AC Space Debris and Colonization NC SBSP DA and Cylinder PIC 1AR Space Debris and Colonization NR SBSP DA and Cylinder PIC 2AR Space Debris and Colonization
UW Westerns
4
Opponent: Laramie TF | Judge: Lawrence Zhou
AC Space Debris Colonialism NC Asteroid Mining CP 1AR Space Debris Colonialism NR Asteroid Mining CP 2AR Space Debris Colonialism
WBFL
2
Opponent: Brentwood - AR | Judge: Nicholas Balfe
AC Space Debris NC Climate Change 1AR Space Debris NR Climate Change 2AR Space Debris
WBFL
4
Opponent: Loyola - CW | Judge: Riya Thakre
AC Space Debris Inequality NC Asteroid Mining 1AR Space Debris Inequality NR Asteroid Mining 2AR Space Debris Inequality
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Cites
Entry
Date
0-Contact Info
Tournament: Contact Info | Round: 1 | Opponent: NA | Judge: NA Hi I'm Elle My email is liladershewitz25@marlboroughorg and my phone number is (206)-476-4551 If you want to contact me try emailing me first
10/11/21
JF - Outer Space
Tournament: UW Westerns | Round: 1 | Opponent: Harvard Westlake - EG | Judge: Amadea Datel AC Ambiguities in the OST that allow private appropriation have kicked off a race to develop space, setting the stage for a debris crisis and the domination of space by unaccountable billionaires. Current laws fail due to lax rules and forum shopping. Dovey 21 Ceridwen Dovey, “Space Exploration At What Price?,” Readers Digest Asia Pacific, 5/1/21. https://www.pressreader.com/australia/readers-digest-asia-pacific/20210501/281487869174485 CT One environmental risk all stakeholders agree on is that posed by space debris. There’s already about 5000 satellites in orbit around Earth, of which roughly 2000 are operational, plus hundreds of millions of tiny pieces of debris. Ninety-five per cent of the stuff in low-Earth orbit is classified as ‘space junk’. More space debris makes accessing space costlier in terms of loss of equipment (and possibly of human life). There’s also the risk of the Kessler effect: a cascade of collisions, to the point where the most useful orbital slots become permanently clogged. “We are in the process of messing up space, and most people don’t realise it because we can’t see it the way we can see fish kills, algal blooms or acid rain,” Michael Krepon, an expert on nuclear and space issues, said in 2015. Maybe we’ll understand only when it’s too late, “when we can’t get our satellite television and our telecommunications ... when we get knocked back to the 1950s”. The current clashes over space are rooted in the nitty-gritty of international space law. There are five multilateral UN treaties governing space, most importantly the 1967 Outer Space Treaty (OST), which has been ratified by 109 states, including all major spacefaring nations. It defines outer space as a global commons, the province of all humanity, free to be used and explored “for the benefit and in the interests of all countries”, “on a basis of equality” and only for “peaceful purposes”. Article II of the OST has become the major sticking point in the new space race. It forbids “national appropriation by claim of sovereignty, by means of use or occupation, or by any other means”. No nation can make a territorial claim on the Moon or on any other celestial bodies, such as asteroids. While the OST contains no explicit ban of appropriation by private enterprise, Steven Freeland, a professor specialising in space law at Western Sydney University and Australia’s representative to the UN Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space (COPUOS), says discussions at the time of the OST negotiations clearly show the states parties, including the US, were “of the opinion that Article II prohibited both public and private appropriation”. Yet this perceived legal uncertainty is the loophole that commercial companies are now exploiting. They’ve actively lobbied for an interpretation of OST Article II in the domestic space law of certain countries, to allow for private ownership of resources extracted from the Moon or other celestial bodies. They argue that, because the OST declares all humans are free to “use” space, companies can exercise this right by mining anywhere they like. They won’t claim ownership of the land itself, but will claim ownership of the resources they mine there. They’ve already had a major win in this regard. The space industry lobby in the US put pressure on members of Congress to reinterpret the US’s obligations under international space law, to become more ‘business friendly’. The outcome was the 2015 Commercial Space Launch Competitiveness Act, signed into law by President Obama. Since then, companies owned by US citizens have been given the right to claim ownership of – and sell – any resources they mine off-Earth. Further emboldened by the Trump administration, the “commercial space industry is becoming far more aggressive in how it lobbies for its own interests” in the US, Freeland says. There have been Acts proposed in recent years to enable a corporate space culture of “permissionless innovation”, with little regulatory oversight. In a 2017 speech, President Trump’s space law adviser Scott Pace said, “It bears repeating: outer space is not a ‘global commons’, not the ‘common heritage of mankind’, not ‘ res communis’ area of territory that is not subject to legal title of any state, nor is it a public good.” Even if you accept the US government’s interpretation of Article II – that space resources, but not the territory on which they’re located, can be owned – what happens if someone mines an asteroid out of existence, which is an act of outright appropriation? Should the public trust that companies mining in space will do the right thing? We’re still uncovering the full extent of terrestrial mining companies’ cover-ups. For instance, inhouse scientists at Exxon – now Exxon-Mobil, one of the biggest oil and gas companies in the world – knew long ago that burning fossil fuels was responsible for global warming, but they actively buried those findings and discredited climate change science for decades. We live in a world where ‘meta-national’ companies can accrue and exercise more wealth and power than traditional nation-states. Silicon Valley is believed to be becoming more powerful than not only Wall Street but also the US government. Branson and other space billionaires like to reassure the masses they’re “democratising” space: just as plane travel started out for the wealthy and gradually became cheaper, so too will space travel. Yet this conveniently overlooks the fact that railroads, airlines and now space industries have all been heavily subsidised by taxpayers. “When we take a step back and notice that private corporations are often even less accountable than governments, then it seems mistaken to say these decisions have been democratised,” Ryan Jenkins, an emerging sciences ethicist at California Polytechnic State University, says. “They’ve merely been privatised.” Lenient supervision. In 2017, Luxembourg – already a corporate tax haven, complicit in international investor tax avoidance and evasion – followed the US’s lead and passed a space-resources law that allows companies to claim resources they extract from space as private property. Guardian journalist Atossa Araxia Abrahamian recounted a chilling comment from an American space executive: “We just want to work with a government who won’t get in the way.” Companies anywhere in the world can stake resource claims in space under this new law; their only requirement is an office in Luxembourg. This sets a murky precedent of ‘regulatory forum-shopping’, where companies choose to incorporate in states where they’ll be most leniently supervised. In 2018, a Silicon Valley start-up called Swarm Technologies illegally launched four miniature satellites known as CubeSats into space from India. They’d been refused launch permission in the US due to safety concerns over whether the satellites could be tracked once in orbit. Fined US$900,000 by the US Federal Communications Commission, the company was subsequently given permission to start communicating with its satellites, and launched more CubeSats as part of a payload on a SpaceX rocket that November. In January 2019, the company raised $25 million in venture capital. Space start-ups that are prepared – unlike Swarm Technologies – to play by the rules are nonetheless still proposing to launch their own swarms of hundreds or thousands of satellites into very low orbits around Earth. SpaceX has already launched over 1000 internet-beaming Starlink satellites, aiming to have a constellation of at least 30,000 in orbit eventually. The UK’s Royal Astronomical Society said these satellites will “compromise astronomical research” due to light pollution, and questioned why there’d been no proper consultation with the scientific community before launch.
Advantage 1: Space Debris Increasing space debris levels inevitably set off a chain of collisions. Chelsea Muñoz-Patchen, 19 - (J.D. Candidate at The University of Chicago Law School., "Regulating the Space Commons: Treating Space Debris as Abandoned Property in Violation of the Outer Space Treaty," University of Chicago, 2019, 12-6-2021, https://cjil.uchicago.edu/publication/regulating-space-commons-treating-space-debris-abandoned-property-violation-outer-space)//AW Debris poses a threat to functioning space objects and astronauts in space, and may cause damage to the earth’s surface upon re-entry.29 Much of the small debris cannot be tracked due to its size and the velocity at which it travels, making it impossible to anticipate and maneuver to avoid collisions.30 To remain in orbit, debris must travel at speeds of up to 17,500 miles per hour.31 At this speed even very small pieces of debris can cause serious damage, threatening a spacecraft and causing expensive damage.32 There are millions of these very small pieces, and thousands of larger ones.33 The small-to-medium pieces of debris “continuously shed fragments like lens caps, booster upper stages, nuts, bolts, paint chips, motor sprays of aluminum particles, glass splinters, waste water, and bits of foil,” and may stay in orbit for decades or even centuries, posing an ongoing risk.34 Debris ten centimeters or larger in diameter creates the likelihood of complete destruction for any functioning satellite with which it collides.35 Large nonfunctional objects remaining in orbit are a collision threat, capable of creating huge amounts of space debris and taking up otherwise useful orbit space.36 This issue is of growing importance as more nations and companies gain the ability to launch satellites and other objects into space.37 From February 2009 through the end of 2010, more than thirty-two collision-avoidance maneuvers were reportedly used to avoid debris by various space agencies and satellite companies, and as of March 2012, the crew of the International Space Station (ISS) had to take shelter three times due to close calls with passing debris.38 These maneuvers require costly fuel usage and place a strain on astronauts.39 Furthermore, the launches of some spacecraft have “been delayed because of the presence of space debris in the planned flight paths.”40 In 2011, Euroconsult, a satellite consultant, projected that there would be “a 51 increase in satellites launched in the next decade over the number launched in the past decade.”41 In addition to satellites, the rise of commercial space tourism will also increase the number of objects launched into space and thus the amount of debris.42 The more objects are sent into space, and the more collisions create cascades of debris, the greater the risk of damage to vital satellites and other devices relied on for “weather forecasting, telecommunications, commerce, and national security.”43 The Space Debris Mitigation Guidelines44 were created by UNCOPUOS with input from the IADC and adopted in 2007.45 The guidelines were developed to address the problem of space debris and were intended to “increase mutual understanding on acceptable activities in space.”46 These guidelines are nonbinding but suggest best practices to implement at the national level when planning for a launch. Many nations have adopted the guidelines to some degree, and some have gone beyond what the guidelines suggest.47 While the guidelines do not address existing debris, they do much to prevent the creation of new debris. The Kessler Syndrome is the biggest concern with space debris. The Kessler Syndrome is a cascade created when debris hits a space object, creating new debris and setting off a chain reaction of collisions that eventually closes off entire orbits.48 The concern is that this cascade will occur when a tipping point is reached at which the natural removal rate cannot keep up with the amount of new debris added.49 At this point a collision could set off a cascade destroying all space objects within the orbit.50 In 2011, The National Research Council predicted that the Kessler Syndrome could happen within ten to twenty years.51 Donald J. Kessler, the astrophysicist and NASA scientist who theorized the Kessler Syndrome in 1978, believes this cascade may be a century away, meaning that there is still time to develop a solution.52 Collisions make orbit unusable, causing nuclear war, mass starvation, and economic destruction. Johnson 13 Les Johnson 13, Deputy Manager for NASA's Advanced Concepts Office at the Marshall Space Flight Center, Co-Investigator for the JAXA T-Rex Space Tether Experiment and PI of NASA's ProSEDS Experiment, Master's Degree in Physics from Vanderbilt University, Popular Science Writer, and NASA Technologist, Frequent Contributor to the Journal of the British Interplanetary Sodety and Member of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, National Space Society, the World Future Society, and MENSA, Sky Alert!: When Satellites Fail, p. 9-12 Whatever the initial cause, the result may be the same. A satellite destroyed in orbit will break apart into thousands of pieces, each traveling at over 8 km/sec. This virtual shotgun blast, with pellets traveling 20 times faster than a bullet, will quickly spread out, with each pellet now following its own orbit around the Earth. With over 300,000 other pieces of junk already there, the tipping point is crossed and a runaway series of collisions begins. A few orbits later, two of the new debris pieces strike other satellites, causing them to explode into thousands more pieces of debris. The rate of collisions increases, now with more spacecraft being destroyed. Called the "Kessler Effect", after the NASA scientist who first warned of its dangers, these debris objects, now numbering in the millions, cascade around the Earth, destroying every satellite in low Earth orbit. Without an atmosphere to slow them down, thus allowing debris pieces to bum up, most debris (perhaps numbering in the millions) will remain in space for hundreds or thousands of years. Any new satellite will be threatened by destruction as soon as it enters space, effectively rendering many Earth orbits unusable. But what about us on the ground? How will this affect us? Imagine a world that suddenly loses all of its space technology. If you are like most people, then you would probably have a few fleeting thoughts about the Apollo-era missions to the Moon, perhaps a vision of the Space Shuttle launching astronauts into space for a visit to the International Space Station (ISS), or you might fondly recall the "wow" images taken by the orbiting Hubble Space Telescope. In short, you would know that things important to science would be lost, but you would likely not assume that their loss would have any impact on your daily life. Now imagine a world that suddenly loses network and cable television, accurate weather forecasts, Global Positioning System (GPS) navigation, some cellular phone networks, on-time delivery of food and medical supplies via truck and train to stores and hospitals in virtually every community in America, as well as science useful in monitoring such things as climate change and agricultural sustainability. Add to this the crippling of the US military who now depend upon spy satellites, space-based communications systems, and GPS to know where their troops and supplies are located at all times and anywhere in the world. The result is a nightmarish world, one step away from nuclear war, economic disaster, and potential mass starvation. This is the world in which we are now perilously close to living. Space satellites now touch our lives in many ways. And, unfortunately, these satellites are extremely vulnerable to risks arising from a half-century of carelessness regarding protecting the space environment around the Earth as well as from potential adversaries such as China, North Korea, and Iran. No government policy has put us at risk. It has not been the result of a conspiracy. No, we are dependent upon them simply because they offer capabilities that are simply unavailable any other way. Individuals, corporations, and governments found ways to use the unique environment of space to provide services, make money, and better defend the country. In fact, only a few space visionaries and futurists could have foreseen where the advent of