits". There is also a suspicion of the pursuit of profit because it is often embraced not just because of the material benefits it sought, but because of the hierarchical satisfaction of being more affluent than others. The pursuit of profit in the pharmaceutical and medical-device industries is tor many in particular morally dubious because it is acquired from those who have the bad fortune to be diseased or disabled. Although the suspicion of profit is not well-founded, this suspicion is a major moral and public-policy challenge. Profit in the market for the pharmaceutical and medical-device industries is to be celebrated. This is the case, in that if one is of the view (1) that the presence of additional resources for research and development spurs innovation in the development of pharmaceuticals and med-ical devices (i.e., if one is of the view that the allure of profit is one of the most effective ways not only to acquire resources but productively to direct human energies in their use), (2) that given the limits of altruism and of the willingness of persons to be taxed, the possibility of profits is necessary to secure such resources, (3) that the allure of profits also tends to enhance the creative use of available resources in the pursuit of phar-maceutical and medical-device innovation, and (4) if one judges it to be the case that such innovation is both necessary to maintain the human species in an ever-changing and always dangerous environment in which new microbial and other threats may at any time emerge to threaten human well-being, if not survival (i.e., that such innovation is necessary to prevent increases in morbidity and mortality risks), as well as (5) in order generally to decrease morbidity and mortality risks in the future, it then follows (6) that one should be concerned regarding any policies that decrease the amount of resources and energies available to encourage such innovation. One should indeed be of the view that the possibilities for profit, all things being equal, should be highest in the pharmaceutical and medical-device industries. Yet, there is a suspicion regarding the pursuit of profit in medicine and especially in the pharmaceutical and medical-device industries.
9/18/21
Innovation DA
Tournament: Yale | Round: 4 | Opponent: American Heritage Broward JW | Judge: John Paul Leonardi SO21 – DA – Innovation (1:05-1:15) Pharma innovation is strong now – patent incentives are key to maintaining progress, Austin and Hayford 21: David Austin, an Analyst in CBO’s Microeconomics Studies Division and Tamara Hayford, a principal analyst in the Health, Retirement, and Long-Term Analysis Division, Congressional Budget Office prepared the report with guidance from Joseph Kile, Lyle Nelson, and Julie Topoleski. Christopher Adams, Pranav Bhandarkar, and David Wylie (formerly of CBO) contributed to the analysis., April 2021, “Research and Development in the Pharmaceutical Industry” https://www.cbo.gov/publication/57126LHP AV DOA: 9/8/21 At a Glance This report examines research and development (RandD) by the pharmaceutical industry. Spending on RandD and Its Results. Spending on RandD and the introduction of new drugs have both increased in the past two decades. In 2019, the pharmaceutical industry spent $83 billion dollars on RandD. Adjusted for inflation, that amount is about 10 times what the industry spent per year in the 1980s. Between 2010 and 2019, the number of new drugs approved for sale increased by 60 percent compared with the previous decade, with a peak of 59 new drugs approved in 2018. Factors Influencing RandD Spending. The amount of money that drug companies devote to RandD is determined by the amount of revenue they expect to earn from a new drug, the expected cost of developing that drug, and policies that influence the supply of and demand for drugs. The expected lifetime global revenues of a new drug depends on the prices that companies expect to charge for the drug in different markets around the world, the volume of sales they anticipate at those prices, and the likelihood the drug-development effort will succeed. The expected cost to develop a new drug—including capital costs and expenditures on drugs that fail to reach the market—has been estimated to range from less than $1 billion to more than $2 billion. The federal government influences the amount of private spending on RandD through programs (such as Medicare) that increase the demand for prescription drugs, through policies (such as spending for basic research and regulations on what must be demonstrated in clinical trials) that affect the supply of new drugs, and through policies (such as recommendations for vaccines) that affect both supply and demand. Notes Research and Development in the Pharmaceutical Industry Summary Every year, the U.S. pharmaceutical industry develops a variety of new drugs that provide valuable medical benefits. Many of those drugs are expensive and contribute to rising health care costs for the private sector and the federal government. Policymakers have considered policies that would lower drug prices and reduce federal drug expenditures. Such policies would probably reduce the industry’s incentive to develop new drugs. In this report, the Congressional Budget Office assesses trends in spending for drug research and development (RandD) and the introduction of new drugs. CBO also examines factors that determine how much drug companies spend on RandD: expected global revenues from a new drug; cost to develop a new drug; and federal policies that affect the demand for drug therapies, the supply of new drugs, or both. What Are Recent Trends in Pharmaceutical RandD and New Drug Approvals? The pharmaceutical industry devoted $83 billion to RandD expenditures in 2019. Those expenditures covered a variety of activities, including discovering and testing new drugs, developing incremental innovations such as product extensions, and clinical testing for safety-monitoring or marketing purposes. That amount is about 10 times what the industry spent per year in the 1980s, after adjusting for the effects of inflation. The share of revenues that drug companies devote to RandD has also grown: On average, pharmaceutical companies spent about one-quarter of their revenues (net of expenses and buyer rebates) on RandD expenses in 2019, which is almost twice as large a share of revenues as they spent in 2000. That revenue share is larger than that for other knowledge-based industries, such as semiconductors, technology hardware, and software. The number of new drugs approved each year has also grown over the past decade. On average, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved 38 new drugs per year from 2010 through 2019 (with a peak of 59 in 2018), which is 60 percent more than the yearly average over the previous decade. Many of the drugs that have been approved in recent years are “specialty drugs.” Specialty drugs generally treat chronic, complex, or rare conditions, and they may also require special handling or monitoring of patients. Many specialty drugs are biologics (large-molecule drugs based on living cell lines), which are costly to develop, hard to imitate, and frequently have high prices. Previously, most drugs were small-molecule drugs based on chemical compounds. Even while they were under patent, those drugs had lower prices than recent specialty drugs have. Information about the kinds of drugs in current clinical trials indicates that much of the industry’s innovative activity is focused on specialty drugs that would provide new cancer therapies and treatments for nervous-system disorders, such as Alzheimer’s disease and Parkinson’s disease. What Factors Influence Spending for RandD? Drug companies’ RandD spending decisions depend on three main factors: Anticipated lifetime global revenues from a new drug, Expected costs to develop a new drug, and Policies and programs that influence the supply of and demand for prescription drugs. Various considerations inform companies’ expectations about a drug’s revenue stream, including the anticipated prices it could command in different markets around the world and the expected global sales volume at those prices (given the number of people who might use the drug). The prices and sales volumes of existing drugs provide information about consumers’ and insurance plans’ willingness to pay for drug treatments. Importantly, when drug companies set the prices of a new drug, they do so to maximize future revenues net of manufacturing and distribution costs. A drug’s sunk RandD costs—that is, the costs already incurred in developing that drug—do not influence its price. Developing new drugs is a costly and uncertain process, and many potential drugs never make it to market. Only about 12 percent of drugs entering clinical trials are ultimately approved for introduction by the FDA. In recent studies, estimates of the average RandD cost per new drug range from less than $1 billion to more than $2 billion per drug. Those estimates include the costs of both laboratory research and clinical trials of successful new drugs as well as expenditures on drugs that do not make it past the laboratory-development stage, that enter clinical trials but fail in those trials or are withdrawn by the drugmaker for business reasons, or that are not approved by the FDA. Those estimates also include the company’s capital costs—the value of other forgone investments—incurred during the RandD process. Such costs can make up a substantial share of the average total cost of developing a new drug. The development process often takes a decade or more, and during that time the company does not receive a financial return on its investment in developing that drug. The federal government affects RandD decisions in three ways. First, it increases demand for prescription drugs, which encourages new drug development, by fully or partially subsidizing the purchase of prescription drugs through a variety of federal programs (including Medicare and Medicaid) and by providing tax preferences for employment-based health insurance. Second, the federal government increases the supply of new drugs. It funds basic biomedical research that provides a scientific foundation for the development of new drugs by private industry. Additionally, tax credits—both those available to all types of companies and those available to drug companies for developing treatments of uncommon diseases—provide incentives to invest in RandD. Similarly, deductions for RandD investment can be used to reduce tax liabilities immediately rather than over the life of that investment. Finally, the patent system and certain statutory provisions that delay FDA approval of generic drugs provide pharmaceutical companies with a period of market exclusivity, when competition is legally restricted. During that time, they can maintain higher prices on a patented product than they otherwise could, which makes new drugs more profitable and thereby increases drug companies’ incentives to invest in RandD. Third, some federal policies affect the number of new drugs by influencing both demand and supply. For example, federal recommendations for specific vaccines increase the demand for those vaccines and provide an incentive for drug companies to develop new ones. Additionally, federal regulatory policies that influence returns on drug RandD can bring about increases or decreases in both the supply of and demand for new drugs. Trends in RandD Spending and New Drug Development Private spending on pharmaceutical RandD and the approval of new drugs have both increased markedly in recent years, resuming a decades-long trend that was interrupted in 2008 as generic versions of some top-selling drugs became available and as the 2007–2009 recession occurred. In particular, spending on drug RandD increased by nearly 50 percent between 2015 and 2019. Many of the drugs approved in recent years are high-priced specialty drugs for relatively small numbers of potential patients. By contrast, the top-selling drugs of the 1990s were lower-cost drugs with large patient populations. RandD Spending RandD spending in the pharmaceutical industry covers a variety of activities, including the following: Invention, or research and discovery of new drugs; Development, or clinical testing, preparation and submission of applications for FDA approval, and design of production processes for new drugs; Incremental innovation, including the development of new dosages and delivery mechanisms for existing drugs and the testing of those drugs for additional indications; Product differentiation, or the clinical testing of a new drug against an existing rival drug to show that the new drug is superior; and Safety monitoring, or clinical trials (conducted after a drug has reached the market) that the FDA may require to detect side effects that may not have been observed in shorter trials when the drug was in development. In real terms, private investment in drug RandD among member firms of the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA), an industry trade association, was about $83 billion in 2019, up from about $5 billion in 1980 and $38 billion in 2000.1 Although those spending totals do not include spending by many smaller drug companies that do not belong to PhRMA, the trend is broadly representative of RandD spending by the industry as a whole.2 A survey of all U.S. pharmaceutical RandD spending (including that of smaller firms) by the National Science Foundation (NSF) reveals similar trends.3 Intellectual property protections are key to pharmaceutical innovation – laundry of list of studies – that solves access better, Ezeli and Cory 19: Stephen Ezell, vice president, global innovation policy, at the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation (ITIF). He focuses on science and technology policy, international competitiveness, trade, manufacturing, and services issues. and Nigel Cory, an associate director covering trade policy at the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation. He focuses on cross-border data flows, data governance, intellectual property, and how they each relate to digital trade and the broader digital economy. Cory has provided in-person testimony and written submissions and has published reports and op-eds relating to these issues in the United States, the European Union, Australia, China, India, and New Zealand, among other countries and regions, and he has completed research projects for international bodies such as the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation and the World Trade Organization. “The Way Forward for Intellectual Property Internationally” April 25, 2019, https://itif.org/publications/2019/04/25/way-forward-intellectual-property-internationallyLHP AV INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY UNDERPINS INNOVATION AND GROWTH Intellectual property rights arrangements are well recognized, going back to the Middle Ages, as enabling innovators to earn the returns necessary to continue to innovate and promote the availability of leading-edge technologies. Nobel laureate economist Douglas North, one of the foremost scholars of economic history, argues that the introduction of intellectual property rights had one of the most profound impacts on spurring economic growth in human history. North points out that average global economic growth rates for about one and a half millennia prior to the Industrial Revolution were essentially zero. Eighteenth-century elites in England had practically the same per capita income as their counterparts in third-century Rome.21 North has shown that the inflection point toward greater economic growth was the widespread development of patent systems in the 19th century.22 Gregory Clark, in his seminal book, Farewell to Alms: A Brief Economic History of the World, reached a similar conclusion that the introduction of IPRs was catalytic to turbo-charging global economic growth.23 Robust intellectual property rights spur innovative activity by increasing the appropriability of the returns to innovation, enabling innovators to capture enough of the benefits of their own innovative activity to justify taking considerable risks. By raising the private rate of return closer to the social rate of return, intellectual property rights address the knowledge-asset incentive problem, allowing inventors to realize economic gain from their inventions, thereby catalyzing investment in knowledge creation. If innovators know that most of the benefits from their innovations would go to others without compensation, they would be much less likely and capable of engaging in future innovations. In addition, as they capture a larger portion of the benefits of their innovative activity, innovating companies obtain the resources to pursue the next generation of innovative activities. IP thus produces a number of positive benefits, including: 1) creating powerful incentives for domestic innovation; 2) inducing knowledge spillovers that help others to innovate; 3) ensuring a country’s companies can focus on operating productively and innovating, instead of having to devote an undue amount of their time and resources to protecting their IP in an environment where it’s at risk; 4) promoting the international diffusion of technology, innovation, and knowhow; and 5) boosting a country’s levels of research and development, inbound foreign direct investment (FDI), and exports of goods and services.24 Robust intellectual property rights spur innovative activity by increasing the appropriability of the returns to innovation, enabling innovators to capture enough of the benefits of their own innovative activity to justify taking considerable risks. The evidence shows that strong intellectual property rights protections are vitally important for both developed and developing countries alike. As the definitive 2010 OECD review of the effects of intellectual property rights protections on developing countries, “Policy Complements to the Strengthening of IPRs in Developing Countries” found, “The results point to a tendency for IPR reform to deliver positive economic results.”25 The OECD study found that developing-country IPR reforms concerning patent protection have tended to deliver the most substantial results, although the results for copyright reform and trademark reform are also positive and significant. But to have the greatest impact on economic growth, IPR reforms must occur concomitantly with other positive complements, particularly ones regarding inputs for innovative and productive processes and the ability to conduct business. These include policies that influence the macro-environment for firms as well as the availability of resources (e.g., related to education), a country’s legal and institutional conditions, and fiscal incentives.26 The evidence shows that strong intellectual property rights protections are vitally important for both developed and developing countries alike. The following section details the broad swath of academic literature reviewing the relationships between IPR strengthening and trade, FDI, and technology transfer; IPR reform and innovation and RandD; and IPR reform and exports and industry growth, revealing the benefits of stronger IPR protections for developed and developing countries alike. IPRs Strengthen Trade, FDI, and Technology Transfer A wealth of academic research has documented the relationship between the strength of a country’s intellectual property protections and the extent of trade, foreign direct investment, and technology transfer it enjoys. Strengthening IPR protection has been shown to correlate with increased trade.27 For instance, Fink and Primo Braga found that IPR protection is positively associated with international trade flows, in particular of manufactured, non-fuel imports.28 Other studies have found a positive association between IPR protection and trade flows in high-technology products.29 Likewise, strengthening of IPR protection has also been connected with increased inflows of FDI. Cavazos Cepeda et al. found that a 1 percent increase in the protection of IPRs as measured by the Patent Rights Index (a measure of the strength of countries’ IPR regimes) is associated with a 2.8 percent increase in the inflow of FDI.30 Similarly, a 1 percent increase in trademark protection levels is associated with a 3.8 percent increase in incoming FDI; and a 1 percent increase in copyright protection yields a 6.8 percent increase in FDI.31 Moreover, the researchers identified a virtuous cycle between FDI and protection of IP, whereby improvements in the IPR environment are associated with improved economic performance—in particular with respect to FDI—and, in turn, further improvements in the IPR environment. Park and Lippoldt showed that stronger IPRs in developing countries are associated with an increase of technology-intensive FDI, while Awokuse and Yin provided a concrete example concerning the relationship of IPR protection in China to FDI inflows, concluding that IPR reforms in China have had a positive and significant effect on inbound FDI.32 There is also evidence that countries with similar levels of intellectual property protection trade more with one another.33 Academic research also signals a strong correlation between IPR and technology transfer. Lippoldt showed that IPR strengthening in countries—particularly with respect to patents—is associated with increased technology transfer via trade and investment.34 Research has revealed that a country’s level of intellectual property protection considerably affects whether foreign firms will transfer technology into it.35 That matters because the welfare gains from the importation of technology via innovative products, while differing across countries, can be substantial.36 For instance, foreign sources of technology account for over 90 percent of domestic productivity growth in all but a handful of countries.37 The research on this matter is clear and consistent. For example, a 1986 United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) study found that direct investment in new technology areas such as computer software, semiconductors, and biotechnology is supported by stronger intellectual property rights policy regimes.38 (However, as this report later clarifies, subsequent UNCTAD reports have lamentably taken a more skeptical view toward IP.) A 1989 study by the United Nations Commission on Transnational Corporations (UNCTC) found that weak IP rights reduce computer software direct investment; and a 1990 study by UNCTC found that weak IP rights reduce pharmaceutical investment.39 Mansfield conducted firm-level surveys and found that perceptions of strong IP rights abroad have a positive effect on incentives to transfer technologies abroad. Likewise, survey research by the World Bank’s International Finance Corporation found that, with variations by sector, country, and technology, at least 25 percent of American and Japanese high-tech firms refuse to directly invest, or enter into a joint venture, in developing countries with weak intellectual property rights; and a later study confirmed those survey findings with actual foreign direct investment data.40 And an Institute for International Economics study of World Bank data concluded that weak intellectual property rights reduce flows of all these commercial activities, regardless of nations’ levels of economic development.41 A wealth of academic research has documented the relationship between the strength of a country’s intellectual property protections and the extent of trade, foreign direct investment, and technology transfer it enjoys. Studies have also shown how the benefits of intellectual property extend to developing countries. Diwan and Rodrik demonstrated that stronger patent rights in developing countries give enterprises from developed countries a greater incentive to research and introduce technologies appropriate to developing countries.42 Similarly, Taylor showed that weak patent rights in developing countries lead enterprises from developed countries to introduce less-than-best-practice technologies to developing countries.43 Interestingly, the relationship goes in both directions. Branstetter and Saggi showed that strengthened IPR protection not only improves the investment climate in the implementing countries, but also leads to increased FDI in the country producing the original innovation.44 They concluded that IPR reform in the “global South” (e.g., developing countries) may be associated with FDI increases in the “global North” (e.g., developed countries). As northern firms shift their production to southern affiliates, this FDI accelerates southern industrial development, creating a cyclical feedback mechanism that also benefits the North. Another study by Liao and Wong, which focused on firm-level analysis, highlights the inter-relationship of IPR reform in developed and developing countries. Their study concluded that developing countries can entice technology transfer from the North by providing IPR protection for incoming products (although they note there is a need for redoubled RandD efforts in developed countries to spur needed innovations).45 IPRs Strengthen Innovation Intellectual property rights power innovation. For instance, analyzing the level of intellectual property protections (via the World Economic Forum’s Global Competitiveness reports) and creative outputs (via the Global Innovation Index) shows that counties with stronger IP protection have more creative outputs (in terms of intangible assets and creative goods and services in a nation’s media, printing and publishing, and entertainment industries, including online), even at varying levels of development.46 IPR reforms also introduce strong incentives for domestic innovation. Sherwood, using case studies from 18 developing countries, concluded that poor provision of intellectual property rights deters local innovation and risk-taking.47 In contrast, IPR reform has been associated with increased innovative activity, as measured by domestic patent filings, albeit with some variation across countries and sectors.48 For example, Ryan, in a study of biomedical innovations and patent reform in Brazil, found that patents provided incentives for innovation investments and facilitated the functioning of technology markets.49 Park and Lippoldt also observed that the provision of adequate protection for IPRs can help to stimulate local innovation, in some cases building on the transfer of technologies that provide inputs and spillovers.50 In other words, local innovators are introduced to technologies first through the technology transfer that takes place in an environment wherein protection of IPRs is assured; then, they may build on those ideas to create an evolved product or develop alternate approaches (i.e., to innovate). Related research finds that trade in technology—through channels including imports, foreign direct investment, and technology licensing—improves the quality of developing-country innovation by increasing the pool of ideas and efficiency of innovation by encouraging the division of innovative labor and specialization.51 However, Maskus notes that without protection from potential abuse of their newly developed technologies, foreign enterprises may be less willing to reveal technical information associated with their innovations.52 The protection of patents and trade secrets provides necessary legal assurances for firms wishing to reveal proprietary characteristics of technologies to subsidiaries and licensees via contracts. Counties with stronger IP protection have more creative outputs (in terms of intangible assets and creative goods and services in a nation’s media, printing and publishing, and entertainment industries, including online), even at varying levels of development. The relationship between IPR rights and innovation can also be seen in studies of how the introduction of stronger IPR laws, with regard to patents, copyrights, and trademarks, affect RandD activity in an economy. Studies by Varsakelis and by Kanwar and Evenson found that RandD to GDP ratios are positively related to the strength of patent rights, and are conditional on other factors.53 Cavazos Cepeda et al. found a positive influence of IPRs on the level of RandD in an economy, with each 1 percent increase in the level of protection of IPRs in an economy (as measured by improvements to a country’s score in the Patent Rights Index) equating to, on average, a 0.7 percent increase in the domestic level of RandD.54 Likewise, a 1 percent increase in copyright protection was associated with a 3.3 percent increase in domestic RandD. Similarly, when trademark protection increased by 1 percent, there was an associated RandD increase of 1.4 percent. As the authors concluded, “Increases in the protection of the IPRs carried economic benefits in the form of higher inflows of FDI, and increases in the levels of both domestically conducted RandD and service imports as measured by licensing fees.”55 As Jackson summarized, regarding the relationship between IPR reform and both innovation and RandD, and FDI, “In addition to spurring domestic innovation, strong intellectual property rights can increase incentives for foreign direct investment which in turn also leads to economic growth.”56 BOX 1: INNOVATE FOR HEALTH: IP IS NOT THE PROBLEM, BUT PART OF THE SOLUTION Many opponents of robust IPR rights view them as antithetical to the interests of developing countries in terms of access to medicines or the provision of national health care services. Yet the reality is that stronger IPR rights in developing nations actually unleash the power of developing-country innovators to contribute to solving health challenges both in their own nations and across the global economy. First, opponents of IP fail to recognize that intellectual property rights matter for health care innovation in emerging economies. An Information Technology and Innovation Foundation (ITIF) and George Mason University Center for Intellectual Property Protection report, “How Innovators Are Solving Global Health Challenges,” provides 25 case studies that show innovators in developing countries relying on IP to invent and bring solutions to market.57 The 25 case studies revealed a number of key themes, including that there is opportunity in adapting health care interventions for developing-country environments where resources and infrastructure are scarce, and that local innovation and IP can contribute substantially toward providing both affordable and robust tests for diagnosing diseases and affordable interventions to meet basic needs in challenging environments. Second, opponents of IP tend to ignore broader systemic issues that contribute to poor health care outcomes in developing countries. While cost is a central factor for policymakers in all countries, given resource scarcity, these trade-offs are not unique to health. The greater the resource scarcity, the greater the need for innovation. One of the biggest challenges policymakers and innovators in developing countries confront again and again is scarcity—in access to trained professionals, in transportation, and in other infrastructure. For example, reports estimate that as many as 1 billion people lack access to essential health care because of a shortage of trained health professionals.58 A 2014 World Health Organization study estimated a shortage of 7 million public health care workers, with that number expected to rise to 13 million by 2035.59 More than 80 countries currently fail to meet the basic threshold of 23 skilled health professionals per 10,000 citizens.60 The challenge is even more daunting when it comes to specialists. For instance, Cameroon has fewer than 50 cardiologists supporting a population of over 23 million citizens.61 And Ethiopia, a country of some 90 million residents, is served by a single radiation-treatment center located in the capital of Addis Ababa.62 In other instances, individuals lack access to essential medicines, with cost being a relatively small part of the problem. For instance, in 2014, researchers at the University of Utrecht in the Netherlands found that, on average, essential medicines are available in public-sector facilities in developing countries only 40 percent of the time.63 Again, the cost of medicines is far from the most serious problem in the provision of health care services in developing nations. Indeed, the vast majority of drugs—at least 95 percent—on the World Health Organization’s Essential Medicines list are off-patent, and thus potentially available in generic versions.64 The problem, in much larger part, stems from countries’ underdeveloped health systems and the fact that many people live in rural areas far from care. Stronger IP rights create an environment wherein entrepreneurs can innovate to meet health challenges in their own nations, the benefits thereof spilling over to benefit the entire international community. IPRs Strengthen Exports and Industry Growth Academic research has also found that stronger IPR protections support exports from developing countries and faster growth rates of certain industries. Yang and Kuo argue that stronger IPR protection improves the export performance of firms benefitting from technology transfer. And in their research, Cavazos Cepeda et al. found that trademark protection has a statistically significant association in relation to the export turnover, sales, and total assets of firms studied. They also found a significant association between copyrights and export turnover. Moreover, they found “a positive influence of patent right protection on export turnover (e.g., sales) under certain specifications with respect to complementary policies.”65 In cross-country studies, researchers have found that stronger patent rights are associated with faster company growth in IP-intensive industries such as pharmaceuticals. In fact, during the early 1990s, a one-standard-deviation increase in patent rights was associated with an increase in firm growth of 0.69 percent (an advantage amounting to nearly one-fifth of the average industry growth rate of 3.7 percent).66 Consequences of Countries Not Enacting Robust IPR Protections and Enforcement Nations that have not implemented—or do not enforce—robust intellectual property rights protections end up harming their economic development in at least three principle ways. First, they deter future innovative activity. Second, they discourage trade and foreign direct investment, which only hurts their own consumers and businesses, by both limiting their choices and inhibiting their enterprises’ ability to access best-of-breed technologies that are vital to boosting domestic productivity. Third, in countries with weak IP protections, firms are forced to invest undue amounts of resources in protection rather than invention. Ironically, developing countries’ own economic development opportunities and intellectual property development potential are inhibited by their own weak intellectual property protections. For instance, the lack of effective protection for intellectual property rights in China has limited the introduction of advanced technology and innovation investments by foreign companies, thereby reducing potential benefits to local innovation capacity.67 As Cavazos Cepeda et al. found in a case study of IPR protections in that economy, “China has made progress in strengthening the protection of intellectual property over the past two decades, as attested to by indicators such as the Patent Rights Index…. However, uncertainty around the protection of intellectual property remains an important deterrent for foreign as well as domestic firms engaging in RandD-related activities.”68 Ironically, developing countries’ own economic development opportunities and intellectual property development potential are inhibited by their own weak intellectual property protections. Pharma Innovation prevents Extinction – checks new diseases. Engelhardt 8, H. Tristram. Innovation and the pharmaceutical industry: critical reflections on the virtues of profit. M and M Scrivener Press, 2008 (doctorate in philosophy (University of Texas at Austin), M.D. (Tulane University), professor of philosophy (Rice University), and professor emeritus at Baylor College of Medicine) Many are suspicious of, or indeed jealous of, the good fortune of others. Even when profit is gained in the market without fraud and with the consent of all buying and selling goods and services, there is a sense on the part of some that something is wrong if considerable profit is secured. There is even a sense that good fortune in the market, especially if it is very good fortune, is unfair. One might think of such rhetorically disparaging terms as "wind-fall profits". There is also a suspicion of the pursuit of profit because it is often embraced not just because of the material benefits it sought, but because of the hierarchical satisfaction of being more affluent than others. The pursuit of profit in the pharmaceutical and medical-device industries is tor many in particular morally dubious because it is acquired from those who have the bad fortune to be diseased or disabled. Although the suspicion of profit is not well-founded, this suspicion is a major moral and public-policy challenge. Profit in the market for the pharmaceutical and medical-device industries is to be celebrated. This is the case, in that if one is of the view (1) that the presence of additional resources for research and development spurs innovation in the development of pharmaceuticals and med-ical devices (i.e., if one is of the view that the allure of profit is one of the most effective ways not only to acquire resources but productively to direct human energies in their use), (2) that given the limits of altruism and of the willingness of persons to be taxed, the possibility of profits is necessary to secure such resources, (3) that the allure of profits also tends to enhance the creative use of available resources in the pursuit of phar-maceutical and medical-device innovation, and (4) if one judges it to be the case that such innovation is both necessary to maintain the human species in an ever-changing and always dangerous environment in which new microbial and other threats may at any time emerge to threaten human well-being, if not survival (i.e., that such innovation is necessary to prevent increases in morbidity and mortality risks), as well as (5) in order generally to decrease morbidity and mortality risks in the future, it then follows (6) that one should be concerned regarding any policies that decrease the amount of resources and energies available to encourage such innovation. One should indeed be of the view that the possibilities for profit, all things being equal, should be highest in the pharmaceutical and medical-device industries. Yet, there is a suspicion regarding the pursuit of profit in medicine and especially in the pharmaceutical and medical-device industries.
9/18/21
Innovation DA v3
Tournament: Yale | Round: 5 | Opponent: Durham JH | Judge: Eva Lamberson Tournament: Yale | Round: 4 | Opponent: American Heritage Broward JW | Judge: John Paul Leonardi SO21 – DA – Innovation (1:05-1:15) Pharma innovation is strong now – patent incentives are key to maintaining progress, Austin and Hayford 21: David Austin, an Analyst in CBO’s Microeconomics Studies Division and Tamara Hayford, a principal analyst in the Health, Retirement, and Long-Term Analysis Division, Congressional Budget Office prepared the report with guidance from Joseph Kile, Lyle Nelson, and Julie Topoleski. Christopher Adams, Pranav Bhandarkar, and David Wylie (formerly of CBO) contributed to the analysis., April 2021, “Research and Development in the Pharmaceutical Industry” https://www.cbo.gov/publication/57126 LHP AV DOA: 9/8/21 At a Glance This report examines research and development (RandD) by the pharmaceutical industry. Spending on RandD and Its Results. Spending on RandD and the introduction of new drugs have both increased in the past two decades. In 2019, the pharmaceutical industry spent $83 billion dollars on RandD. Adjusted for inflation, that amount is about 10 times what the industry spent per year in the 1980s. Between 2010 and 2019, the number of new drugs approved for sale increased by 60 percent compared with the previous decade, with a peak of 59 new drugs approved in 2018. Factors Influencing RandD Spending. The amount of money that drug companies devote to RandD is determined by the amount of revenue they expect to earn from a new drug, the expected cost of developing that drug, and policies that influence the supply of and demand for drugs. The expected lifetime global revenues of a new drug depends on the prices that companies expect to charge for the drug in different markets around the world, the volume of sales they anticipate at those prices, and the likelihood the drug-development effort will succeed. The expected cost to develop a new drug—including capital costs and expenditures on drugs that fail to reach the market—has been estimated to range from less than $1 billion to more than $2 billion. The federal government influences the amount of private spending on RandD through programs (such as Medicare) that increase the demand for prescription drugs, through policies (such as spending for basic research and regulations on what must be demonstrated in clinical trials) that affect the supply of new drugs, and through policies (such as recommendations for vaccines) that affect both supply and demand. Notes Research and Development in the Pharmaceutical Industry Summary Every year, the U.S. pharmaceutical industry develops a variety of new drugs that provide valuable medical benefits. Many of those drugs are expensive and contribute to rising health care costs for the private sector and the federal government. Policymakers have considered policies that would lower drug prices and reduce federal drug expenditures. Such policies would probably reduce the industry’s incentive to develop new drugs. In this report, the Congressional Budget Office assesses trends in spending for drug research and development (RandD) and the introduction of new drugs. CBO also examines factors that determine how much drug companies spend on RandD: expected global revenues from a new drug; cost to develop a new drug; and federal policies that affect the demand for drug therapies, the supply of new drugs, or both. What Are Recent Trends in Pharmaceutical RandD and New Drug Approvals? The pharmaceutical industry devoted $83 billion to RandD expenditures in 2019. Those expenditures covered a variety of activities, including discovering and testing new drugs, developing incremental innovations such as product extensions, and clinical testing for safety-monitoring or marketing purposes. That amount is about 10 times what the industry spent per year in the 1980s, after adjusting for the effects of inflation. The share of revenues that drug companies devote to RandD has also grown: On average, pharmaceutical companies spent about one-quarter of their revenues (net of expenses and buyer rebates) on RandD expenses in 2019, which is almost twice as large a share of revenues as they spent in 2000. That revenue share is larger than that for other knowledge-based industries, such as semiconductors, technology hardware, and software. The number of new drugs approved each year has also grown over the past decade. On average, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved 38 new drugs per year from 2010 through 2019 (with a peak of 59 in 2018), which is 60 percent more than the yearly average over the previous decade. Many of the drugs that have been approved in recent years are “specialty drugs.” Specialty drugs generally treat chronic, complex, or rare conditions, and they may also require special handling or monitoring of patients. Many specialty drugs are biologics (large-molecule drugs based on living cell lines), which are costly to develop, hard to imitate, and frequently have high prices. Previously, most drugs were small-molecule drugs based on chemical compounds. Even while they were under patent, those drugs had lower prices than recent specialty drugs have. Information about the kinds of drugs in current clinical trials indicates that much of the industry’s innovative activity is focused on specialty drugs that would provide new cancer therapies and treatments for nervous-system disorders, such as Alzheimer’s disease and Parkinson’s disease. What Factors Influence Spending for RandD? Drug companies’ RandD spending decisions depend on three main factors: Anticipated lifetime global revenues from a new drug, Expected costs to develop a new drug, and Policies and programs that influence the supply of and demand for prescription drugs. Various considerations inform companies’ expectations about a drug’s revenue stream, including the anticipated prices it could command in different markets around the world and the expected global sales volume at those prices (given the number of people who might use the drug). The prices and sales volumes of existing drugs provide information about consumers’ and insurance plans’ willingness to pay for drug treatments. Importantly, when drug companies set the prices of a new drug, they do so to maximize future revenues net of manufacturing and distribution costs. A drug’s sunk RandD costs—that is, the costs already incurred in developing that drug—do not influence its price. Developing new drugs is a costly and uncertain process, and many potential drugs never make it to market. Only about 12 percent of drugs entering clinical trials are ultimately approved for introduction by the FDA. In recent studies, estimates of the average RandD cost per new drug range from less than $1 billion to more than $2 billion per drug. Those estimates include the costs of both laboratory research and clinical trials of successful new drugs as well as expenditures on drugs that do not make it past the laboratory-development stage, that enter clinical trials but fail in those trials or are withdrawn by the drugmaker for business reasons, or that are not approved by the FDA. Those estimates also include the company’s capital costs—the value of other forgone investments—incurred during the RandD process. Such costs can make up a substantial share of the average total cost of developing a new drug. The development process often takes a decade or more, and during that time the company does not receive a financial return on its investment in developing that drug. The federal government affects RandD decisions in three ways. First, it increases demand for prescription drugs, which encourages new drug development, by fully or partially subsidizing the purchase of prescription drugs through a variety of federal programs (including Medicare and Medicaid) and by providing tax preferences for employment-based health insurance. Second, the federal government increases the supply of new drugs. It funds basic biomedical research that provides a scientific foundation for the development of new drugs by private industry. Additionally, tax credits—both those available to all types of companies and those available to drug companies for developing treatments of uncommon diseases—provide incentives to invest in RandD. Similarly, deductions for RandD investment can be used to reduce tax liabilities immediately rather than over the life of that investment. Finally, the patent system and certain statutory provisions that delay FDA approval of generic drugs provide pharmaceutical companies with a period of market exclusivity, when competition is legally restricted. During that time, they can maintain higher prices on a patented product than they otherwise could, which makes new drugs more profitable and thereby increases drug companies’ incentives to invest in RandD. Third, some federal policies affect the number of new drugs by influencing both demand and supply. For example, federal recommendations for specific vaccines increase the demand for those vaccines and provide an incentive for drug companies to develop new ones. Additionally, federal regulatory policies that influence returns on drug RandD can bring about increases or decreases in both the supply of and demand for new drugs. Trends in RandD Spending and New Drug Development Private spending on pharmaceutical RandD and the approval of new drugs have both increased markedly in recent years, resuming a decades-long trend that was interrupted in 2008 as generic versions of some top-selling drugs became available and as the 2007–2009 recession occurred. In particular, spending on drug RandD increased by nearly 50 percent between 2015 and 2019. Many of the drugs approved in recent years are high-priced specialty drugs for relatively small numbers of potential patients. By contrast, the top-selling drugs of the 1990s were lower-cost drugs with large patient populations. RandD Spending RandD spending in the pharmaceutical industry covers a variety of activities, including the following: Invention, or research and discovery of new drugs; Development, or clinical testing, preparation and submission of applications for FDA approval, and design of production processes for new drugs; Incremental innovation, including the development of new dosages and delivery mechanisms for existing drugs and the testing of those drugs for additional indications; Product differentiation, or the clinical testing of a new drug against an existing rival drug to show that the new drug is superior; and Safety monitoring, or clinical trials (conducted after a drug has reached the market) that the FDA may require to detect side effects that may not have been observed in shorter trials when the drug was in development. In real terms, private investment in drug RandD among member firms of the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA), an industry trade association, was about $83 billion in 2019, up from about $5 billion in 1980 and $38 billion in 2000.1 Although those spending totals do not include spending by many smaller drug companies that do not belong to PhRMA, the trend is broadly representative of RandD spending by the industry as a whole.2 A survey of all U.S. pharmaceutical RandD spending (including that of smaller firms) by the National Science Foundation (NSF) reveals similar trends.3 Intellectual property protections are key to pharmaceutical innovation – laundry of list of studies – that solves access better, Ezeli and Cory 19: Stephen Ezell, vice president, global innovation policy, at the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation (ITIF). He focuses on science and technology policy, international competitiveness, trade, manufacturing, and services issues. and Nigel Cory, an associate director covering trade policy at the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation. He focuses on cross-border data flows, data governance, intellectual property, and how they each relate to digital trade and the broader digital economy. Cory has provided in-person testimony and written submissions and has published reports and op-eds relating to these issues in the United States, the European Union, Australia, China, India, and New Zealand, among other countries and regions, and he has completed research projects for international bodies such as the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation and the World Trade Organization. “The Way Forward for Intellectual Property Internationally” April 25, 2019, https://itif.org/publications/2019/04/25/way-forward-intellectual-property-internationally LHP AV INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY UNDERPINS INNOVATION AND GROWTH Intellectual property rights arrangements are well recognized, going back to the Middle Ages, as enabling innovators to earn the returns necessary to continue to innovate and promote the availability of leading-edge technologies. Nobel laureate economist Douglas North, one of the foremost scholars of economic history, argues that the introduction of intellectual property rights had one of the most profound impacts on spurring economic growth in human history. North points out that average global economic growth rates for about one and a half millennia prior to the Industrial Revolution were essentially zero. Eighteenth-century elites in England had practically the same per capita income as their counterparts in third-century Rome.21 North has shown that the inflection point toward greater economic growth was the widespread development of patent systems in the 19th century.22 Gregory Clark, in his seminal book, Farewell to Alms: A Brief Economic History of the World, reached a similar conclusion that the introduction of IPRs was catalytic to turbo-charging global economic growth.23 Robust intellectual property rights spur innovative activity by increasing the appropriability of the returns to innovation, enabling innovators to capture enough of the benefits of their own innovative activity to justify taking considerable risks. By raising the private rate of return closer to the social rate of return, intellectual property rights address the knowledge-asset incentive problem, allowing inventors to realize economic gain from their inventions, thereby catalyzing investment in knowledge creation. If innovators know that most of the benefits from their innovations would go to others without compensation, they would be much less likely and capable of engaging in future innovations. In addition, as they capture a larger portion of the benefits of their innovative activity, innovating companies obtain the resources to pursue the next generation of innovative activities. IP thus produces a number of positive benefits, including: 1) creating powerful incentives for domestic innovation; 2) inducing knowledge spillovers that help others to innovate; 3) ensuring a country’s companies can focus on operating productively and innovating, instead of having to devote an undue amount of their time and resources to protecting their IP in an environment where it’s at risk; 4) promoting the international diffusion of technology, innovation, and knowhow; and 5) boosting a country’s levels of research and development, inbound foreign direct investment (FDI), and exports of goods and services.24 Robust intellectual property rights spur innovative activity by increasing the appropriability of the returns to innovation, enabling innovators to capture enough of the benefits of their own innovative activity to justify taking considerable risks. The evidence shows that strong intellectual property rights protections are vitally important for both developed and developing countries alike. As the definitive 2010 OECD review of the effects of intellectual property rights protections on developing countries, “Policy Complements to the Strengthening of IPRs in Developing Countries” found, “The results point to a tendency for IPR reform to deliver positive economic results.”25 The OECD study found that developing-country IPR reforms concerning patent protection have tended to deliver the most substantial results, although the results for copyright reform and trademark reform are also positive and significant. But to have the greatest impact on economic growth, IPR reforms must occur concomitantly with other positive complements, particularly ones regarding inputs for innovative and productive processes and the ability to conduct business. These include policies that influence the macro-environment for firms as well as the availability of resources (e.g., related to education), a country’s legal and institutional conditions, and fiscal incentives.26 The evidence shows that strong intellectual property rights protections are vitally important for both developed and developing countries alike. The following section details the broad swath of academic literature reviewing the relationships between IPR strengthening and trade, FDI, and technology transfer; IPR reform and innovation and RandD; and IPR reform and exports and industry growth, revealing the benefits of stronger IPR protections for developed and developing countries alike. IPRs Strengthen Trade, FDI, and Technology Transfer A wealth of academic research has documented the relationship between the strength of a country’s intellectual property protections and the extent of trade, foreign direct investment, and technology transfer it enjoys. Strengthening IPR protection has been shown to correlate with increased trade.27 For instance, Fink and Primo Braga found that IPR protection is positively associated with international trade flows, in particular of manufactured, non-fuel imports.28 Other studies have found a positive association between IPR protection and trade flows in high-technology products.29 Likewise, strengthening of IPR protection has also been connected with increased inflows of FDI. Cavazos Cepeda et al. found that a 1 percent increase in the protection of IPRs as measured by the Patent Rights Index (a measure of the strength of countries’ IPR regimes) is associated with a 2.8 percent increase in the inflow of FDI.30 Similarly, a 1 percent increase in trademark protection levels is associated with a 3.8 percent increase in incoming FDI; and a 1 percent increase in copyright protection yields a 6.8 percent increase in FDI.31 Moreover, the researchers identified a virtuous cycle between FDI and protection of IP, whereby improvements in the IPR environment are associated with improved economic performance—in particular with respect to FDI—and, in turn, further improvements in the IPR environment. Park and Lippoldt showed that stronger IPRs in developing countries are associated with an increase of technology-intensive FDI, while Awokuse and Yin provided a concrete example concerning the relationship of IPR protection in China to FDI inflows, concluding that IPR reforms in China have had a positive and significant effect on inbound FDI.32 There is also evidence that countries with similar levels of intellectual property protection trade more with one another.33 Academic research also signals a strong correlation between IPR and technology transfer. Lippoldt showed that IPR strengthening in countries—particularly with respect to patents—is associated with increased technology transfer via trade and investment.34 Research has revealed that a country’s level of intellectual property protection considerably affects whether foreign firms will transfer technology into it.35 That matters because the welfare gains from the importation of technology via innovative products, while differing across countries, can be substantial.36 For instance, foreign sources of technology account for over 90 percent of domestic productivity growth in all but a handful of countries.37 The research on this matter is clear and consistent. For example, a 1986 United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) study found that direct investment in new technology areas such as computer software, semiconductors, and biotechnology is supported by stronger intellectual property rights policy regimes.38 (However, as this report later clarifies, subsequent UNCTAD reports have lamentably taken a more skeptical view toward IP.) A 1989 study by the United Nations Commission on Transnational Corporations (UNCTC) found that weak IP rights reduce computer software direct investment; and a 1990 study by UNCTC found that weak IP rights reduce pharmaceutical investment.39 Mansfield conducted firm-level surveys and found that perceptions of strong IP rights abroad have a positive effect on incentives to transfer technologies abroad. Likewise, survey research by the World Bank’s International Finance Corporation found that, with variations by sector, country, and technology, at least 25 percent of American and Japanese high-tech firms refuse to directly invest, or enter into a joint venture, in developing countries with weak intellectual property rights; and a later study confirmed those survey findings with actual foreign direct investment data.40 And an Institute for International Economics study of World Bank data concluded that weak intellectual property rights reduce flows of all these commercial activities, regardless of nations’ levels of economic development.41 A wealth of academic research has documented the relationship between the strength of a country’s intellectual property protections and the extent of trade, foreign direct investment, and technology transfer it enjoys. Studies have also shown how the benefits of intellectual property extend to developing countries. Diwan and Rodrik demonstrated that stronger patent rights in developing countries give enterprises from developed countries a greater incentive to research and introduce technologies appropriate to developing countries.42 Similarly, Taylor showed that weak patent rights in developing countries lead enterprises from developed countries to introduce less-than-best-practice technologies to developing countries.43 Interestingly, the relationship goes in both directions. Branstetter and Saggi showed that strengthened IPR protection not only improves the investment climate in the implementing countries, but also leads to increased FDI in the country producing the original innovation.44 They concluded that IPR reform in the “global South” (e.g., developing countries) may be associated with FDI increases in the “global North” (e.g., developed countries). As northern firms shift their production to southern affiliates, this FDI accelerates southern industrial development, creating a cyclical feedback mechanism that also benefits the North. Another study by Liao and Wong, which focused on firm-level analysis, highlights the inter-relationship of IPR reform in developed and developing countries. Their study concluded that developing countries can entice technology transfer from the North by providing IPR protection for incoming products (although they note there is a need for redoubled RandD efforts in developed countries to spur needed innovations).45 IPRs Strengthen Innovation Intellectual property rights power innovation. For instance, analyzing the level of intellectual property protections (via the World Economic Forum’s Global Competitiveness reports) and creative outputs (via the Global Innovation Index) shows that counties with stronger IP protection have more creative outputs (in terms of intangible assets and creative goods and services in a nation’s media, printing and publishing, and entertainment industries, including online), even at varying levels of development.46 IPR reforms also introduce strong incentives for domestic innovation. Sherwood, using case studies from 18 developing countries, concluded that poor provision of intellectual property rights deters local innovation and risk-taking.47 In contrast, IPR reform has been associated with increased innovative activity, as measured by domestic patent filings, albeit with some variation across countries and sectors.48 For example, Ryan, in a study of biomedical innovations and patent reform in Brazil, found that patents provided incentives for innovation investments and facilitated the functioning of technology markets.49 Park and Lippoldt also observed that the provision of adequate protection for IPRs can help to stimulate local innovation, in some cases building on the transfer of technologies that provide inputs and spillovers.50 In other words, local innovators are introduced to technologies first through the technology transfer that takes place in an environment wherein protection of IPRs is assured; then, they may build on those ideas to create an evolved product or develop alternate approaches (i.e., to innovate). Related research finds that trade in technology—through channels including imports, foreign direct investment, and technology licensing—improves the quality of developing-country innovation by increasing the pool of ideas and efficiency of innovation by encouraging the division of innovative labor and specialization.51 However, Maskus notes that without protection from potential abuse of their newly developed technologies, foreign enterprises may be less willing to reveal technical information associated with their innovations.52 The protection of patents and trade secrets provides necessary legal assurances for firms wishing to reveal proprietary characteristics of technologies to subsidiaries and licensees via contracts. Counties with stronger IP protection have more creative outputs (in terms of intangible assets and creative goods and services in a nation’s media, printing and publishing, and entertainment industries, including online), even at varying levels of development. The relationship between IPR rights and innovation can also be seen in studies of how the introduction of stronger IPR laws, with regard to patents, copyrights, and trademarks, affect RandD activity in an economy. Studies by Varsakelis and by Kanwar and Evenson found that RandD to GDP ratios are positively related to the strength of patent rights, and are conditional on other factors.53 Cavazos Cepeda et al. found a positive influence of IPRs on the level of RandD in an economy, with each 1 percent increase in the level of protection of IPRs in an economy (as measured by improvements to a country’s score in the Patent Rights Index) equating to, on average, a 0.7 percent increase in the domestic level of RandD.54 Likewise, a 1 percent increase in copyright protection was associated with a 3.3 percent increase in domestic RandD. Similarly, when trademark protection increased by 1 percent, there was an associated RandD increase of 1.4 percent. As the authors concluded, “Increases in the protection of the IPRs carried economic benefits in the form of higher inflows of FDI, and increases in the levels of both domestically conducted RandD and service imports as measured by licensing fees.”55 As Jackson summarized, regarding the relationship between IPR reform and both innovation and RandD, and FDI, “In addition to spurring domestic innovation, strong intellectual property rights can increase incentives for foreign direct investment which in turn also leads to economic growth.”56 BOX 1: INNOVATE FOR HEALTH: IP IS NOT THE PROBLEM, BUT PART OF THE SOLUTION Many opponents of robust IPR rights view them as antithetical to the interests of developing countries in terms of access to medicines or the provision of national health care services. Yet the reality is that stronger IPR rights in developing nations actually unleash the power of developing-country innovators to contribute to solving health challenges both in their own nations and across the global economy. First, opponents of IP fail to recognize that intellectual property rights matter for health care innovation in emerging economies. An Information Technology and Innovation Foundation (ITIF) and George Mason University Center for Intellectual Property Protection report, “How Innovators Are Solving Global Health Challenges,” provides 25 case studies that show innovators in developing countries relying on IP to invent and bring solutions to market.57 The 25 case studies revealed a number of key themes, including that there is opportunity in adapting health care interventions for developing-country environments where resources and infrastructure are scarce, and that local innovation and IP can contribute substantially toward providing both affordable and robust tests for diagnosing diseases and affordable interventions to meet basic needs in challenging environments. Second, opponents of IP tend to ignore broader systemic issues that contribute to poor health care outcomes in developing countries. While cost is a central factor for policymakers in all countries, given resource scarcity, these trade-offs are not unique to health. The greater the resource scarcity, the greater the need for innovation. One of the biggest challenges policymakers and innovators in developing countries confront again and again is scarcity—in access to trained professionals, in transportation, and in other infrastructure. For example, reports estimate that as many as 1 billion people lack access to essential health care because of a shortage of trained health professionals.58 A 2014 World Health Organization study estimated a shortage of 7 million public health care workers, with that number expected to rise to 13 million by 2035.59 More than 80 countries currently fail to meet the basic threshold of 23 skilled health professionals per 10,000 citizens.60 The challenge is even more daunting when it comes to specialists. For instance, Cameroon has fewer than 50 cardiologists supporting a population of over 23 million citizens.61 And Ethiopia, a country of some 90 million residents, is served by a single radiation-treatment center located in the capital of Addis Ababa.62 In other instances, individuals lack access to essential medicines, with cost being a relatively small part of the problem. For instance, in 2014, researchers at the University of Utrecht in the Netherlands found that, on average, essential medicines are available in public-sector facilities in developing countries only 40 percent of the time.63 Again, the cost of medicines is far from the most serious problem in the provision of health care services in developing nations. Indeed, the vast majority of drugs—at least 95 percent—on the World Health Organization’s Essential Medicines list are off-patent, and thus potentially available in generic versions.64 The problem, in much larger part, stems from countries’ underdeveloped health systems and the fact that many people live in rural areas far from care. Stronger IP rights create an environment wherein entrepreneurs can innovate to meet health challenges in their own nations, the benefits thereof spilling over to benefit the entire international community. IPRs Strengthen Exports and Industry Growth Academic research has also found that stronger IPR protections support exports from developing countries and faster growth rates of certain industries. Yang and Kuo argue that stronger IPR protection improves the export performance of firms benefitting from technology transfer. And in their research, Cavazos Cepeda et al. found that trademark protection has a statistically significant association in relation to the export turnover, sales, and total assets of firms studied. They also found a significant association between copyrights and export turnover. Moreover, they found “a positive influence of patent right protection on export turnover (e.g., sales) under certain specifications with respect to complementary policies.”65 In cross-country studies, researchers have found that stronger patent rights are associated with faster company growth in IP-intensive industries such as pharmaceuticals. In fact, during the early 1990s, a one-standard-deviation increase in patent rights was associated with an increase in firm growth of 0.69 percent (an advantage amounting to nearly one-fifth of the average industry growth rate of 3.7 percent).66 Consequences of Countries Not Enacting Robust IPR Protections and Enforcement Nations that have not implemented—or do not enforce—robust intellectual property rights protections end up harming their economic development in at least three principle ways. First, they deter future innovative activity. Second, they discourage trade and foreign direct investment, which only hurts their own consumers and businesses, by both limiting their choices and inhibiting their enterprises’ ability to access best-of-breed technologies that are vital to boosting domestic productivity. Third, in countries with weak IP protections, firms are forced to invest undue amounts of resources in protection rather than invention. Ironically, developing countries’ own economic development opportunities and intellectual property development potential are inhibited by their own weak intellectual property protections. For instance, the lack of effective protection for intellectual property rights in China has limited the introduction of advanced technology and innovation investments by foreign companies, thereby reducing potential benefits to local innovation capacity.67 As Cavazos Cepeda et al. found in a case study of IPR protections in that economy, “China has made progress in strengthening the protection of intellectual property over the past two decades, as attested to by indicators such as the Patent Rights Index…. However, uncertainty around the protection of intellectual property remains an important deterrent for foreign as well as domestic firms engaging in RandD-related activities.”68 Ironically, developing countries’ own economic development opportunities and intellectual property development potential are inhibited by their own weak intellectual property protections. Pharma Innovation prevents Extinction – checks new diseases. Engelhardt 8, H. Tristram. Innovation and the pharmaceutical industry: critical reflections on the virtues of profit. M and M Scrivener Press, 2008 (doctorate in philosophy (University of Texas at Austin), M.D. (Tulane University), professor of philosophy (Rice University), and professor emeritus at Baylor College of Medicine) Many are suspicious of, or indeed jealous of, the good fortune of others. Even when profit is gained in the market without fraud and with the consent of all buying and selling goods and services, there is a sense on the part of some that something is wrong if considerable profit is secured. There is even a sense that good fortune in the market, especially if it is very good fortune, is unfair. One might think of such rhetorically disparaging terms as "wind-fall profits". There is also a suspicion of the pursuit of profit because it is often embraced not just because of the material benefits it sought, but because of the hierarchical satisfaction of being more affluent than others. The pursuit of profit in the pharmaceutical and medical-device industries is tor many in particular morally dubious because it is acquired from those who have the bad fortune to be diseased or disabled. Although the suspicion of profit is not well-founded, this suspicion is a major moral and public-policy challenge. Profit in the market for the pharmaceutical and medical-device industries is to be celebrated. This is the case, in that if one is of the view (1) that the presence of additional resources for research and development spurs innovation in the development of pharmaceuticals and med-ical devices (i.e., if one is of the view that the allure of profit is one of the most effective ways not only to acquire resources but productively to direct human energies in their use), (2) that given the limits of altruism and of the willingness of persons to be taxed, the possibility of profits is necessary to secure such resources, (3) that the allure of profits also tends to enhance the creative use of available resources in the pursuit of phar-maceutical and medical-device innovation, and (4) if one judges it to be the case that such innovation is both necessary to maintain the human species in an ever-changing and always dangerous environment in which new microbial and other threats may at any time emerge to threaten human well-being, if not survival (i.e., that such innovation is necessary to prevent increases in morbidity and mortality risks), as well as (5) in order generally to decrease morbidity and mortality risks in the future, it then follows (6) that one should be concerned regarding any policies that decrease the amount of resources and energies available to encourage such innovation. One should indeed be of the view that the possibilities for profit, all things being equal, should be highest in the pharmaceutical and medical-device industries. Yet, there is a suspicion regarding the pursuit of profit in medicine and especially in the pharmaceutical and medical-device industries.
9/18/21
Innovation DAv4
Tournament: Bronx | Round: 4 | Opponent: Thomas Edison EnergySmart Charter VG | Judge: Jack Morgenstein SO21 – DA – Innovation Pharma innovation is strong now – patent incentives are key to maintaining progress, Austin and Hayford 21: David Austin, an Analyst in CBO’s Microeconomics Studies Division and Tamara Hayford, a principal analyst in the Health, Retirement, and Long-Term Analysis Division, Congressional Budget Office prepared the report with guidance from Joseph Kile, Lyle Nelson, and Julie Topoleski. Christopher Adams, Pranav Bhandarkar, and David Wylie (formerly of CBO) contributed to the analysis., April 2021, “Research and Development in the Pharmaceutical Industry” https://www.cbo.gov/publication/57126LHP AV DOA: 9/8/21 At a Glance This report examines research and development (RandD) by the pharmaceutical industry. Spending on RandD and Its Results. Spending on RandD and the introduction of new drugs have both increased in the past two decades. In 2019, the pharmaceutical industry spent $83 billion dollars on RandD. Adjusted for inflation, that amount is about 10 times what the industry spent per year in the 1980s. Between 2010 and 2019, the number of new drugs approved for sale increased by 60 percent compared with the previous decade, with a peak of 59 new drugs approved in 2018. Factors Influencing RandD Spending. The amount of money that drug companies devote to RandD is determined by the amount of revenue they expect to earn from a new drug, the expected cost of developing that drug, and policies that influence the supply of and demand for drugs. The expected lifetime global revenues of a new drug depends on the prices that companies expect to charge for the drug in different markets around the world, the volume of sales they anticipate at those prices, and the likelihood the drug-development effort will succeed. The expected cost to develop a new drug—including capital costs and expenditures on drugs that fail to reach the market—has been estimated to range from less than $1 billion to more than $2 billion. The federal government influences the amount of private spending on RandD through programs (such as Medicare) that increase the demand for prescription drugs, through policies (such as spending for basic research and regulations on what must be demonstrated in clinical trials) that affect the supply of new drugs, and through policies (such as recommendations for vaccines) that affect both supply and demand. Notes Research and Development in the Pharmaceutical Industry Summary Every year, the U.S. pharmaceutical industry develops a variety of new drugs that provide valuable medical benefits. Many of those drugs are expensive and contribute to rising health care costs for the private sector and the federal government. Policymakers have considered policies that would lower drug prices and reduce federal drug expenditures. Such policies would probably reduce the industry’s incentive to develop new drugs. In this report, the Congressional Budget Office assesses trends in spending for drug research and development (RandD) and the introduction of new drugs. CBO also examines factors that determine how much drug companies spend on RandD: expected global revenues from a new drug; cost to develop a new drug; and federal policies that affect the demand for drug therapies, the supply of new drugs, or both. What Are Recent Trends in Pharmaceutical RandD and New Drug Approvals? The pharmaceutical industry devoted $83 billion to RandD expenditures in 2019. Those expenditures covered a variety of activities, including discovering and testing new drugs, developing incremental innovations such as product extensions, and clinical testing for safety-monitoring or marketing purposes. That amount is about 10 times what the industry spent per year in the 1980s, after adjusting for the effects of inflation. The share of revenues that drug companies devote to RandD has also grown: On average, pharmaceutical companies spent about one-quarter of their revenues (net of expenses and buyer rebates) on RandD expenses in 2019, which is almost twice as large a share of revenues as they spent in 2000. That revenue share is larger than that for other knowledge-based industries, such as semiconductors, technology hardware, and software. The number of new drugs approved each year has also grown over the past decade. On average, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved 38 new drugs per year from 2010 through 2019 (with a peak of 59 in 2018), which is 60 percent more than the yearly average over the previous decade. Many of the drugs that have been approved in recent years are “specialty drugs.” Specialty drugs generally treat chronic, complex, or rare conditions, and they may also require special handling or monitoring of patients. Many specialty drugs are biologics (large-molecule drugs based on living cell lines), which are costly to develop, hard to imitate, and frequently have high prices. Previously, most drugs were small-molecule drugs based on chemical compounds. Even while they were under patent, those drugs had lower prices than recent specialty drugs have. Information about the kinds of drugs in current clinical trials indicates that much of the industry’s innovative activity is focused on specialty drugs that would provide new cancer therapies and treatments for nervous-system disorders, such as Alzheimer’s disease and Parkinson’s disease. What Factors Influence Spending for RandD? Drug companies’ RandD spending decisions depend on three main factors: Anticipated lifetime global revenues from a new drug, Expected costs to develop a new drug, and Policies and programs that influence the supply of and demand for prescription drugs. Various considerations inform companies’ expectations about a drug’s revenue stream, including the anticipated prices it could command in different markets around the world and the expected global sales volume at those prices (given the number of people who might use the drug). The prices and sales volumes of existing drugs provide information about consumers’ and insurance plans’ willingness to pay for drug treatments. Importantly, when drug companies set the prices of a new drug, they do so to maximize future revenues net of manufacturing and distribution costs. A drug’s sunk RandD costs—that is, the costs already incurred in developing that drug—do not influence its price. Developing new drugs is a costly and uncertain process, and many potential drugs never make it to market. Only about 12 percent of drugs entering clinical trials are ultimately approved for introduction by the FDA. In recent studies, estimates of the average RandD cost per new drug range from less than $1 billion to more than $2 billion per drug. Those estimates include the costs of both laboratory research and clinical trials of successful new drugs as well as expenditures on drugs that do not make it past the laboratory-development stage, that enter clinical trials but fail in those trials or are withdrawn by the drugmaker for business reasons, or that are not approved by the FDA. Those estimates also include the company’s capital costs—the value of other forgone investments—incurred during the RandD process. Such costs can make up a substantial share of the average total cost of developing a new drug. The development process often takes a decade or more, and during that time the company does not receive a financial return on its investment in developing that drug. The federal government affects RandD decisions in three ways. First, it increases demand for prescription drugs, which encourages new drug development, by fully or partially subsidizing the purchase of prescription drugs through a variety of federal programs (including Medicare and Medicaid) and by providing tax preferences for employment-based health insurance. Second, the federal government increases the supply of new drugs. It funds basic biomedical research that provides a scientific foundation for the development of new drugs by private industry. Additionally, tax credits—both those available to all types of companies and those available to drug companies for developing treatments of uncommon diseases—provide incentives to invest in RandD. Similarly, deductions for RandD investment can be used to reduce tax liabilities immediately rather than over the life of that investment. Finally, the patent system and certain statutory provisions that delay FDA approval of generic drugs provide pharmaceutical companies with a period of market exclusivity, when competition is legally restricted. During that time, they can maintain higher prices on a patented product than they otherwise could, which makes new drugs more profitable and thereby increases drug companies’ incentives to invest in RandD. Third, some federal policies affect the number of new drugs by influencing both demand and supply. For example, federal recommendations for specific vaccines increase the demand for those vaccines and provide an incentive for drug companies to develop new ones. Additionally, federal regulatory policies that influence returns on drug RandD can bring about increases or decreases in both the supply of and demand for new drugs. Trends in RandD Spending and New Drug Development Private spending on pharmaceutical RandD and the approval of new drugs have both increased markedly in recent years, resuming a decades-long trend that was interrupted in 2008 as generic versions of some top-selling drugs became available and as the 2007–2009 recession occurred. In particular, spending on drug RandD increased by nearly 50 percent between 2015 and 2019. Many of the drugs approved in recent years are high-priced specialty drugs for relatively small numbers of potential patients. By contrast, the top-selling drugs of the 1990s were lower-cost drugs with large patient populations. RandD Spending RandD spending in the pharmaceutical industry covers a variety of activities, including the following: Invention, or research and discovery of new drugs; Development, or clinical testing, preparation and submission of applications for FDA approval, and design of production processes for new drugs; Incremental innovation, including the development of new dosages and delivery mechanisms for existing drugs and the testing of those drugs for additional indications; Product differentiation, or the clinical testing of a new drug against an existing rival drug to show that the new drug is superior; and Safety monitoring, or clinical trials (conducted after a drug has reached the market) that the FDA may require to detect side effects that may not have been observed in shorter trials when the drug was in development. In real terms, private investment in drug RandD among member firms of the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA), an industry trade association, was about $83 billion in 2019, up from about $5 billion in 1980 and $38 billion in 2000.1 Although those spending totals do not include spending by many smaller drug companies that do not belong to PhRMA, the trend is broadly representative of RandD spending by the industry as a whole.2 A survey of all U.S. pharmaceutical RandD spending (including that of smaller firms) by the National Science Foundation (NSF) reveals similar trends.3 Intellectual property protections are key to pharmaceutical innovation – laundry of list of studies – that solves access better, Ezeli and Cory 19: Stephen Ezell, vice president, global innovation policy, at the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation (ITIF). He focuses on science and technology policy, international competitiveness, trade, manufacturing, and services issues. and Nigel Cory, an associate director covering trade policy at the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation. He focuses on cross-border data flows, data governance, intellectual property, and how they each relate to digital trade and the broader digital economy. Cory has provided in-person testimony and written submissions and has published reports and op-eds relating to these issues in the United States, the European Union, Australia, China, India, and New Zealand, among other countries and regions, and he has completed research projects for international bodies such as the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation and the World Trade Organization. “The Way Forward for Intellectual Property Internationally” April 25, 2019, https://itif.org/publications/2019/04/25/way-forward-intellectual-property-internationallyLHP AV INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY UNDERPINS INNOVATION AND GROWTH Intellectual property rights arrangements are well recognized, going back to the Middle Ages, as enabling innovators to earn the returns necessary to continue to innovate and promote the availability of leading-edge technologies. Nobel laureate economist Douglas North, one of the foremost scholars of economic history, argues that the introduction of intellectual property rights had one of the most profound impacts on spurring economic growth in human history. North points out that average global economic growth rates for about one and a half millennia prior to the Industrial Revolution were essentially zero. Eighteenth-century elites in England had practically the same per capita income as their counterparts in third-century Rome.21 North has shown that the inflection point toward greater economic growth was the widespread development of patent systems in the 19th century.22 Gregory Clark, in his seminal book, Farewell to Alms: A Brief Economic History of the World, reached a similar conclusion that the introduction of IPRs was catalytic to turbo-charging global economic growth.23 Robust intellectual property rights spur innovative activity by increasing the appropriability of the returns to innovation, enabling innovators to capture enough of the benefits of their own innovative activity to justify taking considerable risks. By raising the private rate of return closer to the social rate of return, intellectual property rights address the knowledge-asset incentive problem, allowing inventors to realize economic gain from their inventions, thereby catalyzing investment in knowledge creation. If innovators know that most of the benefits from their innovations would go to others without compensation, they would be much less likely and capable of engaging in future innovations. In addition, as they capture a larger portion of the benefits of their innovative activity, innovating companies obtain the resources to pursue the next generation of innovative activities. IP thus produces a number of positive benefits, including: 1) creating powerful incentives for domestic innovation; 2) inducing knowledge spillovers that help others to innovate; 3) ensuring a country’s companies can focus on operating productively and innovating, instead of having to devote an undue amount of their time and resources to protecting their IP in an environment where it’s at risk; 4) promoting the international diffusion of technology, innovation, and knowhow; and 5) boosting a country’s levels of research and development, inbound foreign direct investment (FDI), and exports of goods and services.24 Robust intellectual property rights spur innovative activity by increasing the appropriability of the returns to innovation, enabling innovators to capture enough of the benefits of their own innovative activity to justify taking considerable risks. The evidence shows that strong intellectual property rights protections are vitally important for both developed and developing countries alike. As the definitive 2010 OECD review of the effects of intellectual property rights protections on developing countries, “Policy Complements to the Strengthening of IPRs in Developing Countries” found, “The results point to a tendency for IPR reform to deliver positive economic results.”25 The OECD study found that developing-country IPR reforms concerning patent protection have tended to deliver the most substantial results, although the results for copyright reform and trademark reform are also positive and significant. But to have the greatest impact on economic growth, IPR reforms must occur concomitantly with other positive complements, particularly ones regarding inputs for innovative and productive processes and the ability to conduct business. These include policies that influence the macro-environment for firms as well as the availability of resources (e.g., related to education), a country’s legal and institutional conditions, and fiscal incentives.26 The evidence shows that strong intellectual property rights protections are vitally important for both developed and developing countries alike. The following section details the broad swath of academic literature reviewing the relationships between IPR strengthening and trade, FDI, and technology transfer; IPR reform and innovation and RandD; and IPR reform and exports and industry growth, revealing the benefits of stronger IPR protections for developed and developing countries alike. IPRs Strengthen Trade, FDI, and Technology Transfer A wealth of academic research has documented the relationship between the strength of a country’s intellectual property protections and the extent of trade, foreign direct investment, and technology transfer it enjoys. Strengthening IPR protection has been shown to correlate with increased trade.27 For instance, Fink and Primo Braga found that IPR protection is positively associated with international trade flows, in particular of manufactured, non-fuel imports.28 Other studies have found a positive association between IPR protection and trade flows in high-technology products.29 Likewise, strengthening of IPR protection has also been connected with increased inflows of FDI. Cavazos Cepeda et al. found that a 1 percent increase in the protection of IPRs as measured by the Patent Rights Index (a measure of the strength of countries’ IPR regimes) is associated with a 2.8 percent increase in the inflow of FDI.30 Similarly, a 1 percent increase in trademark protection levels is associated with a 3.8 percent increase in incoming FDI; and a 1 percent increase in copyright protection yields a 6.8 percent increase in FDI.31 Moreover, the researchers identified a virtuous cycle between FDI and protection of IP, whereby improvements in the IPR environment are associated with improved economic performance—in particular with respect to FDI—and, in turn, further improvements in the IPR environment. Park and Lippoldt showed that stronger IPRs in developing countries are associated with an increase of technology-intensive FDI, while Awokuse and Yin provided a concrete example concerning the relationship of IPR protection in China to FDI inflows, concluding that IPR reforms in China have had a positive and significant effect on inbound FDI.32 There is also evidence that countries with similar levels of intellectual property protection trade more with one another.33 Academic research also signals a strong correlation between IPR and technology transfer. Lippoldt showed that IPR strengthening in countries—particularly with respect to patents—is associated with increased technology transfer via trade and investment.34 Research has revealed that a country’s level of intellectual property protection considerably affects whether foreign firms will transfer technology into it.35 That matters because the welfare gains from the importation of technology via innovative products, while differing across countries, can be substantial.36 For instance, foreign sources of technology account for over 90 percent of domestic productivity growth in all but a handful of countries.37 The research on this matter is clear and consistent. For example, a 1986 United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) study found that direct investment in new technology areas such as computer software, semiconductors, and biotechnology is supported by stronger intellectual property rights policy regimes.38 (However, as this report later clarifies, subsequent UNCTAD reports have lamentably taken a more skeptical view toward IP.) A 1989 study by the United Nations Commission on Transnational Corporations (UNCTC) found that weak IP rights reduce computer software direct investment; and a 1990 study by UNCTC found that weak IP rights reduce pharmaceutical investment.39 Mansfield conducted firm-level surveys and found that perceptions of strong IP rights abroad have a positive effect on incentives to transfer technologies abroad. Likewise, survey research by the World Bank’s International Finance Corporation found that, with variations by sector, country, and technology, at least 25 percent of American and Japanese high-tech firms refuse to directly invest, or enter into a joint venture, in developing countries with weak intellectual property rights; and a later study confirmed those survey findings with actual foreign direct investment data.40 And an Institute for International Economics study of World Bank data concluded that weak intellectual property rights reduce flows of all these commercial activities, regardless of nations’ levels of economic development.41 A wealth of academic research has documented the relationship between the strength of a country’s intellectual property protections and the extent of trade, foreign direct investment, and technology transfer it enjoys. Studies have also shown how the benefits of intellectual property extend to developing countries. Diwan and Rodrik demonstrated that stronger patent rights in developing countries give enterprises from developed countries a greater incentive to research and introduce technologies appropriate to developing countries.42 Similarly, Taylor showed that weak patent rights in developing countries lead enterprises from developed countries to introduce less-than-best-practice technologies to developing countries.43 Interestingly, the relationship goes in both directions. Branstetter and Saggi showed that strengthened IPR protection not only improves the investment climate in the implementing countries, but also leads to increased FDI in the country producing the original innovation.44 They concluded that IPR reform in the “global South” (e.g., developing countries) may be associated with FDI increases in the “global North” (e.g., developed countries). As northern firms shift their production to southern affiliates, this FDI accelerates southern industrial development, creating a cyclical feedback mechanism that also benefits the North. Another study by Liao and Wong, which focused on firm-level analysis, highlights the inter-relationship of IPR reform in developed and developing countries. Their study concluded that developing countries can entice technology transfer from the North by providing IPR protection for incoming products (although they note there is a need for redoubled RandD efforts in developed countries to spur needed innovations).45 IPRs Strengthen Innovation Intellectual property rights power innovation. For instance, analyzing the level of intellectual property protections (via the World Economic Forum’s Global Competitiveness reports) and creative outputs (via the Global Innovation Index) shows that counties with stronger IP protection have more creative outputs (in terms of intangible assets and creative goods and services in a nation’s media, printing and publishing, and entertainment industries, including online), even at varying levels of development.46 IPR reforms also introduce strong incentives for domestic innovation. Sherwood, using case studies from 18 developing countries, concluded that poor provision of intellectual property rights deters local innovation and risk-taking.47 In contrast, IPR reform has been associated with increased innovative activity, as measured by domestic patent filings, albeit with some variation across countries and sectors.48 For example, Ryan, in a study of biomedical innovations and patent reform in Brazil, found that patents provided incentives for innovation investments and facilitated the functioning of technology markets.49 Park and Lippoldt also observed that the provision of adequate protection for IPRs can help to stimulate local innovation, in some cases building on the transfer of technologies that provide inputs and spillovers.50 In other words, local innovators are introduced to technologies first through the technology transfer that takes place in an environment wherein protection of IPRs is assured; then, they may build on those ideas to create an evolved product or develop alternate approaches (i.e., to innovate). Related research finds that trade in technology—through channels including imports, foreign direct investment, and technology licensing—improves the quality of developing-country innovation by increasing the pool of ideas and efficiency of innovation by encouraging the division of innovative labor and specialization.51 However, Maskus notes that without protection from potential abuse of their newly developed technologies, foreign enterprises may be less willing to reveal technical information associated with their innovations.52 The protection of patents and trade secrets provides necessary legal assurances for firms wishing to reveal proprietary characteristics of technologies to subsidiaries and licensees via contracts. Counties with stronger IP protection have more creative outputs (in terms of intangible assets and creative goods and services in a nation’s media, printing and publishing, and entertainment industries, including online), even at varying levels of development. The relationship between IPR rights and innovation can also be seen in studies of how the introduction of stronger IPR laws, with regard to patents, copyrights, and trademarks, affect RandD activity in an economy. Studies by Varsakelis and by Kanwar and Evenson found that RandD to GDP ratios are positively related to the strength of patent rights, and are conditional on other factors.53 Cavazos Cepeda et al. found a positive influence of IPRs on the level of RandD in an economy, with each 1 percent increase in the level of protection of IPRs in an economy (as measured by improvements to a country’s score in the Patent Rights Index) equating to, on average, a 0.7 percent increase in the domestic level of RandD.54 Likewise, a 1 percent increase in copyright protection was associated with a 3.3 percent increase in domestic RandD. Similarly, when trademark protection increased by 1 percent, there was an associated RandD increase of 1.4 percent. As the authors concluded, “Increases in the protection of the IPRs carried economic benefits in the form of higher inflows of FDI, and increases in the levels of both domestically conducted RandD and service imports as measured by licensing fees.”55 As Jackson summarized, regarding the relationship between IPR reform and both innovation and RandD, and FDI, “In addition to spurring domestic innovation, strong intellectual property rights can increase incentives for foreign direct investment which in turn also leads to economic growth.”56 BOX 1: INNOVATE FOR HEALTH: IP IS NOT THE PROBLEM, BUT PART OF THE SOLUTION Many opponents of robust IPR rights view them as antithetical to the interests of developing countries in terms of access to medicines or the provision of national health care services. Yet the reality is that stronger IPR rights in developing nations actually unleash the power of developing-country innovators to contribute to solving health challenges both in their own nations and across the global economy. First, opponents of IP fail to recognize that intellectual property rights matter for health care innovation in emerging economies. An Information Technology and Innovation Foundation (ITIF) and George Mason University Center for Intellectual Property Protection report, “How Innovators Are Solving Global Health Challenges,” provides 25 case studies that show innovators in developing countries relying on IP to invent and bring solutions to market.57 The 25 case studies revealed a number of key themes, including that there is opportunity in adapting health care interventions for developing-country environments where resources and infrastructure are scarce, and that local innovation and IP can contribute substantially toward providing both affordable and robust tests for diagnosing diseases and affordable interventions to meet basic needs in challenging environments. Second, opponents of IP tend to ignore broader systemic issues that contribute to poor health care outcomes in developing countries. While cost is a central factor for policymakers in all countries, given resource scarcity, these trade-offs are not unique to health. The greater the resource scarcity, the greater the need for innovation. One of the biggest challenges policymakers and innovators in developing countries confront again and again is scarcity—in access to trained professionals, in transportation, and in other infrastructure. For example, reports estimate that as many as 1 billion people lack access to essential health care because of a shortage of trained health professionals.58 A 2014 World Health Organization study estimated a shortage of 7 million public health care workers, with that number expected to rise to 13 million by 2035.59 More than 80 countries currently fail to meet the basic threshold of 23 skilled health professionals per 10,000 citizens.60 The challenge is even more daunting when it comes to specialists. For instance, Cameroon has fewer than 50 cardiologists supporting a population of over 23 million citizens.61 And Ethiopia, a country of some 90 million residents, is served by a single radiation-treatment center located in the capital of Addis Ababa.62 In other instances, individuals lack access to essential medicines, with cost being a relatively small part of the problem. For instance, in 2014, researchers at the University of Utrecht in the Netherlands found that, on average, essential medicines are available in public-sector facilities in developing countries only 40 percent of the time.63 Again, the cost of medicines is far from the most serious problem in the provision of health care services in developing nations. Indeed, the vast majority of drugs—at least 95 percent—on the World Health Organization’s Essential Medicines list are off-patent, and thus potentially available in generic versions.64 The problem, in much larger part, stems from countries’ underdeveloped health systems and the fact that many people live in rural areas far from care. Stronger IP rights create an environment wherein entrepreneurs can innovate to meet health challenges in their own nations, the benefits thereof spilling over to benefit the entire international community. IPRs Strengthen Exports and Industry Growth Academic research has also found that stronger IPR protections support exports from developing countries and faster growth rates of certain industries. Yang and Kuo argue that stronger IPR protection improves the export performance of firms benefitting from technology transfer. And in their research, Cavazos Cepeda et al. found that trademark protection has a statistically significant association in relation to the export turnover, sales, and total assets of firms studied. They also found a significant association between copyrights and export turnover. Moreover, they found “a positive influence of patent right protection on export turnover (e.g., sales) under certain specifications with respect to complementary policies.”65 In cross-country studies, researchers have found that stronger patent rights are associated with faster company growth in IP-intensive industries such as pharmaceuticals. In fact, during the early 1990s, a one-standard-deviation increase in patent rights was associated with an increase in firm growth of 0.69 percent (an advantage amounting to nearly one-fifth of the average industry growth rate of 3.7 percent).66 Consequences of Countries Not Enacting Robust IPR Protections and Enforcement Nations that have not implemented—or do not enforce—robust intellectual property rights protections end up harming their economic development in at least three principle ways. First, they deter future innovative activity. Second, they discourage trade and foreign direct investment, which only hurts their own consumers and businesses, by both limiting their choices and inhibiting their enterprises’ ability to access best-of-breed technologies that are vital to boosting domestic productivity. Third, in countries with weak IP protections, firms are forced to invest undue amounts of resources in protection rather than invention. Ironically, developing countries’ own economic development opportunities and intellectual property development potential are inhibited by their own weak intellectual property protections. For instance, the lack of effective protection for intellectual property rights in China has limited the introduction of advanced technology and innovation investments by foreign companies, thereby reducing potential benefits to local innovation capacity.67 As Cavazos Cepeda et al. found in a case study of IPR protections in that economy, “China has made progress in strengthening the protection of intellectual property over the past two decades, as attested to by indicators such as the Patent Rights Index…. However, uncertainty around the protection of intellectual property remains an important deterrent for foreign as well as domestic firms engaging in RandD-related activities.”68 Ironically, developing countries’ own economic development opportunities and intellectual property development potential are inhibited by their own weak intellectual property protections. Pharma Innovation prevents Extinction – checks new diseases. Engelhardt 8, H. Tristram. Innovation and the pharmaceutical industry: critical reflections on the virtues of profit. M and M Scrivener Press, 2008 (doctorate in philosophy (University of Texas at Austin), M.D. (Tulane University), professor of philosophy (Rice University), and professor emeritus at Baylor College of Medicine) Many are suspicious of, or indeed jealous of, the good fortune of others. Even when profit is gained in the market without fraud and with the consent of all buying and selling goods and services, there is a sense on the part of some that something is wrong if considerable profit is secured. There is even a sense that good fortune in the market, especially if it is very good fortune, is unfair. One might think of such rhetorically disparaging terms as "wind-fall profits". There is also a suspicion of the pursuit of profit because it is often embraced not just because of the material benefits it sought, but because of the hierarchical satisfaction of being more affluent than others. The pursuit of profit in the pharmaceutical and medical-device industries is tor many in particular morally dubious because it is acquired from those who have the bad fortune to be diseased or disabled. Although the suspicion of profit is not well-founded, this suspicion is a major moral and public-policy challenge. Profit in the market for the pharmaceutical and medical-device industries is to be celebrated. This is the case, in that if one is of the view (1) that the presence of additional resources for research and development spurs innovation in the development of pharmaceuticals and med-ical devices (i.e., if one is of the view that the allure of profit is one of the most effective ways not only to acquire resources but productively to direct human energies in their use), (2) that given the limits of altruism and of the willingness of persons to be taxed, the possibility of profits is necessary to secure such resources, (3) that the allure of profits also tends to enhance the creative use of available resources in the pursuit of phar-maceutical and medical-device innovation, and (4) if one judges it to be the case that such innovation is both necessary to maintain the human species in an ever-changing and always dangerous environment in which new microbial and other threats may at any time emerge to threaten human well-being, if not survival (i.e., that such innovation is necessary to prevent increases in morbidity and mortality risks), as well as (5) in order generally to decrease morbidity and mortality risks in the future, it then follows (6) that one should be concerned regarding any policies that decrease the amount of resources and energies available to encourage such innovation. One should indeed be of the view that the possibilities for profit, all things being equal, should be highest in the pharmaceutical and medical-device industries. Yet, there is a suspicion regarding the pursuit of profit in medicine and especially in the pharmaceutical and medical-device industries.
Xi’s regime is stable now, but its success depends on strong growth and private sector development.
Mitter and Johnson 21 ~Rana Mitter and Elsbeth Johnson, Rana Mitter is a professor of the history and politics of modern China at Oxford. Elsbeth Johnson, formerly the strategy director for Prudential PLC’s Asian business, is a senior lecturer at MIT’s Sloan School of Management and the founder of SystemShift, a consulting firm. May-June 2021, "What the West Gets Wrong About China," Harvard Business Review, https://hbr.org/2021/05/what-the-west-gets-wrong-about-china accessed 12/14/21~ Adam In China, however, growth has come in the context of stable communist rule
AND
University thanks to social mobility and the party’s significant investment in scientific research.
China wants to colonize Mars – it’s key to CCP legitimacy specifically, Hong 20:
to it more directly than even the U.S. government."11
Xi will launch diversionary war to domestic backlash – escalates in multiple hotspots
Norris 17, William J. Geostrategic Implications of China’s Twin Economic Challenges. CFR Discussion Paper, 2017. (Associate professor of Chinese foreign and security policy at Texas AandM University’s Bush School of Government and Public Service)Elmer Populist pressures might tempt the party leadership to encourage diversionary nationalism. The logic of
AND
resource is directed shifts away from industrial and export production toward domestic consumption.