rocketry and space technology would take us a mere 50 years since those first satellites orbited the Earth. It was the slow progression of capability followed by dependence that puts us at risk. The exploration and use of space began in 1957 with the launch of Sputnik 1 by the Soviet Union. The United States soon followed with Explorer 1. Since then, the nations of the world have launched over 8,000 spacecraft. Of these, several hundred are still providing information and services to the global economy and the world's governments. Over time, nations, corporations, and individuals have grown accustomed to the services these spacecraft provide and many are dependent upon them. Commercial aviation, shipping, emergency services, vehicle fleet tracking, financial transactions, and agriculture are areas of the economy that are increasingly reliant on space. Telestar 1, launched into space in the year of my birth, 1962, relayed the world's first live transatlantic news feed and showed that space satellites can be used to relay television signals, telephone calls, and data. The modern telecommunications age was born. We've come a long way since Telstar; most television networks now distribute most, if not ali, of their programming via satellite. Cable television signals are received by local providers from satellite relays before being sent to our homes and businesses using cables. With 65 of US households relying on cable television and a growing percentage using satellite dishes to receive signals from direct-to-home satellite television providers, a large number of people would be cut off from vital information in an emergency should these satellites be destroyed. And communications satellites relay more than television signals. They serve as hosts to corporate video conferences and convey business, banking, and other commercial information to and from all areas of the planet. The first successful weather satellite was TIROS. Launched in 1960, TIROS operated for only 78 days but it served as the precursor for today's much more long-lived weather satellites, which provide continuous monitoring of weather conditions around the world. Without them, providing accurate weather forecasts for virtually any place on the globe more than a day in advance would be nearly impossible. Figure !.1 shows a satellite image of Hurricane Ivan approaching the Alabama Gulf coast in 2004. Without this type of information, evacuation warnings would have to be given more generally, resulting in needless evacuations and lost economic activity (from areas that avoid landfall) and potentially increasing loss of life in areas that may be unexpectedly hit. The formerly top-secret Corona spy satellites began operation in 1959 and provided critical information about the Soviet Union's military and industrial capabilities to a nervous West in a time of unprecedented paranoia and nuclear risk. With these satellites, US military planners were able to understand and assess the real military threat posed by the Soviet Union. They used information provided by spy satellites to help avert potential military confrontations on numerous occasions. Conversely, the Soviet Union's spy satellites were able to observe the United States and its allies, with similar results. It is nearly impossible to move an army and hide it from multiple eyes in the sky. Satellite information is critical to all aspects of US intelligence and military planning. Spy satellites are used to monitor compliance with international arms treaties and to assess the military activities of countries such as China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea. Figure 1.2 shows the capability of modem unclassified space-based imaging. The capability of the classified systems is presumed to be significantly better, providing much more detail. Losing these satellites would place global militaries on high alert and have them operating, literally, in the blind. Our military would suddenly become vulnerable in other areas as well. GPS, a network of 24-32 satellites in medium-Earth orbit, was developed to provide precise position information to the military, and it is now in common use by individuals and industry. The network, which became fully operational in 1993, allows our armed forces to know their exact locations anywhere in the world. It is used to guide bombs to their targets with unprecedented accuracy, requiring that only one bomb be used to destroy a target that would have previously required perhaps hundreds of bombs to destroy in the pre-GPS world (which, incidentally, has resulted in us reducing our stockpile of non-GPS-guided munitions dramatically). It allows soldiers to navigate in the dark or in adverse weather or sandstorms. Without GPS, our military advantage over potential adversaries would be dramatically reduced or eliminated.
Advantage 2: Corporate Colonialism Tech-billionaires advance a vision of private space colonization as a source of infinite resources to cure society’s ills. This rationalizes unrestrained consumption and replicates the logic of imperialism. Mccormick 21 Ted McCormick writes about the history of science, empire, and economic thought. He has a Ph.D. in history from Columbia University and teaches at Concordia University in Montreal. “The billionaire space race reflects a colonial mindset that fails to imagine a different world”. 8-15-2021. The Conversation. https://theconversation.com/the-billionaire-space-race-reflects-a-colonial-mindset-that-fails-to-imagine-a-different-world-165235. Accessed 12-15-2021; marlborough JH It was a time of political uncertainty, cultural conflict and social change. Private ventures exploited technological advances and natural resources, generating unprecedented fortunes while wreaking havoc on local communities and environments. The working poor crowded cities, spurring property-holders to develop increased surveillance and incarceration regimes. Rural areas lay desolate, buildings vacant, churches empty — the stuff of moralistic elegies. ¶Epidemics raged, forcing quarantines in the ports and lockdowns in the streets. Mortality data was the stuff of weekly news and commentary. ¶Depending on the perspective, mobility — chosen or compelled — was either the cause or the consequence of general disorder. Uncontrolled mobility was associated with political instability, moral degeneracy and social breakdown. However, one form of planned mobility promised to solve these problems: colonization. ¶Europe and its former empires have changed a lot since the 17th century. But the persistence of colonialism as a supposed panacea suggests we are not as far from the early modern period as we think. ¶Colonial promise of limitless growth ¶Seventeenth-century colonial schemes involved plantations around the Atlantic, and motivations that now sound archaic. Advocates of expansion such as the English writer Richard Hakluyt, whose Discourse of Western Planting (1584) outlined the benefits of empire for Queen Elizabeth: the colonization of the New World would prevent Spanish Catholic hegemony and provide a chance to claim Indigenous souls for Protestantism. ¶But a key promise was the economic and social renewal of the mother country through new commodities, trades and territory. Above all, planned mobility would cure the ills of apparent overpopulation. Sending the poor overseas to cut timber, mine gold or farm cane would, according to Hakluyt, turn the “multitudes of loiterers and idle vagabonds” that “swarm(ed)” England’s streets and “pestered and stuffed” its prisons into industrious workers, providing raw materials and a reason to multiply. Colonization would fuel limitless growth. ¶As English plantations took shape in Ulster, Virginia, New England and the Caribbean, “projectors” — individuals (nearly always men) who promised to use new kinds of knowledge to radically and profitably transform society — tied mobility to new sciences and technologies. They were inspired as much by English philosopher Francis Bacon’s vision of a tech-centred state in The New Atlantis as by his advocacy of observation and experiment. ¶Discovery and invention ¶The English agriculturalist Gabriel Plattes cautioned in 1639 that “the finding of new worlds is not like to be a perpetual trade.” But many more saw a supposedly vacant America as an invitation to transplant people, plants and machinery. ¶The inventor Cressy Dymock (from Lincolnshire, where fen-drainage schemes were turning wetlands dry) sought support for a “perpetual motion engine” that would plough fields in England, clear forest in Virginia and drive sugar mills in Barbados. Dymock identified private profit and the public good by speeding plantation and replacing costly draught animals with cheaper enslaved labour. Projects across the empire would employ the idle, create “elbow-room,” heal “unnatural divisions” and make England “the garden of the world.” ¶Extraterrestrial exploration ¶Today, the moon and Mars are in projectors’ sights. And the promises billionaires Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos make for colonization are similar in ambition to those of four centuries ago. ¶As Bezos told an audience at the International Space Development Conference in 2018: “We will have to leave this planet, and we’re going to leave it, and it’s going to make this planet better.” Bezos traces his thinking to Princeton physicist Gerald O’Neill, whose 1974 article “The Colonization of Space” (and 1977 book, The High Frontier) presented orbiting settlements as solutions to nearly every major problem facing the Earth. Bezos echoes O’Neill’s proposal to move heavy industry — and industrial labour — off the planet, rezoning Earth as a mostly residential, green space. A garden, as it were. ¶Musk’s plans for Mars are at once more cynical and more grandiose, in timeline and technical requirements if not in ultimate extent. They center on the dubious possibility of “terraforming” Mars using resources and technologies that don’t yet exist. ¶Musk planned to send the first humans to Mars in 2024, and by 2030, he envisioned breaking ground on a city, launching as many as 100,000 voyages from Earth to Mars within a century. ¶As of 2020, the timeline had been pushed back slightly, in part because terraforming may require bombarding Mars with 10,000 nuclear missiles to start. But the vision – a Mars of thriving crops, pizza joints and “entrepreneurial opportunities,” preserving life and paying dividends while Earth becomes increasingly uninhabitable — remains. Like the colonial company-states of the 17th and 18th centuries, Musk’s SpaceX leans heavily on government backing but will make its own laws on its newly settled planet. ¶A failure of the imagination ¶The techno-utopian visions of Musk and Bezos betray some of the same assumptions as their early modern forebears. They offer colonialism as a panacea for complex social, political and economic ills, rather than attempting to work towards a better world within the constraints of our environment. ¶And rather than facing the palpably devastating consequences of an ideology of limitless growth on our planet, they seek to export it, unaltered, into space. They imagine themselves capable of creating liveable environments where none exist. ¶But for all their futuristic imagery, they have failed to imagine a different world. And they have ignored the history of colonialism on this one. Empire never recreated Eden, but it did fuel centuries of growth based on expropriation, enslavement and environmental transformation in defiance of all limits. We are struggling with these consequences today. If only wealthy elites can tap the vast resources of outer space, we lock in a permanent and unconscionable inequality. Private space colonization amounts to authoritarian corporate control of future settlements. Spencer ‘17 Spencer, Keith A. senior editor at Salon“Against Mars-a-Lago: Why SpaceX's Mars Colonization Plan Should Terrify You.” Salon, Salon.com, Oct. 8 2017, https://www.salon.com/2017/10/08/against-mars-a-lago-why-spacexs-mars-colonization-plan-should-terrify-you/. When CEO Elon Musk announced last month that his aerospace company SpaceX would be sending cargo missions to Mars by 2022 — the first step in his tourism-driven colonization plan — a small cheer went up among space and science enthusiasts. Writing in the New York Post, Stephen Carter called Musk’s vision “inspiring,” a salve for politically contentious times. “Our species has turned its vision inward; our image of human possibility has grown cramped and pessimistic,” Carter wrote: "We dream less of reaching the stars than of winning the next election; less of maturing as a species than of shunning those who are different; less of the blessings of an advanced technological tomorrow than of an apocalyptic future marked by a desperate struggle to survive. Maybe a focus on the possibility of reaching our nearest planetary neighbor will help change all that." The Post editorial reflected a growing media consensus that humankind’s ultimate destiny is the colonization of the solar system — yet on a private basis. American government leaders generally agree with this vision. Obama egged on the privatization of NASA by legislating a policy shift to private commercial spaceflight, awarding government contracts to private companies like SpaceX to shuttle supplies to the International Space Station. “Governments can develop new technology and do some of the exciting early exploration but in the long run it's the private sector that finds ways to make profit, finds ways to expand humanity,” said Dr. S. Pete Worden, the director of the NASA Ames Research lab, in 2012. And in a Wall Street Journal op-ed this week, Vice President Mike Pence wrote of his ambitions to bring American-style capitalism to the stars: “In the years to come, American industry must be the first to maintain a constant commercial human presence in low-Earth orbit, to expand the sphere of the economy beyond this blue marble,” Pence wrote. One wonders if these luminaries know their history. There has be no instance in which a private corporation became a colonizing power that did not end badly for everyone besides the shareholders. The East India Company is perhaps the finest portent of Musk’s Martian ambitions. In 1765, the East India Company forced the Mughal emperor to sign a legal agreement that would essentially permit their company to become the de facto rulers of Bengal. The East India Company then collected taxes and used its private army, which was over 200,000 strong by the early 19th century, to repress those who got in the way of its profit margins. “It was not the British government that seized India at the end of the 18th century, but a dangerously unregulated private company headquartered in one small office, five windows wide, in London, and managed in India by an unstable sociopath,” writes William Dalrymple in the Guardian. “It almost certainly remains the supreme act of corporate violence in world history.” The East India Company came to colonize much of the Indian subcontinent. In the modern era, an era in which the right of corporations to do what they want, unencumbered, has become a sacrosanct right in the eyes of many politicians, the lessons of the East India Company seem to have been all but forgotten. As Dalrymple writes: Democracy as we know it was considered an advance over feudalism because of the power that it gave the commoners to share in collective governance. To privately colonize a nation, much less a planet, means ceding governance and control back to corporations whose interest is not ours, and indeed, is always at odds with workers and residents — particularly in a resource-limited environment like a spaceship or the red planet. Even if, as Musk suggests, a private foundation is put in charge of running the show on Mars, their interests will inherently be at odds with the workers and employees involved. After all, a private foundation is not a democracy; and as major philanthropic organizations like the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation illustrate, often do the bidding of their rich donors, and take an important role in ripening industries and regions for exploitation by Western corporations. Yet Mars’ colonization is a bit different than Bengal, namely in that it is not merely underdeveloped; it is undeveloped. How do you start an entirely new economy on a virgin world with no industry? After all, Martian resource extraction and trade with Earth is not feasible; the cost of transporting material across the solar system is astronomical, and there are no obvious minerals on Mars that we don’t already have in abundance on Earth. The only basis for colonization of Mars that Musk can conceive of is one based on tourism: the rich pay an amount — Musk quotes the ticket price at $200,000 if he can get 1 million tourists to pay that — that entitles them to a round-trip ticket. And while they’re on Mars and traveling to it, they luxuriate: Musk has assured that the trip would be “fun.” This is what makes Musk’s Mars vision so different than, say, the Apollo missions or the International Space Station. This isn’t really exploration for humanity’s