US–China war goes nuclear – deterrence fails, Taiwan raises the stakes – extinction, BRANDS and BECKLEY 22
leaders might use their nuclear weapons rather than risk losing that option altogether.
3/19/22
JF - K - Deleuze
Tournament: Sunvite | Round: 4 | Opponent: Lexington AS | Judge: Alex Rivera The 1AC misunderstands appropriation. It is not just the capitalist method of privatization, blocking individuals from experiencing what becomes segmented as property. Instead, Appropriation is realizing the potential of the subject, to appropriate outer space and create new relations and experiences with matter in outer space. The aff blocks the individual, the crowdfunded group, the education club from learning about their interests and creativity by immersing themselves in space, like teaching a baby how to swim, GOODLEY 7 Dan Goodley (2007) Becoming rhizomatic parents: Deleuze, Guattari and disabled babies, Disability and Society, 22:2, 145-160, DOI: 10.1080/09687590601141576 Team purchased PDF, DOA: Feb 19, 2022 LHP HL A key problem for Deleuze and Guattari is the segmentation of the subject along binary lines (e.g. disabled/non-disabled, accepting parent/parent in denial), centralized in linear ways by available discourses. The question, therefore, is not which subject to become (Lawlor, 1998) but how to escape the forces of subjectification that block flows of desire and territorialize the subject with rigid segmentarities (Bogard, 1998). Such a task sounds so difficult in a world where parents are subjectified along hard professional lines. Professionals ranged from information worker, to community nurse, to autism specialist. When asked about the ways in which parents made sense of their children and diagnosis, parents were pigeonholed into denial (the most prominent category), acceptance (which seemed to include acceptance of the professional role), professional parent (a problematic subject position where parents build up their knowledge of impairment labels often via the internet drawing upon, in the professionals’ opinions, spurious information). We proposed a final type of parent: the parent who is becoming—someone who follows the philosophy of the present … —who is working with the everyday with his or her child. This parent was not really recognised by professionals and when considered, I think, was cast as simply being a (naively) positive person. (Dan Goodley, research notes from a professional focus group of health and social care professionals, 2005) If we take the position espoused by Deleuze and Guattari that there are no complete concepts (Bearn, 2000, p. 446), then how might we see parents? Perhaps, we need to give up the big Subject and rediscover the forces that generate minor subjects. Once relieved of the burden of the big Subject we can start to make sense (Bogard, 1998, p. 59). Weiss (1999, p. 164), following Rosi Braidotti, suggests that in actuality the Subject is often ‘man-white-western-male-adult-reasonable-heterosexual-living-intowns-speaking a standard language’. It is perhaps understandable why such a subject would be deconstructed! An understanding of parents’ engagement is located in Downloaded by Texas State University, San Marcos at 16:24 15 August 2013 Rhizomatic parents 155 Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987) notion of ‘becoming’ (which is implicated in the smoothing, BwOs and rhizomatic actions outlined earlier). By this we are not referring to ‘how the human being is constructed’ (Lawlor, 1998), but to how subjects transcend the given (Buchanan, 1997), to become or to engage with places of immanence, to create action and results rather than establish transcendentals, not being, but always becoming as a line of flight. Not occupying a body/organism but becoming a BwO. For many of the parents in this study their reflections have sometimes taken place as if they lacked the conceptual frameworks through which to describe their experiences. I’m not saying I’m embarrassed because I’m not … perhaps its because I’ve not accepted it myself yet, I don’t know, I don’t quite know what it is but … some people aren’t bothered about disability but I am, sometimes. (Rebecca Greenwood). One take on this would be that Rebecca lacks a reflexive vocabulary from which to talk of herself as a subject as a mother. In other cases it could be argued that some parents apparently contentedly reflect on the present, with seemingly scant regard for past and future. This idea of parents’ embracing the philosophy of present and becoming, as a resistant story to the linear narratives of the medical model, has been developed elsewhere (Fisher and Goodley, in press). In short, for Deleuze and Guattari (1987) becoming is not based around relational binaries (becoming a good parent rather than a bad parent) ): I am coping. I do one thing at a time, one day at a time. I do not make huge plans, I don’t expect certain things. If we overcome a hurdle then great but there’ll be something else around the corner (Cheryl Smith, mother of Danny who has been labelled as having autism; see Fisher and Goodley, in press). Uncertainty promotes openness to new ideas and locations. The subject never settles for too long. For Braidotti (1994) this is a crucial impact of becoming: nomadism. This refers to the kind of critical consciousness that resists settling into socially coded modes of thought and behaviour. Nomads also find themselves in different locations and lands (see also Bayliss, 2006; Goodley and Roets, forthcoming; Roets, 2006): I have this booklet written by the mother of a special needs child. It’s called Welcome to Holland. She talks about the wonderful dreams we attach to pregnancy, birth and having the child and likens it to going on a journey to Italy. It’s what you’ve always dreamt of, you get on the plane and you’re all excited. And then you get on this plane after a couple of hours later or whatever, you’ve now landed in Holland. And you were expecting this fantastic place, Italy, and you’re just so disappointed. But if you look carefully and don’t let go of Italy you’ll see the beauty that’s in Holland, the beautiful tulips, the canals. It will have certain things Italy may never have. You’ll meet people that you wouldn’t meet if you were going to Italy. And you might not get Italian wine but, hey, they’ve got some really good beer in Holland. (Rebecca Greenwood) But let us not forget, nomads settle occasionally. They have to. Hence, a further aspect of becoming to consider in relation to parents is appropriation. Buchanan Downloaded by Texas State University, San Marcos at 16:24 15 August 2013 156 D. Goodley (1997) asked how can a subject transcending the given be constituted in the given? Don’t we settle sometimes? Can nomads ‘be’ for a short while. This is a key question for Deleuze and Guattari. Only a subject that is given can be shaped by the social, that is, constituted by forces external to itself. But a subject that is completely given and not at least partially transcendent cannot have any effect on the social order … the subject is the product of social mechanisms and … the subject is capable of manipulating those mechanisms. To see how this is possible we have to interrogate the decisive relation between the principles of association and the subject. (Buchanan, 1997, p. 484, emphasis in the original) The process of appropriation enables the nomad to become active, to self-fashion as it were (Buchanan, 1997, p. 487; see also Weiss, 1999). For parents of disabled babies this highlights those times when they use normative and normalizing practices of health care. They transcend them through appropriation. I took Ashley into hospital. She’d been having loads of fits. It was just dreadful. They put her on these drugs which knocked her out. She didn’t open her eyes for three days. They were just saying, ‘right, we’ll administer this drug again’. It stopped her fitting but wiped her out. I eventually snapped at the doctor. We spoke about the dosage. He looked again at the dosage, gave me permission to administer the drugs at home and we spoke about increasing dosage if the number of fits started to creep up. When this doctor was away on holidays I spoke to one of his colleagues who was concerned about me being responsible for the drugs. So I carefully took her through my thinking about increasing half a ml here and there, when needed. She told me off for doing it. For increasing amounts. But when my doctor returned he said I’d done the right thing. (Emma Brown’s story) Appropriation is thus a means of creating pluralism where homogeneity had previously reigned (Buchanan, 1987, p. 491). This is not to say that the parent totally escapes the imprisonment of powerful totalizing discourses of health care, but ‘it becomes possible to say, now, that one is not free in prison, but that one can nevertheless achieve freedom there’ (Buchanan, 1987, p. 489). This links back to the idea of the BwO being created on a stratum—an organism, subject position, way of thinking—in which the parent experiments. Appropriation links to Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987) advice to engage in a cautious destratifying of the BwO. Not to totally empty the body, to wildly destratify to a point where no one else can connect because the body, subject and enunciation have been abandoned, but to work in slippery ways with other (temporary) beings/organisms on the stratum (Markula, 2006). It is only by asking how parents are being created and how they may well transcend the givens of their subject construction that we can start to unearth the constructive forces of the contexts they populate. When ‘to be’ can be used and transcended. This is a direct violation of the subject infinite potential. Each individual is dictated to have a certain identity only when they are surrounded by stable structures that force the individual to understand themselves in a single way. Conversion therapy takes the homosexual subject and denies their method of expressing themselves. We can only harness our potential when we become able to interact with new spaces, like discovering ones passion and breaking rules that dictate how one might live, DELEUZE and GUITARRI 88 Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. A thousand plateaus: Capitalism and schizophrenia. Bloomsbury Publishing, 1988. Pg 53-55 real book privately owned, DOA: Feb 19, 2022 LHP HL Forms relate to codes and processes of coding and decoding in the parastrata; substances, being formed matters, relate to territorialities and movements of deterritorialization and reterritorialization on the epis-trata. In truth, the epistrata are just as inseparable from the movements that constitute them as the parastrata are from their processes. Nomadic waves or flows of deterritorialization go from the central layer to the periphery, then from the new center to the new periphery, falling back to the old center and launching forth to the new.16 The organization of the epistrata moves in the direction of increasing deterritorialization. Physical particles and chemical substances cross thresholds of deterritorialization on their own stratum and between strata; these thresholds correspond to more or less stable intermediate states, to more or less transitory valences and existences, to engagements with this or that other body, to densities of proximity, to more or less localizable connections. Not only are physical particles characterized by speeds of deterritorialization—Joycean tachyons, particles-holes, and quarks recalling the fundamental idea of the "soup"—but a single chemical substance (sulfur or carbon, for example) has a number of more and less deterritorialized states. The more interior milieus an organism has on its own stratum, assuring its autonomy and bringing it into a set of aleatory relations with the exterior, the more deterritorialized it is. That is why degrees of development must be understood relatively, and as a function of differential speeds, relations, and rates. Deterritorialization must be thought of as a perfectly positive power that has degrees and thresholds (epistrata), is always relative, and has reterritorialization as its flipside or complement. An organism that is deterritorialized in relation to the exterior necessarily reterritorializes on its interior milieus. A given presumed fragment of embryo is deterritorialized when it changes thresholds or gradients, but is assigned a new role by the new surroundings. Local movements are alterations. Cellular migration, stretching, invagination, folding are examples of this. Every voyage is intensive, and occurs in relation to thresholds of intensity between which it evolves or that it crosses. One travels by intensity; displacements and spatial figures depend on intensive thresholds of nomadic deterritorialization (and thus on differential relations) that simultaneously define complementary, sedentary reterritorializations. Every stratum operates this way: by grasping in its pincers a maximum number of intensities or intensive particles over which it spreads its forms and substances, constituting determinate gradients and thresholds of resonance (deterritorialization on a stratum always occurs in relation to a complementary reterritorialization).17 As long as preestablished forms were compared to predetermined degrees, all one could do was affirm their irreducibility, and there was no way of judging possible communication between the two factors. But we see now that forms depend on codes in the parastrata and plunge into processes of decoding or drift and that degrees themselves are caught up in movements of intensive territorialization and reterritorialization. There is no simple correspondence between codes and territorialities on the one hand and decodings and deterritorialization on the other: on the contrary, a code may be a deterritorialization and a reterritorialization a decoding. Wide gaps separate code and territoriality. The two factors nevertheless have the same "subject" in a stratum: it is populations that are deterritorialized and reterritorialized, and also coded and decoded. In addition, these factors communicate or interlace in the milieus. On the one hand, modifications of a code have an aleatory cause in the milieu of exteriority, and it is their effects on the interior milieus, their compatibility with them, that decide whether they will be popularized. Deterritorializations and reterritorializations do not bring about the modifications; they do, however, strictly determine their selection. On the other hand, every modification has an associated milieu that in turn entails a certain deterritorialization in relation to the milieu of exteriority and a certain reterritorialization on intermediate or interior milieus. Perceptions and actions in an associated milieu, even those on a molecular level, construct or produce territorial signs (indexes). This is especially true of an animal world, which is constituted, marked off by signs that divide it into zones (of shelter, hunting, neutrality, etc.), mobilize special organs, and correspond to fragments of code; this is so even at the margin of decoding inherent in the code. Even the domain of learning is defined by the code, or prescribed by it. But indexes or territorial signs are inseparable from a double movement. Since the associated milieu always confronts a milieu of exteriority with which the animal is engaged and in which it takes necessary risks, a line of flight must be preserved to enable the animal to regain its associated milieu when danger appears (for example, the bull's line of flight in the arena, which it uses to regain the turf it has chosen).18 A second kind of line of flight arises when the associated milieu is rocked by blows from the exterior, forcing the animal to abandon it and strike up an association with new portions of exteriority, this time leaning on its interior milieus like fragile crutches. When the seas dried, the primitive Fish left its associated milieu to explore land, forced to "stand on its own legs," now carrying water only on the inside, in the amniotic membranes protecting the embryo. In one way or the other, the animal is more a fleer than a fighter, but its flights are also conquests, creations. Territorialities, then, are shot through with lines of flight testifying to the presence within them of movements of deterritorialization and reterritorialization. In a certain sense, they are secondary. They would be nothing without these movements that deposit them. In short, the epistrata and parastrata are continually moving, sliding, shifting, and changing on the Ecumenon or unity of composition of a stratum; some are swept away by lines of flight and movements of deterritorialization, others by processes of decoding or drift, but they all communicate at the intersection of the milieus. The strata are continually being shaken by phenomena of cracking and rupture, either at the level of the substrata that furnish the materials (a prebiotic soup, a prechemical soup ...), at the level of the accumulating epistrata, or at the level of the abutting parastrata: everywhere there arise simultaneous accelerations and blockages, comparative speeds, differences in deterritorialization creating relative fields of reterritorialization. Alternative is to interrogate the stable concept of the subject in favor of alignment with the Body without Organs. The Body without Organs is the exact moments a subject has infinite potential to become anything they may wish, like an egg capable of growing into any kind of species, chicken, dinosaur, or even human being. The Alternative allows the subject to exist in society independent of social constructs such as gender, class, and nationality that have previously composed the stable subject, SMITH 18 Smith, Daniel. "What is the body without organs? Machine and organism in Deleuze and Guattari." Continental Philosophy Review 51.1 (2018): 95-110. Team purchased PDF, DOA: Feb 19, 2022 LHP HL As scholars have noted, the body without organs (sometimes abbreviated to BwO) is a somewhat confusing term, because it does not describe ‘‘a body deprived of organs,’’ as the term seems to indicate, but rather ‘‘an assemblage of organs freed from the supposedly ‘natural’ or ‘instinctual’ organization that makes it an organism.’’43 As Deleuze and Guattari put it, for the body without organs, the ‘‘enemy’’ is not the organs, but the organism, the particular arrangement and configuration of the organs.44 The body without organs is supposed to designate all of those things that an organic body could do, but that it is prevented from doing because of its homeostatic self-regulation processes. The body without organs is the full set of capacities or potentialities of a body prior to its being given the structure of an organism, which only limits and constrains what it can do: it is ‘‘what remains when you take everything away.’’45 As they ask in A Thousand Plateaus: Is it really so sad and dangerous to be fed up with seeing with your eyes, breathing with your lungs, swallowing with your mouth, talking with your tongue, thinking with your brain, having an anus and larynx, head and legs? Why not walk on your head, sing with your sinuses, see through your skin, breathe with your belly?46 The injunction here is to use our bodies and our organs in ways which are not in thrall to the overarching plan of the organism, to put them to work doing things other than those for which they were designed. In short, to treat them as machines capable of producing ‘‘events.’’ The organism, then, can be defined as being a certain way in which the body without organs is ‘‘captured,’’ one which restricts its capacities, and constrains it: ‘‘the BwO howls: ‘They’ve made me an organism! They’ve wrongfully folded me! They’ve stolen my body!’’’47 Of course, ‘‘organisms’’ are not the only way in which the body without organs can be ‘‘captured,’’ and in A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari analyse a number of other ‘‘strata’’ which impose their own forms on it and limit its capacities.48 The fact that there are other ‘‘strata’’ helps to explain their otherwise puzzling comment that the body without organs is not an ideal, unattainable point, but something we are attaining all the time.49 One example is the human face, the subject of an entire chapter of A Thousand Plateaus. It is clear that the face is not wholly subordinated to organic functions: we use it to express our emotions, we treat it as an aesthetic object, we use it for communication, and so on. In fact, if one believes the early Levinas, the human face opens us to the very possibility of ethics.50 All of these functions have nothing to do with the head qua organism, and would not have been made possible had the face not first been ‘‘freed’’ from its relation with the organic body and its place within this hierarchy of its system. It is in this sense that the face ‘‘removes the head from the stratum of the organism,’’ and thereby frees it to be used in different ways.51 Thus, rather than following the conservative tendencies of the organism that always pull it back towards the statistically normal, relegating everything that falls beyond this range to the register of the ‘‘pathological,’’ Deleuze and Guattari recommend a kind of experimentation whose ultimate goal is the event, that is, the production of something new. And as we saw in the first section, the production of an event changes even the thing that produced the event in the first place, so that the organic body will not remain the same after it has made itself into a body without organs. We humans are able to carry out this kind of experimentation because, as Canguilhem notes, we are fortunate enough to have a surfeit of organs: ‘‘too many kidneys, too many lungs, too much parathyroid, too much pancreas, even too much brain, if human life were limited to the vegetative life.’’52 Pathological states thus arise not when we use our bodies in ways that make us deviate from the statistical norm, or when we make use of our organs in ways which take them beyond the range of possibilities considered ‘‘normal’’ by the organism, but only when our ‘‘experimentation’’ goes too far, reaching the point where, instead of increasing our capacities, it reduces them, and prevents us from creating something new.53 Now that we have explored Deleuze and Guattari’s modifications to the concepts of ‘‘machine’’ and ‘‘organism,’’ let us briefly summarize our findings. Whereas we usually think that machines are defined by their substance, that is, the way in which they are constructed, the form which they take, Deleuze and Guattari understand them according to what they do. As they write, a machine should be understood ‘‘by function, not by form’’ (recall the example of the knife-rest: understanding it as a machine means understanding what it is used for, not its geometric properties).54 Whereas we usually think that organisms are defined by what they do, that is, by their behaviors, by the kinds of activities they carry out, Deleuze and Guattari instead understand them according to their structure. As we saw in the distinction between ‘‘analogy’’ and ‘‘homology,’’ what makes organisms similar to one another has nothing to do with their function. Rather, comparisons should be based on morphology, that is to say the virtual schema out of which the body emerged. In other words, an organism should be understood by form, not by function (recall the example of the bat wing: understanding it as an organism means understanding the order and connection of it bones, not what it is used for).55 Further, in both cases, there is no substantial link between the form it has and the function it carries out one can no more deduce the function of a bat’s wing from its morphology than one can deduce the function of a knife-rest from its geometrical properties.56 There is something like a priority of creation in Deleuze and Guattari, a preference for the new, which leads them away from what might otherwise appear to be a kind of symmetry between the two concepts (function not form vs. form not function), towards a valorization of the idea of the machine, and a strong criticism of the idea of the organism. This leads, first, to an asymmetry between the scope of the two concepts: whereas their idea of ‘‘machine’’ is supposed to be universal (everything is a machine), their idea of ‘‘organism’’ is restricted to a certain kind of body. But perhaps more importantly, it also leads them to a different understanding of the relation between the two terms, centered on their concept of the ‘‘body without organs.’’ Their non-mechanical mechanism, which is also a vitalism of the inorganic, highlights not the form or structure that bodies actually have, but rather the virtual capacities that bodies have to do something different. A body may be structured like an organism, but, since its organs are all machines, it will always retain the capacity to ‘‘disarticulate,’’ as they put it, to cease to be an organism. The body without organs, then, can be defined as the becoming-machine of the organism; it is what happens when one part of the body enters into combination with some other machine in a way which allows it to escape from the organism’s regularizing, normalizing processes. Seen in this way, the body previously considered an organism is opened up to a whole host of new connections, each of which may lead to the production of an event. The Role of the Ballot is to interrogate the image of thought, the current figure of thought that manipulates the subject into conforming with societies demand, such as the capitalist image yelling, “Work or die!”. Vote for the debater which better presents methods to question structures of limitation and oppression against the individual, it is only from this ROB can we move away from structures such as whiteness and settler innocence and resist oppressive mindsets that hold us all captive by dictating thought, DRONSFIELD 12 Dronsfield, Jonathan. "Deleuze and the image of thought." Philosophy Today 56.4 (2012): 404-414. Team purchased PDF, DOA: Feb 19, 2022 LHP HL The image of thought is Deleuze’s characteri- sation of what comes before thinking: that which philosophy implicitly presupposes and explicitly projects, a pre-philosophical and natural and hence dogmatic image of what thinking is. The dogmatic image supposes that what thought wants, wants both materially and wilfully, is the true. Morality leads us to presuppose this. It is pre-supposed in the sense that everybody knows what it means to think, as though it were common sense. We all have this common picture of what it means to think. It’s an image in which subject and object and being and beings are already assigned their proper place and relation one to the other. And so long as philosophy holds to this image it does not matter what it goes on to think conceptu- ally. If the image of thought guides the creation of concepts then those concepts will be part of the same image projected. Moreover, it is the suppo- sition of a natural capacity to think in this way that permits philosophy to claim to begin without suppositions. It is a supposition which is en- dowed with the power to undercut the conditions of the present moment and its attendant perver- sions. It is not a particular image of thought that worries Deleuze; it’s that thought is pre-con- ceived as an “image in general.” This is philoso- phy’s subjective presupposition and the frame of Deleuze’s critique. “Nous ne parlons pas de telle ou telle image de la pensée,” he says, “variable suivant les philosophies, mais d’une seule Image en général qui constitue le présupposé subjectif de la philosophie dans son ensemble.”5 Part of the image, its stance as it were, is that thought is construed as “naturally upright.” “Up- right” here means proper and good-willed. Thought is upright because it is the possession of the subject. As the unity of the faculties it reduces every other faculty to modes of the subject. Be- cause thinking is subjective in this way the sub- ject’s model of thought is recognition. The fac- ulty of sensibility can grasp only that which can be recognised by all the other faculties in the sub- jective act of recognition. When thinking is mod- elled on recognition, that which can be recog- nised is a reflection of the subject. The subject for whom recognition is the model of thought is filled with no more than an image of itself. Thought is left with no means of grasping that which cannot be recognised, at least whilst it remains erect and standing. But Deleuze makes clear that it is not a ques- tion of opposing “another image” to the dogmatic image of thought. Even the schizophrenic cannot be imaged, because the schizophrenic becomes a possibility for thought and is “revealed as such” only through the “abolition” of the dogmatic im- age.6 Deleuze is unequivocal then about the ne- cessity of theorising a thinking without image. Deleuze’s thought must be measured by the ex- tent to which it thinks without image. Its new- ness, its “répétition authentique,” will be its thinking without image. Indeed, so rigorous would the denunciation of the image as non-phi- losophy be that it would yield the prize of “the greatest destructions and demoralisations,” so obstinate would a thought without image be that it would have no ally but paradox, having re- nounced both representation and common sense, so original would a thinking purged of the image be that thought could finally begin to think. But thought can only begin, and it is this that would allow it continually to begin again, only when liberated from the image and its postulates.7 If representation for Deleuze is a transcendental il- lusion in which thought is “covered over” se recouvre by an image, it implies that in over- coming representation the image must be re- moved t;hought is only “uncovered” once the shroud of the image is taken down.8 The insistence that thought can and should happen “without images” extends even to valo- rising creator-writers, writers who are creators before they are authors, as “blind.” Deleuze’s self-understanding in the form of his “dialogue” with Claire Parnet in 1977, a dialogue which is no way an encounter because in it we recognise a Deleuze pre-given and decided, figures the likes of Nietzsche and Proust not as authors but as cre- ators, creators precisely because they are not au- thors. For as soon as the designation “author” is made, thought is once again determined as an im- age “qu’on soumet la pensée à une image”, and writing made an activity of life.9 Creation is en- counter, in which the writer encounters himself, and a writing which because it is its own life ne- cessitates that reading be an act of creation. Such encounters are “acts of thought without image,” and at once both blind and blinding “aussi bien aveugles qu’aveuglants”10—a thought blind to itself, and one which refuses to form itself as an image which might enable it to be visible. It is the imperceptible, it is that which dwells in the dark- est regions. This is not to argue for a thought no longer subject to recognition and representation, but to a thought no longer determinable as an im- age as such. It is as if an image can only order, or- der correct ideas rooted in goodwill and recogni- tion and governed by an origin of representation and the already decided. And what philosopher would not hope to set up an image of thought that no longer presupposes goodwill and a pre-medi- tated decision? But philosophy is too much on the side of friendship to achieve this.11 In place of the image of thought “rooted” in such postulates Deleuze instates a thinking in which the passional, aimless and horizontal line will be favoured over the natural and upright stance, a thinking always already begun, with its beginning in the repetition of a beginning again. Thinking becomes no longer a natural capacity we all possess but an activity some of us are forced into doing by that which we do not recog- nise but sense; moreover sense in a way which differentiates the faculty of sensibility from all other faculties, indeed brings it into discord with them whilst at the same time confronting them with their own limits. That which cannot be re- cognised has neither form nor figure, yet it “stares” at us. It “stares” at us, but “sans yeux.”12 The thought without image is a ground. It is the ground that an individual brings to the surface, or we might have to say raises to eye-level, the level of the eye-line of the one stared at—if, that is, that otherness is to be encountered and bring us into question—without being able to give the ground form, the ground that draws the eye from out of the body to it, a ground which “penetrates” thought with its stare, “the unrecognised in every recognition.” And that ground will be what al- lows for a metamorphosis productive of the new. For instance habit, the foundation of habit, will be metamorphosed into the failure of habitus, leading to the expulsion of agency in favour of a new individuality, an agency in the condition of continual expulsion. It is a ground which must be turned and brought to the surface, re-turned and repeated as surface, for only then will it be meta- morphosed. Recognition is defeated only if the ground is turned or “bent” “coudé” such that what it grounds it relates to the groundless.13 The thought without image is that which stares, even without eyes, “blind and blinding,” from within the imperceptible, and this thought is the ground- lessness of the ground. The question then arises, how is this ground turned and brought to the surface? We envisage the following answer: by the step, underfoot, by the walk of the one metamorphosed.
Interpretation: The affirmative may not defend action on celestial bodies. To clarify, if the affirmative does defend an action, it must only be within outer-space.
toppr.com/guides/physics/stars-and-solar-system/celestial-bodies LHP PS By the definition, a celestial body is a natural object outside of the Earth’s
AND
will give the necessary details about the celestial bodies in a simple manner.
It’s actively confusing and bad for international law to conflate outer space and celestial bodies – Cheng 2k:
Cheng, Bin. "Properly speaking, only celestial bodies have been reserved for use exclusively for peaceful (non-military) purposes, but not outer void space." International Law Studies 75.1 (2000): 21. LHP BT + LHP PS First of all, it may be necessary to clarify the meaning of the term
AND
It has become nameless, causing a great deal of confusion and misunderstanding.
Outweighs –
A~ Policy Freeze – they actively make it impossible for policymakers to determine what to do
B~ Common usage – every treaty makes an explicit distinction between them by either saying outer space or/and celestial bodies which demonstrates an understood legal difference engrained within law.
C~ Pragmatics – Cheng 99:
Cheng, Bin. "Introducing a New Term to Space Law." The Korean Journal of Air and Space Law and Policy 11 (1999): 321-327. LHP BT + LHP PS However, one of the consequences of this change in the use of the term
AND
because of the lack of a term to describe this vast empty space.
Violation: They defend –
Vote neg for limits – they explode them – multiple warrants – A~ their model justifies an infinite possibility of affs as space is extremely unexplored which is extremely unpredictable and impossible for negs to have prep to – B~ justifies reading any aff because Earth is a celestial body, and if celestial bodies and space are the same Earth is included, which means the aff can read any action on Earth which kills quality engagement and negative ground. That also justifies affs reading trivially true affs.
3/19/22
JF22 - DA - Innovation
Tournament: Harvard | Round: 2 | Opponent: Catonsville AT | Judge: He, Eric Competition in space between private entities lowers costs and barriers of entry for other companies increasing technological innovation. The aff links, cus the AC assumes private entities have hard incentives and space is profitable to make mega constellations Lizzy Gurdus, FEB 27 2021, CNBC, “Private companies such as SpaceX are driving costs down for everyone in the space race, says man behind UFO ETF”, https://www.cnbc.com/2021/02/27/private-companies-like-spacex-are-driving-industry-costs-down-ceo.html ahs ja DOA: Feb 19, 2022 Private space companies are paving the industry’s path to profits, says the man behind the Procure Space ETF (UFO). By taking part in the rapidly developing “space race,” billionaire-backed entities such as Elon Musk’s SpaceX and Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin are lowering costs across the board, ProcureAM CEO Andrew Chanin told CNBC’s “ETF Edge” this week. “They’re able to get the cost of launch down and that’s going to allow more companies to send things into outer space cheaper,” Chanin said in the Wednesday interview. “They’re really opening up the entire environment for space companies and future would-be space companies to lower those barriers of entry.” They’re also lowering costs for government-sponsored space programs by competing amongst themselves for NASA contracts, Chanin said. “They’re actually freeing up more of NASA’s budget to be able to invest in other areas of space, he said. “This competition I think is very healthy. Not necessarily every company’s going to be a winner, but hopefully this competition can drive down prices and also let the best technologies win.” NASA now also has contracts with more than 300 publicly traded U.S. companies, said Chanin, whose UFO ETF counts Loral Space and Communications and Gilat Satellite Networks as its top two holdings. “It’s not just necessarily a pure-play space company that might get a contract,” the CEO said. “It’s really opening up opportunities for everyone.” That’s why it’s important to look beyond name recognition in this particular area of investing, Matthew Bartolini, State Street’s head of SPDR Americas research, said in the same “ETF Edge” interview. State Street offers the SPDR SandP Kensho Final Frontiers ETF (ROKT), the first space ETF to hit the market. The fund’s top three holdings are Maxar Technologies, Virgin Galactic and Aerojet Rocketdyne. Bartolini recommended “to not just look at the high-flying names like SpaceX or Blue Origin that are in the private markets, but showcase what companies in the public markets help supply them.” Aerojet Rocketdyne, which defense giant Lockheed Martin is buying in hopes of competing with private space companies, played a key role in Blue Origin’s New Shepard rocket launch, Bartolini said. “You can see the derivative effects of a private company impacting the public markets just from that one example of Lockheed and Aerojet,” he said. “It helps underscore the opportunity that you’re seeing in space.” As space companies embrace greater efficiency, more government support and more commercial applications on Earth in areas such as satellite technology, that opportunity is likely to grow and continue to filter into public markets, Bartolini said. Morgan Stanley has said the global space industry could produce revenues of over $1 trillion by 2040. Current global revenues are roughly $350 billion. UFO and ROKT both fell by more than 1 on Friday. UFO is up over 14 year to date, while ROKT is up nearly 2. This innovation is occurring in the squo – the aff plan will only harm progress Seetha Raghava, August 4th 2021, UFC TODAY, “The Impact of Innovation in the New Era of Space Exploration”, https://www.ucf.edu/news/the-impact-of-innovation-in-the-new-era-of-space-exploration/ ahs ja DOA: Feb 19, 2022 Every once in a while, a confluence of discoveries, events and initiatives results in a breakthrough so significant that it propels the entire world to a higher level, redefining what is possible in so many different fields. This breakthrough is taking centerstage now, as the new era of space exploration — catalyzed by increasing launch access — dawns upon us. The surge of innovation that comes with this will create new opportunities and inspire the next generation of doers. When this happens, boundaries between scientific and social impact are blurred. Innovation leading to scientific discovery can benefit society in the same way that social innovation can diversify and support scientific innovators, who can contribute to global progress. To ride this wave of progress, we must all participate and innovate in the new era of space exploration. The intersection of space exploration, innovation and impact isn’t a new phenomenon. In the past, technology developments and spin-offs from space research have consistently found their way into communities worldwide sometimes with lifesaving benefits. The International Space Station supports experiments that have led to discoveries and inventions in communication, water purification, and remote guidance for health procedures and robotic surgeries. Satellite-enabled Earth observation capabilities that monitor natural disasters, climate and crops often support early warnings for threats and mitigation strategies. Space exploration has always been relevant to everyone no matter the discipline or interest. Commercialization of space has been key in many ways to the current boost in “firsts” over the last few years. It has spurred innovation in launch vehicles and related technologies that led to firsts in vertical-takeoff-vertical landing rocket technology, reusability of rocket boosters and privately developed crewed missions to orbit. Concurrently, NASA has continued to captivate our imagination with the first flight of a helicopter in another world, a mission to return an asteroid sample to Earth and sending a probe to make the closest ever approach to the sun. While we celebrate the scientific progress, there is a vastly important question that we all need to focus on: How can we drive the surge in innovation offered by increased access to space, to benefit humankind? Access to low-Earth orbit, and eventually human exploration of space, is a portal to achieve many impactful outcomes. The numbers and completion rate of microgravity experiments conducted by scientists will be greatly increased as a range of offerings in suborbital flights provide more opportunities to advance critical research in health, agriculture, energy, and more. Lunar, planetary, and even asteroid exploration may lead to discoveries of new materials — busting the limitations now imposed on capabilities for energy, transportation, and infrastructure or creating new sensors and devices that enhance safety on Earth. Space tourism —one can hope — has the power to potentially create an awareness of our oneness that may lead to social change. But much like all scientific endeavors, we cannot ignore the importance of pre-emptively identifying and mitigating negative impacts of new ventures some of which may have already taken shape. We need to consider space debris that threatens the very access that facilitates it, safety and rescue readiness to support increased crewed missions and space tourism, national security, and effects of light pollution on astronomy. Much of these can be approached and mitigated with new concepts and ideas that have already been set in motion. One thing is for certain, space has always been the inspiration for the next generation of innovators and creative thinkers. Architects of new ideas in this era will inspire many more. Ingenuity must also come from academic and research institutions building a new space-ready generation through innovative curriculum, scholarships, and research opportunities for key fields at all levels. Most of all, engaging participation is a responsibility anyone can take by steering the conversation and gathering ideas on how we can make this era one of positive benefit for all, while making opportunities inclusive to all.
Strong Innovation solves Extinction. Matthews 18 Dylan Matthews 10-26-2018 “How to help people millions of years from now” https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2018/10/26/18023366/far-future-effective-altruism-existential-risk-doing-good (Co-founder of Vox, citing Nick Beckstead @ Rutgers University)Re-cut by Elmer DOA: Feb 19, 2022 If you care about improving human lives, you should overwhelmingly care about those quadrillions of lives rather than the comparatively small number of people alive today. The 7.6 billion people now living, after all, amount to less than 0.003 percent of the population that will live in the future. It’s reasonable to suggest that those quadrillions of future people have, accordingly, hundreds of thousands of times more moral weight than those of us living here today do. That’s the basic argument behind Nick Beckstead’s 2013 Rutgers philosophy dissertation, “On the overwhelming importance of shaping the far future.” It’s a glorious mindfuck of a thesis, not least because Beckstead shows very convincingly that this is a conclusion any plausible moral view would reach. It’s not just something that weird utilitarians have to deal with. And Beckstead, to his considerable credit, walks the walk on this. He works at the Open Philanthropy Project on grants relating to the far future and runs a charitable fund for donors who want to prioritize the far future. And arguments from him and others have turned “long-termism” into a very vibrant, important strand of the effective altruism community. But what does prioritizing the far future even mean? The most literal thing it could mean is preventing human extinction, to ensure that the species persists as long as possible. For the long-term-focused effective altruists I know, that typically means identifying concrete threats to humanity’s continued existence — like unfriendly artificial intelligence, or a pandemic, or global warming/out of control geoengineering — and engaging in activities to prevent that specific eventuality. But in a set of slides he made in 2013, Beckstead makes a compelling case that while that’s certainly part of what caring about the far future entails, approaches that address specific threats to humanity (which he calls “targeted” approaches to the far future) have to complement “broad” approaches, where instead of trying to predict what’s going to kill us all, you just generally try to keep civilization running as best it can, so that it is, as a whole, well-equipped to deal with potential extinction events in the future, not just in 2030 or 2040 but in 3500 or 95000 or even 37 million. In other words, caring about the far future doesn’t mean just paying attention to low-probability risks of total annihilation; it also means acting on pressing needs now. For example: We’re going to be better prepared to prevent extinction from AI or a supervirus or global warming if society as a whole makes a lot of scientific progress. And a significant bottleneck there is that the vast majority of humanity doesn’t get high-enough-quality education to engage in scientific research, if they want to, which reduces the odds that we have enough trained scientists to come up with the breakthroughs we need as a civilization to survive and thrive. So maybe one of the best things we can do for the far future is to improve school systems — here and now — to harness the group economist Raj Chetty calls “lost Einsteins” (potential innovators who are thwarted by poverty and inequality in rich countries) and, more importantly, the hundreds of millions of kids in developing countries dealing with even worse education systems than those in depressed communities in the rich world. What if living ethically for the far future means living ethically now? Beckstead mentions some other broad, or very broad, ideas (these are all his descriptions): Help make computers faster so that people everywhere can work more efficiently Change intellectual property law so that technological innovation can happen more quickly Advocate for open borders so that people from poorly governed countries can move to better-governed countries and be more productive Meta-research: improve incentives and norms in academic work to better advance human knowledge Improve education Advocate for political party X to make future people have values more like political party X ”If you look at these areas (economic growth and technological progress, access to information, individual capability, social coordination, motives) a lot of everyday good works contribute,” Beckstead writes. “An implication of this is that a lot of everyday good works are good from a broad perspective, even though hardly anyone thinks explicitly in terms of far future standards.” Look at those examples again: It’s just a list of what normal altruistically motivated people, not effective altruism folks, generally do. Charities in the US love talking about the lost opportunities for innovation that poverty creates. Lots of smart people who want to make a difference become scientists, or try to work as teachers or on improving education policy, and lord knows there are plenty of people who become political party operatives out of a conviction that the moral consequences of the party’s platform are good. All of which is to say: Maybe effective altruists aren’t that special, or at least maybe we don’t have access to that many specific and weird conclusions about how best to help the world. If the far future is what matters, and generally trying to make the world work better is among the best ways to help the far future, then effective altruism just becomes plain ol’ do-goodery.
2/20/22
JF22 - DA - Xi
Tournament: Palm Classic | Round: 1 | Opponent: Immaculate Heart MF | Judge: Boals, John Xi’s regime is stable now, but its success depends on strong growth and private sector development. Mitter and Johnson 21 Rana Mitter and Elsbeth Johnson, Rana Mitter is a professor of the history and politics of modern China at Oxford. Elsbeth Johnson, formerly the strategy director for Prudential PLC’s Asian business, is a senior lecturer at MIT’s Sloan School of Management and the founder of SystemShift, a consulting firm. May-June 2021, "What the West Gets Wrong About China," Harvard Business Review, https://hbr.org/2021/05/what-the-west-gets-wrong-about-china accessed 12/14/21 DOA: Feb 19, 2022 Adam In China, however, growth has come in the context of stable communist rule, suggesting that democracy and growth are not inevitably mutually dependent. In fact, many Chinese believe that the country’s recent economic achievements—large-scale poverty reduction, huge infrastructure investment, and development as a world-class tech innovator—have come about because of, not despite, China’s authoritarian form of government. Its aggressive handling of Covid-19—in sharp contrast to that of many Western countries with higher death rates and later, less-stringent lockdowns—has, if anything, reinforced that view. China has also defied predictions that its authoritarianism would inhibit its capacity to innovate. It is a global leader in AI, biotech, and space exploration. Some of its technological successes have been driven by market forces: People wanted to buy goods or communicate more easily, and the likes of Alibaba and Tencent have helped them do just that. But much of the technological progress has come from a highly innovative and well-funded military that has invested heavily in China’s burgeoning new industries. This, of course, mirrors the role of U.S. defense and intelligence spending in the development of Silicon Valley. But in China the consumer applications have come faster, making more obvious the link between government investment and products and services that benefit individuals. That’s why ordinary Chinese people see Chinese companies such as Alibaba, Huawei, and TikTok as sources of national pride—international vanguards of Chinese success—rather than simply sources of jobs or GDP, as they might be viewed in the West. Thus July 2020 polling data from the Ash Center at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government revealed 95 satisfaction with the Beijing government among Chinese citizens. Our own experiences on the ground in China confirm this. Most ordinary people we meet don’t feel that the authoritarian state is solely oppressive, although it can be that; for them it also provides opportunity. A cleaner in Chongqing now owns several apartments because the CCP reformed property laws. A Shanghai journalist is paid by her state-controlled magazine to fly around the world for stories on global lifestyle trends. A young student in Nanjing can study propulsion physics at Beijing’s Tsinghua University thanks to social mobility and the party’s significant investment in scientific research. Xi has committed to the commercial space industry as the linchpin of China’s rise – the plan is seen as a complete 180 Patel 21 Neel V. Patel, Neel is a space reporter for MIT Technology Review. 1-21-2021, "China’s surging private space industry is out to challenge the US," MIT Technology Review, https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/01/21/1016513/china-private-commercial-space-industry-dominance/ accessed 12/14/21 DOA: Feb 19, 2022 Adam 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. Making friends The most critical strategic reason to encourage a private space sector is to create opportunities for international collaboration—particularly to attract customers wary of being seen to mix with the Chinese government. (US agencies and government contractors, for example, are barred from working with any groups the regime funds.) Document 60 and others issued by China’s National Development and Reform Commission were aimed not just at promoting technological innovation, but also at drawing in foreign investment and maximizing a customer base beyond Chinese borders. “China realizes there are certain things they cannot get on their own,” says Frans von der Dunk, a space policy expert at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln. Chinese companies like LandSpace and MinoSpace have worked to accrue funding through foreign investment, escaping dependence on state subsidies. And by avoiding state funding, a company can also avoid an array of restrictions on what it can and can’t do (such as constraints on talking with the media). Foreign investment also makes it easier to compete on a global scale: you’re taking on clients around the world, launching from other countries, and bringing talent from outside China. Although China is taking inspiration from the US in building out its private industry, the nature of the Chinese state also means these new companies face obstacles that their rivals in the West don’t have to worry about. While Chinese companies may look private on paper, they must still submit to government guidance and control, and accept some level of interference. It may be difficult for them to make a case to potential overseas customers that they are independent. The distinction between companies that are truly private and those that are more or less state actors is still quite fuzzy, especially if the government is a frequent customer. “That could still lead to a lack of trust from other partners,” says Goswami. It doesn’t help that the government itself is often very cagey about what its national program is even up to. And Hines adds that it’s not always clear exactly how separate these companies are from, say, the People’s Liberation Army, given the historical ties between the space and defense sectors. “Some of these things will pose significant hurdles for the commercial space sector as it tries to expand,” he says. Shifts in regime perception threatens CCP’s legitimacy from nationalist hardliners Weiss 19 Jessica Weiss 1-29-2019 “Authoritarian Audiences, Rhetoric, and Propaganda in International Crises: Evidence from China” http://www.jessicachenweiss.com/uploads/3/0/6/3/30636001/19-01-24-elite-statements-isq-ca.pdf (Associate Professor of Government at Cornell University)DOA: Feb 19, 2022 Elmer Public support—or the appearance of it—matters to many autocracies. As Ithiel de Sola Pool writes, modern dictatorships are “highly conscious of public opinion and make major efforts to affect it.”6 Mao Zedong told his comrades: “When you make revolution, you must first manage public opinion.”7 Because autocracies often rely on nationalist mythmaking,8 success or failure in defending the national honor in international crises could burnish the leadership’s patriotic credentials or spark opposition. Shared outrage at the regime’s foreign policy failures could galvanize street protests or elite fissures, creating intraparty upheaval or inviting military officers to step in to restore order. Fearing a domestic backlash, authoritarian leaders may feel compelled to take a tough international stance. Although authoritarian leaders are rarely held accountable to public opinion through free and fair elections, fears of popular unrest and irregular ouster often weigh heavily on autocrats seeking to maximize their tenure in office. Considering the harsh consequences that authoritarian elites face if pushed out of office, even a small increase in the probability of ouster could alter authoritarian incentives in international crises.9 A history of nationalist uprisings make Chinese citizens and leaders especially aware of the linkage between international disputes and domestic unrest. The weakness of the PRC’s predecessor in defending Chinese sovereignty at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919 galvanized protests and a general strike, forcing the government to sack three officials and reject the Treaty of Versailles, which awarded territories in China to Japan. These precedents have made Chinese officials particularly sensitive to the appearance of hewing to public opinion. As the People’s Daily chief editor wrote: “History and reality have shown us that public opinion and regime safety are inseparable.”10 One Chinese scholar even claimed: “the Chinese government probably knows the public’s opinion better and reacts to it more directly than even the U.S. government.”11 Xi will launch diversionary war to domestic backlash – escalates in multiple hotspots Norris 17, William J. Geostrategic Implications of China’s Twin Economic Challenges. CFR Discussion Paper, 2017. (Associate professor of Chinese foreign and security policy at Texas AandM University’s Bush School of Government and Public Service)Elmer DOA: Feb 19, 2022 Populist pressures might tempt the party leadership to encourage diversionary nationalism. The logic of this concern is straightforward: the Communist Party might seek to distract a restless domestic population with adventurism abroad.19 The Xi administration wants to appear tough in its defense of foreign encroachments against China’s interests. This need stems from a long-running narrative about how a weak Qing dynasty was unable to defend China in the face of European imperial expansion, epitomized by the Opium Wars and the subsequent treaties imposed on China in the nineteenth century. The party is particularly sensitive to perceptions of weakness because much of its claim to legitimacy—manifested in Xi’s Chinese Dream campaign today—stems from the party’s claims of leading the restoration of Chinese greatness. For example, the May Fourth Movement, a popular protest in 1919 that helped catalyze the CPC, called into question the legitimacy of the Republic of China government running the country at that time because the regime was seen as not having effectively defended China’s territorial and sovereignty interests at the Versailles Peace Conference. Diversionary nationalist frictions would likely occur if the Chinese leadership portrayed a foreign adversary as having made the first move, thus forcing Xi to stand up for China’s interests. An example is the 2012 attempt by the nationalist governor of Tokyo, Shintaro Ishihara, to buy the Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands from a private owner.20 Although the Japanese central government sought to avert a crisis by stepping in to purchase the islands—having them bought and administered by Ishihara’s Tokyo metropolitan government would have dragged Japan into a confrontation with China—China saw this move as part of a deliberate orchestration by Japan to nationalize the islands. Xi seemingly had no choice but to defend China’s claims against an attempt by Japan to consolidate its position on the dispute.21 This issue touched off a period of heated tensions between China and Japan, lasting more than two years.22 Such dynamics are not limited to Japan. Other possible areas of conflict include, but are not necessarily limited to, Taiwan, India, and the South China Sea (especially with the Philippines and Vietnam). The Chinese government will use such tactics if it believes that the costs are relatively low. Ideally, China would like to appear tough while avoiding material repercussions or a serious diplomatic breakdown. Standing up against foreign encroachment—without facing much blowback—could provide Xi’s administration with a tempting source of noneconomic legitimacy. However, over the next few years, Xi will probably not be actively looking to get embroiled abroad. Cushioning the fallout from slower growth while managing a structural economic transition will be difficult enough. Courting potential international crises that distract the central leadership would make this task even more daunting. Even if the top leadership did not wish to provoke conflict, a smaller budgetary allotment for security could cause military interests in China to deliberately instigate trouble to justify their claims over increasingly scarce resources. For example, an air force interested in ensuring its funding for a midair tanker program might find the existence of far-flung territorial disputes to be useful in making its case. Such a case would be made even stronger by a pattern of recent frictions that highlights the necessity of greater air power projection. Budgetary pressures may be partly behind a recent People’s Liberation Army reorganization and headcount reduction. A slowing economy might cause a further deceleration in China’s military spending, thus increasing such pressures as budgetary belts tighten. Challenges to Xi’s Leadership Xi Jinping’s efforts to address economic challenges could fail, unleashing consequences that extend well beyond China’s economic health. For example, an economic collapse could give rise to a Vladimir Putin–like redemption figure in China. Xi’s approach of centralizing authority over a diverse, complex, and massive social, political, and economic system is a recipe for brittleness. Rather than designing a resilient, decentralized governance structure that can gracefully cope with localized failures at particular nodes in a network, a highly centralized architecture risks catastrophic, system-level failure. Although centralized authority offers the tantalizing chimera of stronger control from the center, it also puts all the responsibility squarely on Xi’s shoulders. With China’s ascension to great power status, the consequences of internecine domestic political battles are increasingly playing out on the world stage. The international significance of China’s domestic politics is a new paradigm for the Chinese leadership, and one can expect an adjustment period during which the outcome of what had previously been relatively insulated domestic political frictions will likely generate unintended international repercussions. Such dynamics will influence Chinese foreign policy and security behavior. Domestic arguments over ideology, bureaucratic power struggles, and strategic direction could all have ripple effects abroad. Many of China’s party heavyweights still employ a narrow and exclusively domestic political calculus. Such behavior increases the possibility of international implications that are not fully anticipated, raising the risks of strategic miscalculation on the world stage. For example, the factional power struggles that animated the Cultural Revolution were largely driven by domestic concerns, yet manifested themselves in Chinese foreign policy for more than a decade. During this period, China was not the world’s second largest economy and, for much of this time, did not even have formal representation at the United Nations. If today’s globally interconnected China became engulfed in similar domestic chaos, the effects would be felt worldwide.23 Weakened Fetters of Economic Interdependence If China successfully transitioned away from its export-driven growth model toward a consumption-driven economic engine over the next four or five years, it could no longer feel as constrained by economic interdependence. To the extent that such constraints are loosened, the U.S.-China relationship will be more prone to conflict and friction.24 While China has never been the archetypal liberal economic power bent on benign integration with the global economy, its export-driven growth model produced a strong strategic preference for stability. Although past behavior is not necessarily indicative of future strategic calculus, China’s “economic circuit breaker” logic seems to have held its most aggressive nationalism below the threshold of war since 1979. A China that is both comparatively strong and less dependent on the global economy would be a novel development in modern geopolitics. As China changes the composition of its international economic linkages, global integration could place fewer constraints on it. Whereas China has been highly reliant on the import of raw materials and semifinished goods for reexport, a consumption-driven China could have a different international trade profile. China could still rely on imported goods, but their centrality to the country’s overall economic growth would be altered. Imports of luxury goods, consumer products, international brands, and services may not exert a significant constraining influence, since loss of access to such items may not be seen as strategically vital. If these flows were interrupted or jeopardized, the result would be more akin to an inconvenience than a strategic setback for China’s rise. That said, China is likely to continue to highly depend on imported oil even if the economic end to which that energy resource is directed shifts away from industrial and export production toward domestic consumption. US–China war goes nuclear – deterrence fails, Taiwan raises the stakes – extinction, BRANDS and BECKLEY 22 Brands, Hal, and Michael Beckley. “Washington Is Preparing for the Wrong War with China.” Foreign Affairs, 11 Jan. 2022, https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/china/2021-12-16/washington-preparing-wrong-war-china. DOA: Feb 19, 2022 All of this would make forging peace more difficult. The expansion of war aims narrows the diplomatic space for a settlement and produces severe bloodshed that fuels intense hatred and mistrust. Even if U.S. and Chinese leaders grew weary of fighting, they might still struggle to find a mutually acceptable peace. GOING NUCLEAR A war between China and the United States would differ from previous hegemonic wars in one fundamental respect: both sides have nuclear weapons. This would create disincentives to all-out escalation, but it could also, paradoxically, compound the dangers inherent in a long war. For starters, both sides might feel free to shoot off their conventional arsenals under the assumption that their nuclear arsenals would shield them from crippling retaliation. Scholars call this the “stability-instability paradox,” whereby blind faith in nuclear deterrence risks unleashing a massive conventional war. Chinese military writings often suggest that the PLA could wipe out U.S. bases and aircraft carriers in East Asia while China’s nuclear arsenal deterred U.S. attacks on the Chinese mainland. On the flip side, some American strategists have called for pounding Chinese mainland bases at the outset of a conflict in the belief that U.S. nuclear superiority would deter China from responding in kind. Far from preventing a major war, nuclear weapons could catalyze one. Once that war is underway, it could plausibly go nuclear in three distinct ways. Whichever side is losing might use tactical nuclear weapons—low-yield warheads that could destroy specific military targets without obliterating the other side’s homeland—to turn the tide. That was how the Pentagon planned to halt a Soviet invasion of central Europe during the Cold War, and it is what North Korea, Pakistan, and Russia have suggested they would do if they were losing a war today. If China crippled U.S. conventional forces in East Asia, the United States would have to decide whether to save Taiwan by using tactical nuclear weapons against Chinese ports, airfields, or invasion fleets. This is no fantasy: the U.S. military is already developing nuclear-tipped, submarine-launched cruise missiles that could be used for such purposes. A local war could turn into a whole-of-society brawl that spans multiple regions. China might also use nuclear weapons to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat. The PLA has embarked on an unprecedented expansion of its nuclear arsenal, and PLA officers have written that China could use nuclear weapons if a conventional war threatened the survival of its government or nuclear arsenal—which would almost surely be the case if Beijing was losing a war over Taiwan. Perhaps these unofficial claims are bluffs. Yet it is not difficult to imagine that if China faced the prospect of humiliating defeat, it might fire off a nuclear weapon (perhaps at or near the huge U.S. military base on Guam) to regain a tactical advantage or shock Washington into a cease-fire. As the conflict drags on, either side could also use the ultimate weapon to end a grinding war of attrition. During the Korean War, American leaders repeatedly contemplated dropping nuclear bombs on China to force it to accept a cease-fire. Today, both countries would have the option of using limited nuclear strikes to compel a stubborn opponent to concede. The incentives to do so could be strong, given that whichever side pulls the nuclear trigger first might gain a major advantage. A final route to nuclear war is inadvertent escalation. Each side, knowing that escalation is a risk, may try to limit the other’s nuclear options. The United States could, for instance, try to sink China’s ballistic missile submarines before they hide in the deep waters beyond the first island chain. Yet such an attack could put China in a “use it or lose it” situation with regard to its nuclear forces, especially if the United States also struck China’s land-based missiles and communication systems, which intermingle conventional and nuclear forces. In this scenario, China’s leaders might use their nuclear weapons rather than risk losing that option altogether.
2/20/22
JF22 - DA - Xi v2
Tournament: Palm Classic | Round: 4 | Opponent: Northland Christian LB | Judge: Matthes, Leo Xi’s regime is stable now, but its success depends on strong growth and private sector development. Mitter and Johnson 21 Rana Mitter and Elsbeth Johnson, Rana Mitter is a professor of the history and politics of modern China at Oxford. Elsbeth Johnson, formerly the strategy director for Prudential PLC’s Asian business, is a senior lecturer at MIT’s Sloan School of Management and the founder of SystemShift, a consulting firm. May-June 2021, "What the West Gets Wrong About China," Harvard Business Review, https://hbr.org/2021/05/what-the-west-gets-wrong-about-china accessed 12/14/21 Adam DOA: Feb 19, 2022 In China, however, growth has come in the context of stable communist rule, suggesting that democracy and growth are not inevitably mutually dependent. In fact, many Chinese believe that the country’s recent economic achievements—large-scale poverty reduction, huge infrastructure investment, and development as a world-class tech innovator—have come about because of, not despite, China’s authoritarian form of government. Its aggressive handling of Covid-19—in sharp contrast to that of many Western countries with higher death rates and later, less-stringent lockdowns—has, if anything, reinforced that view. China has also defied predictions that its authoritarianism would inhibit its capacity to innovate. It is a global leader in AI, biotech, and space exploration. Some of its technological successes have been driven by market forces: People wanted to buy goods or communicate more easily, and the likes of Alibaba and Tencent have helped them do just that. But much of the technological progress has come from a highly innovative and well-funded military that has invested heavily in China’s burgeoning new industries. This, of course, mirrors the role of U.S. defense and intelligence spending in the development of Silicon Valley. But in China the consumer applications have come faster, making more obvious the link between government investment and products and services that benefit individuals. That’s why ordinary Chinese people see Chinese companies such as Alibaba, Huawei, and TikTok as sources of national pride—international vanguards of Chinese success—rather than simply sources of jobs or GDP, as they might be viewed in the West. Thus July 2020 polling data from the Ash Center at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government revealed 95 satisfaction with the Beijing government among Chinese citizens. Our own experiences on the ground in China confirm this. Most ordinary people we meet don’t feel that the authoritarian state is solely oppressive, although it can be that; for them it also provides opportunity. A cleaner in Chongqing now owns several apartments because the CCP reformed property laws. A Shanghai journalist is paid by her state-controlled magazine to fly around the world for stories on global lifestyle trends. A young student in Nanjing can study propulsion physics at Beijing’s Tsinghua University thanks to social mobility and the party’s significant investment in scientific research. Xi has committed to the commercial space industry as the linchpin of China’s rise – the plan is seen as a complete 180 Patel 21 Neel V. Patel, Neel is a space reporter for MIT Technology Review. 1-21-2021, "China’s surging private space industry is out to challenge the US," MIT Technology Review, https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/01/21/1016513/china-private-commercial-space-industry-dominance/ accessed 12/14/21 DOA: Feb 19, 2022 Adam 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. Making friends The most critical strategic reason to encourage a private space sector is to create opportunities for international collaboration—particularly to attract customers wary of being seen to mix with the Chinese government. (US agencies and government contractors, for example, are barred from working with any groups the regime funds.) Document 60 and others issued by China’s National Development and Reform Commission were aimed not just at promoting technological innovation, but also at drawing in foreign investment and maximizing a customer base beyond Chinese borders. “China realizes there are certain things they cannot get on their own,” says Frans von der Dunk, a space policy expert at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln. Chinese companies like LandSpace and MinoSpace have worked to accrue funding through foreign investment, escaping dependence on state subsidies. And by avoiding state funding, a company can also avoid an array of restrictions on what it can and can’t do (such as constraints on talking with the media). Foreign investment also makes it easier to compete on a global scale: you’re taking on clients around the world, launching from other countries, and bringing talent from outside China. Although China is taking inspiration from the US in building out its private industry, the nature of the Chinese state also means these new companies face obstacles that their rivals in the West don’t have to worry about. While Chinese companies may look private on paper, they must still submit to government guidance and control, and accept some level of interference. It may be difficult for them to make a case to potential overseas customers that they are independent. The distinction between companies that are truly private and those that are more or less state actors is still quite fuzzy, especially if the government is a frequent customer. “That could still lead to a lack of trust from other partners,” says Goswami. It doesn’t help that the government itself is often very cagey about what its national program is even up to. And Hines adds that it’s not always clear exactly how separate these companies are from, say, the People’s Liberation Army, given the historical ties between the space and defense sectors. “Some of these things will pose significant hurdles for the commercial space sector as it tries to expand,” he says. Shifts in regime perception threatens CCP’s legitimacy from nationalist hardliners Weiss 19 Jessica Weiss 1-29-2019 “Authoritarian Audiences, Rhetoric, and Propaganda in International Crises: Evidence from China” http://www.jessicachenweiss.com/uploads/3/0/6/3/30636001/19-01-24-elite-statements-isq-ca.pdf (Associate Professor of Government at Cornell University) DOA: Feb 19, 2022 Elmer Public support—or the appearance of it—matters to many autocracies. As Ithiel de Sola Pool writes, modern dictatorships are “highly conscious of public opinion and make major efforts to affect it.”6 Mao Zedong told his comrades: “When you make revolution, you must first manage public opinion.”7 Because autocracies often rely on nationalist mythmaking,8 success or failure in defending the national honor in international crises could burnish the leadership’s patriotic credentials or spark opposition. Shared outrage at the regime’s foreign policy failures could galvanize street protests or elite fissures, creating intraparty upheaval or inviting military officers to step in to restore order. Fearing a domestic backlash, authoritarian leaders may feel compelled to take a tough international stance. Although authoritarian leaders are rarely held accountable to public opinion through free and fair elections, fears of popular unrest and irregular ouster often weigh heavily on autocrats seeking to maximize their tenure in office. Considering the harsh consequences that authoritarian elites face if pushed out of office, even a small increase in the probability of ouster could alter authoritarian incentives in international crises.9 A history of nationalist uprisings make Chinese citizens and leaders especially aware of the linkage between international disputes and domestic unrest. The weakness of the PRC’s predecessor in defending Chinese sovereignty at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919 galvanized protests and a general strike, forcing the government to sack three officials and reject the Treaty of Versailles, which awarded territories in China to Japan. These precedents have made Chinese officials particularly sensitive to the appearance of hewing to public opinion. As the People’s Daily chief editor wrote: “History and reality have shown us that public opinion and regime safety are inseparable.”10 One Chinese scholar even claimed: “the Chinese government probably knows the public’s opinion better and reacts to it more directly than even the U.S. government.”11 Xi will launch diversionary war to domestic backlash – escalates in multiple hotspots Norris 17, William J. Geostrategic Implications of China’s Twin Economic Challenges. CFR Discussion Paper, 2017. (Associate professor of Chinese foreign and security policy at Texas AandM University’s Bush School of Government and Public Service) DOA: Feb 19, 2022 Elmer Populist pressures might tempt the party leadership to encourage diversionary nationalism. The logic of this concern is straightforward: the Communist Party might seek to distract a restless domestic population with adventurism abroad.19 The Xi administration wants to appear tough in its defense of foreign encroachments against China’s interests. This need stems from a long-running narrative about how a weak Qing dynasty was unable to defend China in the face of European imperial expansion, epitomized by the Opium Wars and the subsequent treaties imposed on China in the nineteenth century. The party is particularly sensitive to perceptions of weakness because much of its claim to legitimacy—manifested in Xi’s Chinese Dream campaign today—stems from the party’s claims of leading the restoration of Chinese greatness. For example, the May Fourth Movement, a popular protest in 1919 that helped catalyze the CPC, called into question the legitimacy of the Republic of China government running the country at that time because the regime was seen as not having effectively defended China’s territorial and sovereignty interests at the Versailles Peace Conference. Diversionary nationalist frictions would likely occur if the Chinese leadership portrayed a foreign adversary as having made the first move, thus forcing Xi to stand up for China’s interests. An example is the 2012 attempt by the nationalist governor of Tokyo, Shintaro Ishihara, to buy the Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands from a private owner.20 Although the Japanese central government sought to avert a crisis by stepping in to purchase the islands—having them bought and administered by Ishihara’s Tokyo metropolitan government would have dragged Japan into a confrontation with China—China saw this move as part of a deliberate orchestration by Japan to nationalize the islands. Xi seemingly had no choice but to defend China’s claims against an attempt by Japan to consolidate its position on the dispute.21 This issue touched off a period of heated tensions between China and Japan, lasting more than two years.22 Such dynamics are not limited to Japan. Other possible areas of conflict include, but are not necessarily limited to, Taiwan, India, and the South China Sea (especially with the Philippines and Vietnam). The Chinese government will use such tactics if it believes that the costs are relatively low. Ideally, China would like to appear tough while avoiding material repercussions or a serious diplomatic breakdown. Standing up against foreign encroachment—without facing much blowback—could provide Xi’s administration with a tempting source of noneconomic legitimacy. However, over the next few years, Xi will probably not be actively looking to get embroiled abroad. Cushioning the fallout from slower growth while managing a structural economic transition will be difficult enough. Courting potential international crises that distract the central leadership would make this task even more daunting. Even if the top leadership did not wish to provoke conflict, a smaller budgetary allotment for security could cause military interests in China to deliberately instigate trouble to justify their claims over increasingly scarce resources. For example, an air force interested in ensuring its funding for a midair tanker program might find the existence of far-flung territorial disputes to be useful in making its case. Such a case would be made even stronger by a pattern of recent frictions that highlights the necessity of greater air power projection. Budgetary pressures may be partly behind a recent People’s Liberation Army reorganization and headcount reduction. A slowing economy might cause a further deceleration in China’s military spending, thus increasing such pressures as budgetary belts tighten. Challenges to Xi’s Leadership Xi Jinping’s efforts to address economic challenges could fail, unleashing consequences that extend well beyond China’s economic health. For example, an economic collapse could give rise to a Vladimir Putin–like redemption figure in China. Xi’s approach of centralizing authority over a diverse, complex, and massive social, political, and economic system is a recipe for brittleness. Rather than designing a resilient, decentralized governance structure that can gracefully cope with localized failures at particular nodes in a network, a highly centralized architecture risks catastrophic, system-level failure. Although centralized authority offers the tantalizing chimera of stronger control from the center, it also puts all the responsibility squarely on Xi’s shoulders. With China’s ascension to great power status, the consequences of internecine domestic political battles are increasingly playing out on the world stage. The international significance of China’s domestic politics is a new paradigm for the Chinese leadership, and one can expect an adjustment period during which the outcome of what had previously been relatively insulated domestic political frictions will likely generate unintended international repercussions. Such dynamics will influence Chinese foreign policy and security behavior. Domestic arguments over ideology, bureaucratic power struggles, and strategic direction could all have ripple effects abroad. Many of China’s party heavyweights still employ a narrow and exclusively domestic political calculus. Such behavior increases the possibility of international implications that are not fully anticipated, raising the risks of strategic miscalculation on the world stage. For example, the factional power struggles that animated the Cultural Revolution were largely driven by domestic concerns, yet manifested themselves in Chinese foreign policy for more than a decade. During this period, China was not the world’s second largest economy and, for much of this time, did not even have formal representation at the United Nations. If today’s globally interconnected China became engulfed in similar domestic chaos, the effects would be felt worldwide.23 Weakened Fetters of Economic Interdependence If China successfully transitioned away from its export-driven growth model toward a consumption-driven economic engine over the next four or five years, it could no longer feel as constrained by economic interdependence. To the extent that such constraints are loosened, the U.S.-China relationship will be more prone to conflict and friction.24 While China has never been the archetypal liberal economic power bent on benign integration with the global economy, its export-driven growth model produced a strong strategic preference for stability. Although past behavior is not necessarily indicative of future strategic calculus, China’s “economic circuit breaker” logic seems to have held its most aggressive nationalism below the threshold of war since 1979. A China that is both comparatively strong and less dependent on the global economy would be a novel development in modern geopolitics. As China changes the composition of its international economic linkages, global integration could place fewer constraints on it. Whereas China has been highly reliant on the import of raw materials and semifinished goods for reexport, a consumption-driven China could have a different international trade profile. China could still rely on imported goods, but their centrality to the country’s overall economic growth would be altered. Imports of luxury goods, consumer products, international brands, and services may not exert a significant constraining influence, since loss of access to such items may not be seen as strategically vital. If these flows were interrupted or jeopardized, the result would be more akin to an inconvenience than a strategic setback for China’s rise. That said, China is likely to continue to highly depend on imported oil even if the economic end to which that energy resource is directed shifts away from industrial and export production toward domestic consumption. US–China war goes nuclear – deterrence fails, Taiwan raises the stakes – extinction, BRANDS and BECKLEY 22 Brands, Hal, and Michael Beckley. “Washington Is Preparing for the Wrong War with China.” Foreign Affairs, 11 Jan. 2022, https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/china/2021-12-16/washington-preparing-wrong-war-china. DOA: Feb 19, 2022 All of this would make forging peace more difficult. The expansion of war aims narrows the diplomatic space for a settlement and produces severe bloodshed that fuels intense hatred and mistrust. Even if U.S. and Chinese leaders grew weary of fighting, they might still struggle to find a mutually acceptable peace. GOING NUCLEAR A war between China and the United States would differ from previous hegemonic wars in one fundamental respect: both sides have nuclear weapons. This would create disincentives to all-out escalation, but it could also, paradoxically, compound the dangers inherent in a long war. For starters, both sides might feel free to shoot off their conventional arsenals under the assumption that their nuclear arsenals would shield them from crippling retaliation. Scholars call this the “stability-instability paradox,” whereby blind faith in nuclear deterrence risks unleashing a massive conventional war. Chinese military writings often suggest that the PLA could wipe out U.S. bases and aircraft carriers in East Asia while China’s nuclear arsenal deterred U.S. attacks on the Chinese mainland. On the flip side, some American strategists have called for pounding Chinese mainland bases at the outset of a conflict in the belief that U.S. nuclear superiority would deter China from responding in kind. Far from preventing a major war, nuclear weapons could catalyze one. Once that war is underway, it could plausibly go nuclear in three distinct ways. Whichever side is losing might use tactical nuclear weapons—low-yield warheads that could destroy specific military targets without obliterating the other side’s homeland—to turn the tide. That was how the Pentagon planned to halt a Soviet invasion of central Europe during the Cold War, and it is what North Korea, Pakistan, and Russia have suggested they would do if they were losing a war today. If China crippled U.S. conventional forces in East Asia, the United States would have to decide whether to save Taiwan by using tactical nuclear weapons against Chinese ports, airfields, or invasion fleets. This is no fantasy: the U.S. military is already developing nuclear-tipped, submarine-launched cruise missiles that could be used for such purposes. A local war could turn into a whole-of-society brawl that spans multiple regions. China might also use nuclear weapons to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat. The PLA has embarked on an unprecedented expansion of its nuclear arsenal, and PLA officers have written that China could use nuclear weapons if a conventional war threatened the survival of its government or nuclear arsenal—which would almost surely be the case if Beijing was losing a war over Taiwan. Perhaps these unofficial claims are bluffs. Yet it is not difficult to imagine that if China faced the prospect of humiliating defeat, it might fire off a nuclear weapon (perhaps at or near the huge U.S. military base on Guam) to regain a tactical advantage or shock Washington into a cease-fire. As the conflict drags on, either side could also use the ultimate weapon to end a grinding war of attrition. During the Korean War, American leaders repeatedly contemplated dropping nuclear bombs on China to force it to accept a cease-fire. Today, both countries would have the option of using limited nuclear strikes to compel a stubborn opponent to concede. The incentives to do so could be strong, given that whichever side pulls the nuclear trigger first might gain a major advantage. A final route to nuclear war is inadvertent escalation. Each side, knowing that escalation is a risk, may try to limit the other’s nuclear options. The United States could, for instance, try to sink China’s ballistic missile submarines before they hide in the deep waters beyond the first island chain. Yet such an attack could put China in a “use it or lose it” situation with regard to its nuclear forces, especially if the United States also struck China’s land-based missiles and communication systems, which intermingle conventional and nuclear forces. In this scenario, China’s leaders might use their nuclear weapons rather than risk losing that option altogether.
2/20/22
JF22 - K - Deleuze v2
Tournament: Palm Classic | Round: 1 | Opponent: Immaculate Heart MF | Judge: Boals, John The 1AC’s perception of property and limitation of appropriation obliterates the subject’s transcendence of the mind, leaving them without freedoms. Property isn’t a totalizing relation that limits others access, instead it is the name for territorialized relations between the subject and their material world. Appropriation of outer space allows the subject to escape natural confines and attain freedom from their Earth prison, BUCHANAN “99 Buchanan, Ian. "Deleuze and Cultural Studies". A Deleuzian Century?, edited by Ian Buchanan, New York, USA: Duke University Press, 1999, pp. 103-118. https://doi.org/10.1515/9780822395973-006 DOA: Feb 19, 2022 LHP HP According to Deleuze, association both transcends and differs frorn the imagination, which is to say, it affects the imagination. "We can now see the special ground of empiricism: nothing in the mind transcends human nature, because it is human nature that, in its principles, transcends the mind; nothing is ever transcendental." This is the basis of what Deleuze de scribes as the "coherent paradox" of Hume's philosophy: "It offers a subjectivity which transcends itself, without being any less passive." 11 The subject, in other words, is constituted in the given but also able to transcend the given. This is possible because the relation between the imagination and the principles of associatio.n operating there is dynamicP Association, then, far from being a product, which would involve an unnecessary hypostatization, is in fact "a rule of the imagination and a manifestation of its free exercise." As such, association at once guides the imagination (thereby giving it uniformity) and constrains it. It is through this relation that the imagination becomes human nature: "The mind, having become nature, has acquired now a tendency." 13 The notion of tendency is anthropological and, in this sense, humanist, since it posits an individual composed of social codes (and thus available to interrogation via those codes). But it is not fully humanist: the subject it posits is a fragmented one. Although the subject is said to have transcended itself, that does not rnean it is a transcendental subject. It does not stand outside what it organizes or makes coherent; rather, organization and coherence-made possible by the principles of association-take place in the subject, which is why the subject is fragmented. As the site of the instance of coherence referred to as subjectivity, the subject is not the principle of totalization that would supply that coherence. "Ernpirical subjectivity is constituted in the mind under the influence of principles affecting it; the mind therefore does not have the characteristics of a preexisting subject." 14 It transcends itself to the extent that the mind becomes a subject.15 "In Hume's empiricisrn, genesis is always understood in terms of principles, and itself as a principle." The subject, therefore, can only be apprehended via its constitutive principles - which must be external in order to be apprehended in themselves - and chief among these is habit: "Habit is the constitutive root of the subject." 16 The paradox of habit is that it is formed by degrees (therefore cons tituted, not constitutive) and a preformed principle of nature (therefore constitutive, not constituted). But as Deleuze shows, this implies no contradiction: the subject invents the very norms and general rules it lives by. Despite appearances, habit is not the same thing as habitus, not as Bourdieu understands the term anyway. In his formulation, habitus is an acquired "system of generative schemes" with "an infinite capacity for generating products-thoughts, perceptions, expressions and actions-whose lirnits are set by the historically and socially situated conditions of its production."18 The transcendental ernpirical subject, in contrast to Bourdieu's conception, is as much the product of self-invention as it is the consequence of conforrning to an existing structure. To put it another way, in the given the subject is without agency; he or she is simply one particle among many and must rnove and sway with the ebb and flow of the social tide. To gain agency, the subject must transcend the given. How the subject does this is perhaps the most vital question we can ask of Deleuze's version of empiricism. It is the process of appropriation that enables the passively synthesized subject to become active-to self-fashion, as it were.19 By "appropriation" 1 mean precisely what Deleuze describes in reference to Artaud as the necessary effort to think. This concept of appropriation posits "uses" as creative acts. It is through the practices of everyday life-the rnultiplicity of "uses" to which social structures, the regulatory bodies that shape culture and cultural cornrnodities, the already appropriated and about to be appropriated items that combine with desire to produce a culture, are put-that the passively formed subject becornes active. The value of this pivotaI "mechanism" to cultural studies is that it is liberating, enabling the subject to particularize the universaI and, as a result, to put the so-called normative institutions which ordinarily govern his or her existence to his or her own use. Appropriation is therefore a path to freedom. 108 Jan Buchanan Prisons provide an excellent test case for this hypothesis. If it can be shown that freedom is possible, via appropriation, in a place so purposively unfree as a prison, then we can be sure that freedorn is always possible. The crucial problem for our the ory is that circumstances cannot be ignored or relegated to a secondary role. There would be nothing profound in the clairn that freedom is possible even in Auschwitz, say, if circurnstances are totally ignored. The gas chambers, the crematoria, the electrified-wire fences, the irnpossibly small bunks, the desperate lack offood, the wooden clogs that permit only clumsy hobbling-none of these circumstantial elements can be discounted or dismissed.20 But, by the sarne token, none can be said to be decisive either or we will be forced to conclude that freedom in this situation is impossible. If the prisoner is an other, then what rnust be found is a means of expressing, simultaneously, otherness as an insular identity with its own sovereign power and otherness as a deplorable state of oppression. This is, in fact, the principal utility of appropriation as an analytic rnodel: by not defining the Self in relation to an Other, it enables cultural studies to express the everyday as a dynamic and complex series of interlocking relations between existing forms and current uses (i.e., between passive forrns and active transforrnations), allowing us to theorize concomitantly-despite the law of noncontradiction-oppression and resistance. Such a facility, in turn, enables us to apprehend the fact that an imprisoned person can simultaneously conform to an imposed "foreign" order and subvert that order.21 Because the social structure defining the parameters of people's lives-oppressed or otherwise-has to be enunciated by thern in order to be actualized, it is always available to appropriation. The passively formed subject is always becoming active. When, for example, Arthur Koestler's Rubashov (in Darkness at Noon) is taken into custody, the given ofhis everyday lifè is radically altered.22 He undergoes what Deleuze and Guattari call an "incorporeal" transformation and becornes a political prisoner.23 When Rubashov says "1" in prison, he realizes the potential of the prison to turn hirn into a prisoner. In saying "1 am a prisoner," he actualizes his imprisonrnent as the given of his daily existence, but, in order to do that, he has to appropriate the language of incarceration. This is an uncertain enterprise: while appropriation can certainly be shown to lead to freedom, the freedom it results in is not constant; rather, it varies according to degrees of intensity, that is, there are diflerent modalities of freedom (a problern 1 will return Deleuze and Cultural Studies lOg to). In this respect, the interrogation scene that takes up much of the third section of the novel is revelatory. At this moment in his detention, Rubashov is able to regain agency by appropriating his interrogation, and subsequent confession, to his own existentially motivated purposes. What this means, in effect, is that while the prison and its regulations define the circurnstances of Rubashov's existence, they do not fully determine the conditions for his freedom. It becomes possible to say, now, that one is not free in prison, but that one can nevertheless achieve freedom there.
This is a direct violation of the subject infinite potential. Each individual is dictated to have a certain identity only when they are surrounded by stable structures that force the individual to understand themselves in a single way. Conversion therapy takes the homosexual subject and denies their method of expressing themselves. We can only harness our potential when we become able to interact with new spaces, like discovering ones passion and breaking rules that dictate how one might live, DELEUZE and GUITARRI 88 Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. A thousand plateaus: Capitalism and schizophrenia. Bloomsbury Publishing, 1988. Pg 53-55 DOA: Feb 19, 2022 but it’s a physical book I got LHP HL Forms relate to codes and processes of coding and decoding in the parastrata; substances, being formed matters, relate to territorialities and movements of deterritorialization and reterritorialization on the epis-trata. In truth, the epistrata are just as inseparable from the movements that constitute them as the parastrata are from their processes. Nomadic waves or flows of deterritorialization go from the central layer to the periphery, then from the new center to the new periphery, falling back to the old center and launching forth to the new.16 The organization of the epistrata moves in the direction of increasing deterritorialization. Physical particles and chemical substances cross thresholds of deterritorialization on their own stratum and between strata; these thresholds correspond to more or less stable intermediate states, to more or less transitory valences and existences, to engagements with this or that other body, to densities of proximity, to more or less localizable connections. Not only are physical particles characterized by speeds of deterritorialization—Joycean tachyons, particles-holes, and quarks recalling the fundamental idea of the "soup"—but a single chemical substance (sulfur or carbon, for example) has a number of more and less deterritorialized states. The more interior milieus an organism has on its own stratum, assuring its autonomy and bringing it into a set of aleatory relations with the exterior, the more deterritorialized it is. That is why degrees of development must be understood relatively, and as a function of differential speeds, relations, and rates. Deterritorialization must be thought of as a perfectly positive power that has degrees and thresholds (epistrata), is always relative, and has reterritorialization as its flipside or complement. An organism that is deterritorialized in relation to the exterior necessarily reterritorializes on its interior milieus. A given presumed fragment of embryo is deterritorialized when it changes thresholds or gradients, but is assigned a new role by the new surroundings. Local movements are alterations. Cellular migration, stretching, invagination, folding are examples of this. Every voyage is intensive, and occurs in relation to thresholds of intensity between which it evolves or that it crosses. One travels by intensity; displacements and spatial figures depend on intensive thresholds of nomadic deterritorialization (and thus on differential relations) that simultaneously define complementary, sedentary reterritorializations. Every stratum operates this way: by grasping in its pincers a maximum number of intensities or intensive particles over which it spreads its forms and substances, constituting determinate gradients and thresholds of resonance (deterritorialization on a stratum always occurs in relation to a complementary reterritorialization).17 As long as preestablished forms were compared to predetermined degrees, all one could do was affirm their irreducibility, and there was no way of judging possible communication between the two factors. But we see now that forms depend on codes in the parastrata and plunge into processes of decoding or drift and that degrees themselves are caught up in movements of intensive territorialization and reterritorialization. There is no simple correspondence between codes and territorialities on the one hand and decodings and deterritorialization on the other: on the contrary, a code may be a deterritorialization and a reterritorialization a decoding. Wide gaps separate code and territoriality. The two factors nevertheless have the same "subject" in a stratum: it is populations that are deterritorialized and reterritorialized, and also coded and decoded. In addition, these factors communicate or interlace in the milieus. On the one hand, modifications of a code have an aleatory cause in the milieu of exteriority, and it is their effects on the interior milieus, their compatibility with them, that decide whether they will be popularized. Deterritorializations and reterritorializations do not bring about the modifications; they do, however, strictly determine their selection. On the other hand, every modification has an associated milieu that in turn entails a certain deterritorialization in relation to the milieu of exteriority and a certain reterritorialization on intermediate or interior milieus. Perceptions and actions in an associated milieu, even those on a molecular level, construct or produce territorial signs (indexes). This is especially true of an animal world, which is constituted, marked off by signs that divide it into zones (of shelter, hunting, neutrality, etc.), mobilize special organs, and correspond to fragments of code; this is so even at the margin of decoding inherent in the code. Even the domain of learning is defined by the code, or prescribed by it. But indexes or territorial signs are inseparable from a double movement. Since the associated milieu always confronts a milieu of exteriority with which the animal is engaged and in which it takes necessary risks, a line of flight must be preserved to enable the animal to regain its associated milieu when danger appears (for example, the bull's line of flight in the arena, which it uses to regain the turf it has chosen).18 A second kind of line of flight arises when the associated milieu is rocked by blows from the exterior, forcing the animal to abandon it and strike up an association with new portions of exteriority, this time leaning on its interior milieus like fragile crutches. When the seas dried, the primitive Fish left its associated milieu to explore land, forced to "stand on its own legs," now carrying water only on the inside, in the amniotic membranes protecting the embryo. In one way or the other, the animal is more a fleer than a fighter, but its flights are also conquests, creations. Territorialities, then, are shot through with lines of flight testifying to the presence within them of movements of deterritorialization and reterritorialization. In a certain sense, they are secondary. They would be nothing without these movements that deposit them. In short, the epistrata and parastrata are continually moving, sliding, shifting, and changing on the Ecumenon or unity of composition of a stratum; some are swept away by lines of flight and movements of deterritorialization, others by processes of decoding or drift, but they all communicate at the intersection of the milieus. The strata are continually being shaken by phenomena of cracking and rupture, either at the level of the substrata that furnish the materials (a prebiotic soup, a prechemical soup ...), at the level of the accumulating epistrata, or at the level of the abutting parastrata: everywhere there arise simultaneous accelerations and blockages, comparative speeds, differences in deterritorialization creating relative fields of reterritorialization. Alternative is to interrogate the stable concept of the subject in favor of alignment with the Body without Organs. The Body without Organs is the exact moments a subject has infinite potential to become anything they may wish, like an egg capable of growing into any kind of species, chicken, dinosaur, or even human being. The Alternative allows the subject to exist in society independent of social constructs such as gender, class, and nationality that have previously composed the stable subject, SMITH 18 Smith, Daniel. "What is the body without organs? Machine and organism in Deleuze and Guattari." Continental Philosophy Review 51.1 (2018): 95-110. Team purchased PDF, Feb 19, 2022 LHP HL As scholars have noted, the body without organs (sometimes abbreviated to BwO) is a somewhat confusing term, because it does not describe ‘‘a body deprived of organs,’’ as the term seems to indicate, but rather ‘‘an assemblage of organs freed from the supposedly ‘natural’ or ‘instinctual’ organization that makes it an organism.’’43 As Deleuze and Guattari put it, for the body without organs, the ‘‘enemy’’ is not the organs, but the organism, the particular arrangement and configuration of the organs.44 The body without organs is supposed to designate all of those things that an organic body could do, but that it is prevented from doing because of its homeostatic self-regulation processes. The body without organs is the full set of capacities or potentialities of a body prior to its being given the structure of an organism, which only limits and constrains what it can do: it is ‘‘what remains when you take everything away.’’45 As they ask in A Thousand Plateaus: Is it really so sad and dangerous to be fed up with seeing with your eyes, breathing with your lungs, swallowing with your mouth, talking with your tongue, thinking with your brain, having an anus and larynx, head and legs? Why not walk on your head, sing with your sinuses, see through your skin, breathe with your belly?46 The injunction here is to use our bodies and our organs in ways which are not in thrall to the overarching plan of the organism, to put them to work doing things other than those for which they were designed. In short, to treat them as machines capable of producing ‘‘events.’’ The organism, then, can be defined as being a certain way in which the body without organs is ‘‘captured,’’ one which restricts its capacities, and constrains it: ‘‘the BwO howls: ‘They’ve made me an organism! They’ve wrongfully folded me! They’ve stolen my body!’’’47 Of course, ‘‘organisms’’ are not the only way in which the body without organs can be ‘‘captured,’’ and in A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari analyse a number of other ‘‘strata’’ which impose their own forms on it and limit its capacities.48 The fact that there are other ‘‘strata’’ helps to explain their otherwise puzzling comment that the body without organs is not an ideal, unattainable point, but something we are attaining all the time.49 One example is the human face, the subject of an entire chapter of A Thousand Plateaus. It is clear that the face is not wholly subordinated to organic functions: we use it to express our emotions, we treat it as an aesthetic object, we use it for communication, and so on. In fact, if one believes the early Levinas, the human face opens us to the very possibility of ethics.50 All of these functions have nothing to do with the head qua organism, and would not have been made possible had the face not first been ‘‘freed’’ from its relation with the organic body and its place within this hierarchy of its system. It is in this sense that the face ‘‘removes the head from the stratum of the organism,’’ and thereby frees it to be used in different ways.51 Thus, rather than following the conservative tendencies of the organism that always pull it back towards the statistically normal, relegating everything that falls beyond this range to the register of the ‘‘pathological,’’ Deleuze and Guattari recommend a kind of experimentation whose ultimate goal is the event, that is, the production of something new. And as we saw in the first section, the production of an event changes even the thing that produced the event in the first place, so that the organic body will not remain the same after it has made itself into a body without organs. We humans are able to carry out this kind of experimentation because, as Canguilhem notes, we are fortunate enough to have a surfeit of organs: ‘‘too many kidneys, too many lungs, too much parathyroid, too much pancreas, even too much brain, if human life were limited to the vegetative life.’’52 Pathological states thus arise not when we use our bodies in ways that make us deviate from the statistical norm, or when we make use of our organs in ways which take them beyond the range of possibilities considered ‘‘normal’’ by the organism, but only when our ‘‘experimentation’’ goes too far, reaching the point where, instead of increasing our capacities, it reduces them, and prevents us from creating something new.53 Now that we have explored Deleuze and Guattari’s modifications to the concepts of ‘‘machine’’ and ‘‘organism,’’ let us briefly summarize our findings. Whereas we usually think that machines are defined by their substance, that is, the way in which they are constructed, the form which they take, Deleuze and Guattari understand them according to what they do. As they write, a machine should be understood ‘‘by function, not by form’’ (recall the example of the knife-rest: understanding it as a machine means understanding what it is used for, not its geometric properties).54 Whereas we usually think that organisms are defined by what they do, that is, by their behaviors, by the kinds of activities they carry out, Deleuze and Guattari instead understand them according to their structure. As we saw in the distinction between ‘‘analogy’’ and ‘‘homology,’’ what makes organisms similar to one another has nothing to do with their function. Rather, comparisons should be based on morphology, that is to say the virtual schema out of which the body emerged. In other words, an organism should be understood by form, not by function (recall the example of the bat wing: understanding it as an organism means understanding the order and connection of it bones, not what it is used for).55 Further, in both cases, there is no substantial link between the form it has and the function it carries out one can no more deduce the function of a bat’s wing from its morphology than one can deduce the function of a knife-rest from its geometrical properties.56 There is something like a priority of creation in Deleuze and Guattari, a preference for the new, which leads them away from what might otherwise appear to be a kind of symmetry between the two concepts (function not form vs. form not function), towards a valorization of the idea of the machine, and a strong criticism of the idea of the organism. This leads, first, to an asymmetry between the scope of the two concepts: whereas their idea of ‘‘machine’’ is supposed to be universal (everything is a machine), their idea of ‘‘organism’’ is restricted to a certain kind of body. But perhaps more importantly, it also leads them to a different understanding of the relation between the two terms, centered on their concept of the ‘‘body without organs.’’ Their non-mechanical mechanism, which is also a vitalism of the inorganic, highlights not the form or structure that bodies actually have, but rather the virtual capacities that bodies have to do something different. A body may be structured like an organism, but, since its organs are all machines, it will always retain the capacity to ‘‘disarticulate,’’ as they put it, to cease to be an organism. The body without organs, then, can be defined as the becoming-machine of the organism; it is what happens when one part of the body enters into combination with some other machine in a way which allows it to escape from the organism’s regularizing, normalizing processes. Seen in this way, the body previously considered an organism is opened up to a whole host of new connections, each of which may lead to the production of an event.