sake — there’s not that much science assumed here, as there was in the Moon missions. Musk wants to build the ultimate luxury package, exclusively for the richest among us. Musk isn’t trying to build something akin to Matt Damon’s spartan research base in "The Martian." He wants to build Mars-a-Lago. And an economy based on tourism, particularly high-end tourism, needs employees — even if a high degree of automation is assumed. And as I’ve written about before, that means a lot of labor at the lowest cost possible. Imagine signing away years of your life to be a housekeeper in the Mars-a-Lago hotel, with your communications, water, food, energy usage, even oxygen tightly managed by your employer, and no government to file a grievance to if your employer cuts your wages, harasses you, cuts off your oxygen. Where would Mars-a-Lago's employees turn if their rights were impinged upon? Oh wait, this planet is run privately? You have no rights. Musk's vision for Mars colonization is inherently authoritarian. The potential for the existence of the employees of the Martian tourism industry to slip into something resembling indentured servitude, even slavery, cannot be underestimated. We have government regulations for a reason on Earth — to protect us from the fresh horror Musk hopes to export to Mars. If he's considered these questions, he doesn't seem to care; for Musk, the devil's in the technological and financial details. The social and political are pretty uninteresting to him. This is unsurprising; accounts from those who have worked closely with him hint that he, like many CEOs, may be a sociopath. Even as a space enthusiast, I cannot get excited about the private colonization of Mars. You shouldn’t be either. This is not a giant leap for mankind; this is the next great leap in plutocracy. The mere notion that global wealth is so unevenly distributed that a small but sufficient sum of rich people could afford this trip is unsettling, indicative of the era of astonishing economic inequality in which we suffer. Thomas Frank, writing in Harpers, once wrote of a popular t-shirt he sighted while picnicking in a small West Virginia coal town: “Mine it union or keep it in the ground.” The idea, of course, is that the corporations interested in resource extraction do not care whatsoever about their workers’ health, safety, or well-being; the union had their interests at heart, and was able to negotiate for safety, job security, and so on. I’d like to see a similar t-shirt or bumper sticker emerge among scientists and space enthusiasts: “Explore Mars democratically, or keep it in the sky.” Neoliberalism destroys ethics, locks in poverty and exploitation, decimates the environment, and causes war. Werlhof 15 – Claudia, Professor of Political Science/Women's Studies, University Innsbruck (Austria), 2015 (“Neoliberal Globalization: Is There an Alternative to Plundering the Earth?” Global Research, May 25th, Available Online at http://www.globalresearch.ca/neoliberal-globalization-is-there-an-alternative-to-plundering-the-earth/24403) At the center of both old and new economic liberalism lies: Self-interest and individualism; segregation of ethical principles and economic affairs, in other words: a process of ‘de-bedding’ economy from society; economic rationality as a mere cost-benefit calculation and profit maximization; competition as the essential driving force for growth and progress; specialization and the replacement of a subsistence economy with profit-oriented foreign trade (‘comparative cost advantage’); and the proscription of public (state) interference with market forces.3 Where the new economic liberalism outdoes the old is in its global claim. Today’s economic liberalism functions as a model for each and everyone: all parts of the economy, all sectors of society, of life/nature itself. As a consequence, the once “de-bedded” economy now claims to “im-bed” everything, including political power. Furthermore, a new twisted “economic ethics” (and with it a certain idea of “human nature”) emerges that mocks everything from so-called do-gooders to altruism to selfless help to care for others to a notion of responsibility.4 This goes as far as claiming that the common good depends entirely on the uncontrolled egoism of the individual and, especially, on the prosperity of transnational corporations. The allegedly necessary “freedom” of the economy – which, paradoxically, only means the freedom of corporations – hence consists of a freedom from responsibility and commitment to society. The maximization of profit itself must occur within the shortest possible time; this means, preferably, through speculation and “shareholder value”. It must meet as few obstacles as possible. Today, global economic interests outweigh not only extra-economic concerns but also national economic considerations since corporations today see themselves beyond both community and nation.5 A “level playing field” is created that offers the global players the best possible conditions. This playing field knows of no legal, social, ecological, cultural or national “barriers”.6 As a result, economic competition plays out on a market that is free of all non-market, extra-economic or protectionist influences – unless they serve the interests of the big players (the corporations), of course. The corporations’ interests – their maximal growth and progress – take on complete priority. This is rationalized by alleging that their well-being means the well-being of small enterprises and workshops as well. The difference between the new and the old economic liberalism can first be articulated in quantitative terms: after capitalism went through a series of ruptures and challenges – caused by the “competing economic system”, the crisis of capitalism, post-war “Keynesianism” with its social and welfare state tendencies, internal mass consumer demand (so-called Fordism), and the objective of full employment in the North. The liberal economic goals of the past are now not only euphorically resurrected but they are also “globalized”. The main reason is indeed that the competition between alternative economic systems is gone. However, to conclude that this confirms the victory of capitalism and the “golden West” over “dark socialism” is only one possible interpretation. Another – opposing – interpretation is to see the “modern world system” (which contains both capitalism and socialism) as having hit a general crisis which causes total and merciless competition over global resources while leveling the way for investment opportunities, i.e. the valorization of capital.7 The ongoing globalization of neoliberalism demonstrates which interpretation is right. Not least, because the differences between the old and the new economic liberalism can not only be articulated in quantitative terms but in qualitative ones too. What we are witnessing are completely new phenomena: instead of a democratic “complete competition” between many small enterprises enjoying the freedom of the market, only the big corporations win. In turn, they create new market oligopolies and monopolies of previously unknown dimensions. The market hence only remains free for them, while it is rendered unfree for all others who are condemned to an existence of dependency (as enforced producers, workers and consumers) or excluded from the market altogether (if they have neither anything to sell or buy). About fifty percent of the world’s population fall into this group today, and the percentage is rising.8 Anti-trust laws have lost all power since the transnational corporations set the norms. It is the corporations – not “the market” as an anonymous mechanism or “invisible hand” – that determine today’s rules of trade, for example prices and legal regulations. This happens outside any political control. Speculation with an average twenty percent profit margin edges out honest producers who become “unprofitable”.9 Money becomes too precious for comparatively non-profitable, long-term projects, or projects that only – how audacious! – serve a good life. Money instead “travels upwards” and disappears. Financial capital determines more and more what the markets are and do.10 By delinking the dollar from the price of gold, money creation no longer bears a direct relationship to production”.11 Moreover, these days most of us are – exactly like all governments – in debt. It is financial capital that has all the money – we have none.12 Small, medium, even some bigger enterprises are pushed out of the market, forced to fold or swallowed by transnational corporations because their performances are below average in comparison to speculation – rather: spookulation – wins. The public sector, which has historically been defined as a sector of not-for-profit economy and administration, is “slimmed” and its “profitable” parts (“gems”) handed to corporations (privatized). As a consequence, social services that are necessary for our existence disappear. Small and medium private businesses – which, until recently, employed eighty percent of the workforce and provided normal working conditions – are affected by these developments as well. The alleged correlation between economic growth and secure employment is false. When economic growth is accompanied by the mergers of businesses, jobs are lost.13 If there are any new jobs, most are precarious, meaning that they are only available temporarily and badly paid. One job is usually not enough to make a living.14 This means that the working conditions in the North become akin to those in the South, and the working conditions of men akin to those of women – a trend diametrically opposed to what we have always been told. Corporations now leave for the South (or East) to use cheap – and particularly female – labor without union affiliation. This has already been happening since the 1970s in the “Export Processing Zones” (EPZs, “world market factories” or “maquiladoras”), where most of the world’s computer chips, sneakers, clothes and electronic goods are produced.15 The EPZs lie in areas where century-old colonial-capitalist and authoritarian-patriarchal conditions guarantee the availability of cheap labor.16 The recent shift of business opportunities from consumer goods to armaments is a particularly troubling development.17 It is not only commodity production that is “outsourced” and located in the EPZs, but service industries as well. This is a result of the so-called Third Industrial Revolution, meaning the development of new information and communication technologies. Many jobs have disappeared entirely due to computerization, also in administrative fields.18 The combination of the principles of “high tech” and “low wage”/”no wage” (always denied by “progress” enthusiasts) guarantees a “comparative cost advantage” in foreign trade. This will eventually lead to “Chinese wages” in the West. A potential loss of Western consumers is not seen as a threat. A corporate economy does not care whether consumers are European, Chinese or Indian. The means of production become concentrated in fewer and fewer hands, especially since finance capital – rendered precarious itself – controls asset values ever more aggressively. New forms of private property are created, not least through the “clearance” of public property and the transformation of formerly public and small-scale private services and industries to a corporate business sector. This concerns primarily fields that have long been (at least partly) excluded from the logic of profit – e.g. education, health, energy or water supply/disposal. New forms of so-called enclosures emerge from today’s total commercialization of formerly small-scale private or public industries and services, of the “commons”, and of natural resources like oceans, rain forests, regions of genetic diversity or geopolitical interest (e.g. potential pipeline routes), etc.19 As far as the new virtual spaces and communication networks go, we are witnessing frantic efforts to bring these under private control as well.20 All these new forms of private property are essentially created by (more or less) predatory forms of appropriation. In this sense, they are a continuation of the history of so-called original accumulation which has expanded globally, in accordance with to the motto: “Growth through expropriation!”21 Most people have less and less access to the means of production, and so the dependence on scarce and underpaid work increases. The destruction of the welfare state also destroys the notion that individuals can rely on the community to provide for them in times of need. Our existence relies exclusively on private, i.e. expensive, services that are often of much worse quality and much less reliable than public services. (It is a myth that the private always outdoes the public.) What we are experiencing is undersupply formerly only known by the colonial South. The old claim that the South will eventually develop into the North is proven wrong. It is the North that increasingly develops into the South. We are witnessing the latest form of “development”, namely, a world system of underdevelopment.22 Development and underdevelopment go hand in hand.23 This might even dawn on “development aid” workers soon. It is usually women who are called upon to counterbalance underdevelopment through increased work (“service provisions”) in the household. As a result, the workload and underpay of women takes on horrendous dimensions: they do unpaid work inside their homes and poorly paid “housewifized” work outside.24 Yet, commercialization does not stop in front of the home’s doors either. Even housework becomes commercially co-opted (“new maid question”), with hardly any financial benefits for the women who do the work.25 Not least because of this, women are increasingly coerced into prostitution, one of today’s biggest global industries.26 This illustrates two things: a) how little the “emancipation” of women actually leads to “equal terms” with men; and b) that “capitalist development” does not imply increased “freedom” in wage labor relations, as the Left has claimed for a long time.27 If the latter were the case, then neoliberalism would mean the voluntary end of capitalism once it reaches its furthest extension. This, however, does not appear likely. Today, hundreds of millions of quasi-slaves, more than ever before, exist in the “world system.”28 The authoritarian model of the “Export Processing Zones” is conquering the East and threatening the North. The redistribution of wealth runs ever more – and with ever accelerated speed – from the bottom to the top. The gap between the rich and the poor has never been wider. The middle classes disappear. This is the situation we are facing. It becomes obvious that neoliberalism marks not the end of colonialism but, to the contrary, the colonization of the North. This new “colonization of the world”29 points back to the beginnings of the “modern world system” in the “long 16th century”, when the conquering of the Americas, their exploitation and colonial transformation allowed for the rise and “development” of Europe.30 The so-called “children’s diseases” of modernity keep on haunting it, even in old age. They are, in fact, the main feature of modernity’s latest stage. They are expanding instead of disappearing. Where there is no South, there is no North; where there is no periphery, there is no center; where there is no colony, there is no – in any case no “Western” – civilization.31 Austria is part of the world system too. It is increasingly becoming a corporate colony (particularly of German corporations). This, however, does not keep it from being an active colonizer itself, especially in the East.32 Social, cultural, traditional and ecological considerations are abandoned and give way to a mentality of plundering. All global resources that we still have – natural resources, forests, water, genetic pools – have turned into objects of utilization. Rapid ecological destruction through depletion is the consequence.If one makes more profit by cutting down trees than by planting them, then there is no reason not to cut them.33 Neither the public nor the state interferes, despite global warming and the obvious fact that the clearing of the few remaining rain forests will irreversibly destroy the earth’s climate – not to mention the many other negative effects of such actions.34 Climate, animal, plants, human and general ecological rights are worth nothing compared to the interests of the corporations – no matter that the rain forest is not a renewable resource and that the entire earth’s ecosystem depends on it. If greed, and the rationalism with which it is economically enforced, really was an inherent anthropological trait, we would have never even reached this day. The commander of the Space Shuttle that circled the earth in 2005 remarked that “the center of Africa was burning”. She meant the Congo, in which the last great rain forest of the continent is located. Without it there will be no more rain clouds above the sources of the Nile. However, it needs to disappear in order for corporations to gain free access to the Congo’s natural resources that are the reason for the wars that plague the region today. After all, one needs diamonds and coltan for mobile phones. Today, everything on earth is turned into commodities, i.e. everything becomes an object of “trade” and commercialization (which truly means liquidation, the transformation of all into liquid money). In its neoliberal stage it is not enough for capitalism to globally pursue less cost-intensive and preferably “wageless” commodity production. The objective is to transform everyone and everything into commodities, including life itself.35 We are racing blindly towards the violent and absolute conclusion of this “mode of production”, namely total capitalization/liquidation by “monetarization”.36 We are not only witnessing perpetual praise of the market – we are witnessing what can be described as “market fundamentalism”. People believe in the market as if it was a god. There seems to be a sense that nothing could ever happen without it. Total global maximized accumulation of money/capital as abstract wealth becomes the sole purpose of economic activity. A “free” world market for everything has to be established – a world market that functions according to the interests of the corporations and capitalist money. The installment of such a market proceeds with dazzling speed. It creates new profit possibilities where they have not existed before, e.g. in Iraq, Eastern Europe or China. One thing remains generally overlooked: the abstract wealth created for accumulation implies the destruction of nature as concrete wealth. The result is a “hole in the ground” and next to it a garbage dump with used commodities, outdated machinery and money without value.37 However, once all concrete wealth (which today consists mainly of the last natural resources) will be gone, abstract wealth will disappear as well. It will, in Marx’s words, “evaporate”. The fact that abstract wealth is not real wealth will become obvious, and so will the answer to the question of which wealth modern economic activity has really created. In the end it is nothing but monetary wealth (and even this mainly exists virtually or on accounts) that constitutes a monoculture controlled by a tiny minority. Diversity is suffocated and millions of people are left wondering how to survive. And really: how do you survive with neither resources nor means of production nor money? The nihilism of our economic system is evident. The whole world will be transformed into money – and then it will disappear. After all, money cannot be eaten. What no one seems to consider is the fact that it is impossible to re-transform commodities, money, capital and machinery into nature or concrete wealth. It seems that underlying all “economic development” is the assumption that “resources”, the “sources of wealth”,38 are renewable and everlasting – just like the “growth” they create.39 The notion that capitalism and democracy are one is proven a myth by neoliberalism and its “monetary totalitarianism”.40 The primacy of politics over economy has been lost. Politicians of all parties have abandoned it. It is the corporations that dictate politics. Where corporate interests are concerned, there is no place for democratic convention or community control. Public space disappears. The res publica turns into a res privata, or – as we could say today – a res privata transnationale (in its original Latin meaning, privare means “to deprive”). Only those in power still have rights. They give themselves the licenses they need, from the “license to plunder” to the “license to kill”.41 Those who get in their way or challenge their “rights” are vilified, criminalized and to an increasing degree defined as “terrorists” or, in the case of defiant governments, as “rogue states” – a label that usually implies threatened or actual military attack, as we can see in the cases of Yugoslavia, Afghanistan and Iraq, and maybe Syria and Iran in the near future. U.S. President Bush had even spoken of the possibility of “preemptive” nuclear strikes should the U.S. feel endangered by weapons of mass destruction.42 The European Union did not object.43 Neoliberalism and war are two sides of the same coin.44 Free trade, piracy and war are still “an inseparable three” – today maybe more so than ever. War is not only “good for the economy” but is indeed its driving force and can be understood as the “continuation of economy with other means”.45 War and economy have become almost indistinguishable.46 Wars about resources – especially oil and water – have already begun.47 The Gulf Wars are the most obvious examples. Militarism once again appears as the “executor of capital accumulation” – potentially everywhere and enduringly.48 Human rights and rights of sovereignty have been transferred from people, communities and governments to corporations.49 The notion of the people as a sovereign body has practically been abolished. We have witnessed a coup of sorts. The political systems of the West and the nation state as guarantees for and expression of the international division of labor in the modern world system are increasingly dissolving.50 Nation states are developing into “periphery states” according to the inferior role they play in the proto-despotic “New World Order”.51 Democracy appears outdated. After all, it “hinders business”.52 The “New World Order” implies a new division of labor that does no longer distinguish between North and South, East and West – today, everywhere is South. An according International Law is established which effectively functions from top to bottom (“top-down”) and eliminates all local and regional communal rights. And not only that: many such rights are rendered invalid both retroactively and for the future.53 The logic of neoliberalism as a sort of totalitarian neo-mercantilism is that all resources, all markets, all money, all profits, all means of production, all “investment opportunities”, all rights and all power belong to the corporations only. To paraphrase Richard Sennett: “Everything to the Corporations!”54 One might add: “Now!” The corporations are free to do whatever they please with what they get. Nobody is allowed to interfere. Ironically, we are expected to rely on them to find a way out of the crisis we are in. This puts the entire globe at risk since responsibility is something the corporations do not have or know. The times of social contracts are gone.55 In fact, pointing out the crisis alone has become a crime and all critique will soon be defined as “terror” and persecuted as such.56 IMF Economic Medicine Since the 1980s, it is mainly the Structural Adjustment Programs (SAPs) of the World Bank and the IMF that act as the enforcers of neoliberalism. These programs are levied against the countries of the South which can be extorted due to their debts. Meanwhile, numerous military interventions and wars help to take possession of the assets that still remain, secure resources, install neoliberalism as the global economic politics, crush resistance movements (which are cynically labeled as “IMF uprisings”), and facilitate the lucrative business of reconstruction.57 In the 1980s, Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher introduced neoliberalism in Anglo-America. In 1989, the so-called “Washington Consensus” was formulated. It claimed to lead to global freedom, prosperity and economic growth through “deregulation, liberalization and privatization”. This has become the credo and promise of all neoliberals. Today we know that the promise has come true for the corporations only – not for anybody else. In the Middle East, the Western support for Saddam Hussein in the war between Iraq and Iran in the 1980s, and the Gulf War of the early 1990s, announced the permanent U.S. presence in the world’s most contested oil region. In continental Europe, neoliberalism began with the crisis in Yugoslavia caused by the Structural Adjustment Programs (SAPs) of the World Bank and the IMF. The country was heavily exploited, fell apart and finally beset by a civil war over its last remaining resources.58 Since the NATO war in 1999, the Balkans are fragmented, occupied and geopolitically under neoliberal control.59 The region is of main strategic interest for future oil and gas transport from the Caucasus to the West (for example the “Nabucco” gas pipeline that is supposed to start operating from the Caspian Sea through Turkey and the Balkans by 2011.60 The reconstruction of the Balkans is exclusively in the hands of Western corporations. All governments, whether left, right, liberal or green, accept this. There is no analysis of the connection between the politics of neoliberalism, its history, its background and its effects on Europe and other parts of the world. Likewise, there is no analysis of its connection to the new militarism. Plan/Solvency Since, in a just world, outer space would be treated as a global commons, and a global commons model precludes appropriation by private entries, then the appropriation of outer space by private entries is unjust. Thus, the plan: States ought to adopt a binding international agreement that bans the appropriation of outer space by private entities by establishing outer space as a global commons subject to regulatory delimiting and global liability. The aff: - solves debris and space colonialism by ensuring the sustainable and equitable use of outer space resources. - prevents circumvention by aligning the interests of state parties - is normal means since it models numerous successful agreements governing all other global commons. Vollmer 20 Sarah Louise Vollmer (St. Mary's University School of Law), “The Right Stuff in Geospace: Using Mutual Coercion to Avoid an Inevitable Prison for Humanity,” 51 ST. MARY'S L.J. 777 (2020). https://commons.stmarytx.edu/thestmaryslawjournal/vol51/iss3/6?utm_source=commons.stmarytx.edu2Fthestmaryslawjournal2Fvol512Fiss32F6andutm_medium=PDFandutm_campaign=PDFCoverPages CT IV. NECESSITY FOR REGULATION TO PRESERVE THE HERITAGE OF MANKIND—A PROPOSAL ¶ Conceptually, all persons hold an implied property right in the space commons.111 As such, spacefaring entities and developing nations possess an equitable right to access and use orbital resources.112 But the sui generis nature of geospace presents a paradox requiring a unique regime for the sustainable usage of its resources.113 The international community cannot realize the advantages of the common heritage principle under a property regime because any conceivable assignment would violate the non-appropriation clause or unjustly enrich a particular interest.114 This means that only regulatory solutions can protect the interests inherent in a commons protected for the common heritage of mankind. ¶ A. The Motivations for International Compliance¶ The crux of a workable treaty lies in the consent of the parties to the agreement.115 Thereafter, signatories internalize the agreement’s object and purpose into their domestic law, or in the case of international organizations, into an institutional framework.116 To implement a binding international instrument, we must therefore ask the question: Why do nations follow international law,117 and how can we use those behavioral realities to construct a workable framework to ensure geospace survives?118¶ At the dawn of civilized society, depending on a particular jurisdiction’s values, the laws of nature and morality compelled obedience and social order.119 When nation-states concluded international agreements, it represented the coalescence of the various values-based systems, the overlap of which formed a universal understanding of the law of mankind.120 “The fundamental conceptual boundary between municipal and international law . . . views international law largely in terms of contractual relations, therefore assigning to the ‘sovereign’ a central place in the construction of the two orders.”121 In other words, transnational cooperation operated through balancing the competing autonomy and values of the parties involved. Despite centuries of debate, values systems remain the principal motivating factor of compliance with international law.122 Effective regulatory regimes must, therefore, strike at the heart of what nation-states value the most, which is often related to national security.123¶ When entering an international agreement, whether or not a nation-state will ratify it informs us of the value a nation-state places on the instrument’s subject matter. That value equates to the utility a nation-state places on certain allowances or prohibitions.124 Incorporating these motivating factors with Hardin’s regulatory solution, any freedoms infringed upon must manifest a higher utility than currently realized. If COPUOS proposes a protocol for sustainable uses of space, the provisions must either have a negligible effect on the global community’s perceived utility of space access or substantially increase that utility. Assuming the propositioned regulatory scheme aligns with the values system of each nation-state, the probability of internalizing such regulations through domestic codification is high. ¶ To ascertain the interests of nation-states, we must look to the factors motivating current space utilization. Routine access to space undeniably aids our technological advancement. The ISS’s antigravity environment provides unique conditions to study medicine.125 Satellites provide real-time tracking of environmental conditions and transmit crucial information for disaster recovery planning.126 Space telescopes track objects with the potential to cause the extinction of life of Earth.127 Free from the veil of our hazy atmosphere, satellites can produce better imagery and ascertain the composition of potential resource deposits on celestial bodies.128 And simply receiving satellite imagery of our planet forces us to confront the realities of our fragile existence. These benefits signify the tangible realization of the OST’s object and purpose, which flow to all members of the global community.129 If we do not begin active decontamination and mitigation of space debris, the utility of geospace will cease to exist. Imagining our existence without these advances is a potent method to stress the criticality of unabated pollution in geospace.¶ B. Existing Proposals¶ Legal scholars have formulated several frameworks to mitigate space debris. Some recommend implementing a market-share liability regime, which assigns liability according to the volume of each nation-states’ exploits.130 Opponents of this construction rightfully highlight the inequities inherent in such a scheme. Considering the United States, Russia, and China make up the bulk of spacefaring activity, market-share liability would unduly burden these nations, and coerce a categorical exit from the space industry or a repeat of the Moon Treaty.131 Another scholar advocates for an environmental law approach, asserting that the space commons would benefit from a protocol closely mirroring the Madrid Protocol.132 While prospective applications of such a model could prevent additional accumulations, it would not feasibly abate the current collection of debris.133 The strengths of Mary Button’s mitigation proposal lie in the binding nature of the Madrid Protocol and compulsory environmental impact requirements. And though it advocates for a more collaborative conference mechanism, rather than the strict unanimous consent required of UNCOPUOS’s resolutions, it still shies away from compulsory requirements for active debris removal. Along with the Antarctic Treaty (ATS), the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) also served as a model for the Corpus Juris Spatialis. But oddly, the law of salvage was omitted from the treaties. Unlike abandoned objects at sea, once a nation-state places an object into space, ownership exists in perpetuity. Sandra Drago addressed removing the OST’s property-in-perpetuity mechanism134 so as to permit the active salvage of inoperable satellites.135 Drago’s proposal is vital to any mitigation framework. But while this removes a substantial bar currently restricting debris removal, it does not address free-riding, and spacefaring enterprises are free to choose more lucrative space activities other than salvage operations.136 ¶ C. A Coercive Proposal¶ Mutual coercion lies at the core of Hardin’s solution.137 To summarize, law-abiding citizens make concessions to regulatory social constructs in the interest of conserving some utility otherwise lost.138 The coercive element lies in relinquishing one’s ability to exploit some freedom, the detriment of which cannot be realized at that moment in time.139 Conceding to a regime that tempers free exploitation of the commons allows everyone to benefit from the positive externalities of individual usage. Equated to space, nation-states currently concede to non-appropriation in the interest of maintaining equitable access. But because of the sui generis nature of geospace, even non-participants receive a benefit from the use of the commons. In effect, beneficiaries are free-riding from the capital investment of spacefaring nations and entities. This informs the structure of the ensuing two-part framework: geospace delimitation and global liability ¶ 