The Role of the Ballot is to interrogate the image of thought, the current figure of thought that manipulates the subject into conforming with societies demand, such as the capitalist image yelling, “Work or die!”. Vote for the debater which better presents methods to question structures of limitation and oppression against the individual, it is only from this ROB can we move away from structures such as whiteness and settler innocence and resist oppressive mindsets that hold us all captive by dictating thought, DRONSFIELD 12 Dronsfield, Jonathan. "Deleuze and the image of thought." Philosophy Today 56.4 (2012): 404-414. Team purchased PDF, Feb 19, 2022 LHP HL The image of thought is Deleuze’s characteri- sation of what comes before thinking: that which philosophy implicitly presupposes and explicitly projects, a pre-philosophical and natural and hence dogmatic image of what thinking is. The dogmatic image supposes that what thought wants, wants both materially and wilfully, is the true. Morality leads us to presuppose this. It is pre-supposed in the sense that everybody knows what it means to think, as though it were common sense. We all have this common picture of what it means to think. It’s an image in which subject and object and being and beings are already assigned their proper place and relation one to the other. And so long as philosophy holds to this image it does not matter what it goes on to think conceptu- ally. If the image of thought guides the creation of concepts then those concepts will be part of the same image projected. Moreover, it is the suppo- sition of a natural capacity to think in this way that permits philosophy to claim to begin without suppositions. It is a supposition which is en- dowed with the power to undercut the conditions of the present moment and its attendant perver- sions. It is not a particular image of thought that worries Deleuze; it’s that thought is pre-con- ceived as an “image in general.” This is philoso- phy’s subjective presupposition and the frame of Deleuze’s critique. “Nous ne parlons pas de telle ou telle image de la pensée,” he says, “variable suivant les philosophies, mais d’une seule Image en général qui constitue le présupposé subjectif de la philosophie dans son ensemble.”5 Part of the image, its stance as it were, is that thought is construed as “naturally upright.” “Up- right” here means proper and good-willed. Thought is upright because it is the possession of the subject. As the unity of the faculties it reduces every other faculty to modes of the subject. Be- cause thinking is subjective in this way the sub- ject’s model of thought is recognition. The fac- ulty of sensibility can grasp only that which can be recognised by all the other faculties in the sub- jective act of recognition. When thinking is mod- elled on recognition, that which can be recog- nised is a reflection of the subject. The subject for whom recognition is the model of thought is filled with no more than an image of itself. Thought is left with no means of grasping that which cannot be recognised, at least whilst it remains erect and standing. But Deleuze makes clear that it is not a ques- tion of opposing “another image” to the dogmatic image of thought. Even the schizophrenic cannot be imaged, because the schizophrenic becomes a possibility for thought and is “revealed as such” only through the “abolition” of the dogmatic im- age.6 Deleuze is unequivocal then about the ne- cessity of theorising a thinking without image. Deleuze’s thought must be measured by the ex- tent to which it thinks without image. Its new- ness, its “répétition authentique,” will be its thinking without image. Indeed, so rigorous would the denunciation of the image as non-phi- losophy be that it would yield the prize of “the greatest destructions and demoralisations,” so obstinate would a thought without image be that it would have no ally but paradox, having re- nounced both representation and common sense, so original would a thinking purged of the image be that thought could finally begin to think. But thought can only begin, and it is this that would allow it continually to begin again, only when liberated from the image and its postulates.7 If representation for Deleuze is a transcendental il- lusion in which thought is “covered over” se recouvre by an image, it implies that in over- coming representation the image must be re- moved t;hought is only “uncovered” once the shroud of the image is taken down.8 The insistence that thought can and should happen “without images” extends even to valo- rising creator-writers, writers who are creators before they are authors, as “blind.” Deleuze’s self-understanding in the form of his “dialogue” with Claire Parnet in 1977, a dialogue which is no way an encounter because in it we recognise a Deleuze pre-given and decided, figures the likes of Nietzsche and Proust not as authors but as cre- ators, creators precisely because they are not au- thors. For as soon as the designation “author” is made, thought is once again determined as an im- age “qu’on soumet la pensée à une image”, and writing made an activity of life.9 Creation is en- counter, in which the writer encounters himself, and a writing which because it is its own life ne- cessitates that reading be an act of creation. Such encounters are “acts of thought without image,” and at once both blind and blinding “aussi bien aveugles qu’aveuglants”10—a thought blind to itself, and one which refuses to form itself as an image which might enable it to be visible. It is the imperceptible, it is that which dwells in the dark- est regions. This is not to argue for a thought no longer subject to recognition and representation, but to a thought no longer determinable as an im- age as such. It is as if an image can only order, or- der correct ideas rooted in goodwill and recogni- tion and governed by an origin of representation and the already decided. And what philosopher would not hope to set up an image of thought that no longer presupposes goodwill and a pre-medi- tated decision? But philosophy is too much on the side of friendship to achieve this.11 In place of the image of thought “rooted” in such postulates Deleuze instates a thinking in which the passional, aimless and horizontal line will be favoured over the natural and upright stance, a thinking always already begun, with its beginning in the repetition of a beginning again. Thinking becomes no longer a natural capacity we all possess but an activity some of us are forced into doing by that which we do not recog- nise but sense; moreover sense in a way which differentiates the faculty of sensibility from all other faculties, indeed brings it into discord with them whilst at the same time confronting them with their own limits. That which cannot be re- cognised has neither form nor figure, yet it “stares” at us. It “stares” at us, but “sans yeux.”12 The thought without image is a ground. It is the ground that an individual brings to the surface, or we might have to say raises to eye-level, the level of the eye-line of the one stared at—if, that is, that otherness is to be encountered and bring us into question—without being able to give the ground form, the ground that draws the eye from out of the body to it, a ground which “penetrates” thought with its stare, “the unrecognised in every recognition.” And that ground will be what al- lows for a metamorphosis productive of the new. For instance habit, the foundation of habit, will be metamorphosed into the failure of habitus, leading to the expulsion of agency in favour of a new individuality, an agency in the condition of continual expulsion. It is a ground which must be turned and brought to the surface, re-turned and repeated as surface, for only then will it be meta- morphosed. Recognition is defeated only if the ground is turned or “bent” “coudé” such that what it grounds it relates to the groundless.13 The thought without image is that which stares, even without eyes, “blind and blinding,” from within the imperceptible, and this thought is the ground- lessness of the ground. The question then arises, how is this ground turned and brought to the surface? We envisage the following answer: by the step, underfoot, by the walk of the one metamorphosed.
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JF22 - K - Deleuze v3
Tournament: Palm Classic | Round: 4 | Opponent: Northland Christian LB | Judge: Matthes, Leo The 1AC’s perception of property and limitation of appropriation obliterates the subject’s transcendence of the mind, leaving them without freedoms. Property isn’t a totalizing relation that limits others access, instead it is the name for territorialized relations between the subject and their material world. Appropriation of outer space allows the subject to escape natural confines and attain freedom from their Earth prison, BUCHANAN “99 Buchanan, Ian. "Deleuze and Cultural Studies". A Deleuzian Century?, edited by Ian Buchanan, New York, USA: Duke University Press, 1999, pp. 103-118. https://doi.org/10.1515/9780822395973-006 DOA: Feb 18, 2022 LHP HL According to Deleuze, association both transcends and differs frorn the imagination, which is to say, it affects the imagination. "We can now see the special ground of empiricism: nothing in the mind transcends human nature, because it is human nature that, in its principles, transcends the mind; nothing is ever transcendental." This is the basis of what Deleuze de scribes as the "coherent paradox" of Hume's philosophy: "It offers a subjectivity which transcends itself, without being any less passive." 11 The subject, in other words, is constituted in the given but also able to transcend the given. This is possible because the relation between the imagination and the principles of associatio.n operating there is dynamicP Association, then, far from being a product, which would involve an unnecessary hypostatization, is in fact "a rule of the imagination and a manifestation of its free exercise." As such, association at once guides the imagination (thereby giving it uniformity) and constrains it. It is through this relation that the imagination becomes human nature: "The mind, having become nature, has acquired now a tendency." 13 The notion of tendency is anthropological and, in this sense, humanist, since it posits an individual composed of social codes (and thus available to interrogation via those codes). But it is not fully humanist: the subject it posits is a fragmented one. Although the subject is said to have transcended itself, that does not rnean it is a transcendental subject. It does not stand outside what it organizes or makes coherent; rather, organization and coherence-made possible by the principles of association-take place in the subject, which is why the subject is fragmented. As the site of the instance of coherence referred to as subjectivity, the subject is not the principle of totalization that would supply that coherence. "Ernpirical subjectivity is constituted in the mind under the influence of principles affecting it; the mind therefore does not have the characteristics of a preexisting subject." 14 It transcends itself to the extent that the mind becomes a subject.15 "In Hume's empiricisrn, genesis is always understood in terms of principles, and itself as a principle." The subject, therefore, can only be apprehended via its constitutive principles - which must be external in order to be apprehended in themselves - and chief among these is habit: "Habit is the constitutive root of the subject." 16 The paradox of habit is that it is formed by degrees (therefore cons tituted, not constitutive) and a preformed principle of nature (therefore constitutive, not constituted). But as Deleuze shows, this implies no contradiction: the subject invents the very norms and general rules it lives by. Despite appearances, habit is not the same thing as habitus, not as Bourdieu understands the term anyway. In his formulation, habitus is an acquired "system of generative schemes" with "an infinite capacity for generating products-thoughts, perceptions, expressions and actions-whose lirnits are set by the historically and socially situated conditions of its production."18 The transcendental ernpirical subject, in contrast to Bourdieu's conception, is as much the product of self-invention as it is the consequence of conforrning to an existing structure. To put it another way, in the given the subject is without agency; he or she is simply one particle among many and must rnove and sway with the ebb and flow of the social tide. To gain agency, the subject must transcend the given. How the subject does this is perhaps the most vital question we can ask of Deleuze's version of empiricism. It is the process of appropriation that enables the passively synthesized subject to become active-to self-fashion, as it were.19 By "appropriation" 1 mean precisely what Deleuze describes in reference to Artaud as the necessary effort to think. This concept of appropriation posits "uses" as creative acts. It is through the practices of everyday life-the rnultiplicity of "uses" to which social structures, the regulatory bodies that shape culture and cultural cornrnodities, the already appropriated and about to be appropriated items that combine with desire to produce a culture, are put-that the passively formed subject becornes active. The value of this pivotaI "mechanism" to cultural studies is that it is liberating, enabling the subject to particularize the universaI and, as a result, to put the so-called normative institutions which ordinarily govern his or her existence to his or her own use. Appropriation is therefore a path to freedom. 108 Jan Buchanan Prisons provide an excellent test case for this hypothesis. If it can be shown that freedom is possible, via appropriation, in a place so purposively unfree as a prison, then we can be sure that freedorn is always possible. The crucial problem for our the ory is that circumstances cannot be ignored or relegated to a secondary role. There would be nothing profound in the clairn that freedom is possible even in Auschwitz, say, if circurnstances are totally ignored. The gas chambers, the crematoria, the electrified-wire fences, the irnpossibly small bunks, the desperate lack offood, the wooden clogs that permit only clumsy hobbling-none of these circumstantial elements can be discounted or dismissed.20 But, by the sarne token, none can be said to be decisive either or we will be forced to conclude that freedom in this situation is impossible. If the prisoner is an other, then what rnust be found is a means of expressing, simultaneously, otherness as an insular identity with its own sovereign power and otherness as a deplorable state of oppression. This is, in fact, the principal utility of appropriation as an analytic rnodel: by not defining the Self in relation to an Other, it enables cultural studies to express the everyday as a dynamic and complex series of interlocking relations between existing forms and current uses (i.e., between passive forrns and active transforrnations), allowing us to theorize concomitantly-despite the law of noncontradiction-oppression and resistance. Such a facility, in turn, enables us to apprehend the fact that an imprisoned person can simultaneously conform to an imposed "foreign" order and subvert that order.21 Because the social structure defining the parameters of people's lives-oppressed or otherwise-has to be enunciated by thern in order to be actualized, it is always available to appropriation. The passively formed subject is always becoming active. When, for example, Arthur Koestler's Rubashov (in Darkness at Noon) is taken into custody, the given ofhis everyday lifè is radically altered.22 He undergoes what Deleuze and Guattari call an "incorporeal" transformation and becornes a political prisoner.23 When Rubashov says "1" in prison, he realizes the potential of the prison to turn hirn into a prisoner. In saying "1 am a prisoner," he actualizes his imprisonrnent as the given of his daily existence, but, in order to do that, he has to appropriate the language of incarceration. This is an uncertain enterprise: while appropriation can certainly be shown to lead to freedom, the freedom it results in is not constant; rather, it varies according to degrees of intensity, that is, there are diflerent modalities of freedom (a problern 1 will return Deleuze and Cultural Studies lOg to). In this respect, the interrogation scene that takes up much of the third section of the novel is revelatory. At this moment in his detention, Rubashov is able to regain agency by appropriating his interrogation, and subsequent confession, to his own existentially motivated purposes. What this means, in effect, is that while the prison and its regulations define the circurnstances of Rubashov's existence, they do not fully determine the conditions for his freedom. It becomes possible to say, now, that one is not free in prison, but that one can nevertheless achieve freedom there.
This is a direct violation of the subject infinite potential. Each individual is dictated to have a certain identity only when they are surrounded by stable structures that force the individual to understand themselves in a single way. Conversion therapy takes the homosexual subject and denies their method of expressing themselves. We can only harness our potential when we become able to interact with new spaces, like discovering ones passion and breaking rules that dictate how one might live, DELEUZE and GUITARRI 88 Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. A thousand plateaus: Capitalism and schizophrenia. Bloomsbury Publishing, 1988. Pg 53-55 it’s a physical book but DOA: Feb 18, 2022 LHP HL Forms relate to codes and processes of coding and decoding in the parastrata; substances, being formed matters, relate to territorialities and movements of deterritorialization and reterritorialization on the epis-trata. In truth, the epistrata are just as inseparable from the movements that constitute them as the parastrata are from their processes. Nomadic waves or flows of deterritorialization go from the central layer to the periphery, then from the new center to the new periphery, falling back to the old center and launching forth to the new.16 The organization of the epistrata moves in the direction of increasing deterritorialization. Physical particles and chemical substances cross thresholds of deterritorialization on their own stratum and between strata; these thresholds correspond to more or less stable intermediate states, to more or less transitory valences and existences, to engagements with this or that other body, to densities of proximity, to more or less localizable connections. Not only are physical particles characterized by speeds of deterritorialization—Joycean tachyons, particles-holes, and quarks recalling the fundamental idea of the "soup"—but a single chemical substance (sulfur or carbon, for example) has a number of more and less deterritorialized states. The more interior milieus an organism has on its own stratum, assuring its autonomy and bringing it into a set of aleatory relations with the exterior, the more deterritorialized it is. That is why degrees of development must be understood relatively, and as a function of differential speeds, relations, and rates. Deterritorialization must be thought of as a perfectly positive power that has degrees and thresholds (epistrata), is always relative, and has reterritorialization as its flipside or complement. An organism that is deterritorialized in relation to the exterior necessarily reterritorializes on its interior milieus. A given presumed fragment of embryo is deterritorialized when it changes thresholds or gradients, but is assigned a new role by the new surroundings. Local movements are alterations. Cellular migration, stretching, invagination, folding are examples of this. Every voyage is intensive, and occurs in relation to thresholds of intensity between which it evolves or that it crosses. One travels by intensity; displacements and spatial figures depend on intensive thresholds of nomadic deterritorialization (and thus on differential relations) that simultaneously define complementary, sedentary reterritorializations. Every stratum operates this way: by grasping in its pincers a maximum number of intensities or intensive particles over which it spreads its forms and substances, constituting determinate gradients and thresholds of resonance (deterritorialization on a stratum always occurs in relation to a complementary reterritorialization).17 As long as preestablished forms were compared to predetermined degrees, all one could do was affirm their irreducibility, and there was no way of judging possible communication between the two factors. But we see now that forms depend on codes in the parastrata and plunge into processes of decoding or drift and that degrees themselves are caught up in movements of intensive territorialization and reterritorialization. There is no simple correspondence between codes and territorialities on the one hand and decodings and deterritorialization on the other: on the contrary, a code may be a deterritorialization and a reterritorialization a decoding. Wide gaps separate code and territoriality. The two factors nevertheless have the same "subject" in a stratum: it is populations that are deterritorialized and reterritorialized, and also coded and decoded. In addition, these factors communicate or interlace in the milieus. On the one hand, modifications of a code have an aleatory cause in the milieu of exteriority, and it is their effects on the interior milieus, their compatibility with them, that decide whether they will be popularized. Deterritorializations and reterritorializations do not bring about the modifications; they do, however, strictly determine their selection. On the other hand, every modification has an associated milieu that in turn entails a certain deterritorialization in relation to the milieu of exteriority and a certain reterritorialization on intermediate or interior milieus. Perceptions and actions in an associated milieu, even those on a molecular level, construct or produce territorial signs (indexes). This is especially true of an animal world, which is constituted, marked off by signs that divide it into zones (of shelter, hunting, neutrality, etc.), mobilize special organs, and correspond to fragments of code; this is so even at the margin of decoding inherent in the code. Even the domain of learning is defined by the code, or prescribed by it. But indexes or territorial signs are inseparable from a double movement. Since the associated milieu always confronts a milieu of exteriority with which the animal is engaged and in which it takes necessary risks, a line of flight must be preserved to enable the animal to regain its associated milieu when danger appears (for example, the bull's line of flight in the arena, which it uses to regain the turf it has chosen).18 A second kind of line of flight arises when the associated milieu is rocked by blows from the exterior, forcing the animal to abandon it and strike up an association with new portions of exteriority, this time leaning on its interior milieus like fragile crutches. When the seas dried, the primitive Fish left its associated milieu to explore land, forced to "stand on its own legs," now carrying water only on the inside, in the amniotic membranes protecting the embryo. In one way or the other, the animal is more a fleer than a fighter, but its flights are also conquests, creations. Territorialities, then, are shot through with lines of flight testifying to the presence within them of movements of deterritorialization and reterritorialization. In a certain sense, they are secondary. They would be nothing without these movements that deposit them. In short, the epistrata and parastrata are continually moving, sliding, shifting, and changing on the Ecumenon or unity of composition of a stratum; some are swept away by lines of flight and movements of deterritorialization, others by processes of decoding or drift, but they all communicate at the intersection of the milieus. The strata are continually being shaken by phenomena of cracking and rupture, either at the level of the substrata that furnish the materials (a prebiotic soup, a prechemical soup ...), at the level of the accumulating epistrata, or at the level of the abutting parastrata: everywhere there arise simultaneous accelerations and blockages, comparative speeds, differences in deterritorialization creating relative fields of reterritorialization. Alternative is to interrogate the stable concept of the subject in favor of alignment with the Body without Organs. The Body without Organs is the exact moments a subject has infinite potential to become anything they may wish, like an egg capable of growing into any kind of species, chicken, dinosaur, or even human being. The Alternative allows the subject to exist in society independent of social constructs such as gender, class, and nationality that have previously composed the stable subject, SMITH 18 Smith, Daniel. "What is the body without organs? Machine and organism in Deleuze and Guattari." Continental Philosophy Review 51.1 (2018): 95-110. Team purchased PDF, DOA: Feb 18, 2022 LHP HL As scholars have noted, the body without organs (sometimes abbreviated to BwO) is a somewhat confusing term, because it does not describe ‘‘a body deprived of organs,’’ as the term seems to indicate, but rather ‘‘an assemblage of organs freed from the supposedly ‘natural’ or ‘instinctual’ organization that makes it an organism.’’43 As Deleuze and Guattari put it, for the body without organs, the ‘‘enemy’’ is not the organs, but the organism, the particular arrangement and configuration of the organs.44 The body without organs is supposed to designate all of those things that an organic body could do, but that it is prevented from doing because of its homeostatic self-regulation processes. The body without organs is the full set of capacities or potentialities of a body prior to its being given the structure of an organism, which only limits and constrains what it can do: it is ‘‘what remains when you take everything away.’’45 As they ask in A Thousand Plateaus: Is it really so sad and dangerous to be fed up with seeing with your eyes, breathing with your lungs, swallowing with your mouth, talking with your tongue, thinking with your brain, having an anus and larynx, head and legs? Why not walk on your head, sing with your sinuses, see through your skin, breathe with your belly?46 The injunction here is to use our bodies and our organs in ways which are not in thrall to the overarching plan of the organism, to put them to work doing things other than those for which they were designed. In short, to treat them as machines capable of producing ‘‘events.’’ The organism, then, can be defined as being a certain way in which the body without organs is ‘‘captured,’’ one which restricts its capacities, and constrains it: ‘‘the BwO howls: ‘They’ve made me an organism! They’ve wrongfully folded me! They’ve stolen my body!’’’47 Of course, ‘‘organisms’’ are not the only way in which the body without organs can be ‘‘captured,’’ and in A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari analyse a number of other ‘‘strata’’ which impose their own forms on it and limit its capacities.48 The fact that there are other ‘‘strata’’ helps to explain their otherwise puzzling comment that the body without organs is not an ideal, unattainable point, but something we are attaining all the time.49 One example is the human face, the subject of an entire chapter of A Thousand Plateaus. It is clear that the face is not wholly subordinated to organic functions: we use it to express our emotions, we treat it as an aesthetic object, we use it for communication, and so on. In fact, if one believes the early Levinas, the human face opens us to the very possibility of ethics.50 All of these functions have nothing to do with the head qua organism, and would not have been made possible had the face not first been ‘‘freed’’ from its relation with the organic body and its place within this hierarchy of its system. It is in this sense that the face ‘‘removes the head from the stratum of the organism,’’ and thereby frees it to be used in different ways.51 Thus, rather than following the conservative tendencies of the organism that always pull it back towards the statistically normal, relegating everything that falls beyond this range to the register of the ‘‘pathological,’’ Deleuze and Guattari recommend a kind of experimentation whose ultimate goal is the event, that is, the production of something new. And as we saw in the first section, the production of an event changes even the thing that produced the event in the first place, so that the organic body will not remain the same after it has made itself into a body without organs. We humans are able to carry out this kind of experimentation because, as Canguilhem notes, we are fortunate enough to have a surfeit of organs: ‘‘too many kidneys, too many lungs, too much parathyroid, too much pancreas, even too much brain, if human life were limited to the vegetative life.’’52 Pathological states thus arise not when we use our bodies in ways that make us deviate from the statistical norm, or when we make use of our organs in ways which take them beyond the range of possibilities considered ‘‘normal’’ by the organism, but only when our ‘‘experimentation’’ goes too far, reaching the point where, instead of increasing our capacities, it reduces them, and prevents us from creating something new.53 Now that we have explored Deleuze and Guattari’s modifications to the concepts of ‘‘machine’’ and ‘‘organism,’’ let us briefly summarize our findings. Whereas we usually think that machines are defined by their substance, that is, the way in which they are constructed, the form which they take, Deleuze and Guattari understand them according to what they do. As they write, a machine should be understood ‘‘by function, not by form’’ (recall the example of the knife-rest: understanding it as a machine means understanding what it is used for, not its geometric properties).54 Whereas we usually think that organisms are defined by what they do, that is, by their behaviors, by the kinds of activities they carry out, Deleuze and Guattari instead understand them according to their structure. As we saw in the distinction between ‘‘analogy’’ and ‘‘homology,’’ what makes organisms similar to one another has nothing to do with their function. Rather, comparisons should be based on morphology, that is to say the virtual schema out of which the body emerged. In other words, an organism should be understood by form, not by function (recall the example of the bat wing: understanding it as an organism means understanding the order and connection of it bones, not what it is used for).55 Further, in both cases, there is no substantial link between the form it has and the function it carries out one can no more deduce the function of a bat’s wing from its morphology than one can deduce the function of a knife-rest from its geometrical properties.56 There is something like a priority of creation in Deleuze and Guattari, a preference for the new, which leads them away from what might otherwise appear to be a kind of symmetry between the two concepts (function not form vs. form not function), towards a valorization of the idea of the machine, and a strong criticism of the idea of the organism. This leads, first, to an asymmetry between the scope of the two concepts: whereas their idea of ‘‘machine’’ is supposed to be universal (everything is a machine), their idea of ‘‘organism’’ is restricted to a certain kind of body. But perhaps more importantly, it also leads them to a different understanding of the relation between the two terms, centered on their concept of the ‘‘body without organs.’’ Their non-mechanical mechanism, which is also a vitalism of the inorganic, highlights not the form or structure that bodies actually have, but rather the virtual capacities that bodies have to do something different. A body may be structured like an organism, but, since its organs are all machines, it will always retain the capacity to ‘‘disarticulate,’’ as they put it, to cease to be an organism. The body without organs, then, can be defined as the becoming-machine of the organism; it is what happens when one part of the body enters into combination with some other machine in a way which allows it to escape from the organism’s regularizing, normalizing processes. Seen in this way, the body previously considered an organism is opened up to a whole host of new connections, each of which may lead to the production of an event.
The Role of the Ballot is to interrogate the image of thought, the current figure of thought that manipulates the subject into conforming with societies demand, such as the capitalist image yelling, “Work or die!”. Vote for the debater which better presents methods to question structures of limitation and oppression against the individual, it is only from this ROB can we move away from structures such as whiteness and settler innocence and resist oppressive mindsets that hold us all captive by dictating thought, DRONSFIELD 12 Dronsfield, Jonathan. "Deleuze and the image of thought." Philosophy Today 56.4 (2012): 404-414. Team purchased PDF, DOA: Feb 18, 2022 LHP HL The image of thought is Deleuze’s characteri- sation of what comes before thinking: that which philosophy implicitly presupposes and explicitly projects, a pre-philosophical and natural and hence dogmatic image of what thinking is. The dogmatic image supposes that what thought wants, wants both materially and wilfully, is the true. Morality leads us to presuppose this. It is pre-supposed in the sense that everybody knows what it means to think, as though it were common sense. We all have this common picture of what it means to think. It’s an image in which subject and object and being and beings are already assigned their proper place and relation one to the other. And so long as philosophy holds to this image it does not matter what it goes on to think conceptu- ally. If the image of thought guides the creation of concepts then those concepts will be part of the same image projected. Moreover, it is the suppo- sition of a natural capacity to think in this way that permits philosophy to claim to begin without suppositions. It is a supposition which is en- dowed with the power to undercut the conditions of the present moment and its attendant perver- sions. It is not a particular image of thought that worries Deleuze; it’s that thought is pre-con- ceived as an “image in general.” This is philoso- phy’s subjective presupposition and the frame of Deleuze’s critique. “Nous ne parlons pas de telle ou telle image de la pensée,” he says, “variable suivant les philosophies, mais d’une seule Image en général qui constitue le présupposé subjectif de la philosophie dans son ensemble.”5 Part of the image, its stance as it were, is that thought is construed as “naturally upright.” “Up- right” here means proper and good-willed. Thought is upright because it is the possession of the subject. As the unity of the faculties it reduces every other faculty to modes of the subject. Be- cause thinking is subjective in this way the sub- ject’s model of thought is recognition. The fac- ulty of sensibility can grasp only that which can be recognised by all the other faculties in the sub- jective act of recognition. When thinking is mod- elled on recognition, that which can be recog- nised is a reflection of the subject. The subject for whom recognition is the model of thought is filled with no more than an image of itself. Thought is left with no means of grasping that which cannot be recognised, at least whilst it remains erect and standing. But Deleuze makes clear that it is not a ques- tion of opposing “another image” to the dogmatic image of thought. Even the schizophrenic cannot be imaged, because the schizophrenic becomes a possibility for thought and is “revealed as such” only through the “abolition” of the dogmatic im- age.6 Deleuze is unequivocal then about the ne- cessity of theorising a thinking without image. Deleuze’s thought must be measured by the ex- tent to which it thinks without image. Its new- ness, its “répétition authentique,” will be its thinking without image. Indeed, so rigorous would the denunciation of the image as non-phi- losophy be that it would yield the prize of “the greatest destructions and demoralisations,” so obstinate would a thought without image be that it would have no ally but paradox, having re- nounced both representation and common sense, so original would a thinking purged of the image be that thought could finally begin to think. But thought can only begin, and it is this that would allow it continually to begin again, only when liberated from the image and its postulates.7 If representation for Deleuze is a transcendental il- lusion in which thought is “covered over” se recouvre by an image, it implies that in over- coming representation the image must be re- moved t;hought is only “uncovered” once the shroud of the image is taken down.8 The insistence that thought can and should happen “without images” extends even to valo- rising creator-writers, writers who are creators before they are authors, as “blind.” Deleuze’s self-understanding in the form of his “dialogue” with Claire Parnet in 1977, a dialogue which is no way an encounter because in it we recognise a Deleuze pre-given and decided, figures the likes of Nietzsche and Proust not as authors but as cre- ators, creators precisely because they are not au- thors. For as soon as the designation “author” is made, thought is once again determined as an im- age “qu’on soumet la pensée à une image”, and writing made an activity of life.9 Creation is en- counter, in which the writer encounters himself, and a writing which because it is its own life ne- cessitates that reading be an act of creation. Such encounters are “acts of thought without image,” and at once both blind and blinding “aussi bien aveugles qu’aveuglants”10—a thought blind to itself, and one which refuses to form itself as an image which might enable it to be visible. It is the imperceptible, it is that which dwells in the dark- est regions. This is not to argue for a thought no longer subject to recognition and representation, but to a thought no longer determinable as an im- age as such. It is as if an image can only order, or- der correct ideas rooted in goodwill and recogni- tion and governed by an origin of representation and the already decided. And what philosopher would not hope to set up an image of thought that no longer presupposes goodwill and a pre-medi- tated decision? But philosophy is too much on the side of friendship to achieve this.11 In place of the image of thought “rooted” in such postulates Deleuze instates a thinking in which the passional, aimless and horizontal line will be favoured over the natural and upright stance, a thinking always already begun, with its beginning in the repetition of a beginning again. Thinking becomes no longer a natural capacity we all possess but an activity some of us are forced into doing by that which we do not recog- nise but sense; moreover sense in a way which differentiates the faculty of sensibility from all other faculties, indeed brings it into discord with them whilst at the same time confronting them with their own limits. That which cannot be re- cognised has neither form nor figure, yet it “stares” at us. It “stares” at us, but “sans yeux.”12 The thought without image is a ground. It is the ground that an individual brings to the surface, or we might have to say raises to eye-level, the level of the eye-line of the one stared at—if, that is, that otherness is to be encountered and bring us into question—without being able to give the ground form, the ground that draws the eye from out of the body to it, a ground which “penetrates” thought with its stare, “the unrecognised in every recognition.” And that ground will be what al- lows for a metamorphosis productive of the new. For instance habit, the foundation of habit, will be metamorphosed into the failure of habitus, leading to the expulsion of agency in favour of a new individuality, an agency in the condition of continual expulsion. It is a ground which must be turned and brought to the surface, re-turned and repeated as surface, for only then will it be meta- morphosed. Recognition is defeated only if the ground is turned or “bent” “coudé” such that what it grounds it relates to the groundless.13 The thought without image is that which stares, even without eyes, “blind and blinding,” from within the imperceptible, and this thought is the ground- lessness of the ground. The question then arises, how is this ground turned and brought to the surface? We envisage the following answer: by the step, underfoot, by the walk of the one metamorphosed.
2/20/22
JF22 - K - Deleuze v4
Tournament: Harvard | Round: 3 | Opponent: American Heritage Broward MC | Judge: Kurian, Michael 1 They can’t cross-apply why agency is important to take out the K; I also have an understanding an agency, but the K critiques how we build agency –not as a static being, but a becoming process that is not complete, always changing. 2 Saying the standard allows for different empirical differences among subjects – the claim that we are purely rational but deviate from it in the material world – doesn’t delink the K my arg is that the logic of establishing a base criteria for a subject creates a desire from lack and leads to individual oppression. 3 Their framework grounds agency in a static conception of reason and a definite view of the subject. This is incoherent – two warrants: First, desire – underpinning any rational thought is an irrational desire that makes the subject inherently unstable. SMITH ‘88: Smith, Daniel W. Jun, Nathan. “Deleuze and Ethics. Pg. 137. University of Edinburgh. 1988., it’s a team purchased PDF, DOA: Feb 19, 2022 LHP MK 3. Third, the difference between interest and desire could be said to parallels the difference between the rational and the irrational. “Once interests have been defined within the confines of a society, the rational is the way in which people pursue those interests and attempt to realize them” (Deleuze 2004: 262–3) – the interest for a job, or cavity-free teeth. “But underneath that,” Deleuze insists, “you find desires, investments of desire that are not to be confused with investments of interest, and on which interests depend for their determination and very distribution: an enormous flow, all kinds of libidinal-unconscious flows that constitute the delirium of this society” (Deleuze 2004: 263). As Deleuze will say: Reason is always a region carved out of the irrational – it is not sheltered from the irrational at all, but traversed by it and only defined by a particular kind of relationship among irrational factors. Underneath all reason lies delirium and drift. Everything about capitalism is rational, except capital . . . A stock market is a perfectly rational mechanism, you can understand it, learn how it works; capitalists know how to use it; and yet what a delirium, it’s mad . . . It’s just like theology: everything about it is quite rational – if you accept sin, the immaculate conception, and the incarnation, which are themselves irrational elements. (Deleuze 2004: 262) Impacts: A New link to the K – proves your conception of an agent is one that restricts the free-flowing bounds of subjectivity and recognition of difference. B There is no conceptual structure of an agent. The link from the structure of an agent to its motivation in people is not accounted for in practical reason. The only way we can motivate individuals is to follow through with their unfolding affects and desires so the K is a prior question. C Takes out reason - it is always changing – just like our desires. It is not ground in the agent because that assumes the agent has one universal will, but that view is incoherent. Second, time – the ‘I think’ is not the ‘I am’. The ‘I think’ does not determine the subject – it is merely its capacity. Thinking only affects a subject as a being in time and so is not a transcendent feature. Transcendent subject hood fails because of differentiation through time causes instability. DELEUZE: Deleuze, Gilles. “Difference and Repitition.” Translated by Paul Patton. Columbia Press. 1994. Physical book I own, DOA: Feb 19, 2022 LHP AA Temporally speaking - in other words, from the point of view of the theory of time - nothing is more instructive than the difference between the Kantian and the Cartesian Cogito. It is as though Descartes's Cogito operated with two logical values: determination and undetermined existence. The determination (I think) implies an undetermined existence (I am, because 'in order to think one must exist') - and determines it precisely as the existence of a thinking subject: I think therefore I am, I am a thing which thinks. The entire Kantian critique is amounts to objecting against Descartes that it is impossible for determination to bear directly upon the undetermined. The determination ('I think') obviously implies something undetermined ('I am'), but nothing so far tells us how it is that this undetermined is determinable by the 'I think': 'in the consciousness of myself in mere thought I am the being itself although nothing in myself is thereby given for thought.'8 Kant therefore adds a third logical value: the determinable, or rather the form in which the undetermined is determinable (by the deter mination). This third value suffices to make logic a transcendental instance. It amounts to the discovery of Difference - no longer in the form of an empirical difference between two determinations, but in the form of a transcendental Difference between the Determination as such and what it determines; not longer in the form of an external difference which separates, but in the form of an internal Difference which establishes an a priori relation between thought and being. Kant's answer is well known: the form under which undetermined existence is determinable by the 'I think' is that of time ...9 The consequences of this are extreme: my undetermined existence can be determined only within time as the existence of a phenomenon, of a passive, receptive phenomenal subject appearing within time. As a result, the spontaneity of which I am conscious in the 'I think' cannot be understood as the attribute of a substantial and spontaneous being, but only as the affection of a passive self which experiences its own thought - its own intelligence, that by virtue of which it can say I - being exercised in it and upon it but not by it. Here begins a long and inexhaustible story: I is an other, or the paradox of inner sense. The activity of thought applies to a receptive being, to a passive subject which represents that activity to itself rather than enacts it, which experiences its effect rather than initiates it, and which lives it like an Other within itself. To 'I think' and 'I am' must be added the self - that is, the passive position (what Kant calls the receptivity of intuition); to the determination and the undetermined must be added the form of the determinable, namely time. Nor is 'add' entirely the right word here, since it is rather a matter of establishing the difference and interiorising it within being and thought. It is as though the I were fractured from one end to the other: fractured by the pure and empty form of time. In this form it is the correlate of the passive self which appears in time. Time signifies a fault or a fracture in the I and a passivity in the self, and the correlation between the passive self and the fractured I constitutes the discovery of the transcendental, the element of the Copernican Revolution. Descartes could draw his conclusion only by expelling time, by reducing the Cogito to an instant and entrusting time to the operation of continuous creation carried out by God. More generally, the supposed identity of the I has no other guarantee than the unity of God himself. For this reason, the substitution of the point of view of the 'I' for the point of view of 'God' = than is commonly supposed, so long as the former retains an identity that it owes precisely tt. If the greatest tmttattve of transcendental philosophy was to introduce the form of time into thought as such, then this pure and empty form in turn signifies indissolubly the death of God, the fractured I and the passive self. It is true that Kant did not pursue this initiative: both God and the I underwent a practical resurrection. Even in the speculative domain, the fracture is quickly filled by a new form of identity - namely, active synthetic identity; whereas the passive self is defined only by receptivity and, as such, endowed with no power of synthesis. On the contrary, we have seen that receptivity, understood as a capacity for experiencing affections, was only a consequence, and that the passive self was more profoundly constituted by a synthesis which is itself passive (contemplation ontraction). · The possibility of receiving sensations or impressions follows from this. It is impossible to maintain the Kantian distribution, which amounts to a supreme effort to save the world of representation: here, synthesis is understood as active and as giving rise to a new form of identity in the I, while passivity is understood as simple receptivity without synthesis. The Kantian initiative can be taken up, and the form of time can support both the death of God and the fractured I, but in the course of a quite different understanding of the passive self. In this sense, it is correct to claim that neither Fichte nor Hegel is the descendant of Kant - rather, it is Holderlin, who discovers the emptiness of pure time and, in this emptiness, simultaneously the continued diversion of the divine, the prolonged fracture of the I and the constitutive passion of the self.10 Holderlin saw in this form of time both the essence of tragedy and the adventure of Oedipus, as though these were complementary figures of the same death instinct. Is it possible that Kantian philosophy should thus be the heir of Oedipus? Takes out their framework – it assumes a consistent model of the subject throughout time which ignores how time influences the subject.