1. Geospace Delimitation ¶ The history of regulatory delimitation illustrates its effectiveness at balancing the rights of individuals, sovereigns, and mankind. Each instance explained in Part II infra, arose out of public necessity to ensure and protect the maximum utility of the global commons, without the deleteriousness of inhabitability, sovereign interference, or over-exploitation.140 The regimes governing Antarctica, the High Seas, the Atmosphere, and the radio-frequency spectrum evidence that mutually coercive delimitation can honor the common heritage of mankind, without encroaching on the peaceful enjoyment and benefits attributable to these areas. ¶ a. Antarctica ¶ In the 1950s, there was concern that Antarctica would succumb to Cold War hysteria, becoming a target for international discord and nuclear arms testing.141 In a move to reestablish global scientific exchange, the international scientific community hosted the International Geophysical Year project, and after identifying the potential of Antarctica, sought to protect it from any ruinous power posturing.142 This necessity for regulating permissible activity resulted in the formation of the ATS.143 Subsequent technological advancement revealed mineral deposits, triggering commercial interest in exploiting its natural resources. The threat catalyzed the promulgation of the Madrid Protocol.144 Again, these delimitations did not sever humanity’s utility in Antarctica. Rather, mankind conceded to the prohibition of deleterious usage in the interest of preserving its scientific utility.145¶ b. The High Seas¶ Similar to Antarctica, the High Seas faced threats in the 1960s when nation-states began unilaterally and arbitrarily, extending resource recovery activities further into the depths of international waters.146 In the interest of equity, particularly the interests of landlocked nations, UNCLOS delimited sovereign access to the seas, allowing usage only within the established exclusive economic zones (EEZs).147 An annex to UNCLOS provided a procedural framework in which resource recovery enterprises could operate in international common areas beyond the EEZs, precluding the unilateral capture of global resources by one nation.148 Once more, a mutually coercive framework removed certain freedoms in the interest of mankind without unjustly limiting equitable access to resources. ¶ c. The Atmosphere¶ Divergent from the problems of the ice and sea, atmospheric regulation resolved an issue more analogous to geospace debris proliferation. Atmospheric utility is quite simple: breathable air and protection from deadly cosmic radiation. When satellite imagery revealed the sizable hole in the ozone layer, the Montreal Protocol to the Vienna Convention placed an outright ban on ozone-depleting chemicals in everyday consumables.149 This prohibition directly addressed the source of the negative externality, forcing humanity to internalize the externality through alternate investment in refrigerants. Recent evidence of the reduction of ozone loss validates the mutually coercive delimitation within the Montreal Protocol.150¶ d. Regulating the Telecommunication Spectrum¶ The business model and financial strategy of telecommunications entities influence satellite deployment planning. Typically, orbital placement aims to “maximize a potential user base,” and if that base happens to encompass, for instance, the continental United States, market competition drastically narrows the availability of slots for satellite positioning.151 Realizing that satellite acquisition becomes moot without conscientious “use of telemetry and control . . . required for spaceflight,”152 the Space Radiocommunication Conference convened to revise the Radio Regulations in 1963,153 granting the ITU authority to allocate radio frequencies among spacefaring entities.154 Originally, the ITU:¶ Allocated orbits and frequencies solely through a first-in-time system. This led to concern that developed countries would secure all of the available slots before developing countries had the technological capacity to use them. Although some orbits and frequencies are still allocated on a first-in-time basis, each state is now guaranteed a certain number of future orbits and frequencies, regardless of its current technological capacity.155¶ The FCC regulates the segment of the electromagnetic spectrum allocated to the United States.156 Arguably, the ITU and agencies like the FCC engage in de facto appropriation of the more highly sought-after orbits.157 Yet to an extent, the ITU’s delimiting of the radio-frequency spectrum remedied the negative externalities of non-appropriation in geospace, such as the overcrowding of active satellites and the resultant interference. Where the ITU’s scheme does not remedy the byproduct of geospace resource use, it succeeds in ensuring communication capabilities remain free from inequitable use.158¶ e. The OST’s Ineffective Delimitations¶ The recurrent theme among the aforementioned regulatory schemes is the preservation of utility within the commons concerned.159 The frameworks each provide a means to enjoy shared resources while removing the potential for destruction. The OST’s nonproliferation provisions properly regulate the usage of the space commons to further the enjoyment of space’s true utility: scientific discovery and telecommunications. Likewise, the Liability Convention reinforces the necessity to maintain heightened situational awareness to guarantee the mutual, uninterrupted enjoyment of activity in space.160 But nation-states exploit the loop-holes within these documents to avoid internalizing some of their externalities. Specifically, the Liability Convention only assigns liability for damage caused to space objects when fault can actually be determined.161 Though it would be simple to assign fault to a collision caused by an intact and inoperative satellite, it is virtually impossible to identify the owner of smaller pieces of debris. Further, while the ITU reserves slots for nations not represented in space,162 it does nothing to stop those capable of reaching geospace from littering the commons and destroying the utility of reserved slots.163 Holistically, none of the delimitations in the Corpus Juris Spatialis negate the cause of the growing belt of debris in geospace.¶ As a sui generis resource, the mere occupation of LEO or GSO equates to the reduction of the overall utility of geospace. When an entity launches a rocket into space, the accompanying payload causes either (1) temporary reduction of the aggregate utility of geospace or (2) permanent reduction of the aggregate utility of geospace.164¶ The first delimitation prong will recommend bifurcating the applicability of the Corpus Juris Spatialis, with separate regimes for outer space and geospace. While the commercialization of outer space is not overly injurious to the international commons or interests of developing nations, the overcrowding of affluent spacefaring entities vying for orbital acquisition puts immense pressure on the finite resources within geospace. Therefore, demarcating the upper limit of geospace will allow entities to continue exploring the universe without imposing the restrictions placed on those seeking geospace positioning.165 This modification will allow continued use of both regions, but coerce more sustainable usage of geospace with the assistance of the secondary prong below. ¶ 2. Global Liability ¶ Operating under the theory that humanity holds an implied property right in the global commons but limited under the non-appropriation clause to protect those interests through traditional property mechanisms, the logical alternative is to impose liability on actions violative of the global interest.166 Further, assuming humanity collectively benefits from utilization of this commons, then humanity likewise must internalize the cost of the negative externalities imposed.167 This means that spacefarers, as members of the global collective, hold both the right and obligation to protect that right for others.168 Therefore, anyone utilizing or benefitting from the utilization of the geospace commons has an equitable duty to ensure its sustainability. Under traditional tort theories, when one has a duty, breach of that duty causally linked to a measurable injury is actionable. In terms of the duty to humanity when utilizing geospace, the culmination of Kessler Syndrome represents the measurable injury.¶ Kessler informed the scientific community in 1970 of the probable cataclysmic chain-reaction and destructive conclusion of unabated geospace debris pollution.169 This theory, reiterated consistently since its dissemination, materialized in 2009.170 Fundamentally, every spacefaring entity and approving launching state knows of this monumental threat to the utility of geospace. Yet to date, mitigation guidelines remain non-binding, and four-figure satellite constellations continue to receive approval.171 To incorporate a time-honored risk calculation method, the Hand Formula is instructive and evidences a trend toward unapologetic endangerment to the utility of geospace in isolation of the associated tort regime.¶ Let us assume the burden to mitigate space debris is $18.5 million172 but the probable magnitude of not mitigating the accumulation of space debris equates to reverting our technological capabilities back to the 1800s. Considering the accumulation of debris from the accidental or intentional breakup of geospace satellites, the probability of Kessler Syndrome fully concluding in the absence of a comprehensive mitigation protocol is one hundred percent.173 While difficult to quantify, the value of our scientific progress attributable to the advent of space travel far outstrips the burden to mitigate space debris. Should Kessler Syndrome become our reality, the measurable injury is the cost of reestablishing global communications without the usage of satellite relays. To add insult to injury, the invaluable utility of geospace will cease to exist.¶ A viable alternative would institute a regime of shared global liability which makes consideration of capital investors as well as nonparticipating beneficiaries in the interest of equity. That is, should the inevitable prison for humanity become a reality, the entire global community will be liable to pay an equitable share of the overall cost of recovery efforts.174 The Liability Convention should undergo a similar trifurcation, adding this new scheme to the current strict and absolute liability mechanisms.175 As such, shared global liability will consider the responsibility of nation-states and private entities in isolation.176 This will coerce cooperation among all agencies, nations, and private entities because the equitable share of responsibility will drive collective resolution. ¶ V. CONCLUSION¶ In light of the emerging global sentiments regarding environmental conservation and sustainability, instituting a regime that clearly defines a legal consequence in the event of environmental ruin boasts greater coercive force than non-binding resolutions. 9 This international agreement aligns with the universal value that the international community places on the utility of geospace.177 In essence, it protects geospace by forcing the signatory to face the reality of their negative externalities. It is unlikely that a nation-state exists that does not value space exploration and the benefits attributable.¶ In April of 2019, in the spirit of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), COPUOS adopted an agenda that focused on the long-term sustainability of the space commons, space traffic management, equitable uses of GSO, and the mitigation of space debris.178 Mindful of space’s critical role in attaining many of the SDGs, the Committee put forth guidelines to facilitate capacity building without prejudice to any one nation-states’ economic capabilities. To be sure, the Guidelines for the Long-Term Sustainability of Outer Space Activities are an important step forward, but many delegates reiterated the importance of developing binding instruments, particularly in light of developments in “space resource exploitation, large constellations, and space debris remediation.”179 ¶ Looking forward, research continues to advance the availability of debris mitigation mechanisms, such as the European Space Agency’s newly-commissioned ClearSpace-1 satellite.180 Mission objectives increasingly include end-of-life procedures to place satellites in appropriate orbits to decrease clutter in areas where active satellites operate.181 In the context of private entities, Planetary Resources—originally positioned to become a principle player in the space mining industry—merged with Consensys Space and quickly launched TruSat, a crowd-sourced situational awareness forum that compiles the reports of private citizens to track objects in geospace.182 These developments instill confidence in the international community’s sentiments toward ameliorating this ever-approaching catastrophe. It is with great hope that this trend continues, and COPUOS promulgates binding regulations to ensure the sustainability of geospace for the common heritage of mankind. “But we can never do nothing. That which we have done for thousands of years is also action. It also produces evils.”183
2/11/22
JF - Outer Space
Tournament: UW Westerns | Round: 4 | Opponent: Laramie TF | Judge: Lawrence Zhou AC Ambiguities in the OST that allow private appropriation have kicked off a race to develop space, setting the stage for a debris crisis and the domination of space by unaccountable billionaires. Current laws fail due to lax rules and forum shopping. Dovey 21 Ceridwen Dovey, “Space Exploration At What Price?,” Readers Digest Asia Pacific, 5/1/21. https://www.pressreader.com/australia/readers-digest-asia-pacific/20210501/281487869174485 CT One environmental risk all stakeholders agree on is that posed by space debris. There’s already about 5000 satellites in orbit around Earth, of which roughly 2000 are operational, plus hundreds of millions of tiny pieces of debris. Ninety-five per cent of the stuff in low-Earth orbit is classified as ‘space junk’. More space debris makes accessing space costlier in terms of loss of equipment (and possibly of human life). There’s also the risk of the Kessler effect: a cascade of collisions, to the point where the most useful orbital slots become permanently clogged. “We are in the process of messing up space, and most people don’t realise it because we can’t see it the way we can see fish kills, algal blooms or acid rain,” Michael Krepon, an expert on nuclear and space issues, said in 2015. Maybe we’ll understand only when it’s too late, “when we can’t get our satellite television and our telecommunications ... when we get knocked back to the 1950s”. The current clashes over space are rooted in the nitty-gritty of international space law. There are five multilateral UN treaties governing space, most importantly the 1967 Outer Space Treaty (OST), which has been ratified by 109 states, including all major spacefaring nations. It defines outer space as a global commons, the province of all humanity, free to be used and explored “for the benefit and in the interests of all countries”, “on a basis of equality” and only for “peaceful purposes”. Article II of the OST has become the major sticking point in the new space race. It forbids “national appropriation by claim of sovereignty, by means of use or occupation, or by any other means”. No nation can make a territorial claim on the Moon or on any other celestial bodies, such as asteroids. While the OST contains no explicit ban of appropriation by private enterprise, Steven Freeland, a professor specialising in space law at Western Sydney University and Australia’s representative to the UN Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space (COPUOS), says discussions at the time of the OST negotiations clearly show the states parties, including the US, were “of the opinion that Article II prohibited both public and private appropriation”. Yet this perceived legal uncertainty is the loophole that commercial companies are now exploiting. They’ve actively lobbied for an interpretation of OST Article II in the domestic space law of certain countries, to allow for private ownership of resources extracted from the Moon or other celestial bodies. They argue that, because the OST declares all humans are free to “use” space, companies can exercise this right by mining anywhere they like. They won’t claim ownership of the land itself, but will claim ownership of the resources they mine there. They’ve already had a major win in this regard. The space industry lobby in the US put pressure on members of Congress to reinterpret the US’s obligations under international space law, to become more ‘business friendly’. The outcome was the 2015 Commercial Space Launch Competitiveness Act, signed into law by President Obama. Since then, companies owned by US citizens have been given the right to claim ownership of – and sell – any resources they mine off-Earth. Further emboldened by the Trump administration, the “commercial space industry is becoming far more aggressive in how it lobbies for its own interests” in the US, Freeland says. There have been Acts proposed in recent years to enable a corporate space culture of “permissionless innovation”, with little regulatory oversight. In a 2017 speech, President Trump’s space law adviser Scott Pace said, “It bears repeating: outer space is not a ‘global commons’, not the ‘common heritage of mankind’, not ‘ res communis’ area of territory that is not subject to legal title of any state, nor is it a public good.” Even if you accept the US government’s interpretation of Article II – that space resources, but not the territory on which they’re located, can be owned – what happens if someone mines an asteroid out of existence, which is an act of outright appropriation? Should the public trust that companies mining in space will do the right thing? We’re still uncovering the full extent of terrestrial mining companies’ cover-ups. For instance, inhouse scientists at Exxon – now Exxon-Mobil, one of the biggest oil and gas companies in the world – knew long ago that burning fossil fuels was responsible for global warming, but they actively buried those findings and discredited climate change science for decades. We live in a world where ‘meta-national’ companies can accrue and exercise more wealth and power than traditional nation-states. Silicon Valley is believed to be becoming more powerful than not only Wall Street but also the US government. Branson and other space billionaires like to reassure the masses they’re “democratising” space: just as plane travel started out for the wealthy and gradually became cheaper, so too will space travel. Yet this conveniently overlooks the fact that railroads, airlines and now space industries have all been heavily subsidised by taxpayers. “When we take a step back and notice that private corporations are often even less accountable than governments, then it seems mistaken to say these decisions have been democratised,” Ryan Jenkins, an emerging sciences ethicist at California Polytechnic State University, says. “They’ve merely been privatised.” Lenient supervision. In 2017, Luxembourg – already a corporate tax haven, complicit in international investor tax avoidance and evasion – followed the US’s lead and passed a space-resources law that allows companies to claim resources they extract from space as private property. Guardian journalist Atossa Araxia Abrahamian recounted a chilling comment from an American space executive: “We just want to work with a government who won’t get in the way.” Companies anywhere in the world can stake resource claims in space under this new law; their only requirement is an office in Luxembourg. This sets a murky precedent of ‘regulatory forum-shopping’, where companies choose to incorporate in states where they’ll be most leniently supervised. In 2018, a Silicon Valley start-up called Swarm Technologies illegally launched four miniature satellites known as CubeSats into space from India. They’d been refused launch permission in the US due to safety concerns over whether the satellites could be tracked once in orbit. Fined US$900,000 by the US Federal Communications Commission, the company was subsequently given permission to start communicating with its satellites, and launched more CubeSats as part of a payload on a SpaceX rocket that November. In January 2019, the company raised $25 million in venture capital. Space start-ups that are prepared – unlike Swarm Technologies – to play by the rules are nonetheless still proposing to launch their own swarms of hundreds or thousands of satellites into very low orbits around Earth. SpaceX has already launched over 1000 internet-beaming Starlink satellites, aiming to have a constellation of at least 30,000 in orbit eventually. The UK’s Royal Astronomical Society said these satellites will “compromise astronomical research” due to light pollution, and questioned why there’d been no proper consultation with the scientific community before launch.
Advantage 1: Space Debris Increasing space debris levels inevitably set off a chain of collisions. Chelsea Muñoz-Patchen, 19 - (J.D. Candidate at The University of Chicago Law School., "Regulating the Space Commons: Treating Space Debris as Abandoned Property in Violation of the Outer Space Treaty," University of Chicago, 2019, 12-6-2021, https://cjil.uchicago.edu/publication/regulating-space-commons-treating-space-debris-abandoned-property-violation-outer-space)//AW Debris poses a threat to functioning space objects and astronauts in space, and may cause damage to the earth’s surface upon re-entry.29 Much of the small debris cannot be tracked due to its size and the velocity at which it travels, making it impossible to anticipate and maneuver to avoid collisions.30 To remain in orbit, debris must travel at speeds of up to 17,500 miles per hour.31 At this speed even very small pieces of debris can cause serious damage, threatening a spacecraft and causing expensive damage.32 There are millions of these very small pieces, and thousands of larger ones.33 The small-to-medium pieces of debris “continuously shed fragments like lens caps, booster upper stages, nuts, bolts, paint chips, motor sprays of aluminum particles, glass splinters, waste water, and bits of foil,” and may stay in orbit for decades or even centuries, posing an ongoing risk.34 Debris ten centimeters or larger in diameter creates the likelihood of complete destruction for any functioning satellite with which it collides.35 Large nonfunctional objects remaining in orbit are a collision threat, capable of creating huge amounts of space debris and taking up otherwise useful orbit space.36 This issue is of growing importance as more nations and companies gain the ability to launch satellites and other objects into space.37 From February 2009 through the end of 2010, more than thirty-two collision-avoidance maneuvers were reportedly used to avoid debris by various space agencies and satellite companies, and as of March 2012, the crew of the International Space Station (ISS) had to take shelter three times due to close calls with passing debris.38 These maneuvers require costly fuel usage and place a strain on astronauts.39 Furthermore, the launches of some spacecraft have “been delayed because of the presence of space debris in the planned flight paths.”40 In 2011, Euroconsult, a satellite consultant, projected that there would be “a 51 increase in satellites launched in the next decade over the number launched in the past decade.”41 In addition to satellites, the rise of commercial space tourism will also increase the number of objects launched into space and thus the amount of debris.42 The more objects are sent into space, and the more collisions create cascades of debris, the greater the risk of damage to vital satellites and other devices relied on for “weather forecasting, telecommunications, commerce, and national security.”43 The Space Debris Mitigation Guidelines44 were created by UNCOPUOS with input from the IADC and adopted in 2007.45 The guidelines were developed to address the problem of space debris and were intended to “increase mutual understanding on acceptable activities in space.”46 These guidelines are nonbinding but suggest best practices to implement at the national level when planning for a launch. Many nations have adopted the guidelines to some degree, and some have gone beyond what the guidelines suggest.47 While the guidelines do not address existing debris, they do much to prevent the creation of new debris. The Kessler Syndrome is the biggest concern with space debris. The Kessler Syndrome is a cascade created when debris hits a space object, creating new debris and setting off a chain reaction of collisions that eventually closes off entire orbits.48 The concern is that this cascade will occur when a tipping point is reached at which the natural removal rate cannot keep up with the amount of new debris added.49 At this point a collision could set off a cascade destroying all space objects within the orbit.50 In 2011, The National Research Council predicted that the Kessler Syndrome could happen within ten to twenty years.51 Donald J. Kessler, the astrophysicist and NASA scientist who theorized the Kessler Syndrome in 1978, believes this cascade may be a century away, meaning that there is still time to develop a solution.52 Collisions make orbit unusable, causing nuclear war, mass starvation, and economic destruction. Johnson 13 Les Johnson 13, Deputy Manager for NASA's Advanced Concepts Office at the Marshall Space Flight Center, Co-Investigator for the JAXA T-Rex Space Tether Experiment and PI of NASA's ProSEDS Experiment, Master's Degree in Physics from Vanderbilt University, Popular Science Writer, and NASA Technologist, Frequent Contributor to the Journal of the British Interplanetary Sodety and Member of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, National Space Society, the World Future Society, and MENSA, Sky Alert!: When Satellites Fail, p. 9-12 Whatever the initial cause, the result may be the same. A satellite destroyed in orbit will break apart into thousands of pieces, each traveling at over 8 km/sec. This virtual shotgun blast, with pellets traveling 20 times faster than a bullet, will quickly spread out, with each pellet now following its own orbit around the Earth. With over 300,000 other pieces of junk already there, the tipping point is crossed and a runaway series of collisions begins. A few orbits later, two of the new debris pieces strike other satellites, causing them to explode into thousands more pieces of debris. The rate of collisions increases, now with more spacecraft being destroyed. Called the "Kessler Effect", after the NASA scientist who first warned of its dangers, these debris objects, now numbering in the millions, cascade around the Earth, destroying every satellite in low Earth orbit. Without an atmosphere to slow them down, thus allowing debris pieces to bum up, most debris (perhaps numbering in the millions) will remain in space for hundreds or thousands of years. Any new satellite will be threatened by destruction as soon as it enters space, effectively rendering many Earth orbits unusable. But what about us on the ground? How will this affect us? Imagine a world that suddenly loses all of its space technology. If you are like most people, then you would probably have a few fleeting thoughts about the Apollo-era missions to the Moon, perhaps a vision of the Space Shuttle launching astronauts into space for a visit to the International Space Station (ISS), or you might fondly recall the "wow" images taken by the orbiting Hubble Space Telescope. In short, you would know that things important to science would be lost, but you would likely not assume that their loss would have any impact on your daily life. Now imagine a world that suddenly loses network and cable television, accurate weather forecasts, Global Positioning System (GPS) navigation, some cellular phone networks, on-time delivery of food and medical supplies via truck and train to stores and hospitals in virtually every community in America, as well as science useful in monitoring such things as climate change and agricultural sustainability. Add to this the crippling of the US military who now depend upon spy satellites, space-based communications systems, and GPS to know where their troops and supplies are located at all times and anywhere in the world. The result is a nightmarish world, one step away from nuclear war, economic disaster, and potential mass starvation. This is the world in which we are now perilously close to living. Space satellites now touch our lives in many ways. And, unfortunately, these satellites are extremely vulnerable to risks arising from a half-century of carelessness regarding protecting the space environment around the Earth as well as from potential adversaries such as China, North Korea, and Iran. No government policy has put us at risk. It has not been the result of a conspiracy. No, we are dependent upon them simply because they offer capabilities that are simply unavailable any other way. Individuals, corporations, and governments found ways to use the unique environment of space to provide services, make money, and better defend the country. In fact, only a few space visionaries and futurists could have foreseen where the advent of rocketry and space technology would take us a mere 50 years since those first satellites orbited the Earth. It was the slow progression of capability followed by dependence that puts us at risk. The exploration and use of space began in 1957 with the launch of Sputnik 1 by the Soviet Union. The United States soon followed with Explorer 1. Since then, the nations of the world have launched over 8,000 spacecraft. Of these, several hundred are still providing information and services to the global economy and the world's governments. Over time, nations, corporations, and individuals have grown accustomed to the services these spacecraft provide and many are dependent upon them. Commercial aviation, shipping, emergency services, vehicle fleet tracking, financial transactions, and agriculture are areas of the economy that are increasingly reliant on space. Telestar 1, launched into space in the year of my birth, 1962, relayed the world's first live transatlantic news feed and showed that space satellites can be used to relay television signals, telephone calls, and data. The modern telecommunications age was born. We've come a long way since Telstar; most television networks now distribute most, if not ali, of their programming via satellite. Cable television signals are received by local providers from satellite relays before being sent to our homes and businesses using cables. With 65 of US households relying on cable television and a growing percentage using satellite dishes to receive signals from direct-to-home satellite television providers, a large number of people would be cut off from vital information in an emergency should these satellites be destroyed. And communications satellites relay more than television signals. They serve as hosts to corporate video conferences and convey business, banking, and other commercial information to and from all areas of the planet. The first successful weather satellite was TIROS. Launched in 1960, TIROS operated for only 78 days but it served as the precursor for today's much more long-lived weather satellites, which provide continuous monitoring of weather conditions around the world. Without them, providing accurate weather forecasts for virtually any place on the globe more than a day in advance would be nearly impossible. Figure !.1 shows a satellite image of Hurricane Ivan approaching the Alabama Gulf coast in 2004. Without this type of information, evacuation warnings would have to be given more generally, resulting in needless evacuations and lost economic activity (from areas that avoid landfall) and potentially increasing loss of life in areas that may be unexpectedly hit. The formerly top-secret Corona spy satellites began operation in 1959 and provided critical information about the Soviet Union's military and industrial capabilities to a nervous West in a time of unprecedented paranoia and nuclear risk. With these satellites, US military planners were able to understand and assess the real military threat posed by the Soviet Union. They used information provided by spy satellites to help avert potential military confrontations on numerous occasions. Conversely, the Soviet Union's spy satellites were able to observe the United States and its allies, with similar results. It is nearly impossible to move an army and hide it from multiple eyes in the sky. Satellite information is critical to all aspects of US intelligence and military planning. Spy satellites are used to monitor compliance with international arms treaties and to assess the military activities of countries such as China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea. Figure 1.2 shows the capability of modem unclassified space-based imaging. The capability of the classified systems is presumed to be significantly better, providing much more detail. Losing these satellites would place global militaries on high alert and have them operating, literally, in the blind. Our military would suddenly become vulnerable in other areas as well. GPS, a network of 24-32 satellites in medium-Earth orbit, was developed to provide precise position information to the military, and it is now in common use by individuals and industry. The network, which became fully operational in 1993, allows our armed forces to know their exact locations anywhere in the world. It is used to guide bombs to their targets with unprecedented accuracy, requiring that only one bomb be used to destroy a target that would have previously required perhaps hundreds of bombs to destroy in the pre-GPS world (which, incidentally, has resulted in us reducing our stockpile of non-GPS-guided munitions dramatically). It allows soldiers to navigate in the dark or in adverse weather or sandstorms. Without GPS, our military advantage over potential adversaries would be dramatically reduced or eliminated.