The Alternative is to interrogate the stable concept of the subject in favor of alignment with the Body without Organs, to allow the subject to exist in society independent of social constructs such as gender, class, and nationality that have previously composed the stable subject, SMITH 18 Smith, Daniel. "What is the body without organs? Machine and organism in Deleuze and Guattari." Continental Philosophy Review 51.1 (2018): 95-110. it’s a team purchased PDF, DOA: Feb 19, 2022 LHP HL As scholars have noted, the body without organs (sometimes abbreviated to BwO) is a somewhat confusing term, because it does not describe ‘‘a body deprived of organs,’’ as the term seems to indicate, but rather ‘‘an assemblage of organs freed from the supposedly ‘natural’ or ‘instinctual’ organization that makes it an organism.’’43 As Deleuze and Guattari put it, for the body without organs, the ‘‘enemy’’ is not the organs, but the organism, the particular arrangement and configuration of the organs.44 The body without organs is supposed to designate all of those things that an organic body could do, but that it is prevented from doing because of its homeostatic self-regulation processes. The body without organs is the full set of capacities or potentialities of a body prior to its being given the structure of an organism, which only limits and constrains what it can do: it is ‘‘what remains when you take everything away.’’45 As they ask in A Thousand Plateaus: Is it really so sad and dangerous to be fed up with seeing with your eyes, breathing with your lungs, swallowing with your mouth, talking with your tongue, thinking with your brain, having an anus and larynx, head and legs? Why not walk on your head, sing with your sinuses, see through your skin, breathe with your belly?46 The injunction here is to use our bodies and our organs in ways which are not in thrall to the overarching plan of the organism, to put them to work doing things other than those for which they were designed. In short, to treat them as machines capable of producing ‘‘events.’’ The organism, then, can be defined as being a certain way in which the body without organs is ‘‘captured,’’ one which restricts its capacities, and constrains it: ‘‘the BwO howls: ‘They’ve made me an organism! They’ve wrongfully folded me! They’ve stolen my body!’’’47 Of course, ‘‘organisms’’ are not the only way in which the body without organs can be ‘‘captured,’’ and in A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari analyse a number of other ‘‘strata’’ which impose their own forms on it and limit its capacities.48 The fact that there are other ‘‘strata’’ helps to explain their otherwise puzzling comment that the body without organs is not an ideal, unattainable point, but something we are attaining all the time.49 One example is the human face, the subject of an entire chapter of A Thousand Plateaus. It is clear that the face is not wholly subordinated to organic functions: we use it to express our emotions, we treat it as an aesthetic object, we use it for communication, and so on. In fact, if one believes the early Levinas, the human face opens us to the very possibility of ethics.50 All of these functions have nothing to do with the head qua organism, and would not have been made possible had the face not first been ‘‘freed’’ from its relation with the organic body and its place within this hierarchy of its system. It is in this sense that the face ‘‘removes the head from the stratum of the organism,’’ and thereby frees it to be used in different ways.51 Thus, rather than following the conservative tendencies of the organism that always pull it back towards the statistically normal, relegating everything that falls beyond this range to the register of the ‘‘pathological,’’ Deleuze and Guattari recommend a kind of experimentation whose ultimate goal is the event, that is, the production of something new. And as we saw in the first section, the production of an event changes even the thing that produced the event in the first place, so that the organic body will not remain the same after it has made itself into a body without organs. We humans are able to carry out this kind of experimentation because, as Canguilhem notes, we are fortunate enough to have a surfeit of organs: ‘‘too many kidneys, too many lungs, too much parathyroid, too much pancreas, even too much brain, if human life were limited to the vegetative life.’’52 Pathological states thus arise not when we use our bodies in ways that make us deviate from the statistical norm, or when we make use of our organs in ways which take them beyond the range of possibilities considered ‘‘normal’’ by the organism, but only when our ‘‘experimentation’’ goes too far, reaching the point where, instead of increasing our capacities, it reduces them, and prevents us from creating something new.53 Now that we have explored Deleuze and Guattari’s modifications to the concepts of ‘‘machine’’ and ‘‘organism,’’ let us briefly summarize our findings. Whereas we usually think that machines are defined by their substance, that is, the way in which they are constructed, the form which they take, Deleuze and Guattari understand them according to what they do. As they write, a machine should be understood ‘‘by function, not by form’’ (recall the example of the knife-rest: understanding it as a machine means understanding what it is used for, not its geometric properties).54 Whereas we usually think that organisms are defined by what they do, that is, by their behaviors, by the kinds of activities they carry out, Deleuze and Guattari instead understand them according to their structure. As we saw in the distinction between ‘‘analogy’’ and ‘‘homology,’’ what makes organisms similar to one another has nothing to do with their function. Rather, comparisons should be based on morphology, that is to say the virtual schema out of which the body emerged. In other words, an organism should be understood by form, not by function (recall the example of the bat wing: understanding it as an organism means understanding the order and connection of it bones, not what it is used for).55 Further, in both cases, there is no substantial link between the form it has and the function it carries out one can no more deduce the function of a bat’s wing from its morphology than one can deduce the function of a knife-rest from its geometrical properties.56 There is something like a priority of creation in Deleuze and Guattari, a preference for the new, which leads them away from what might otherwise appear to be a kind of symmetry between the two concepts (function not form vs. form not function), towards a valorization of the idea of the machine, and a strong criticism of the idea of the organism. This leads, first, to an asymmetry between the scope of the two concepts: whereas their idea of ‘‘machine’’ is supposed to be universal (everything is a machine), their idea of ‘‘organism’’ is restricted to a certain kind of body. But perhaps more importantly, it also leads them to a different understanding of the relation between the two terms, centered on their concept of the ‘‘body without organs.’’ Their non-mechanical mechanism, which is also a vitalism of the inorganic, highlights not the form or structure that bodies actually have, but rather the virtual capacities that bodies have to do something different. A body may be structured like an organism, but, since its organs are all machines, it will always retain the capacity to ‘‘disarticulate,’’ as they put it, to cease to be an organism. The body without organs, then, can be defined as the becoming-machine of the organism; it is what happens when one part of the body enters into combination with some other machine in a way which allows it to escape from the organism’s regularizing, normalizing processes. Seen in this way, the body previously considered an organism is opened up to a whole host of new connections, each of which may lead to the production of an event.
The Role of the Ballot is to interrogate the image of thought, the current figure of thought that manipulates the subject into conforming with societies demand, such as the capitalist image yelling, “Work or die!”. Vote for the debater which better presents methods to question structures of limitation and oppression against the individual, it is only from this ROB can we move away from structures such as whiteness and settler innocence and resist oppressive mindsets that hold us all captive by dictating thought, DRONSFIELD 12 Dronsfield, Jonathan. "Deleuze and the image of thought." Philosophy Today 56.4 (2012): 404-414. it’s a team purchased PDF, DOA: Feb 19, 2022 LHP HL The image of thought is Deleuze’s characteri- sation of what comes before thinking: that which philosophy implicitly presupposes and explicitly projects, a pre-philosophical and natural and hence dogmatic image of what thinking is. The dogmatic image supposes that what thought wants, wants both materially and wilfully, is the true. Morality leads us to presuppose this. It is pre-supposed in the sense that everybody knows what it means to think, as though it were common sense. We all have this common picture of what it means to think. It’s an image in which subject and object and being and beings are already assigned their proper place and relation one to the other. And so long as philosophy holds to this image it does not matter what it goes on to think conceptu- ally. If the image of thought guides the creation of concepts then those concepts will be part of the same image projected. Moreover, it is the suppo- sition of a natural capacity to think in this way that permits philosophy to claim to begin without suppositions. It is a supposition which is en- dowed with the power to undercut the conditions of the present moment and its attendant perver- sions. It is not a particular image of thought that worries Deleuze; it’s that thought is pre-con- ceived as an “image in general.” This is philoso- phy’s subjective presupposition and the frame of Deleuze’s critique. “Nous ne parlons pas de telle ou telle image de la pensée,” he says, “variable suivant les philosophies, mais d’une seule Image en général qui constitue le présupposé subjectif de la philosophie dans son ensemble.”5 Part of the image, its stance as it were, is that thought is construed as “naturally upright.” “Up- right” here means proper and good-willed. Thought is upright because it is the possession of the subject. As the unity of the faculties it reduces every other faculty to modes of the subject. Be- cause thinking is subjective in this way the sub- ject’s model of thought is recognition. The fac- ulty of sensibility can grasp only that which can be recognised by all the other faculties in the sub- jective act of recognition. When thinking is mod- elled on recognition, that which can be recog- nised is a reflection of the subject. The subject for whom recognition is the model of thought is filled with no more than an image of itself. Thought is left with no means of grasping that which cannot be recognised, at least whilst it remains erect and standing. But Deleuze makes clear that it is not a ques- tion of opposing “another image” to the dogmatic image of thought. Even the schizophrenic cannot be imaged, because the schizophrenic becomes a possibility for thought and is “revealed as such” only through the “abolition” of the dogmatic im- age.6 Deleuze is unequivocal then about the ne- cessity of theorising a thinking without image. Deleuze’s thought must be measured by the ex- tent to which it thinks without image. Its new- ness, its “répétition authentique,” will be its thinking without image. Indeed, so rigorous would the denunciation of the image as non-phi- losophy be that it would yield the prize of “the greatest destructions and demoralisations,” so obstinate would a thought without image be that it would have no ally but paradox, having re- nounced both representation and common sense, so original would a thinking purged of the image be that thought could finally begin to think. But thought can only begin, and it is this that would allow it continually to begin again, only when liberated from the image and its postulates.7 If representation for Deleuze is a transcendental il- lusion in which thought is “covered over” se recouvre by an image, it implies that in over- coming representation the image must be re- moved t;hought is only “uncovered” once the shroud of the image is taken down.8 The insistence that thought can and should happen “without images” extends even to valo- rising creator-writers, writers who are creators before they are authors, as “blind.” Deleuze’s self-understanding in the form of his “dialogue” with Claire Parnet in 1977, a dialogue which is no way an encounter because in it we recognise a Deleuze pre-given and decided, figures the likes of Nietzsche and Proust not as authors but as cre- ators, creators precisely because they are not au- thors. For as soon as the designation “author” is made, thought is once again determined as an im- age “qu’on soumet la pensée à une image”, and writing made an activity of life.9 Creation is en- counter, in which the writer encounters himself, and a writing which because it is its own life ne- cessitates that reading be an act of creation. Such encounters are “acts of thought without image,” and at once both blind and blinding “aussi bien aveugles qu’aveuglants”10—a thought blind to itself, and one which refuses to form itself as an image which might enable it to be visible. It is the imperceptible, it is that which dwells in the dark- est regions. This is not to argue for a thought no longer subject to recognition and representation, but to a thought no longer determinable as an im- age as such. It is as if an image can only order, or- der correct ideas rooted in goodwill and recogni- tion and governed by an origin of representation and the already decided. And what philosopher would not hope to set up an image of thought that no longer presupposes goodwill and a pre-medi- tated decision? But philosophy is too much on the side of friendship to achieve this.11 In place of the image of thought “rooted” in such postulates Deleuze instates a thinking in which the passional, aimless and horizontal line will be favoured over the natural and upright stance, a thinking always already begun, with its beginning in the repetition of a beginning again. Thinking becomes no longer a natural capacity we all possess but an activity some of us are forced into doing by that which we do not recog- nise but sense; moreover sense in a way which differentiates the faculty of sensibility from all other faculties, indeed brings it into discord with them whilst at the same time confronting them with their own limits. That which cannot be re- cognised has neither form nor figure, yet it “stares” at us. It “stares” at us, but “sans yeux.”12 The thought without image is a ground. It is the ground that an individual brings to the surface, or we might have to say raises to eye-level, the level of the eye-line of the one stared at—if, that is, that otherness is to be encountered and bring us into question—without being able to give the ground form, the ground that draws the eye from out of the body to it, a ground which “penetrates” thought with its stare, “the unrecognised in every recognition.” And that ground will be what al- lows for a metamorphosis productive of the new. For instance habit, the foundation of habit, will be metamorphosed into the failure of habitus, leading to the expulsion of agency in favour of a new individuality, an agency in the condition of continual expulsion. It is a ground which must be turned and brought to the surface, re-turned and repeated as surface, for only then will it be meta- morphosed. Recognition is defeated only if the ground is turned or “bent” “coudé” such that what it grounds it relates to the groundless.13 The thought without image is that which stares, even without eyes, “blind and blinding,” from within the imperceptible, and this thought is the ground- lessness of the ground. The question then arises, how is this ground turned and brought to the surface? We envisage the following answer: by the step, underfoot, by the walk of the one metamorphosed.
2/20/22
JF22 - K - Deleuze v5
Tournament: Woodward | Round: 1 | Opponent: Jonathan Hsu | Judge: Marlborough Stoller cites aren't working
3/18/22
JF22 - K - Deleuze v5
Tournament: Woodward | Round: 1 | Opponent: Jonathan Hsu | Judge: Marlborough Stoller cites aren't working
The 1AC’s perception of property and limitation of appropriation obliterates the subject’s transcendence of the mind, leaving them without freedoms. Property isn’t a totalizing relation that limits others access, instead it is the name for territorialized relations between the subject and their material world. Appropriation of outer space allows the subject to escape natural confines and attain freedom from their Earth prison, BUCHANAN "99
Buchanan, Ian. "Deleuze and Cultural Studies". A Deleuzian Century?, edited by Ian Buchanan, New York, USA: Duke University Press, 1999, pp. 103-118. https://doi.org/10.1515/9780822395973-006 last accessed Jan 2 LHP HP According to Deleuze, association both transcends and differs frorn the imagination, which is
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not free in prison, but that one can nevertheless achieve freedom there.
This is a direct violation of the subject infinite potential. Each individual is dictated to have a certain identity only when they are surrounded by stable structures that force the individual to understand themselves in a single way. Conversion therapy takes the homosexual subject and denies their method of expressing themselves. We can only harness our potential when we become able to interact with new spaces, like discovering ones passion and breaking rules that dictate how one might live, DELEUZE and GUITARRI 88
~Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. A thousand plateaus: Capitalism and schizophrenia. Bloomsbury Publishing, 1988. Pg 53-55~ this is a printed book carded by LHP HL on Jan 2, 2022 Forms relate to codes and processes of coding and decoding in the parastrata; substances
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blockages, comparative speeds, differences in deterritorialization creating relative fields of reterritorialization.
The Alternative is to interrogate the stable concept of the subject in favor of alignment with the Body without Organs, to allow the subject to exist in society independent of social constructs such as gender, class, and nationality that have previously composed the stable subject, SMITH 18
~Smith, Daniel. "What is the body without organs? Machine and organism in Deleuze and Guattari." Continental Philosophy Review 51.1 (2018): 95-110.~ This is a team purchased PDF accessed Jan 1, 2022 LHP HL As scholars have noted, the body without organs (sometimes abbreviated to BwO)
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connections, each of which may lead to the production of an event.
The Role of the Ballot is to interrogate the image of thought, the current figure of thought that manipulates the subject into conforming with societies demand, such as the capitalist image yelling, "Work or die!". Vote for the debater which better presents methods to question structures of limitation and oppression against the individual, it is only from this ROB can we move away from structures such as whiteness and settler innocence and resist oppressive mindsets that hold us all captive by dictating thought, DRONSFIELD 12
Dronsfield, Jonathan. "Deleuze and the image of thought." Philosophy Today 56.4 (2012): 404-414. This is a team purchased PDF accessed Jan 1, LHP HL The image of thought is Deleuze’s characteri- sation of what comes before thinking:
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by the step, underfoot, by the walk of the one metamorphosed.
3/19/22
JF22 - K - Settler Colonialism
Tournament: Woodward | Round: 5 | Opponent: Apple Valley Willingham | Judge: Johnstone 22, Graham
International law’s origins are based on the racist refusal to acknowledge Native sovereignty. Treaty authority is predicated on the nonexistence of indigenous governance and seeks to reconcile Native indifference through genocidal means. Scott 18,
(Xavier Scott, Department of Philosophy, York University, Repairing Broken Relations by Repairing Broken Treaties: Theorizing Post-Colonial States in Settler Colonies, Studies in Social Justice, Volume 12, Issue 2, 388-405, 2018, JKS) The divisibility of sovereignty in the case of non-Europeans allowed colonial states to
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wrong done in the abrogation of their duty to stand by their treaties.
Irrationality is placed within the state of nature for Kant, which indigenous peoples are pathologized through. This is an issue with their metaphysics not their reps. THEY MENTION THE STATE OF NATURE BEING BAD! You could read kant without replicating this racist trope.
James (Sakej) Youngblood Henderson, "The Context of the State of Nature". Chapter within Reclaiming Indigenous Voice and Vision edited by Marie Battiste in 2000, UBCPress Vancouver Toronto https://books.google.com/books?hl=enandlr= andid=XAq01sB8k-ACandoi=fndandpg=PA11anddq=the+state+of+nature+indigenousandots=UfRfnoa7Yjandsig=c1U8URUMFOhxDl5MP'TBpBVkWmg~#v=onepageandqandf=false (HTE). Terror and suffering have always been integral to European life and thought. Modern European
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The best way to understand this phenomenon is through the idea of contextuality.
The alternative is to make space for indigenous futurist reimagining of the relationship between the NDN and the state. It’s a prerequisite to any reconceptualization of land ownership and requires the capability to appropriate space making it mutually exclusive to the aff. The aff reinforces the settler view of relation to land with their flattened understanding of appropriation. Cornum 15.
the space NDN reveals the myriad ways of relating to land beyond property.
Settler colonialism is an ongoing structure, not an event. As European settlers came with the intention of making indigenous land their home, they enacted mass genocide and erasure to Native Americans. The erasing of Native history, life and culture are ongoing devastating impacts that outweigh the affirmative. The affirmative actively participates in the settler colonial project of erasure—-anything that does not start from the question of settler colonialism removes indigeneity from history - Barker12
—MA U of Victoria, BASc McMaster University ~Adam J., "(Re-)Ordering the New World: Settler Colonialism, Space, and Identity" Thesis submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, University of Leicester 224-234, December 2012~ Dynamics of Erasure It is important to begin by investigating the erasure of Indigenous presence
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to differentiate between genocidal acts based on arbitrary distinctions, splitting colonial hairs.
Thus, the ROTB is to challenge settler colonialism. I as a settler am in a unique position to challenge and un-forget the erasure of the past in order to try create a more positive future. ~could switch out this rotb for centering indigenous knowledge and scholarship too if needed~Shotwell16
Alexis Shotwell, "Against Purity: Living Ethically in Compromised Times", University of Minnesota Press, 2016, LHP AM To do this, we need to revisit how we remember and reckon with this
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though they were held in more dispersed institutional housing and schooling situations.3
3/19/22
JF22 - T - Positive Action
Tournament: Harvard | Round: 2 | Opponent: Catonsville AT | Judge: He, Eric 1 Interp – Unjust refers to a negative action – it means contrary. Black Laws No Date "What is Unjust?" https://thelawdictionary.org/unjust/Elmer Contrary to right and justice, or to the enjoyment of his rights by another, or to the standards of conduct furnished by the laws. 2 Violation – The Aff is a positive action – it creates a new concept for Space i.e. the treating of Space as a “Global Commons”. 3 Standards – a Precision – they eliminate a topical stasis point, justifying the aff talking about anything which explodes neg prep burden and nullifies any engagement. Nowhere does the resolution prescribe active action, so there’s no basis for reasonable negative ground – hold the line. b Limits – making the topic bi-directional explodes predictability – it means that Aff’s can both increase non-exist property regimes in space AND decrease appropriation by private actors – makes the topic untenable. c Ground – wrecks Neg Generics – we can’t say appropriation good since the 1AC can create new views on Outer Space Property Rights that circumvent our Links since they can say “UN agency” approach solves. 4 TVA – just defend that space appropriation is bad. a Fairness is a voter – debate’s a game that requires fair evaluation and rigorous testing – otherwise we can’t test if your arguments are true b Topicality is Drop the Debater – it’s a fundamental baseline for debate-ability and we can’t get new 2nr da’s so the debate’s permanently skewed. c Use Competing Interps – 1 Topicality is a yes/no question, you can’t be reasonably topical and 2 Reasonability invites arbitrary judge intervention and a race to the bottom of questionable argumentation. d No RVI’s - 1 Forces the 1NC to go all-in on Theory which kills substance education, 2 Encourages Baiting since the 1AC will purposely be abusive, and 3
2/20/22
JF22- NC - Kant
Tournament: Harvard | Round: 5 | Opponent: Northern Valley HS Independent JS | Judge: Pittman, Phoenix The meta-ethic is practical reason. A Bindingness – Any obligation must not only tell us what is good, but why we ought to be good or else agents can reject the value of goodness itself. That means ethics must start with what is constitutive of agents since it traces obligations to features that are intrinsic to being an agent – as an agent you must follow certain rules. Only practical agency is constitutive since agents can use rationality to decide against other values but the act of deciding to reject practical agency engages in it. B Action theory – every moral analysis requires an action to evaluate, but actions are infinitely divisible into smaller meaningless movements. The act of stealing can be reduced to going to a house, entering, grabbing things, and leaving, all of which are distinct actions without moral value. Only the practical decision to steal ties these actions together to give them any moral value. That justifies universalizability. A The principle of equality is true since anything else assigns moral value to contingent factors like identity and justifies racism, and the principle of non-contradiction is true since 2+2 can’t equal 4 for me and not for you meaning ethical statements true for one must be true for all. B Ethics must be defined a priori because of the is ought gap – experience only tells us what is since that’s what we perceive, not what ought to be. But it’s impossible to derive an ought from descriptive premises, so there needs to be additional a priori premises to make a moral theory. Applying reason to a priori truth results in universal obligations.
Prefer additionally, 1 An intrinsic feature to any action is the acceptance of the goodness of universal freedom, Gewirth 84 bracketed for grammar and gendered language Alan Gewirth, () "The Ontological Basis of Natural Law: A Critique and an Alternative" American Journal Of Jurisprudence: Vol. 29: Iss. 1 Article 5, 1984, https://scholarship.law.nd.edu/ajj/vol29/iss1/5/, DOA:9-10-2018 WWBW Recut LHP AV Let me briefly sketch the main line of argument that leads to this conclusion. As I have said, the argument is based on the generic features of human action. To begin with, every agent acts for purposes they regards as good. Hence, they must regard as necessary goods the freedom and well being that is are the generic features and necessary conditions of his action and successful action in general. From this, it follows that every agent logically must hold or accept that he has rights to these conditions. For if he were to deny that he has these rights, then he would have to admit that it is permissible for other persons to remove from him the very conditions of freedom and well-being that, as an agent, he must have. But it is contradictory for him to hold both that they must have these conditions and also that he may not have them. Hence, on pain of self-contradiction, every agent must accept that he has rights to freedom and well-being. Moreover, every agent must further admit that all other agents also have those rights, since all other actual or prospective agents have the same general characteristics of agency on which he must ground his own right-claims. What I am saying, then, is that every agent, simply by virtue of being an agent, must regard his freedom and well being as necessary goods and must hold that he and all other actual or prospective agents have rights to these necessary goods. Hence, every agent, on pain of self-contradiction, must accept the following principle: Act in accord with the generic rights of your recipients as well as of yourself. The generic rights are rights to the generic features of action, freedom, and well-being. I call this the Principle of Generic Consistency (PGC), because it combines the formal consideration of consistency with the material consideration of the generic features and rights of action. 2 Agency requires deliberation to choose what actions to take which creates a practical identity identical for every agent. It is the only form of ontology that can account for every individual, making it the only identity that can create obligations. Christine M. Korsgaard, 1992 Korsgaard, Christine. "The sources of normativity." The Tanner Lectures on human values (1992). Korsgaard, Christine. "The sources of normativity." The Tanner Lectures on human values (1992). DOA: Feb 18, 2022 The Solution: Those who think that the human mind is internally luminous and transparent to itself think that the term “self-consciousness” is appropriate because what we get in human consciousness is a direct encounter with the self. Those who think that the human mind has a reflective structure use the term too, but for a different reason. The reflective structure of the mind is a source of “self-consciousness” because it forces us to have a conception of ourselves. As Kant argues, this is a fact about what it is like to be reflectively conscious and it does not prove the existence of a metaphysical self. From a third person point of view, outside of the deliberative standpoint, it may look as if what happens when someone makes a choice is that the strongest of his conflicting desires wins. But that isn’t the way it is for you when you deliberate. When you deliberate, it is as if there were something over and above all of your desires, something that is you, and that chooses which desire to act on. This means that the principle or law by which you determine your actions is one that you regard as being expressive of yourself. To identify with such a principle or law is to be, in St. Paul’s famous phrase, a law to yourself.6 An agent might think of herself as a Citizen in the Kingdom of Ends. Or she might think of herself as a member of a family or an ethnic group or a nation. She might think of herself as the steward of her own interests, and then she will be an egoist. Or she might think of herself as the slave of her passions, and then she will be a wanton. And how she thinks of herself will determine whether it is the law of the Kingdom of Ends, or the law of some smaller group, or the law of the egoist, or the law of the wanton that is the law that she is to herself. The conception of one’s identity in question here is not a theoretical one, a view about what as a matter of inescapable scientific fact you are. It is better understood as a description under which you value yourself, a description under which you find your life to be worth living and your actions to be worth undertaking. So I will call this a conception of your practical identity. Practical identity is a complex matter and for the average person there will be a jumble of such conceptions. You are a human being, a woman or a man, an adherent of a certain religion, a member of an ethnic group, someone’s friend, and so on. And all of these identities give rise to reasons and obligations. Your reasons express your identity, your nature; your obligations spring from what that identity forbids. Impacts: A Since obligations arise from a universal identity, they must be the same for all, B hijacks any role of the judge since judging is an identity contained within the practical one
That justifies a minimalist libertarian state – Otteson 09 James R. Otteson, 2009, “Kantian Individualism and Political Libertarianism,” The Independent Review, v. 13, n. 3., Winter 2009, available at https://www.independent.org/pdf/tir/tir_13_03_4_otteson.pdf DOA: Feb 18: 2022 LHP PS The link between Kantian agency and the limited libertarian state is plausible, and indeed the former explains the latter; moreover, the evidence suggests that Kant himself believed that the former implied the latter. That conclusion leaves us, however, with the final question of how exactly to characterize Kant’s position. To approach this question, consider two claims. First, Kant believes that people create a state in order to protect their rational, autonomous agency and that this state is justified insofar as it protects that agency. Moreover, coercive state action can also be justified if it serves only to secure the conditions necessary for continued or more effective protection of this agency. A plausible extension of this argument is that the conditions of morality themselves are possible only within the protections of a Kantian minimal state. Given that extension, Kant’s endorsement of limited, state-based welfare measures might have been motivated by a belief that they exemplify state coercion necessary to secure the conditions of agency. For the reasons explained earlier, I deny that such institutions can be defended successfully on these grounds, but the particular application notwithstanding, we may be able to endorse—consistently and rationally—Kant’s principle of granting the state those, and only those, coercive powers necessary for the protection of “right.” Second, Kant may not have been as convinced as one might be today of intermediary “civil” institutions’ ability to do the work of foundling hospitals and so on. Substantial evidence now attests, however, to the perhaps surprisingly effective scope and reach of civil society’s private institutions to find and meet the needs of society’s most destitute (for a recent treatment, see Beito, Gordon, and Tabarrok 2002). Kant might well have been unaware of such institutions, or—for reasons owing to his particular time and place—he might have been positively suspicious of them, including organized churches. I believe these two points absolve Kant of the claim of contradiction. He can claim consistently that the state’s purpose is to protect individual free agency and that it is justified in using coercion to secure the conditions that allow such protection—but not in any other circumstances. If this account correctly represents Kant’s position, then we may properly describe him as a political libertarian, though one sensitive to libertarianism’s limitations. Thus, we might aptly call his position constrained libertarianism.
Vote neg – 1 Injustice requires someone wronged, but initial acquisition doesn’t violate any entity’s rights– therefore, private appropriation of outer space cannot be unjust, Feser 05: Edward Feser, Associate Professor of Philosophy at Pasadena City College “THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS AN UNJUST INITIAL ACQUISITION,” 2005, DOA: Feb 18, 2022, team purchased pdf LHP AV The reason there is no such thing as an unjust initial acquisition of resources is that there is no such thing as either a just or an unjust initial acquisition of resources. The concept of justice, that is to say, simply does not apply to initial acquisition. It applies only after initial acquisition has already taken place. In particular, it applies only to transfers of property (and derivatively, to the rectification of injustices in transfer). This, it seems to me, is a clear implication of the assumption (rightly) made by Nozick that external resources are initially unowned. Consider the following example. Suppose an individual A seeks to acquire some previously unowned resource R. For it to be the case that A commits an injustice in acquiring R, it would also have to be the case that there is some individual B (or perhaps a group of individuals) against whom A commits the injustice. But for B to have been wronged by A’s acquisi- tion of R, B would have to have had a rightful claim over R, a right to R. By hypothesis, however, B did not have a right to R, because no one had a right to it—it was unowned, after all. So B was not wronged and could not have been. In fact, the very first person who could conceivably be wronged by anyone’s use of R would be, not B, but A himself, since A is the first one to own R. Such a wrong would in the nature of the case be an injustice in transfer—in unjustly taking from A what is rightfully his—not in initial acquisition. The same thing, by extension, will be true of all unowned resources: it is only after some- one has initially acquired them that anyone could unjustly come to possess them, via unjust transfer. It is impossible, then, for there to be any injustices in initial acquisition.7 2 Submitting to international limits on power is a contradiction in will – it weakens the republic and has no binding force. Waltz ’62 (Waltz, Kenneth N. "Kant, Liberalism, and War." The American Political Science Review 56, no. 2 (1962): 331-40. doi:10.2307/1952369.) team purchased pdf, DOA: Feb 18, 2022 So long at least as the state "runs a danger of being suddenly swallowed up by other States," it must be powerful externally as well as internally. In international relations the difficulties multiply. The republican form is preferable, partly because republics are more peacefully inclined; but despotisms are stronger-and no one would expect or wish to bring the state into jeopardy by decreasing its strength.15 Standing armies are dangerous, arms races themselves being a cause of war, but in the absence of an outside agency affording protection, each state must look to the effectiveness of its army.'6 A freely flowing commerce is a means of promoting peace, but a state must control imports, in the interests of its subjects "and not for the advantage of strangers and the encouragement of the industry of others, because the State without the prosperity of the people would not possess sufficient power to resist external enemies or to maintain itself as a common- wealth."'7 Not only standing armies but also, indeed more so, the disparity of economic capacities may represent danger, occasion fear, and give rise to war. Kant's concern with the strength and thus the safety of the state is part of his perception of the necessities of power politics. Among states in the world, as among individuals in the state of nature, there is constantly either violence or the threat of violence. States, like "lawless savages," are with each other "naturally in a nonjuridical condition.'8 There is no law above them; there is no judge among them; there is no legal process by which states can pursue their rights. They can do so only by war, and, as Kant points out, neither war nor the treaty of peace following it, can settle the question of right. A treaty of peace can end only a particular war; a pretext for new hostilities can always be found. "Nor can such a pretext under these circumstances be regarded as un- just; for in this state of society every nation is the judge of its own cause."'19 More surely than those who extract and emphasize merely Kant's republican aspirations and peaceful hopes, Khrushchev speaks as though he had read Kant correctly. "War," in Khrushchev's peculiar yet apt phrase, "is not fatalistically inevitable." Kant does set forth the "shoulds" and "oughts" of state behavior.2' He does not expect them to be followed in a state of nature, for, as he says, "philosophically or diplomatically composed codes have not, nor could have, the slightest legal force, since the States as such stand under no common legal constraint.... 22 His intention clearly is that the "oughts" be taken as the basis for the juridical order that must one day be established among states, just as the rights of the individual, though not viable in a state of nature, provided the basis for the civil state. 3 The aff violates the rights of private entities – a no one owns space and can exclude them on legitimate grounds, and they want to go to space so stopping them is a contradiction in will b private entities expend and have expended resources to claim things in space like making rockets or rocket fuel, preventing that is a violation of property rights since you are not allowing them to use what they own as they want
2/20/22
ND21 - K - Dean
Tournament: Princeton | Round: 1 | Opponent: Princeton PE | Judge: Jalyn Wu Unions themselves are weapons of the neoliberal regime, one that does not directly oppose a hierarchal system but forms its institutions within it. They merely exist on the premise of reformation, not abolition of the general structure that shifts from their own fugitivity. EIDLIN Eidlin, Barry. “Why Unions Are Good - but Not Good Enough.” Jacobin, 1 June 2020, https://www.jacobinmag.com/2020/01/marxism-trade-unions-socialism-revolutionary-organizing. At the same time, unions are an imperfect and incomplete vehicle for the working class to achieve one of Marxist theory’s central goals: overthrowing capitalism. Unions by their very existence affirm and reinforce capitalist class society. As organizations which primarily negotiate wages, benefits, and working conditions with employers, unions only exist in relation to capitalists. This makes them almost by definition reformist institutions, designed to mitigate and manage the employment relationship, not transform it. Many unions have adapted to this conservative, managerial role. Others have played key roles in challenging capital’s power. Some have even played insurgent roles at one moment and managerial roles at others. When unions have organized workplace insurgencies, this has sometimes translated into political pressure that expanded democracy and led to large-scale policy reforms. In the few revolutionary historical moments that we can identify, worker organization, whether called unions or something else, has been essential. Thus, labor unions and movements have long been a central focus of Marxist debate. At its core, the debate centers around the role of unions in class formation, the creation of the revolutionary working-class agent. The debate focuses on four key questions. First, to what degree do unions simply reflect existing relations of production and class struggle, or actively shape those relations? Second, if unions actively shape class struggle, why and under what conditions do they enhance or inhibit it? Third, how do unions shape class identities, and how does this affect unions’ scope of action? Fourth, what is the relation between unions and politics? This question is comprised of two sub-questions: to what degree do unions help or hinder struggles in the workplace becoming broader political struggles? And how should unions relate to political parties, the more conventional vehicle for advancing political demands? The following is a chapter from The Oxford Handbook of Karl Marx (Oxford University Press, 2019). It assesses Marxist debates surrounding trade unions, oriented by the four questions mentioned previously. It proceeds historically, first examining how Marx and Engels conceived of the roles and limitations of trade unions, then tracing how others within Marxism have pursued these debates as class relations and politics have changed over time. While the chapter includes some history of labor unions and movements themselves, the central focus is on how Marxist theorists thought of and related to those movements. Marx and Engels wrote extensively about the unions of their time, although never systematically. The majority of their writings on unions responded to concrete labor struggles of their time. From their earliest works, they grasped unions’ necessity and limitations in creating a working-class agent capable of advancing class struggle against the bourgeoisie. This departed from previous variants of socialism, often based in idealized views of rebuilding a rapidly eroding community of artisanal producers, which did not emphasize class organization or class struggle. Writing in The Condition of the Working Class in England about emerging forms of unionism, Engels observed that even though workers’ primary struggles were over material issues such as wages, they pointed to a deeper social and political conflict: What gives these Unions and the strikes arising from them their real importance is this, that they are the first attempt of the workers to abolish competition. They im¬ply the recognition of the fact that the supremacy of the bourgeoisie is based wholly upon the competition of the workers among themselves; i.e., upon their want of cohesion. And precisely because the Unions direct themselves against the vital nerve of the present social order, however one-sidedly, in however narrow a way, are they so dangerous to this social order. At the same time, Engels saw that, even as union struggles “kept alive the opposition of the workers to the … omnipotence of the bourgeoisie,” so too did they “compel the admission that something more is needed than Trades Unions and strikes to break the power of the ruling class.” Here Engels articulates the crux of the problem. First, unions are essential for working-class formation, creating a collective actor both opposed to the bourgeoisie and capable of challenging it for power. Second, they are an insufficient vehicle for creating and mobilizing that collective actor. Marx and Engels understood that unions are essential to working-class formation because, under capitalism, the system of “free labor,” where individual workers sell their labor power to an employer for a wage, fragments relations between workers and makes them compete with each other. As described in the Communist Manifesto, the bourgeoisie “has left no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous ‘cash payment,’” leaving workers “exposed to all the vicissitudes of competition, to all the fluctuations of the market.” While workers organized based on other collective identities, such as race, ethnicity, or religion, only unions could unite them as workers against the source of their exploitation — the bourgeoisie. Unions serve “as organized agencies for superseding the very system of wage labor and capital rule.” But just as unions could allow the proletariat to take shape and challenge the bourgeoisie for power, Marx and Engels also saw that they were a partial, imperfect vehicle for doing so for two reasons. First, unions’ fundamentally defensive role, protecting workers against employers’ efforts to drive a competitive race to the bottom, meant that they limited themselves “to a guerrilla war against the effects of the existing system, instead of simultaneously trying to change it.” Thus, even militant trade unions found themselves struggling for “a fair day’s work for a fair day’s wage” without challenging the bourgeoisie’s fundamental power, particularly the wage labor system. And some layers of the trade union officialdom were content to fight for privileges for their small segment of the working class, leaving most workers behind. Second, unions’ focus on wages and workplace issues tended to reinforce a division between economic and political struggles. This division was explicit with the more conservative “old” unions in Britain, which “barred all political action on principle and in their charters.” But even with more progressive formations, such as the early nineteenth century’s Chartists, or the late nineteenth century’s “new” unions, Marx and Engels saw that the transition from workplace struggles to politics was not automatic. For one, it varied across national contexts. Engels observed that French workers were much more likely to mobilize politically, while English workers “fight, not against the Government, but directly against the bourgeoisie.” But beyond national variation, they saw a recurring pattern of division, separating economic and political struggles by organization. Reflecting on the early to mid-nineteenth century English working-class movement, Engels noted a threefold divide between “socially-based” Chartists, “politically-based” Socialists, and conservative, craft-based trade unions. While the Chartists were “purely a working-men’s sic cause freed from all bourgeois elements,” they remained “theoretically the more backward, the less developed.” Socialists may have been more theoretically sophisticated, but their bourgeois origins made it difficult to “amalgamate completely with the working class.” Although young Engels thought an alliance of Chartism and socialism was underway, the alliance proved elusive. By the 1870s, Marx opined that politically, the English working class was “nothing more than the tail of the great Liberal Party, i.e., henchmen of the capitalists.” Likewise, Engels had soured on the English working class. Both saw promise in the militant worker protest in the United States at the time, seeing the seeds of a nascent labor party. But that too fell short. Thus, unions failed in Marx and Engels’s central task: the formation of “a political organization of the working class as a whole.” Marx and Engels’s sober analyses of unions’ concrete difficulties in moving from economic to political struggles stood at odds with many of their theoretical pronouncements, where this transition seemed inevitable. While they noted in the Manifesto that the “organization of the proletarians into a class, and, consequently, into a political party, is continually being upset again by the competition between the workers themselves,” they also asserted that “it ever rises up again, stronger, firmer, mightier.” In The Poverty of Philosophy, Marx asserted that “in the struggle . . . this mass of people transformed by economic conditions into workers becomes united, and constitutes itself as a class for itself.” If they were attuned to the challenges of class formation, and the contradictory roles unions could play in that process, they never drew out the theoretical implications of their concrete analyses. Nonetheless, in Marx and Engels’s work we can detect in embryonic form many of the core questions that would orient subsequent Marxist debates about trade unions’ role in class formation and class struggle. Marx and Engels saw that unions were inherently products of their historical period, limited by existing relations of production. At the same time, as organizational expressions of the working class, unions could play a key role in reshaping relations of production. As for enhancing or inhibiting class struggle, they saw that unions’ focus on concrete, practical workplace questions such as wages and working hours was a necessary step in developing the proletariat’s fighting capacity, but also constrained workers within a capitalist framework, limiting their ability to fight for broader demands such as abolition of the wage system. Similarly, different types of union organization could create different class identities, from craft unions’ narrow exclusion to the “new” unions’ broader inclusivity. As for the relation between unions and politics, they understood unions’ necessary but limited role in mobilizing the working class around political demands. Still, these core insights remained fragmentary. Later theorists would flesh them out.