Advantage 2: Corporate Colonialism Tech-billionaires advance a vision of private space colonization as a source of infinite resources to cure society’s ills. This rationalizes unrestrained consumption and replicates the logic of imperialism. Mccormick 21 Ted McCormick writes about the history of science, empire, and economic thought. He has a Ph.D. in history from Columbia University and teaches at Concordia University in Montreal. “The billionaire space race reflects a colonial mindset that fails to imagine a different world”. 8-15-2021. The Conversation. https://theconversation.com/the-billionaire-space-race-reflects-a-colonial-mindset-that-fails-to-imagine-a-different-world-165235. Accessed 12-15-2021; marlborough JH It was a time of political uncertainty, cultural conflict and social change. Private ventures exploited technological advances and natural resources, generating unprecedented fortunes while wreaking havoc on local communities and environments. The working poor crowded cities, spurring property-holders to develop increased surveillance and incarceration regimes. Rural areas lay desolate, buildings vacant, churches empty — the stuff of moralistic elegies. ¶Epidemics raged, forcing quarantines in the ports and lockdowns in the streets. Mortality data was the stuff of weekly news and commentary. ¶Depending on the perspective, mobility — chosen or compelled — was either the cause or the consequence of general disorder. Uncontrolled mobility was associated with political instability, moral degeneracy and social breakdown. However, one form of planned mobility promised to solve these problems: colonization. ¶Europe and its former empires have changed a lot since the 17th century. But the persistence of colonialism as a supposed panacea suggests we are not as far from the early modern period as we think. ¶Colonial promise of limitless growth ¶Seventeenth-century colonial schemes involved plantations around the Atlantic, and motivations that now sound archaic. Advocates of expansion such as the English writer Richard Hakluyt, whose Discourse of Western Planting (1584) outlined the benefits of empire for Queen Elizabeth: the colonization of the New World would prevent Spanish Catholic hegemony and provide a chance to claim Indigenous souls for Protestantism. ¶But a key promise was the economic and social renewal of the mother country through new commodities, trades and territory. Above all, planned mobility would cure the ills of apparent overpopulation. Sending the poor overseas to cut timber, mine gold or farm cane would, according to Hakluyt, turn the “multitudes of loiterers and idle vagabonds” that “swarm(ed)” England’s streets and “pestered and stuffed” its prisons into industrious workers, providing raw materials and a reason to multiply. Colonization would fuel limitless growth. ¶As English plantations took shape in Ulster, Virginia, New England and the Caribbean, “projectors” — individuals (nearly always men) who promised to use new kinds of knowledge to radically and profitably transform society — tied mobility to new sciences and technologies. They were inspired as much by English philosopher Francis Bacon’s vision of a tech-centred state in The New Atlantis as by his advocacy of observation and experiment. ¶Discovery and invention ¶The English agriculturalist Gabriel Plattes cautioned in 1639 that “the finding of new worlds is not like to be a perpetual trade.” But many more saw a supposedly vacant America as an invitation to transplant people, plants and machinery. ¶The inventor Cressy Dymock (from Lincolnshire, where fen-drainage schemes were turning wetlands dry) sought support for a “perpetual motion engine” that would plough fields in England, clear forest in Virginia and drive sugar mills in Barbados. Dymock identified private profit and the public good by speeding plantation and replacing costly draught animals with cheaper enslaved labour. Projects across the empire would employ the idle, create “elbow-room,” heal “unnatural divisions” and make England “the garden of the world.” ¶Extraterrestrial exploration ¶Today, the moon and Mars are in projectors’ sights. And the promises billionaires Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos make for colonization are similar in ambition to those of four centuries ago. ¶As Bezos told an audience at the International Space Development Conference in 2018: “We will have to leave this planet, and we’re going to leave it, and it’s going to make this planet better.” Bezos traces his thinking to Princeton physicist Gerald O’Neill, whose 1974 article “The Colonization of Space” (and 1977 book, The High Frontier) presented orbiting settlements as solutions to nearly every major problem facing the Earth. Bezos echoes O’Neill’s proposal to move heavy industry — and industrial labour — off the planet, rezoning Earth as a mostly residential, green space. A garden, as it were. ¶Musk’s plans for Mars are at once more cynical and more grandiose, in timeline and technical requirements if not in ultimate extent. They center on the dubious possibility of “terraforming” Mars using resources and technologies that don’t yet exist. ¶Musk planned to send the first humans to Mars in 2024, and by 2030, he envisioned breaking ground on a city, launching as many as 100,000 voyages from Earth to Mars within a century. ¶As of 2020, the timeline had been pushed back slightly, in part because terraforming may require bombarding Mars with 10,000 nuclear missiles to start. But the vision – a Mars of thriving crops, pizza joints and “entrepreneurial opportunities,” preserving life and paying dividends while Earth becomes increasingly uninhabitable — remains. Like the colonial company-states of the 17th and 18th centuries, Musk’s SpaceX leans heavily on government backing but will make its own laws on its newly settled planet. ¶A failure of the imagination ¶The techno-utopian visions of Musk and Bezos betray some of the same assumptions as their early modern forebears. They offer colonialism as a panacea for complex social, political and economic ills, rather than attempting to work towards a better world within the constraints of our environment. ¶And rather than facing the palpably devastating consequences of an ideology of limitless growth on our planet, they seek to export it, unaltered, into space. They imagine themselves capable of creating liveable environments where none exist. ¶But for all their futuristic imagery, they have failed to imagine a different world. And they have ignored the history of colonialism on this one. Empire never recreated Eden, but it did fuel centuries of growth based on expropriation, enslavement and environmental transformation in defiance of all limits. We are struggling with these consequences today. If only wealthy elites can tap the vast resources of outer space, we lock in a permanent and unconscionable inequality. Private space colonization amounts to authoritarian corporate control of future settlements. Spencer ‘17 Spencer, Keith A. senior editor at Salon“Against Mars-a-Lago: Why SpaceX's Mars Colonization Plan Should Terrify You.” Salon, Salon.com, Oct. 8 2017, https://www.salon.com/2017/10/08/against-mars-a-lago-why-spacexs-mars-colonization-plan-should-terrify-you/. When CEO Elon Musk announced last month that his aerospace company SpaceX would be sending cargo missions to Mars by 2022 — the first step in his tourism-driven colonization plan — a small cheer went up among space and science enthusiasts. Writing in the New York Post, Stephen Carter called Musk’s vision “inspiring,” a salve for politically contentious times. “Our species has turned its vision inward; our image of human possibility has grown cramped and pessimistic,” Carter wrote: "We dream less of reaching the stars than of winning the next election; less of maturing as a species than of shunning those who are different; less of the blessings of an advanced technological tomorrow than of an apocalyptic future marked by a desperate struggle to survive. Maybe a focus on the possibility of reaching our nearest planetary neighbor will help change all that." The Post editorial reflected a growing media consensus that humankind’s ultimate destiny is the colonization of the solar system — yet on a private basis. American government leaders generally agree with this vision. Obama egged on the privatization of NASA by legislating a policy shift to private commercial spaceflight, awarding government contracts to private companies like SpaceX to shuttle supplies to the International Space Station. “Governments can develop new technology and do some of the exciting early exploration but in the long run it's the private sector that finds ways to make profit, finds ways to expand humanity,” said Dr. S. Pete Worden, the director of the NASA Ames Research lab, in 2012. And in a Wall Street Journal op-ed this week, Vice President Mike Pence wrote of his ambitions to bring American-style capitalism to the stars: “In the years to come, American industry must be the first to maintain a constant commercial human presence in low-Earth orbit, to expand the sphere of the economy beyond this blue marble,” Pence wrote. One wonders if these luminaries know their history. There has be no instance in which a private corporation became a colonizing power that did not end badly for everyone besides the shareholders. The East India Company is perhaps the finest portent of Musk’s Martian ambitions. In 1765, the East India Company forced the Mughal emperor to sign a legal agreement that would essentially permit their company to become the de facto rulers of Bengal. The East India Company then collected taxes and used its private army, which was over 200,000 strong by the early 19th century, to repress those who got in the way of its profit margins. “It was not the British government that seized India at the end of the 18th century, but a dangerously unregulated private company headquartered in one small office, five windows wide, in London, and managed in India by an unstable sociopath,” writes William Dalrymple in the Guardian. “It almost certainly remains the supreme act of corporate violence in world history.” The East India Company came to colonize much of the Indian subcontinent. In the modern era, an era in which the right of corporations to do what they want, unencumbered, has become a sacrosanct right in the eyes of many politicians, the lessons of the East India Company seem to have been all but forgotten. As Dalrymple writes: Democracy as we know it was considered an advance over feudalism because of the power that it gave the commoners to share in collective governance. To privately colonize a nation, much less a planet, means ceding governance and control back to corporations whose interest is not ours, and indeed, is always at odds with workers and residents — particularly in a resource-limited environment like a spaceship or the red planet. Even if, as Musk suggests, a private foundation is put in charge of running the show on Mars, their interests will inherently be at odds with the workers and employees involved. After all, a private foundation is not a democracy; and as major philanthropic organizations like the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation illustrate, often do the bidding of their rich donors, and take an important role in ripening industries and regions for exploitation by Western corporations. Yet Mars’ colonization is a bit different than Bengal, namely in that it is not merely underdeveloped; it is undeveloped. How do you start an entirely new economy on a virgin world with no industry? After all, Martian resource extraction and trade with Earth is not feasible; the cost of transporting material across the solar system is astronomical, and there are no obvious minerals on Mars that we don’t already have in abundance on Earth. The only basis for colonization of Mars that Musk can conceive of is one based on tourism: the rich pay an amount — Musk quotes the ticket price at $200,000 if he can get 1 million tourists to pay that — that entitles them to a round-trip ticket. And while they’re on Mars and traveling to it, they luxuriate: Musk has assured that the trip would be “fun.” This is what makes Musk’s Mars vision so different than, say, the Apollo missions or the International Space Station. This isn’t really exploration for humanity’s sake — there’s not that much science assumed here, as there was in the Moon missions. Musk wants to build the ultimate luxury package, exclusively for the richest among us. Musk isn’t trying to build something akin to Matt Damon’s spartan research base in "The Martian." He wants to build Mars-a-Lago. And an economy based on tourism, particularly high-end tourism, needs employees — even if a high degree of automation is assumed. And as I’ve written about before, that means a lot of labor at the lowest cost possible. Imagine signing away years of your life to be a housekeeper in the Mars-a-Lago hotel, with your communications, water, food, energy usage, even oxygen tightly managed by your employer, and no government to file a grievance to if your employer cuts your wages, harasses you, cuts off your oxygen. Where would Mars-a-Lago's employees turn if their rights were impinged upon? Oh wait, this planet is run privately? You have no rights. Musk's vision for Mars colonization is inherently authoritarian. The potential for the existence of the employees of the Martian tourism industry to slip into something resembling indentured servitude, even slavery, cannot be underestimated. We have government regulations for a reason on Earth — to protect us from the fresh horror Musk hopes to export to Mars. If he's considered these questions, he doesn't seem to care; for Musk, the devil's in the technological and financial details. The social and political are pretty uninteresting to him. This is unsurprising; accounts from those who have worked closely with him hint that he, like many CEOs, may be a sociopath. Even as a space enthusiast, I cannot get excited about the private colonization of Mars. You shouldn’t be either. This is not a giant leap for mankind; this is the next great leap in plutocracy. The mere notion that global wealth is so unevenly distributed that a small but sufficient sum of rich people could afford this trip is unsettling, indicative of the era of astonishing economic inequality in which we suffer. Thomas Frank, writing in Harpers, once wrote of a popular t-shirt he sighted while picnicking in a small West Virginia coal town: “Mine it union or keep it in the ground.” The idea, of