Disorganized politics are that of short, temporary progress. Lack of political will shifts interests from the largest issues at hand and we shift from the status quo of infinite violence, DEAN 1 Dean, Jodi. Comrade: An essay on political belonging. Verso, 2019. Some on the left are skeptical of such political belonging. Seeing discipline only as constraint and not as a decision to build collective capacity, they substitute the fantasy that politics can be individual for the actuality of political struggle and movement. This substitution evades the fact that comradeship is a choice—both for the one joining and for the party joined, as I explore below. It also ignores the liberating quality of discipline: When we have comrades, we are freed from the obligation to be and know and do everything on our own; there is a larger collective with a line, program, and set of tasks and goals. We are also freed from our impulses (enjoined by communicative capitalism) to criticize and comment on the outrage of the moment. And we are freed from the cynicism that parades as maturity because of the practical optimism that faithful work engenders. Discipline provides the support that frees us to make mistakes, learn, and grow. When we err—and each of us will—our comrades will be there to catch us, dust us off, and set us right. We aren’t abandoned to go it alone. Disorganized leftists too often remain entranced by the illusion of everyday people spontaneously creating new forms of life that will usher in a glorious future. This illusion fails to acknowledge the deprivations and decapacitations that forty years of neoliberalism have inflicted. If it were true that austerity, debt, the collapse of institutional infrastructures, and capital flight could enable the spontaneous emergence of egalitarian forms of life, we would not see the enormous economic inequalities, intensification of racialized violence, declines in life expectancy, slow death, undrinkable water, contaminated soil, militarized policing and surveillance, and desolate urban and suburban neighborhoods that are now commonplace. Exhaustion of resources includes the exhaustion of human resources. Lots of times people want to do something but they don’t know what to do or how to do it. They may be isolated in nonunionized workplaces, overburdened by multiple flextime positions, stretched thin caring for friends and family. Disciplined organization—the discipline of comrades committed to common struggle for an emancipatory egalitarian future—can help here. Sometimes we want and need someone to tell us what to do because we are too tired and overextended to figure it out for ourselves. Sometimes when we are given a task as a comrade, we feel like our small efforts have larger meaning and purpose, maybe even world-historical significance in the age-old fight of the people against oppression. Sometimes just knowing that we have comrades who share our commitments, our joys, and our efforts to learn from defeats makes political work possible where it was not before. Some leftists agree with everything I’ve said thus far, yet they add buts. But won’t we end up disappointed and betrayed? But won’t it all ultimately fail (as it has so many times)? But what about the harms comrades have inflicted on each other in the name of comradeship? But what about the persistence of sexism and racism, bigotry and bias? But what happens when we are no longer on the same side, when we cannot say “we” or acknowledge a side? These questions press consideration of the end of comradeship. Frankly speaking, the critical tendency to reject an idea because of a slew of possible future failures is widespread in left milieus. An intellectual façade masks a failure of political will that would be unconvincing in any other context—don’t meet that person for coffee in case you fall in love and later have an expensive and hateful divorce; don’t speak at that meeting in case you lose your train of thought and end up sounding stupid; don’t take up sport or exercise because you might get injured and you’ll never be very good at it anyway; don’t live because you will inevitably die. Worries about the end foreclose possibilities of beginning. Yes, relationships end. Failures happen. But failure is nothing to fear—it’s something to learn from, a next step. This chapter endeavors to learn from the end of comradeship. It considers four types of ending: expulsion, resignation, drift, and the end of the world. These four types are not always distinct. At times, one blends into the other. Yet they open up the ways that the loss of comradeship has differing causes and effects, results and outcomes. They remind us that the fact of an end should not forestall beginning.
The alternative is a politics of the comrade, oriented toward a shared communist horizon. Rejection of capitalism requires building an egalitarian organized social life. Recognition in comradery breaks from the capitalist hierarchy by binding together with a system against us. Dean 2 Dean, Jodi. Comrade: An essay on political belonging. Verso, 2019. The term comrade indexes a political relation, a set of expectations for action toward a common goal. It highlights the sameness of those on the same side—no matter their differences, comrades stand together. As Obama’s joke implies, when you share a politics, you don’t generally distance yourself from your comrades. Comradeship binds action, and in this binding, this solidarity, it collectivizes and directs action in light of a shared vision for the future. For communists, this is the egalitarian future of a society emancipated from the determinations of private property and capitalism and reorganized according to the free association, common benefit, and collective decisions of the producers. But the term comrade predates its use by communists and socialists. In romance languages, comrade first appears in the sixteenth century to designate one who shares a room with another. Juan A. Herrero Brasas cites a Spanish historical-linguistic dictionary’s definition of the term: “Camarada is someone who is so close to another man that he eats and sleeps in the same house with him.”2 In French, the term was originally feminine, camarade, and referred to a barracks or room shared by soldiers.3 Etymologically, comrade derives from camera, the Latin word for room, chamber, and vault. The technical connotation of vault indexes a generic function, the structure that produces a particular space and holds it open.4 A chamber or room is a repeatable structure that takes its form by producing an inside separate from an outside and providing a supported cover for those underneath it. Sharing a room, sharing a space, generates a closeness, an intensity of feeling and expectation of solidarity that differentiates those on one side from those on the other. Comradeship is a political relation of supported cover. Interested in comrade as a mode of address, carrier of expectations, and figure of belonging in the communist and socialist traditions, I emphasize the comrade as a generic figure for the political relation between those on the same side of a political struggle. Comrades are those who tie themselves together instrumentally, for a common purpose: If we want to win—and we have to win—we must act together. As Angela Davis describes her decision to join the Communist Party: I wanted an anchor, a base, a mooring. I needed comrades with whom I could share a common ideology. I was tired of ephemeral ad-hoc groups that fell apart when faced with the slightest difficulty; tired of men who measured their sexual height by women’s intellectual genuflection. It wasn’t that I was fearless, but I knew that to win, we had to fight and the fight that would win was the one collectively waged by the masses of our people and working people in general. I knew that this fight had to be led by a group, a party with more permanence in its membership and structure and substance in its ideology.5 Comrades are those you can count on. You share enough of a common ideology, enough of a commitment to common principles and goals, to do more than one-off actions. Together you can fight the long fight. As comrades, our actions are voluntary, but they are not always of our own choosing. Comrades have to be able to count on each other even when we don’t like each other and even when we disagree. We do what needs to be done because we owe it to our comrades. In The Romance of American Communism, Vivian Gornick reports the words of a former member of the Communist Party USA, or CPUSA, who hated the daily grind of selling papers and canvassing expected of party cadre, but nevertheless, according to her, “I did it. I did it because if I didn’t do it, I couldn’t face my comrades the next day. And we all did it for the same reason: we were accountable to each other.”6 Put in psychoanalytic terms, the comrade functions as an ego ideal: the point from which party members assess themselves as doing important, meaningful work.7Being accountable to another entails seeing your actions through their eyes. Are you letting them down or are you doing work that they respect and admire? In Crowds and Party, I present the good comrade as an ideal ego, that is to say, as how party members imagine themselves.8 They may imagine themselves as thrilling orators, brilliant polemicists, skilled organizers, or courageous militants. In contrast with my discussion there, in the current book, I draw out how the comrade also functions as an ego ideal, the perspective that party members—and often fellow travelers—take toward themselves. This perspective is the effect of belonging on the same side as it works back on those who have committed themselves to common struggle. The comrade is a symbolic as well as an imaginary figure and it is the symbolic dimension of ego ideal I focus on here. My thinking about the comrade as a generic figure for those on the same side flows out of my work on communism as the horizon of left politics and my work on the party as the political form necessary for this politics.9 To see our political horizon as communist is to highlight the emancipatory egalitarian struggle of the proletarianized against capitalist exploitation—that is, against the determination of life by market forces; by value; by the division of labor (on the basis of sex and race); by imperialism (theorized by Lenin in terms of the dominance of monopoly and finance capital); and by neocolonialism (theorized by Nkrumah as the last stage of imperialism). Today we see this horizon in struggles such as those led by women of color against police violence, white supremacy, and the murder and incarceration of black, brown, and working-class people. We see it in the infrastructure battles around pipelines, climate justice, and barely habitable cities with undrinkable water and contaminated soil. We see it in the array of social reproduction struggles against debt, foreclosure, and privatization, and for free, quality public housing, childcare, education, transportation, healthcare, and other basic services. We see it in the ongoing fight of LGBTQ people against harassment, discrimination, and oppression. It is readily apparent today that the communist horizon is the horizon of political struggle not for the nation but for the world; it is an international horizon. This is evident in the antagonism between the rights of immigrants and refugees and intensified nationalisms; in the necessity of a global response to planetary warming; and in anti-imperialist, decolonization, and peace movements. In these examples, communism is a force of negativity, the negation of the global capitalist present. Communism is also the name for the positive alternative to capitalism’s permanent and expanding exploitation, crisis, and immiseration, the name of a system of production based on meeting social needs—from each according to ability to each according to need, to paraphrase Marx’s famous slogan—in a way that is collectively determined and carried out by the producers. This positive dimension of communism attends to social relations, to how people treat each other, animals, things, and the world around them. Building communism entails more than resistance and riot. It requires the emancipated egalitarian organization of collective life. With respect to the party, intellectuals on the contemporary left tend to extract the party from the aspirations and accomplishments it enabled. Communist philosophers who disagree on a slew of theoretical questions, such as Antonio Negri and Alain Badiou, converge on the organizational question—no party! The party has been rejected as authoritarian, as outmoded, as ill-fitting a society of networks. Every other mode of political association may be revised, renewed, rethought, or reimagined except for the party of communists. This rejection of the party as a form for left politics is a mistake. It ignores the effects of association on those engaged in common struggle. It fails to learn from the everyday experiences of generations of activists, organizers, and revolutionaries. It relies on a narrow, fantasied notion of the party as a totalitarian machine. It neglects the courage, enthusiasm, and achievements of millions of party members for over a century. Rejection of the party form has been left dogmatism for the last thirty years and has gotten us nowhere. Fortunately, the movements of the squares in Greece and Spain, as well as lessons from the successes and limits of the Occupy movement, have pushed against this left dogmatism. They have reenergized interest in the party as a political form that can scale; a form that is flexible, adaptive, and expansive enough to endure beyond the joyous and disruptive moments of crowds in the streets. A theory of the comrade contributes to this renewal by drawing out the ways that shared commitment to a common struggle generates new strengths and new capacities. Over and against the reduction of party relations to the relations between the leaders and the led, comrade attends to the effects of political belonging on those on the same side of a political struggle. As we fight together for a world free of exploitation, oppression, and bigotry, we have to be able to trust and count on each other. Comrade names this relation. The comrade relation remakes the place from which one sees, what it is possible to see, and what possibilities can appear. It enables the revaluation of work and time, what one does, and for whom one does it. Is one’s work done for the people or for the bosses? Is it voluntary or done because one has to work? Does one work for personal provisions or for a collective good? We should recall Marx’s lyrical description of communism in which work becomes “life’s prime want.” We get a glimpse of that in comradeship: one wants to do political work. You don’t want to let down your comrades; you see the value of your work through their eyes, your new collective eyes. Work, determined not by markets but by shared commitments, becomes fulfilling. French communist philosopher and militant Bernard Aspe discusses the problem of contemporary capitalism as a loss of “common time”; that is, the loss of an experience of time generated and enjoyed through our collective being-together.10 From holidays, to meals, to breaks, whatever common time we have is synchronized and enclosed in forms for capitalist appropriation. Communicative capitalism’s apps and trackers amplify this process such that the time of consumption can be measured in much the same way that Taylorism measured the time of production: How long did a viewer spend on a particular web page? Did a person watch a whole ad or click off of it after five seconds? In contrast, the common action that is the actuality of communist movement induces a collective change in capacities. Breaking from capitalism’s 24-7 injunctions to produce and consume for the bosses and owners, the discipline of common struggle expands possibilities for action and intensifies the sense of its necessity. The comrade is a figure for the relation through which this transformation of work and time occurs. How do we imagine political work? Under conditions where political change seems completely out of reach, we might imagine political work as self-transformation. At the very least, we can work on ourselves. In the intensely mediated networks of communicative capitalism, we might see our social media engagements as a kind of activism where Twitter and Facebook function as important sites of struggle. Perhaps we understand writing as important political work and hammer out opinion pieces, letters to the editors, and manifestoes. When we imagine political work, we often take electoral politics as our frame of reference, focusing on voting, lawn signs, bumper stickers, and campaign buttons. Or we think of activists as those who arrange phone banks, canvass door-to-door, and set up rallies. In yet another political imaginary, we might envision political work as study, whether done alone or with others. We might imagine political work as cultural production, the building of new communities, spaces, and ways of seeing. Our imaginary might have a militant, or even militarist, inflection: political work is carried out through marches, occupations, strikes, and blockades; through civil disobedience, direct action, and covert operations. Even with the recognition of the wide array of political activities, the ways people use them to respond to specific situations and capacities, and how they combine to enhance each other, we might still imagine radical political work as punching a Nazi in the face. Throughout these various actions and activities, how are the relations among those fighting on the same side imagined? How do the activists and organizers, militants and revolutionaries relate to one another? During the weeks and months when the Occupy movement was at its peak, relations with others were often infused with a joyous sense of being together, with an enthusiasm for the collective co-creation of new patterns of action and ways of living.11 But the feeling didn’t last. The pressures of organizing diverse people and politics under conditions of police repression and real material need wore down even the most committed activists. Since then, on social media and across the broader left, relations among the politically engaged have again become tense and conflicted, often along lines of race and gender. Dispersed and disorganized, we’re uncertain of whom to trust and what to expect. We encounter contradictory injunctions to self-care and call out. Suspicion undermines support. Exhaustion displaces enthusiasm. Attention to comradeship, to the ways that shared expectations make political work not just possible but also gratifying, may help redirect our energies back to our common struggle. As former CPUSA member David Ross explained to Gornick: I knew that I could never feel passionately about the new movements as I had about the old, I realized that the CP has provided me with a sense of comradeship I would never have again, and that without that comradeship I could never be political.12 For Ross, the Communist Party is what made Marxism. The party gave Marxism life, political purpose. This life-giving capacity came from comradeship. Ross continues: “The idea of politics as simply a diffused consciousness linked only to personal integrity was—is—anathema to me.” His description of politics as “a diffused consciousness linked only to personal integrity” fits today’s left milieus. Perhaps, then, his remedy—comradeship—will as well. Various people have told me their stories of feeling a rush of warmth when they were first welcomed into their party as a comrade. I’ve had this feeling myself. In his memoir Incognegro: A Memoir of Exile and Apartheid, the theorist Frank Wilderson, a former member of uMkhonto weSizwe, or MK, the armed wing of the African National Congress (ANC), describes his first meeting with Chris Hani, the leader of the South African Communist Party and the chief of staff of MK. Wilderson writes, “I beamed like a schoolboy when he called me ‘comrade.’”13 Wilderson chides himself for what he calls a “childish need for recognition.”14 Perhaps because he still puts Hani on a pedestal, he feels exposed in his enjoyment of the egalitarian disruption of comradeship. Wilderson hasn’t yet internalized the idea that he and Hani are political equals. “Comrade” holds out an equalizing promise, and when that promise is fulfilled, we confront our own continuing yet unwanted attachments to hierarchy, prestige, inadequacy. Accepting equality takes courage. Wilderson’s joy in hearing Hani call him “comrade” contrasts sharply with another instance Wilderson recounts where comrade was the term of address. In 1994, shortly before Wilderson was forced to leave South Africa, he encountered Nelson Mandela at an event hosted by Tributemagazine. After Mandela’s public remarks, Wilderson asked a question in which he addressed Mandela as “comrade.” “Not Mr. Mandela. Not sir, like the fawning advertising mogul who asked the first question. Comrade Mandela. It stitched him back into the militant garb he’d shed since the day he left prison.”15 Wilderson’s recollection shows how comrade’s equalizing insistence can be aggressive, an imposition of discipline. This is part of its power. Addressing another as “comrade” reminds them that something is expected of them. Discipline and joy are two sides of the same coin, two aspects of comradeship as a mode of political belonging. As a form of address, figure of political relation, and carrier of expectations, comrade disrupts capitalist society’s hierarchical identifications of sex, race, and class. It insists on the equalizing sameness of those on the same side of a political struggle and renders that equalizing sameness productive of new modes of work and belonging. In this respect, comrade is a carrier of utopian longings in the sense theorized by Kathi Weeks. Weeks presents the utopian form as carrying out two functions: “One function is to alter our connection to the present, while the other is to shift our relationship to the future; one is productive of estrangement, the other of hope.”16 The first function mobilizes the negativity of disidentification and disinvestment. Present relations become strange, less binding on our sense of possibility. The second function redirects “our attention and energies toward an open future … providing a vision or glimmer of a better world.”17 The power of comrade is in how it negates old relations and promises new ones—the promise itself ushers them in, welcoming the new comrade into relations irreducible to their broader setting.
The role of the ballot is to embrace fidelity to the political truth, for comrades to embrace themselves in partnership toward a collective goal. DEAN 3 Dean, Jodi. Comrade: An essay on political belonging. Verso, 2019. The idea that comrades are those who belong to the same side of a political struggle leads to the fourth thesis: The relation between comrades is mediated by fidelity to a truth; practices of comradeship materialize this fidelity. The “same side” points to the truth comrades are faithful to—the political truth that unites them—and the fidelity with which they work to realize this truth in the world. “Belonging” invites attention to the expectations, practices, and affects that being on the same side generates. The notions of truth and fidelity at work here come from Alain Badiou. In brief, Badiou rejects the idea of truth as a proposition or judgment, arguing instead that truth is a process. The process begins with the eruption of something new, an event. Because an event changes the situation, breaks the confines of the given, it is undecidable in terms of the given; it is something entirely new. Badiou argues that this undecidability “induces the appearance of a subject of the event.”60 This subject isn’t the cause of the event. It’s an effect of or response to the event, “the decision to say that the event has taken place.” Grammar might seduce us into rendering this subject as “I.” We should avoid this temptation and recognize the subject as designating an inflection point, a response that extends the event. The decision that a truth has appeared, that an event has occurred, incites a process of verification, the “infinite procedure of verification of the true,” in what Badiou calls an “exercise of fidelity.”61 Fidelity is a working out and working through of the truth, an engagement with truth that extends out into and changes the world. We should recognize here the unavoidably collective dimension of fidelity: in the political field, verification is a struggle of the many. Peter Hallward draws out some implications of Badiou’s conception of truth. First, it is subjective. Those faithful to an evental truth involve themselves in working it out, exploring its consequences.62 Second, fidelity is not blind faith; it is rigorous engagement unconcerned with individual personality and incorporated into the body of truth that it generates. Hallward writes: Fidelity is, by definition, ex-centric, directed outward, beyond the limits of a merely personal integrity. To be faithful to an evental implication always means to abandon oneself, rigorously, to the unfolding of its consequences. Fidelity implies that, if there is truth, it can be only cruelly indifferent to the private as such. Every truth involves a kind of anti-privatization, a subjective collectivization. In truth, “I” matter only insofar as I am subsumed by the impersonal vector of truth—say, the political organization, or the scientific research program.63 The truth process builds a new body. This body of truth is a collective formed to “work for the consequences of the new” and this work, this collective, disciplines and subsumes the faithful.64Third, collectivity does not imply uniformity. The infinite procedure of verification incorporates multiple experiments, enactments, and effects. Badiou writes, “An organization lies at the intersection between an Idea and an event. However, this intersection only exists as process, whose immediate subject is the political militant.”65 We should amend this statement by replacing militant with comrade. Comrade highlights the “discipline of the event,” the way that political fidelity cannot be exercised by a solitary individual—hence, the Marxist-Leninist emphasis on the unity of theory and practice, the barren incapacity of each alone. Comrade also affirms the self-abandonment accompanying fidelity to a truth: its vector, its unfolding, is indifferent to my personal experiences and inclinations. For communists, the process of truth has a body and that body is the party, in both its historical and formal sense. Already in Theory of the Subject, Badiou recognizes the necessity of a political body, the party as the “subject-support of all politics.”66 He writes: The party is the body of politics, in the strict sense. The fact that there is a body by no means guarantees that there is a subject … But for there to be a subject, for a subject to be found, there must be the support of a body.67 As a figure of political belonging, the comrade is a faithful response to the evental rupture of crowds and movements, to the egalitarian discharge that erupts from the force of the many where they don’t belong, to the movement of the people as the subject of politics.68 Comrades demonstrate fidelity through political work; through concerted, disciplined engagement. Their practical political work extends the truth of the emancipatory egalitarian struggle of the oppressed into the world. Amending Badiou (by drawing from his earlier work), we can say that the comrade is not a faithful subject but a political relation faithful to the divided people as the subject of emancipatory egalitarian politics.69 For us to see the revolutionary people as the subject in the struggles of the oppressed, for their subject to be found, we must be comrades. In Ninotchka, Nina Ivanova Yakushova can’t tell who her comrades are by looking at them. The party has told her who to look for, but she has to ask. After Iranoff identifies himself, Yakushova tells him her name and the name and position of the party comrade who authorized her visit. Iranoff introduces Buljanoff and Kopalski. Yakushova addresses each as comrade. But it’s not the address that makes them all comrades. They are comrades because they are members of the same party. The party is the organized body of truth that mediates their relationship. This mediation makes clear what is expected of comrades—disciplined, faithful work. Iranoff, Buljanoff, and Kopalski have not been doing the work expected of comrades, which is why Moscow sent Yakushova to oversee them in Paris. That Kopalski says they would have greeted her with flowers demonstrates their embourgeoisment, the degeneration of their sense of comradeship. But they are all there for work. Gendered identity and hierarchy don’t mediate relations between comrades. The practices of fidelity to a political truth, the work done toward building that truth in the world, do. The solidarity of comrades in political struggle arises out of the intertwining of truth, practice, and party. It’s not reducible to any of these alone. Comrades are not simply those who believe in the same truth—as in, for example, the idea of communism. Their fidelity to a certain truth is manifested in practical work. Work for the realization of a political truth brings people into comradely relation. But carrying out similar tasks in fidelity to the same truth isn’t sufficient for comradeship. The work must be in common; no one is a comrade on their own. Practices of comradeship are coordinated, organized. The party is the organization out of which comradeship emerges and that comrade relations produce. It concentrates comradeship even as comradeship exceeds it.
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Tournament: Princeton | Round: 3 | Opponent: Stuyvesant LC | Judge: Joshua StPeter Dean Shell – 1.33 Unions themselves are weapons of the neoliberal regime, one that does not directly oppose a hierarchal system but forms its institutions within it. They merely exist on the premise of reformation, not abolition of the general structure that shifts from their own fugitivity. EIDLIN Eidlin, Barry. “Why Unions Are Good - but Not Good Enough.” Jacobin, 1 June 2020, https://www.jacobinmag.com/2020/01/marxism-trade-unions-socialism-revolutionary-organizing. At the same time, unions are an imperfect and incomplete vehicle for the working class to achieve one of Marxist theory’s central goals: overthrowing capitalism. Unions by their very existence affirm and reinforce capitalist class society. As organizations which primarily negotiate wages, benefits, and working conditions with employers, unions only exist in relation to capitalists. This makes them almost by definition reformist institutions, designed to mitigate and manage the employment relationship, not transform it. Many unions have adapted to this conservative, managerial role. Others have played key roles in challenging capital’s power. Some have even played insurgent roles at one moment and managerial roles at others. When unions have organized workplace insurgencies, this has sometimes translated into political pressure that expanded democracy and led to large-scale policy reforms. In the few revolutionary historical moments that we can identify, worker organization, whether called unions or something else, has been essential. Thus, labor unions and movements have long been a central focus of Marxist debate. At its core, the debate centers around the role of unions in class formation, the creation of the revolutionary working-class agent. The debate focuses on four key questions. First, to what degree do unions simply reflect existing relations of production and class struggle, or actively shape those relations? Second, if unions actively shape class struggle, why and under what conditions do they enhance or inhibit it? Third, how do unions shape class identities, and how does this affect unions’ scope of action? Fourth, what is the relation between unions and politics? This question is comprised of two sub-questions: to what degree do unions help or hinder struggles in the workplace becoming broader political struggles? And how should unions relate to political parties, the more conventional vehicle for advancing political demands? The following is a chapter from The Oxford Handbook of Karl Marx (Oxford University Press, 2019). It assesses Marxist debates surrounding trade unions, oriented by the four questions mentioned previously. It proceeds historically, first examining how Marx and Engels conceived of the roles and limitations of trade unions, then tracing how others within Marxism have pursued these debates as class relations and politics have changed over time. While the chapter includes some history of labor unions and movements themselves, the central focus is on how Marxist theorists thought of and related to those movements. Marx and Engels wrote extensively about the unions of their time, although never systematically. The majority of their writings on unions responded to concrete labor struggles of their time. From their earliest works, they grasped unions’ necessity and limitations in creating a working-class agent capable of advancing class struggle against the bourgeoisie. This departed from previous variants of socialism, often based in idealized views of rebuilding a rapidly eroding community of artisanal producers, which did not emphasize class organization or class struggle. Writing in The Condition of the Working Class in England about emerging forms of unionism, Engels observed that even though workers’ primary struggles were over material issues such as wages, they pointed to a deeper social and political conflict: What gives these Unions and the strikes arising from them their real importance is this, that they are the first attempt of the workers to abolish competition. They im¬ply the recognition of the fact that the supremacy of the bourgeoisie is based wholly upon the competition of the workers among themselves; i.e., upon their want of cohesion. And precisely because the Unions direct themselves against the vital nerve of the present social order, however one-sidedly, in however narrow a way, are they so dangerous to this social order. At the same time, Engels saw that, even as union struggles “kept alive the opposition of the workers to the … omnipotence of the bourgeoisie,” so too did they “compel the admission that something more is needed than Trades Unions and strikes to break the power of the ruling class.” Here Engels articulates the crux of the problem. First, unions are essential for working-class formation, creating a collective actor both opposed to the bourgeoisie and capable of challenging it for power. Second, they are an insufficient vehicle for creating and mobilizing that collective actor. Marx and Engels understood that unions are essential to working-class formation because, under capitalism, the system of “free labor,” where individual workers sell their labor power to an employer for a wage, fragments relations between workers and makes them compete with each other. As described in the Communist Manifesto, the bourgeoisie “has left no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous ‘cash payment,’” leaving workers “exposed to all the vicissitudes of competition, to all the fluctuations of the market.” While workers organized based on other collective identities, such as race, ethnicity, or religion, only unions could unite them as workers against the source of their exploitation — the bourgeoisie. Unions serve “as organized agencies for superseding the very system of wage labor and capital rule.” But just as unions could allow the proletariat to take shape and challenge the bourgeoisie for power, Marx and Engels also saw that they were a partial, imperfect vehicle for doing so for two reasons. First, unions’ fundamentally defensive role, protecting workers against employers’ efforts to drive a competitive race to the bottom, meant that they limited themselves “to a guerrilla war against the effects of the existing system, instead of simultaneously trying to change it.” Thus, even militant trade unions found themselves struggling for “a fair day’s work for a fair day’s wage” without challenging the bourgeoisie’s fundamental power, particularly the wage labor system. And some layers of the trade union officialdom were content to fight for privileges for their small segment of the working class, leaving most workers behind. Second, unions’ focus on wages and workplace issues tended to reinforce a division between economic and political struggles. This division was explicit with the more conservative “old” unions in Britain, which “barred all political action on principle and in their charters.” But even with more progressive formations, such as the early nineteenth century’s Chartists, or the late nineteenth century’s “new” unions, Marx and Engels saw that the transition from workplace struggles to politics was not automatic. For one, it varied across national contexts. Engels observed that French workers were much more likely to mobilize politically, while English workers “fight, not against the Government, but directly against the bourgeoisie.” But beyond national variation, they saw a recurring pattern of division, separating economic and political struggles by organization. Reflecting on the early to mid-nineteenth century English working-class movement, Engels noted a threefold divide between “socially-based” Chartists, “politically-based” Socialists, and conservative, craft-based trade unions. While the Chartists were “purely a working-men’s sic cause freed from all bourgeois elements,” they remained “theoretically the more backward, the less developed.” Socialists may have been more theoretically sophisticated, but their bourgeois origins made it difficult to “amalgamate completely with the working class.” Although young Engels thought an alliance of Chartism and socialism was underway, the alliance proved elusive. By the 1870s, Marx opined that politically, the English working class was “nothing more than the tail of the great Liberal Party, i.e., henchmen of the capitalists.” Likewise, Engels had soured on the English working class. Both saw promise in the militant worker protest in the United States at the time, seeing the seeds of a nascent labor party. But that too fell short. Thus, unions failed in Marx and Engels’s central task: the formation of “a political organization of the working class as a whole.” Marx and Engels’s sober analyses of unions’ concrete difficulties in moving from economic to political struggles stood at odds with many of their theoretical pronouncements, where this transition seemed inevitable. While they noted in the Manifesto that the “organization of the proletarians into a class, and, consequently, into a political party, is continually being upset again by the competition between the workers themselves,” they also asserted that “it ever rises up again, stronger, firmer, mightier.” In The Poverty of Philosophy, Marx asserted that “in the struggle . . . this mass of people transformed by economic conditions into workers becomes united, and constitutes itself as a class for itself.” If they were attuned to the challenges of class formation, and the contradictory roles unions could play in that process, they never drew out the theoretical implications of their concrete analyses. Nonetheless, in Marx and Engels’s work we can detect in embryonic form many of the core questions that would orient subsequent Marxist debates about trade unions’ role in class formation and class struggle. Marx and Engels saw that unions were inherently products of their historical period, limited by existing relations of production. At the same time, as organizational expressions of the working class, unions could play a key role in reshaping relations of production. As for enhancing or inhibiting class struggle, they saw that unions’ focus on concrete, practical workplace questions such as wages and working hours was a necessary step in developing the proletariat’s fighting capacity, but also constrained workers within a capitalist framework, limiting their ability to fight for broader demands such as abolition of the wage system. Similarly, different types of union organization could create different class identities, from craft unions’ narrow exclusion to the “new” unions’ broader inclusivity. As for the relation between unions and politics, they understood unions’ necessary but limited role in mobilizing the working class around political demands. Still, these core insights remained fragmentary. Later theorists would flesh them out.
Disorganized politics are that of short, temporary progress. Lack of political will shifts interests from the largest issues at hand and we shift from the status quo of infinite violence, DEAN 1 Dean, Jodi. Comrade: An essay on political belonging. Verso, 2019. Some on the left are skeptical of such political belonging. Seeing discipline only as constraint and not as a decision to build collective capacity, they substitute the fantasy that politics can be individual for the actuality of political struggle and movement. This substitution evades the fact that comradeship is a choice—both for the one joining and for the party joined, as I explore below. It also ignores the liberating quality of discipline: When we have comrades, we are freed from the obligation to be and know and do everything on our own; there is a larger collective with a line, program, and set of tasks and goals. We are also freed from our impulses (enjoined by communicative capitalism) to criticize and comment on the outrage of the moment. And we are freed from the cynicism that parades as maturity because of the practical optimism that faithful work engenders. Discipline provides the support that frees us to make mistakes, learn, and grow. When we err—and each of us will—our comrades will be there to catch us, dust us off, and set us right. We aren’t abandoned to go it alone. Disorganized leftists too often remain entranced by the illusion of everyday people spontaneously creating new forms of life that will usher in a glorious future. This illusion fails to acknowledge the deprivations and decapacitations that forty years of neoliberalism have inflicted. If it were true that austerity, debt, the collapse of institutional infrastructures, and capital flight could enable the spontaneous emergence of egalitarian forms of life, we would not see the enormous economic inequalities, intensification of racialized violence, declines in life expectancy, slow death, undrinkable water, contaminated soil, militarized policing and surveillance, and desolate urban and suburban neighborhoods that are now commonplace. Exhaustion of resources includes the exhaustion of human resources. Lots of times people want to do something but they don’t know what to do or how to do it. They may be isolated in nonunionized workplaces, overburdened by multiple flextime positions, stretched thin caring for friends and family. Disciplined organization—the discipline of comrades committed to common struggle for an emancipatory egalitarian future—can help here. Sometimes we want and need someone to tell us what to do because we are too tired and overextended to figure it out for ourselves. Sometimes when we are given a task as a comrade, we feel like our small efforts have larger meaning and purpose, maybe even world-historical significance in the age-old fight of the people against oppression. Sometimes just knowing that we have comrades who share our commitments, our joys, and our efforts to learn from defeats makes political work possible where it was not before. Some leftists agree with everything I’ve said thus far, yet they add buts. But won’t we end up disappointed and betrayed? But won’t it all ultimately fail (as it has so many times)? But what about the harms comrades have inflicted on each other in the name of comradeship? But what about the persistence of sexism and racism, bigotry and bias? But what happens when we are no longer on the same side, when we cannot say “we” or acknowledge a side? These questions press consideration of the end of comradeship. Frankly speaking, the critical tendency to reject an idea because of a slew of possible future failures is widespread in left milieus. An intellectual façade masks a failure of political will that would be unconvincing in any other context—don’t meet that person for coffee in case you fall in love and later have an expensive and hateful divorce; don’t speak at that meeting in case you lose your train of thought and end up sounding stupid; don’t take up sport or exercise because you might get injured and you’ll never be very good at it anyway; don’t live because you will inevitably die. Worries about the end foreclose possibilities of beginning. Yes, relationships end. Failures happen. But failure is nothing to fear—it’s something to learn from, a next step. This chapter endeavors to learn from the end of comradeship. It considers four types of ending: expulsion, resignation, drift, and the end of the world. These four types are not always distinct. At times, one blends into the other. Yet they open up the ways that the loss of comradeship has differing causes and effects, results and outcomes. They remind us that the fact of an end should not forestall beginning.
The alternative is a politics of the comrade, oriented toward a shared communist horizon. Rejection of capitalism requires building an egalitarian organized social life. Recognition in comradery breaks from the capitalist hierarchy by binding together with a system against us. Dean 2 Dean, Jodi. Comrade: An essay on political belonging. Verso, 2019. The term comrade indexes a political relation, a set of expectations for action toward a common goal. It highlights the sameness of those on the same side—no matter their differences, comrades stand together. As Obama’s joke implies, when you share a politics, you don’t generally distance yourself from your comrades. Comradeship binds action, and in this binding, this solidarity, it collectivizes and directs action in light of a shared vision for the future. For communists, this is the egalitarian future of a society emancipated from the determinations of private property and capitalism and reorganized according to the free association, common benefit, and collective decisions of the producers. But the term comrade predates its use by communists and socialists. In romance languages, comrade first appears in the sixteenth century to designate one who shares a room with another. Juan A. Herrero Brasas cites a Spanish historical-linguistic dictionary’s definition of the term: “Camarada is someone who is so close to another man that he eats and sleeps in the same house with him.”2 In French, the term was originally feminine, camarade, and referred to a barracks or room shared by soldiers.3 Etymologically, comrade derives from camera, the Latin word for room, chamber, and vault. The technical connotation of vault indexes a generic function, the structure that produces a particular space and holds it open.4 A chamber or room is a repeatable structure that takes its form by producing an inside separate from an outside and providing a supported cover for those underneath it. Sharing a room, sharing a space, generates a closeness, an intensity of feeling and expectation of solidarity that differentiates those on one side from those on the other. Comradeship is a political relation of supported cover. Interested in comrade as a mode of address, carrier of expectations, and figure of belonging in the communist and socialist traditions, I emphasize the comrade as a generic figure for the political relation between those on the same side of a political struggle. Comrades are those who tie themselves together instrumentally, for a common purpose: If we want to win—and we have to win—we must act together. As Angela Davis describes her decision to join the Communist Party: I wanted an anchor, a base, a mooring. I needed comrades with whom I could share a common ideology. I was tired of ephemeral ad-hoc groups that fell apart when faced with the slightest difficulty; tired of men who measured their sexual height by women’s intellectual genuflection. It wasn’t that I was fearless, but I knew that to win, we had to fight and the fight that would win was the one collectively waged by the masses of our people and working people in general. I knew that this fight had to be led by a group, a party with more permanence in its membership and structure and substance in its ideology.5 Comrades are those you can count on. You share enough of a common ideology, enough of a commitment to common principles and goals, to do more than one-off actions. Together you can fight the long fight. As comrades, our actions are voluntary, but they are not always of our own choosing. Comrades have to be able to count on each other even when we don’t like each other and even when we disagree. We do what needs to be done because we owe it to our comrades. In The Romance of American Communism, Vivian Gornick reports the words of a former member of the Communist Party USA, or CPUSA, who hated the daily grind of selling papers and canvassing expected of party cadre, but nevertheless, according to her, “I did it. I did it because if I didn’t do it, I couldn’t face my comrades the next day. And we all did it for the same reason: we were accountable to each other.”6 Put in psychoanalytic terms, the comrade functions as an ego ideal: the point from which party members assess themselves as doing important, meaningful work.7Being accountable to another entails seeing your actions through their eyes. Are you letting them down or are you doing work that they respect and admire? In Crowds and Party, I present the good comrade as an ideal ego, that is to say, as how party members imagine themselves.8 They may imagine themselves as thrilling orators, brilliant polemicists, skilled organizers, or courageous militants. In contrast with my discussion there, in the current book, I draw out how the comrade also functions as an ego ideal, the perspective that party members—and often fellow travelers—take toward themselves. This perspective is the effect of belonging on the same side as it works back on those who have committed themselves to common struggle. The comrade is a symbolic as well as an imaginary figure and it is the symbolic dimension of ego ideal I focus on here. My thinking about the comrade as a generic figure for those on the same side flows out of my work on communism as the horizon of left politics and my work on the party as the political form necessary for this politics.9 To see our political horizon as communist is to highlight the emancipatory egalitarian struggle of the proletarianized against capitalist exploitation—that is, against the determination of life by market forces; by value; by the division of labor (on the basis of sex and race); by imperialism (theorized by Lenin in terms of the dominance of monopoly and finance capital); and by neocolonialism (theorized by Nkrumah as the last stage of imperialism). Today we see this horizon in struggles such as those led by women of color against police violence, white supremacy, and the murder and incarceration of black, brown, and working-class people. We see it in the infrastructure battles around pipelines, climate justice, and barely habitable cities with undrinkable water and contaminated soil. We see it in the array of social reproduction struggles against debt, foreclosure, and privatization, and for free, quality public housing, childcare, education, transportation, healthcare, and other basic services. We see it in the ongoing fight of LGBTQ people against harassment, discrimination, and oppression. It is readily apparent today that the communist horizon is the horizon of political struggle not for the nation but for the world; it is an international horizon. This is evident in the antagonism between the rights of immigrants and refugees and intensified nationalisms; in the necessity of a global response to planetary warming; and in anti-imperialist, decolonization, and peace movements. In these examples, communism is a force of negativity, the negation of the global capitalist present. Communism is also the name for the positive alternative to capitalism’s permanent and expanding exploitation, crisis, and immiseration, the name of a system of production based on meeting social needs—from each according to ability to each according to need, to paraphrase Marx’s famous slogan—in a way that is collectively determined and carried out by the producers. This positive dimension of communism attends to social relations, to how people treat each other, animals, things, and the world around them. Building communism entails more than resistance and riot. It requires the emancipated egalitarian organization of collective life. With respect to the party, intellectuals on the contemporary left tend to extract the party from the aspirations and accomplishments it enabled. Communist philosophers who disagree on a slew of theoretical questions, such as Antonio Negri and Alain Badiou, converge on the organizational question—no party! The party has been rejected as authoritarian, as outmoded, as ill-fitting a society of networks. Every other mode of political association may be revised, renewed, rethought, or reimagined except for the party of communists. This rejection of the party as a form for left politics is a mistake. It ignores the effects of association on those engaged in common struggle. It fails to learn from the everyday experiences of generations of activists, organizers, and revolutionaries. It relies on a narrow, fantasied notion of the party as a totalitarian machine. It neglects the courage, enthusiasm, and achievements of millions of party members for over a century. Rejection of the party form has been left dogmatism for the last thirty years and has gotten us nowhere. Fortunately, the movements of the squares in Greece and Spain, as well as lessons from the successes and limits of the Occupy movement, have pushed against this left dogmatism. They have reenergized interest in the party as a political form that can scale; a form that is flexible, adaptive, and expansive enough to endure beyond the joyous and disruptive moments of crowds in the streets. A theory of the comrade contributes to this renewal by drawing out the ways that shared commitment to a common struggle generates new strengths and new capacities. Over and against the reduction of party relations to the relations between the leaders and the led, comrade attends to the effects of political belonging on those on the same side of a political struggle. As we fight together for a world free of exploitation, oppression, and bigotry, we have to be able to trust and count on each other. Comrade names this relation. The comrade relation remakes the place from which one sees, what it is possible to see, and what possibilities can appear. It enables the revaluation of work and time, what one does, and for whom one does it. Is one’s work done for the people or for the bosses? Is it voluntary or done because one has to work? Does one work for personal provisions or for a collective good? We should recall Marx’s lyrical description of communism in which work becomes “life’s prime want.” We get a glimpse of that in comradeship: one wants to do political work. You don’t want to let down your comrades; you see the value of your work through their eyes, your new collective eyes. Work, determined not by markets but by shared commitments, becomes fulfilling. French communist philosopher and militant Bernard Aspe discusses the problem of contemporary capitalism as a loss of “common time”; that is, the loss of an experience of time generated and enjoyed through our collective being-together.10 From holidays, to meals, to breaks, whatever common time we have is synchronized and enclosed in forms for capitalist appropriation. Communicative capitalism’s apps and trackers amplify this process such that the time of consumption can be measured in much the same way that Taylorism measured the time of production: How long did a viewer spend on a particular web page? Did a person watch a whole ad or click off of it after five seconds? In contrast, the common action that is the actuality of communist movement induces a collective change in capacities. Breaking from capitalism’s 24-7 injunctions to produce and consume for the bosses and owners, the discipline of common struggle expands possibilities for action and intensifies the sense of its necessity. The comrade is a figure for the relation through which this transformation of work and time occurs. How do we imagine political work? Under conditions where political change seems completely out of reach, we might imagine political work as self-transformation. At the very least, we can work on ourselves. In the intensely mediated networks of communicative capitalism, we might see our social media engagements as a kind of activism where Twitter and Facebook function as important sites of struggle. Perhaps we understand writing as important political work and hammer out opinion pieces, letters to the editors, and manifestoes. When we imagine political work, we often take electoral politics as our frame of reference, focusing on voting, lawn signs, bumper stickers, and campaign buttons. Or we think of activists as those who arrange phone banks, canvass door-to-door, and set up rallies. In yet another political imaginary, we might envision political work as study, whether done alone or with others. We might imagine political work as cultural production, the building of new communities, spaces, and ways of seeing. Our imaginary might have a militant, or even militarist, inflection: political work is carried out through marches, occupations, strikes, and blockades; through civil disobedience, direct action, and covert operations. Even with the recognition of the wide array of political activities, the ways people use them to respond to specific situations and capacities, and how they combine to enhance each other, we might still imagine radical political work as punching a Nazi in the face. Throughout these various actions and activities, how are the relations among those fighting on the same side imagined? How do the activists and organizers, militants and revolutionaries relate to one another? During the weeks and months when the Occupy movement was at its peak, relations with others were often infused with a joyous sense of being together, with an enthusiasm for the collective co-creation of new patterns of action and ways of living.11 But the feeling didn’t last. The pressures of organizing diverse people and politics under conditions of police repression and real material need wore down even the most committed activists. Since then, on social media and across the broader left, relations among the politically engaged have again become tense and conflicted, often along lines of race and gender. Dispersed and disorganized, we’re uncertain of whom to trust and what to expect. We encounter contradictory injunctions to self-care and call out. Suspicion undermines support. Exhaustion displaces enthusiasm. Attention to comradeship, to the ways that shared expectations make political work not just possible but also gratifying, may help redirect our energies back to our common struggle. As former CPUSA member David Ross explained to Gornick: I knew that I could never feel passionately about the new movements as I had about the old, I realized that the CP has provided me with a sense of comradeship I would never have again, and that without that comradeship I could never be political.12 For Ross, the Communist Party is what made Marxism. The party gave Marxism life, political purpose. This life-giving capacity came from comradeship. Ross continues: “The idea of politics as simply a diffused consciousness linked only to personal integrity was—is—anathema to me.” His description of politics as “a diffused consciousness linked only to personal integrity” fits today’s left milieus. Perhaps, then, his remedy—comradeship—will as well. Various people have told me their stories of feeling a rush of warmth when they were first welcomed into their party as a comrade. I’ve had this feeling myself. In his memoir Incognegro: A Memoir of Exile and Apartheid, the theorist Frank Wilderson, a former member of uMkhonto weSizwe, or MK, the armed wing of the African National Congress (ANC), describes his first meeting with Chris Hani, the leader of the South African Communist Party and the chief of staff of MK. Wilderson writes, “I beamed like a schoolboy when he called me ‘comrade.’”13 Wilderson chides himself for what he calls a “childish need for recognition.”14 Perhaps because he still puts Hani on a pedestal, he feels exposed in his enjoyment of the egalitarian disruption of comradeship. Wilderson hasn’t yet internalized the idea that he and Hani are political equals. “Comrade” holds out an equalizing promise, and when that promise is fulfilled, we confront our own continuing yet unwanted attachments to hierarchy, prestige, inadequacy. Accepting equality takes courage. Wilderson’s joy in hearing Hani call him “comrade” contrasts sharply with another instance Wilderson recounts where comrade was the term of address. In 1994, shortly before Wilderson was forced to leave South Africa, he encountered Nelson Mandela at an event hosted by Tributemagazine. After Mandela’s public remarks, Wilderson asked a question in which he addressed Mandela as “comrade.” “Not Mr. Mandela. Not sir, like the fawning advertising mogul who asked the first question. Comrade Mandela. It stitched him back into the militant garb he’d shed since the day he left prison.”15 Wilderson’s recollection shows how comrade’s equalizing insistence can be aggressive, an imposition of discipline. This is part of its power. Addressing another as “comrade” reminds them that something is expected of them. Discipline and joy are two sides of the same coin, two aspects of comradeship as a mode of political belonging. As a form of address, figure of political relation, and carrier of expectations, comrade disrupts capitalist society’s hierarchical identifications of sex, race, and class. It insists on the equalizing sameness of those on the same side of a political struggle and renders that equalizing sameness productive of new modes of work and belonging. In this respect, comrade is a carrier of utopian longings in the sense theorized by Kathi Weeks. Weeks presents the utopian form as carrying out two functions: “One function is to alter our connection to the present, while the other is to shift our relationship to the future; one is productive of estrangement, the other of hope.”16 The first function mobilizes the negativity of disidentification and disinvestment. Present relations become strange, less binding on our sense of possibility. The second function redirects “our attention and energies toward an open future … providing a vision or glimmer of a better world.”17 The power of comrade is in how it negates old relations and promises new ones—the promise itself ushers them in, welcoming the new comrade into relations irreducible to their broader setting.
The role of the ballot is to embrace fidelity to the political truth, for comrades to embrace themselves in partnership toward a collective goal. DEAN 3 Dean, Jodi. Comrade: An essay on political belonging. Verso, 2019. The idea that comrades are those who belong to the same side of a political struggle leads to the fourth thesis: The relation between comrades is mediated by fidelity to a truth; practices of comradeship materialize this fidelity. The “same side” points to the truth comrades are faithful to—the political truth that unites them—and the fidelity with which they work to realize this truth in the world. “Belonging” invites attention to the expectations, practices, and affects that being on the same side generates. The notions of truth and fidelity at work here come from Alain Badiou. In brief, Badiou rejects the idea of truth as a proposition or judgment, arguing instead that truth is a process. The process begins with the eruption of something new, an event. Because an event changes the situation, breaks the confines of the given, it is undecidable in terms of the given; it is something entirely new. Badiou argues that this undecidability “induces the appearance of a subject of the event.”60 This subject isn’t the cause of the event. It’s an effect of or response to the event, “the decision to say that the event has taken place.” Grammar might seduce us into rendering this subject as “I.” We should avoid this temptation and recognize the subject as designating an inflection point, a response that extends the event. The decision that a truth has appeared, that an event has occurred, incites a process of verification, the “infinite procedure of verification of the true,” in what Badiou calls an “exercise of fidelity.”61 Fidelity is a working out and working through of the truth, an engagement with truth that extends out into and changes the world. We should recognize here the unavoidably collective dimension of fidelity: in the political field, verification is a struggle of the many. Peter Hallward draws out some implications of Badiou’s conception of truth. First, it is subjective. Those faithful to an evental truth involve themselves in working it out, exploring its consequences.62 Second, fidelity is not blind faith; it is rigorous engagement unconcerned with individual personality and incorporated into the body of truth that it generates. Hallward writes: Fidelity is, by definition, ex-centric, directed outward, beyond the limits of a merely personal integrity. To be faithful to an evental implication always means to abandon oneself, rigorously, to the unfolding of its consequences. Fidelity implies that, if there is truth, it can be only cruelly indifferent to the private as such. Every truth involves a kind of anti-privatization, a subjective collectivization. In truth, “I” matter only insofar as I am subsumed by the impersonal vector of truth—say, the political organization, or the scientific research program.63 The truth process builds a new body. This body of truth is a collective formed to “work for the consequences of the new” and this work, this collective, disciplines and subsumes the faithful.64Third, collectivity does not imply uniformity. The infinite procedure of verification incorporates multiple experiments, enactments, and effects. Badiou writes, “An organization lies at the intersection between an Idea and an event. However, this intersection only exists as process, whose immediate subject is the political militant.”65 We should amend this statement by replacing militant with comrade. Comrade highlights the “discipline of the event,” the way that political fidelity cannot be exercised by a solitary individual—hence, the Marxist-Leninist emphasis on the unity of theory and practice, the barren incapacity of each alone. Comrade also affirms the self-abandonment accompanying fidelity to a truth: its vector, its unfolding, is indifferent to my personal experiences and inclinations. For communists, the process of truth has a body and that body is the party, in both its historical and formal sense. Already in Theory of the Subject, Badiou recognizes the necessity of a political body, the party as the “subject-support of all politics.”66 He writes: The party is the body of politics, in the strict sense. The fact that there is a body by no means guarantees that there is a subject … But for there to be a subject, for a subject to be found, there must be the support of a body.67 As a figure of political belonging, the comrade is a faithful response to the evental rupture of crowds and movements, to the egalitarian discharge that erupts from the force of the many where they don’t belong, to the movement of the people as the subject of politics.68 Comrades demonstrate fidelity through political work; through concerted, disciplined engagement. Their practical political work extends the truth of the emancipatory egalitarian struggle of the oppressed into the world. Amending Badiou (by drawing from his earlier work), we can say that the comrade is not a faithful subject but a political relation faithful to the divided people as the subject of emancipatory egalitarian politics.69 For us to see the revolutionary people as the subject in the struggles of the oppressed, for their subject to be found, we must be comrades. In Ninotchka, Nina Ivanova Yakushova can’t tell who her comrades are by looking at them. The party has told her who to look for, but she has to ask. After Iranoff identifies himself, Yakushova tells him her name and the name and position of the party comrade who authorized her visit. Iranoff introduces Buljanoff and Kopalski. Yakushova addresses each as comrade. But it’s not the address that makes them all comrades. They are comrades because they are members of the same party. The party is the organized body of truth that mediates their relationship. This mediation makes clear what is expected of comrades—disciplined, faithful work. Iranoff, Buljanoff, and Kopalski have not been doing the work expected of comrades, which is why Moscow sent Yakushova to oversee them in Paris. That Kopalski says they would have greeted her with flowers demonstrates their embourgeoisment, the degeneration of their sense of comradeship. But they are all there for work. Gendered identity and hierarchy don’t mediate relations between comrades. The practices of fidelity to a political truth, the work done toward building that truth in the world, do. The solidarity of comrades in political struggle arises out of the intertwining of truth, practice, and party. It’s not reducible to any of these alone. Comrades are not simply those who believe in the same truth—as in, for example, the idea of communism. Their fidelity to a certain truth is manifested in practical work. Work for the realization of a political truth brings people into comradely relation. But carrying out similar tasks in fidelity to the same truth isn’t sufficient for comradeship. The work must be in common; no one is a comrade on their own. Practices of comradeship are coordinated, organized. The party is the organization out of which comradeship emerges and that comrade relations produce. It concentrates comradeship even as comradeship exceeds it.
12/4/21
ND21 - PIC - Police
Tournament: Princeton | Round: 1 | Opponent: Princeton PE | Judge: Jalyn Wu Police PIC, 1:30 Counterplan: A just government ought to recognize the unconditional right of workers to strike except for police officers. Note: The counterplan proves a general condition of unconditionality as bad, thus proving the right should be conditional. The PIC is neg ground, aff has to prove why all strikes are good. Police Strikes are used to combat racial progress and attempts to limit police power. Making them legal and easier only make progress much harder. Andrew Grim 2020 What is the ‘blue flu’ and how has it increased police power? https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2020/07/01/what-is-blue-flu-how-has-it-increased-police-power/ But the result of such protests matter deeply as we consider police reform today. Historically, blue flu strikes have helped expand police power, ultimately limiting the ability of city governments to reform, constrain or conduct oversight over the police. They allow the police to leverage public fear of crime to extract concessions from municipalities. This became clear in Detroit more than 50 years ago. In June 1967, tensions arose between Detroit Mayor Jerome Cavanagh and the Detroit Police Officers Association (DPOA), which represented the city’s 3,300 patrol officers. The two were at odds primarily over police demands for a pay increase. Cavanagh showed no signs of caving to the DPOA’s demands and had, in fact, proposed to cut the police department’s budget. On June 15, the DPOA escalated the dispute with a walkout: 323 officers called in sick. The number grew over the next several days as the blue flu spread, reaching a height of 800 absences on June 17. In tandem with the walkout, the DPOA launched a fearmongering media campaign to win over the public. They took out ads in local newspapers warning Detroit residents, “How does it feel to be held up? Stick around and find out!” This campaign took place at a time of rising urban crime rates and uprisings, and only a month before the 1967 Detroit riot, making it especially potent. The DPOA understood this climate and used it to its advantage. With locals already afraid of crime and displeased at Cavanagh’s failure to rein it in, they would be more likely to demand the return of the police than to demand retribution against officers for an illegal strike. The DPOA’s strategy paid off. The walkout left Detroit Police Commissioner Ray Girardin feeling “practically helpless.” “I couldn’t force them to work,” he later told The Washington Post. Rather than risk public ire by allowing the blue flu to continue, Cavanagh relented. Ultimately, the DPOA got the raises it sought, making Detroit officers the highest paid in the nation. This was far from the end of the fight between Cavanagh and the DPOA. In the ensuing months and years, they continued to tussle over wages, pensions, the budget, the integration of squad cars and the hiring of black officers. The threat of another blue flu loomed over all these disputes, helping the union to win many of them. And Detroit was not an outlier. Throughout the 1960s, ’70s and ’80s, the blue flu was a ubiquitous and highly effective tactic in Baltimore, Memphis, New Orleans, Chicago, Newark, New York and many other cities. In most cases, as author Kristian Williams writes, “When faced with a walkout or slowdown, the authorities usually decided that the pragmatic need to get the cops back to work trumped the city government’s long term interest in diminishing the rank and file’s power.” But each time a city relented to this pressure, they ceded more and more power to police unions, which would turn to the strategy repeatedly to defend officers’ interests — particularly when it came to efforts to address systemic racism in police policies and practices. In 1970, black residents of Pittsburgh’s North Side neighborhood raised an outcry over the “hostile sadistic treatment” they experienced at the hands of white police officers. They lobbied Mayor Peter F. Flaherty to assign more black officers to their neighborhood. The mayor agreed, transferring several white officers out of the North Side and replacing them with black officers. While residents cheered this decision, white officers and the Fraternal Order of Police (FOP), which represented them, were furious. They slammed the transfer as “discrimination” against whites. About 425 of the Pittsburgh Police Department’s 1,600 police officers called out sick in protest. Notably, black police officers broke with their white colleagues and refused to join the walkout. They praised the transfer as a “long overdue action” and viewed the walkout as a betrayal of officers’ oath to protect the public. Nonetheless, the tactic paid off. After several days, Flaherty caved to the “open revolt” of white officers, agreeing to halt the transfers and instead submit the dispute to binding arbitration between the city and the police union. Black officers, though, continued to speak out against their union’s support of racist practices, and many of them later resigned from the union in protest. Similar scenarios played out in Detroit, Chicago and other cities in the 1960s and ’70s, as white officers continually staged walkouts to preserve the segregated status quo in their departments. These blue flu strikes amounted to an authoritarian power grab by police officers bent on avoiding oversight, rejecting reforms and shoring up their own authority. In the aftermath of the 1967 Detroit walkout, a police commissioner’s aide strongly criticized the police union’s strong-arm tactics, saying “it smacks of a police state.” The clash left one newspaper editor wondering, “Who’s the Boss of the Detroit Police?” But in the “law and order” climate of the late 1960s, such criticism did not resonate enough to stir a groundswell of public opinion against the blue flu. And police unions dismissed critics by arguing that officers had “no alternative” but to engage in walkouts to get city officials to make concessions. Crucially, the very effectiveness of the blue flu may be premised on a myth. While police unions use public fear of crime skyrocketing without police on duty, in many cases, the absence of police did not lead to a rise in crime. In New York City in 1971, for example, 20,000 officers called out sick for five days over a pay dispute without any apparent increase in crime. The most striking aspect of the walkout, as one observer noted, “might be just how unimportant it seemed.” Today, municipalities are under immense pressure from activists who have taken to the streets to protest the police killings of black men and women. Some have already responded by enacting new policies and cutting police budgets. As it continues, more blue flus are likely to follow as officers seek to wrest back control of the public debate on policing and reassert their independence.
Those strikes cement a police culture which leads to endless amounts of racist violence and the bolstering of the prison industrial complex. Chaney and Ray 13, Cassandra (Has a PhD and is a professor at LSU. Also has a strong focus in the structure of Black families) , and Ray V. Robertson (Also has a PhD and is a criminal justice professor at LSU). "Racism and police brutality in America." Journal of African American Studies 17.4 (2013): 480-505. SMdo I really need a card for this Racism and Discrimination According to Marger (2012), “racism is an ideology, or belief system, designed to justify and rationalize racial and ethnic inequality” (p. 25) and “discrimination, most basically, is behavior aimed at denying members of particular ethnic groups’ equal access to societal rewards” (p. 57). Defining both of these concepts from the onset is important for they provide the lens through which our focus on the racist and discriminatory practices of law enforcement can occur. Since the time that Africans African Americans were forcibly brought to America, they have been the victims of racist and discriminatory practices that have been spurred and/or substantiated by those who create and enforce the law. For example, The Watts Riots of 1965, the widespread assaults against Blacks in Harlem during the 1920s (King 2011), law enforcement violence against Black women (i.e., Malaika Brooks, Jaisha Akins, Frankie Perkins, Dr. Mae Jemison, Linda Billups, Clementine Applewhite) and other ethnic women of color (Ritchie 2006), the beating of Rodney King, and the deaths of Amadou Diallo in the 1990s and Trayvon Martin more recently are just a few public examples of the historical and contemporaneous ways in which Blacks in America have been assaulted by members of the police system (King 2011; Loyd 2012; Murch 2012; Rafail et al. 2012). In Punishing Race (2011), law professor Michael Tonry’s research findings point to the fact that Whites tend to excuse police brutality against Blacks because of the racial animus that they hold against Blacks. Thus, to Whites, Blacks are viewed as deserving of harsh treatment in the criminal justice system (Peffley and Hurwitz 2013). At first glance, such an assertion may seem to be unfathomable, buy that there is an extensive body of literature which suggests that Black males are viewed as the “prototypical criminal,” and this notion is buttressed in the media, by the general public, and via disparate sentencing outcomes (Blair et al. 2004; Eberhardt et al. 2006; Gabiddon 2010; Maddox and Gray 2004; Oliver and Fonash 2002; Staples 2011). For instance, Blair et al. (2004) revealed that Black males with more Afrocentric features (e.g., dark skin, broad noses, full lips) may receive longer sentences than Blacks with less Afrocentric features, i.e., lighter skin and straighter hair (Eberhardt et al. 2006). Shaun Gabiddon in Criminological Theories on Race and Crime (2010) discussed the concept of “Negrophobia” which was more extensively examined by Armour (1997). Negrophobia can be surmised as an irrational of Blacks, which includes a fear of being victimized by Black, that can result in Whites shooting or harming an AfricanAmerican based on criminal/racial stereotypes (Armour 1997). The aforementioned racialized stereotypical assumptions can be deleterious because they can be used by Whites to justify shooting a Black person on the slightest of pretense (Gabiddon 2010). Finally, African-American males represent a group that has been much maligned in the larger society (Tonry 2011). Further, as victims of the burgeoning prison industrial complex, mass incarceration, and enduring racism, the barriers to truly independent Black male agency are ubiquitous and firmly entrenched (Alexander 2010; Chaney 2009; Baker 1996; Blackmon 2008; Dottolo and Stewart 2008; Karenga 2010; Martin et al. 2001; Smith and Hattery 2009). Thus, racism and discrimination heightens the psychological distress experienced by Blacks (Robertson 2011; Pieterse et al. 2012), as well as their decreased mortality in the USA (Muennig and Murphy 2011). Police Brutality Against Black Males According to Walker (2011), police brutality is defined as “the use of excessive physical force or verbal assault and psychological intimidation” (p. 579). Although one recent study suggests that the NYPD has become better behaved due to greater race and gender diversity (Kane and White 2009), Blacks are more likely to be the victims of police brutality. A growing body of scholarly research related to police brutality has revealed that Blacks are more likely than Whites to make complaints regarding police brutality (Smith and Holmes 2003), to be accosted while operating driving a motorized vehicle (“Driving While Black”), and to underreport how often they are stopped due to higher social desirability factors (TomaskovicDevey et al. 2006). Interestingly, data obtained from the General Social Survey (GSS), a representative sample conducted biennially by the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago for the years 1994 through 2004, provide further proof regarding the acceptance of force against Blacks. In particular, the GSS found Whites to be significantly (29.5 ) more accepting of police use of force when a citizen was attempting to escape custody than Blacks when analyzed using the chi-squared statistical test (p The average Southern policeman is a promoted poor White with a legal sanction to use a weapon. His social heritage has taught him to despise the Negroes, and he has had little education which could have changed him….The result is that probably no group of Whites in America have a lower opinion of the Negro people and are more fixed in their views than Southern policeman. (Myrdal 1944, pp. 540–541) Myrdal (1944) was writing on results from a massive study that he undertook in the late 1930s. He was writing at a time that even the most conservative among us would have to admit was not a colorblind society (if one even believes in such things). But current research does corroborate his observations that less educated police officers tend to be the most aggressive and have the most formal complaints filed against them when compared to their more educated counterparts (Hassell and Archbold 2010; Jefferis et al. 2011). Tonry (2011) delineates some interesting findings from the 2001 Race, Crime, and Public Opinion Survey that can be applied to understanding why the larger society tolerates police misconduct when it comes to Black males. The survey, which involved approximately 978 non-Hispanic Whites and 1,010 Blacks, revealed a divergence in attitudes between Blacks and Whites concerning the criminal justice system (Tonry 2011). For instance, 38 of Whites and 89 of Blacks viewed the criminal justice system as biased against Blacks (Tonry 2011). Additionally, 8 of Blacks and 56 of Whites saw the criminal justice system as treating Blacks fairly (Tonry 2011). Perhaps most revealing when it comes to facilitating an environment ripe for police brutality against Black males, 68 of Whites and only 18 of Whites expressed confidence in law enforcement (Tonry 2011). Is a society wherein the dominant group overwhelming approves of police performance willing to do anything substantive to curtail police brutality against Black males? Police brutality is not a new phenomenon. The Department of Justice (DOJ) office of Civil Rights (OCR) has investigated more than a dozen police departments in major cities across the USA on allegations of either racial discrimination or police brutality (Gabbidon and Greene 2013). To make the aforementioned even more clear, according to Gabbidon and Greene (2013), “In 2010, the OCR was investigating 17 police departments across the country and monitoring five settlements regarding four police agencies” (pp. 119–120). Plant and Peruche (2005) provide some useful information into why police officers view Black males as potential perpetrators and could lead to acts of brutality. In their research, the authors suggest that since Black people in general, and Black males in particular, are caricatured as aggressive and criminal, police are more likely to view Black men as a threat which justifies the disproportionate use of deadly force. Therefore, it is not beyond the realm of possibility that police officers’ decisions to act aggressively may, to some extent, be influenced by race (Jefferis et al. 2011). The media’s portrayals of Black men are often less than sanguine. Bryson’s (1998) work in this area provides empirical evidence that the mass media that has been instrumental in portraying Black men as studs, super detectives, or imitation White men and has a general negative effect on how these men are regarded by others. Such characterizations can be so visceral in nature that “prototypes” of criminal suspects are more likely to be African-American (Oliver et al. 2004). Not surprisingly, the more Afrocentric the African-American’s facial features, the more prone he or she is expected to be deviant (Eberhardt et al. 2006). Interestingly, it is probable that less than flattering depictions of Black males on television and in news stories are activating pre-existing stereotypes possessed by Whites as opposed to facilitating their creation. According to Oliver et al. (2004), “it is important to keep in mind that media consumption is an active process, with viewers’ existing attitudes and beliefs playing a larger role in how images are attended to, interpreted, and remembered” (p. 89). Moreover, it is reductionist to presuppose that individual is powerless in constructing a palatable version of reality and is solely under the control of the media and exercises no agency. Lastly, Peffley and Hurwitz (2013) describe what can be perceived as one of the more deleterious results of negative media caricatures of Black males. More specifically, the authors posit that most Whites believe that Blacks are disproportionately inclined to engage in criminal behavior and are the deserving on harsh treatment by the criminal justice system. On the other hand, such an observation is curious because most urban areas are moderate to highly segregated residentially which would preclude the frequent and significant interaction needed to make such scathing indictments (Bonilla-Silva 2009). Consequently, the aforementioned racial animus has the effect of increased White support for capital punishment if questions regarding its legitimacy around if capital punishment is too frequently applied to Blacks (Peffley and Hurwitz 2013; Tonry 2011). Ultimately, erroneous (negative) portrayals of crime and community, community race and class identities, and concerns over neighborhood change all contribute to place-specific framing of “the crime problem.” These frames, in turn, shape both intergroup dynamics and support for criminal justice policy (Leverentz 2012).
12/3/21
ND21 - T - US
Tournament: Princeton | Round: 3 | Opponent: Stuyvesant LC | Judge: Joshua StPeter Interpretation: The affirmative debater must not specify a government that is not just and spec workers Violation: They specify the United States and tech workers. 1 The US a commits eminent domain abuse, which violates property and b does it against minorities and the poor which is not impartial, Somin 17: Ilya Somin, Contributor, The Volokh Conspiracy which is is a blog co-founded in 2002 by law professor Eugene Volokh,3 covering legal and political issues456 from an ideological orientation it describes as "generally libertarian, conservative, centrist, or some mixture of these.", May 26, 2017 at 10:40 a.m. EDT, “The American experience with eminent domain – and its possible lessons for others” https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/2017/05/26/the-american-experience-with-eminent-domain-and-its-possible-lessons-for-others/LHP AV This week, the Volokh Conspiracy hosted a guest-blogging symposium with posts by contributors to my new book Eminent Domain: A Comparative Perspective (co-edited with Iljoong Kim and Hojun Lee). My last post about the book includes links to a free version of the Introduction to the volume, and to posts by other contributors. In addition to co-editing the volume, I also wrote the chapter on eminent domain in the United States. In this post, I summarize key elements of the American experience with condemnation, building on my chapter in the book and my earlier work on the history of takings in the US. The United States has the reputation of being a nation with a strong commitment to property rights and constitutional limits on government power. In some ways, that reputation is well deserved. But, in some other key respects, it is undercut by our painful history of eminent domain abuse. The Fifth Amendment and nearly all state constitutions mandate that government may only take private property for a “public use.” Almost from the very beginning, there has been conflict between advocates of the “narrow” and “broad” interpretations of this rule. The former allows takings only for publicly owned projects (such as a public road), or private ones that have a legal duty to serve the entire public, such as a public utility. Under the broad view, virtually anything that might benefit the public in some way qualifies as a public use. The narrow view predominated throughout most of the first century or more of American constitutional history. But the broad view eventually triumphed in the mid-twentieth century, culminating in cases like Berman v. Parker (1954). As a result, state and federal courts upheld large-scale “blight” and “economic development” takings that forcibly displaced hundreds of thousands of people, most of them poor, politically weak, or members of racial and ethnic minorities. Often, these takings also destroyed more economic value than they created, wiping out homes and small businesses, and destroying neighborhood “social capital.” Such abuses persist to the present day, though on a considerably smaller scale than at the height of “urban renewal” takings in the 1950s and 1960s. The Supreme Court reaffirmed the broad view in its controversial 2005 decision in Kelo v. City of New London, which ruled that it is permissible to take property from one private owner and give it to another simply because it might lead to greater “economic development” in the area. But Kelo was a close 5-4 decision that turned out to be enormously controversial, generating a massive political backlash. In the aftermath, many states enacted eminent domain reform laws limiting takings, and several state supreme courts ruled that economic development takings violate their state constitutions. Although a win for the broad view, Kelo ended up destroying the seeming consensus behind it. In the wake of Kelo, the narrow view commands greater legitimacy than at any time in decades, and the debate over the proper scope of the eminent domain power continues with no end in sight. In recent years, controversy has erupted over takings for pipelines. An unusual coalition of property rights advocates on the right and environmentalists on the left has won a series of legislative and judicial victories seeking to limit pipeline takings. The alliance recalls the similarly cross-ideological reaction against Kelo, which also brought together some strange bedfellows. The debate over public use is far from the only controversy surrounding eminent domain in the US. Another longstanding problem is the tendency to undercompensate owners of condemned property. The Supreme Court has long held that owners must get “fair market value” compensation. This, unfortunately, fails to account for the “subjective value” that many attach to their land over and above its market value. For example, a person who has lived in the same neighborhood for many years may value the social ties she has formed there; a small business may have a network of clients that would be hard to replicate elsewhere. Even worse, studies show that owners often don’t even get the fair market value compensation that the law requires. That is particularly likely for owners who are relatively poor and lacking in political clout. Donald Trump’s claim that owners of condemned property stand to make “a fortune” is – to put it mildly – belied by the evidence. 2 The oppressive structure of the United States is maintained by the narrative of justice and triumph. Ioanide, Paula. "The Alchemy of Race and Affect:“White Innocence” and Public Secrets in the Post–Civil Rights Era." Kalfou 1.1 (2014). I had to do a lot of revisionist thinking after I confronted this evidence. This is when I realized that there were two operative languages in America: the language of narrative and the language of affect. The first, constituted by dominant discourses, representations, ideologies, and fantasies, was used to craft the consciousness and belief systems of liberal and conservative Americans alike. Employing the language of narrative, Americans spoke of themselves using the terms of triumph, fairness, exceptionalism, merit, rugged individualism, and the ethic of hard work. They repeated the false history they were taught in high school, professed the pleasantries of liberty, equality, justice, and God’s love for all, played out the melodramas and happy endings of Hollywood, and clung to the historicism of liberal democracy. The discourses of cultural pathology, criminality, welfare dependence, big government, family non-normativity, and sexual deviance—all of which were always deeply racialized and gendered— provided easy justifications for the aberrations, divisions, inequalities, hierarchies, and conflicts in what was otherwise understood as the greatest nation in the world. This language of narrative through which Americans most often defined themselves masked the structures that ultimately determine people’s fates and rendered invisible the relationships between past racial injustices and present social relations of power, opportunity, and life chances. In denying individual and collective responsibility for the bitter fruits of American history, the language of narrative required the “dumbing down” of society, since keeping people ignorant of historical consciousness necessitates vacuous forms of know- ledge as well as alienated and instrumentalist social bonds. But it also unwit- tingly produced spiritual emptiness, since a society that denies the unjust out- comes of its past and present actions cannot stand on ethical grounds. I suspect this is what was behind the hollow tones and loveless touches of the people at my church and school. Vote neg – 1 Precision – A stasis point – the topic is the only reasonable focal point for debate – anything else destroys the possibility of debate because we will be two ships passing B internal link turn – violating semantics justifies the aff talking about whatever with zero neg prep or prediction which is the most unfair and uneducational C Jurisdiction – you can’t vote for them because the ballot and the tournament invitation say to vote for the better debater in the context of the resolution 2 Limits – there are almost 200 national governments in the world which is an unmanageable burden, especially for a 3 week camp. Only imposing restrictions via the word just can ensure debates are limited and full of clash supercharged by the fact they chose tech workers 3 TVA – use ideal theory instead. That’s better – a promotes in-depth philosophical clash over labor law that’s constitutive to LD b solves your offense because you can indicate you would solve these problems in an ideal world too – no reason you need the US or tech workersin particular
THEY HAVE TWO VIOLATIONS, GOV and WORKERS
Extempt paradign issues
12/4/21
Tech DA
Tournament: Glenbrooks | Round: 1 | Opponent: Northview MS | Judge: Vennelakanti, Vishnu Tech DA: 1:24, 1:10 Innovation is high now – Tannen 21 Tannen, Janette. “Pandemic Spurs a Burst of Technology Innovation.” University of Miami News and Events, 7 Nov. 2021, https://news.miami.edu/stories/2020/08/pandemic-spurs-a-burst-of-technology-innovation.html. LHP SV But COVID-19 has been a boom for technology and, according to University of Miami experts, these innovations are destined to transform how we do business and almost every other facet of life—from how we communicate, educate, recreate, and entertain to how we seek medical care, design new homes, and perhaps even choose who we live with. “Tech companies are enabling digital productivity,” said Ernie Fernandez, vice president of information technology and the University’s chief information officer. “And this is not just a temporary COVID-19 response—these companies will continue to provide value in a world where digital technology is going to persist.” Geoff Sutcliffe, a computer science professor, added that amid the unfortunate misery and death, the pandemic has some silver linings. “We are privileged to be living through an industrial revolution, with computing at the core of it,” he said. “Suddenly, this is how we do life and it will change our economic lives completely.” Violent strike efforts are increasing – they slow innovation, specifically in the tech sector. Hanasoge 16 Chaithra; Senior Research Analyst, Market Researcher, Consumer Insights, Strategy Consulting; “The Union Strikes: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly,” Supply Wisdom; April/June 2016 (Doesn’t specifically say but this is the most recent event is cites); https://www.supplywisdom.com/resources/the-union-strikes-the-good-the-bad-and-the-ugly///SJWen The result: Verizon conceded to several of the workers’ demands including hiring union workers, protection against outsourcing of call-center jobs, and employee benefits such as salary hikes and higher pension contributions, among others and thus bringing an end to the strike in June. The repercussion: The strike witnessed several instances of social disorder, violence and clashes, ultimately calling for third party intervention (Secretary of Labor – Thomas Perez) to initiate negotiations between the parties. Also, as a result of the strike, Verizon reported lower than expected revenues in the second quarter of 2016. Trade unions/ labor unions aren’t just this millennia’s product and has been in vogue since times immemorial. Unions, to ensure fairness to the working class, have gone on strike for better working conditions and employee benefits since the industrial revolution and are as strong today as they were last century. With the advent of technology and advancement in artificial intelligence, machines are grabbing the jobs which were once the bastion of the humans. So, questions that arise here are, what relevance do unions have in today’s work scenario? And, are the strikes organized by them avoidable? As long as the concept of labor exists and employees feel that they are not receiving their fair share of dues, unions will exist and thrive. Union protests in most cases cause work stoppages, and in certain cases, disruption of law and order. Like in March 2016, public servants at Federal Government departments across Australia went on a series of strikes over failed pay negotiations, disrupting operations of many government departments for a few days. Besides such direct effects, there are many indirect effects as well such as strained employee relations, slower work processes, lesser productivity and unnecessary legal hassles. Also, union strikes can never be taken too lightly as they have prompted major overturn of decisions, on a few occasions. Besides the Verizon incident that was a crucial example of this, nationwide strikes were witnessed in India in March and April this year when the national government introduced reforms related to the withdrawal regulations and interest rate of employee provident fund, terming it as ‘anti-working class’. This compelled the government to withhold the reform for further review. In France, strike against labor law reforms in May turned violent, resulting in riots and significant damage to property. The incident prompted the government to consider modifications to the proposed reforms. However, aside from employee concerns, such incidents are also determined by a number of other factors such as the country’s political scenario, economy, size of the overall workforce and the unions, history of unionization, labor laws, and culture. For example, it is a popular saying that the French are always on strike as per tradition (although recent statistics indicate a decline in frequency). In a communist government like China, strikes have steadily risen in number. In 2015, China Labor Bulletin (CLB), a Hong Kong-based workers’ rights group recorded 2,700 incidents of strikes and protests, compared to 1,300 incidents in 2014. Most of them have stemmed out of failure by the government to respect the basic rights of employees and address labor concerns. Interestingly, unions have not been able to gain a strong foothold in the IT-BPO industry. While many countries do have a separate union to represent workers from the sector, incidents of strikes like Verizon have been relatively low. However, workplace regulations, in addition to other factors mentioned could be a trigger for such incidents, even if on a smaller scale. For example, a recent survey that interviewed several BPO employees in India revealed that while forming a union in the BPO sector was difficult, irksome workplace regulations such as constant surveillance, irregular timings and incentives have prompted employees to express their resentment in smaller ways such as corruption of internal servers and so on. Such risks are further enhanced in a city like Kolkata, which carries a strong trade union culture.
Victories like the aff mobilizes unions in the IT sector. Vynck et al 21 Gerrit De; Carleton University, BA in Journalism and Global Politics, tech reporter for The Washington Post. He writes about Google and the algorithms that increasingly shape society. He previously covered tech for seven years at Bloomberg News; Nitashu Tiku; Columbia University, BA in English, New York University, MA in Journalism, Washington Post's tech culture reporter based in San Francisco; Macalester College, BA in English, Columbia University, MS in Journalism, reporter for The Washington Post who is focused on technology coverage in the Pacific Northwest; “Six things to know about the latest efforts to bring unions to Big Tech,” The Washington Post; https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/01/26/tech-unions-explainer///SJWen In response to tech company crackdowns and lobbying, gig workers have shifted their strategy to emphasize building worker-led movements and increasing their ranks, rather than focusing on employment status as the primary goal, says Veena Dubal, a law professor at the University of California Hastings College of the Law in San Francisco. The hope is that with President Biden in the White House and an even split in the Senate, legislators will mobilize at the federal level, through the NLRA or bills such as the PRO Act, to recognize gig worker collectives as real unions.
Technological innovation solves every existential threat – which outweighs we cannot solve extinction without innovation. Matthews 18 Dylan. Co-founder of Vox, citing Nick Beckstead @ Rutgers University. 10-26-2018. "How to help people millions of years from now." Vox. https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2018/10/26/18023366/far-future-effective-altruism-existential-risk-doing-good If you care about improving human lives, you should overwhelmingly care about those quadrillions of lives rather than the comparatively small number of people alive today. The 7.6 billion people now living, after all, amount to less than 0.003 percent of the population that will live in the future. It’s reasonable to suggest that those quadrillions of future people have, accordingly, hundreds of thousands of times more moral weight than those of us living here today do. That’s the basic argument behind Nick Beckstead’s 2013 Rutgers philosophy dissertation, “On the overwhelming importance of shaping the far future.” It’s a glorious mindfuck of a thesis, not least because Beckstead shows very convincingly that this is a conclusion any plausible moral view would reach. It’s not just something that weird utilitarians have to deal with. And Beckstead, to his considerable credit, walks the walk on this. He works at the Open Philanthropy Project on grants relating to the far future and runs a charitable fund for donors who want to prioritize the far future. And arguments from him and others have turned “long-termism” into a very vibrant, important strand of the effective altruism community. But what does prioritizing the far future even mean? The most literal thing it could mean is preventing human extinction, to ensure that the species persists as long as possible. For the long-term-focused effective altruists I know, that typically means identifying concrete threats to humanity’s continued existence — like unfriendly artificial intelligence, or a pandemic, or global warming/out of control geoengineering — and engaging in activities to prevent that specific eventuality. But in a set of slides he made in 2013, Beckstead makes a compelling case that while that’s certainly part of what caring about the far future entails, approaches that address specific threats to humanity (which he calls “targeted” approaches to the far future) have to complement “broad” approaches, where instead of trying to predict what’s going to kill us all, you just generally try to keep civilization running as best it can, so that it is, as a whole, well-equipped to deal with potential extinction events in the future, not just in 2030 or 2040 but in 3500 or 95000 or even 37 million. In other words, caring about the far future doesn’t mean just paying attention to low-probability risks of total annihilation; it also means acting on pressing needs now. For example: We’re going to be better prepared to prevent extinction from AI or a supervirus or global warming if society as a whole makes a lot of scientific progress. And a significant bottleneck there is that the vast majority of humanity doesn’t get high-enough-quality education to engage in scientific research, if they want to, which reduces the odds that we have enough trained scientists to come up with the breakthroughs we need as a civilization to survive and thrive. So maybe one of the best things we can do for the far future is to improve school systems — here and now — to harness the group economist Raj Chetty calls “lost Einsteins” (potential innovators who are thwarted by poverty and inequality in rich countries) and, more importantly, the hundreds of millions of kids in developing countries dealing with even worse education systems than those in depressed communities in the rich world. What if living ethically for the far future means living ethically now? Beckstead mentions some other broad, or very broad, ideas (these are all his descriptions): Help make computers faster so that people everywhere can work more efficiently Change intellectual property law so that technological innovation can happen more quickly Advocate for open borders so that people from poorly governed countries can move to better-governed countries and be more productive Meta-research: improve incentives and norms in academic work to better advance human knowledge Improve education Advocate for political party X to make future people have values more like political party X ”If you look at these areas (economic growth and technological progress, access to information, individual capability, social coordination, motives) a lot of everyday good works contribute,” Beckstead writes. “An implication of this is that a lot of everyday good works are good from a broad perspective, even though hardly anyone thinks explicitly in terms of far future standards.” Look at those examples again: It’s just a list of what normal altruistically motivated people, not effective altruism folks, generally do. Charities in the US love talking about the lost opportunities for innovation that poverty creates. Lots of smart people who want to make a difference become scientists, or try to work as teachers or on improving education policy, and lord knows there are plenty of people who become political party operatives out of a conviction that the moral consequences of the party’s platform are good. All of which is to say: Maybe effective altruists aren’t that special, or at least maybe we don’t have access to that many specific and weird conclusions about how best to help the world. If the far future is what matters, and generally trying to make the world work better is among the best ways to help the far future, then effective altruism just becomes plain ol’ do-goodery.