course, is that the corporations interested in resource extraction do not care whatsoever about their workers’ health, safety, or well-being; the union had their interests at heart, and was able to negotiate for safety, job security, and so on. I’d like to see a similar t-shirt or bumper sticker emerge among scientists and space enthusiasts: “Explore Mars democratically, or keep it in the sky.” Neoliberalism destroys ethics, locks in poverty and exploitation, decimates the environment, and causes war. Werlhof 15 – Claudia, Professor of Political Science/Women's Studies, University Innsbruck (Austria), 2015 (“Neoliberal Globalization: Is There an Alternative to Plundering the Earth?” Global Research, May 25th, Available Online at http://www.globalresearch.ca/neoliberal-globalization-is-there-an-alternative-to-plundering-the-earth/24403) At the center of both old and new economic liberalism lies: Self-interest and individualism; segregation of ethical principles and economic affairs, in other words: a process of ‘de-bedding’ economy from society; economic rationality as a mere cost-benefit calculation and profit maximization; competition as the essential driving force for growth and progress; specialization and the replacement of a subsistence economy with profit-oriented foreign trade (‘comparative cost advantage’); and the proscription of public (state) interference with market forces.3 Where the new economic liberalism outdoes the old is in its global claim. Today’s economic liberalism functions as a model for each and everyone: all parts of the economy, all sectors of society, of life/nature itself. As a consequence, the once “de-bedded” economy now claims to “im-bed” everything, including political power. Furthermore, a new twisted “economic ethics” (and with it a certain idea of “human nature”) emerges that mocks everything from so-called do-gooders to altruism to selfless help to care for others to a notion of responsibility.4 This goes as far as claiming that the common good depends entirely on the uncontrolled egoism of the individual and, especially, on the prosperity of transnational corporations. The allegedly necessary “freedom” of the economy – which, paradoxically, only means the freedom of corporations – hence consists of a freedom from responsibility and commitment to society. The maximization of profit itself must occur within the shortest possible time; this means, preferably, through speculation and “shareholder value”. It must meet as few obstacles as possible. Today, global economic interests outweigh not only extra-economic concerns but also national economic considerations since corporations today see themselves beyond both community and nation.5 A “level playing field” is created that offers the global players the best possible conditions. This playing field knows of no legal, social, ecological, cultural or national “barriers”.6 As a result, economic competition plays out on a market that is free of all non-market, extra-economic or protectionist influences – unless they serve the interests of the big players (the corporations), of course. The corporations’ interests – their maximal growth and progress – take on complete priority. This is rationalized by alleging that their well-being means the well-being of small enterprises and workshops as well. The difference between the new and the old economic liberalism can first be articulated in quantitative terms: after capitalism went through a series of ruptures and challenges – caused by the “competing economic system”, the crisis of capitalism, post-war “Keynesianism” with its social and welfare state tendencies, internal mass consumer demand (so-called Fordism), and the objective of full employment in the North. The liberal economic goals of the past are now not only euphorically resurrected but they are also “globalized”. The main reason is indeed that the competition between alternative economic systems is gone. However, to conclude that this confirms the victory of capitalism and the “golden West” over “dark socialism” is only one possible interpretation. Another – opposing – interpretation is to see the “modern world system” (which contains both capitalism and socialism) as having hit a general crisis which causes total and merciless competition over global resources while leveling the way for investment opportunities, i.e. the valorization of capital.7 The ongoing globalization of neoliberalism demonstrates which interpretation is right. Not least, because the differences between the old and the new economic liberalism can not only be articulated in quantitative terms but in qualitative ones too. What we are witnessing are completely new phenomena: instead of a democratic “complete competition” between many small enterprises enjoying the freedom of the market, only the big corporations win. In turn, they create new market oligopolies and monopolies of previously unknown dimensions. The market hence only remains free for them, while it is rendered unfree for all others who are condemned to an existence of dependency (as enforced producers, workers and consumers) or excluded from the market altogether (if they have neither anything to sell or buy). About fifty percent of the world’s population fall into this group today, and the percentage is rising.8 Anti-trust laws have lost all power since the transnational corporations set the norms. It is the corporations – not “the market” as an anonymous mechanism or “invisible hand” – that determine today’s rules of trade, for example prices and legal regulations. This happens outside any political control. Speculation with an average twenty percent profit margin edges out honest producers who become “unprofitable”.9 Money becomes too precious for comparatively non-profitable, long-term projects, or projects that only – how audacious! – serve a good life. Money instead “travels upwards” and disappears. Financial capital determines more and more what the markets are and do.10 By delinking the dollar from the price of gold, money creation no longer bears a direct relationship to production”.11 Moreover, these days most of us are – exactly like all governments – in debt. It is financial capital that has all the money – we have none.12 Small, medium, even some bigger enterprises are pushed out of the market, forced to fold or swallowed by transnational corporations because their performances are below average in comparison to speculation – rather: spookulation – wins. The public sector, which has historically been defined as a sector of not-for-profit economy and administration, is “slimmed” and its “profitable” parts (“gems”) handed to corporations (privatized). As a consequence, social services that are necessary for our existence disappear. Small and medium private businesses – which, until recently, employed eighty percent of the workforce and provided normal working conditions – are affected by these developments as well. The alleged correlation between economic growth and secure employment is false. When economic growth is accompanied by the mergers of businesses, jobs are lost.13 If there are any new jobs, most are precarious, meaning that they are only available temporarily and badly paid. One job is usually not enough to make a living.14 This means that the working conditions in the North become akin to those in the South, and the working conditions of men akin to those of women – a trend diametrically opposed to what we have always been told. Corporations now leave for the South (or East) to use cheap – and particularly female – labor without union affiliation. This has already been happening since the 1970s in the “Export Processing Zones” (EPZs, “world market factories” or “maquiladoras”), where most of the world’s computer chips, sneakers, clothes and electronic goods are produced.15 The EPZs lie in areas where century-old colonial-capitalist and authoritarian-patriarchal conditions guarantee the availability of cheap labor.16 The recent shift of business opportunities from consumer goods to armaments is a particularly troubling development.17 It is not only commodity production that is “outsourced” and located in the EPZs, but service industries as well. This is a result of the so-called Third Industrial Revolution, meaning the development of new information and communication technologies. Many jobs have disappeared entirely due to computerization, also in administrative fields.18 The combination of the principles of “high tech” and “low wage”/”no wage” (always denied by “progress” enthusiasts) guarantees a “comparative cost advantage” in foreign trade. This will eventually lead to “Chinese wages” in the West. A potential loss of Western consumers is not seen as a threat. A corporate economy does not care whether consumers are European, Chinese or Indian. The means of production become concentrated in fewer and fewer hands, especially since finance capital – rendered precarious itself – controls asset values ever more aggressively. New forms of private property are created, not least through the “clearance” of public property and the transformation of formerly public and small-scale private services and industries to a corporate business sector. This concerns primarily fields that have long been (at least partly) excluded from the logic of profit – e.g. education, health, energy or water supply/disposal. New forms of so-called enclosures emerge from today’s total commercialization of formerly small-scale private or public industries and services, of the “commons”, and of natural resources like oceans, rain forests, regions of genetic diversity or geopolitical interest (e.g. potential pipeline routes), etc.19 As far as the new virtual spaces and communication networks go, we are witnessing frantic efforts to bring these under private control as well.20 All these new forms of private property are essentially created by (more or less) predatory forms of appropriation. In this sense, they are a continuation of the history of so-called original accumulation which has expanded globally, in accordance with to the motto: “Growth through expropriation!”21 Most people have less and less access to the means of production, and so the dependence on scarce and underpaid work increases. The destruction of the welfare state also destroys the notion that individuals can rely on the community to provide for them in times of need. Our existence relies exclusively on private, i.e. expensive, services that are often of much worse quality and much less reliable than public services. (It is a myth that the private always outdoes the public.) What we are experiencing is undersupply formerly only known by the colonial South. The old claim that the South will eventually develop into the North is proven wrong. It is the North that increasingly develops into the South. We are witnessing the latest form of “development”, namely, a world system of underdevelopment.22 Development and underdevelopment go hand in hand.23 This might even dawn on “development aid” workers soon. It is usually women who are called upon to counterbalance underdevelopment through increased work (“service provisions”) in the household. As a result, the workload and underpay of women takes on horrendous dimensions: they do unpaid work inside their homes and poorly paid “housewifized” work outside.24 Yet, commercialization does not stop in front of the home’s doors either. Even housework becomes commercially co-opted (“new maid question”), with hardly any financial benefits for the women who do the work.25 Not least because of this, women are increasingly coerced into prostitution, one of today’s biggest global industries.26 This illustrates two things: a) how little the “emancipation” of women actually leads to “equal terms” with men; and b) that “capitalist development” does not imply increased “freedom” in wage labor relations, as the Left has claimed for a long time.27 If the latter were the case, then neoliberalism would mean the voluntary end of capitalism once it reaches its furthest extension. This, however, does not appear likely. Today, hundreds of millions of quasi-slaves, more than ever before, exist in the “world system.”28 The authoritarian model of the “Export Processing Zones” is conquering the East and threatening the North. The redistribution of wealth runs ever more – and with ever accelerated speed – from the bottom to the top. The gap between the rich and the poor has never been wider. The middle classes disappear. This is the situation we are facing. It becomes obvious that neoliberalism marks not the end of colonialism but, to the contrary, the colonization of the North. This new “colonization of the world”29 points back to the beginnings of the “modern world system” in the “long 16th century”, when the conquering of the Americas, their exploitation and colonial transformation allowed for the rise and “development” of Europe.30 The so-called “children’s diseases” of modernity keep on haunting it, even in old age. They are, in fact, the main feature of modernity’s latest stage. They are expanding instead of disappearing. Where there is no South, there is no North; where there is no periphery, there is no center; where there is no colony, there is no – in any case no “Western” – civilization.31 Austria is part of the world system too. It is increasingly becoming a corporate colony (particularly of German corporations). This, however, does not keep it from being an active colonizer itself, especially in the East.32 Social, cultural, traditional and ecological considerations are abandoned and give way to a mentality of plundering. All global resources that we still have – natural resources, forests, water, genetic pools – have turned into objects of utilization. Rapid ecological destruction through depletion is the consequence.If one makes more profit by cutting down trees than by planting them, then there is no reason not to cut them.33 Neither the public nor the state interferes, despite global warming and the obvious fact that the clearing of the few remaining rain forests will irreversibly destroy the earth’s climate – not to mention the many other negative effects of such actions.34 Climate, animal, plants, human and general ecological rights are worth nothing compared to the interests of the corporations – no matter that the rain forest is not a renewable resource and that the entire earth’s ecosystem depends on it. If greed, and the rationalism with which it is economically enforced, really was an inherent anthropological trait, we would have never even reached this day. The commander of the Space Shuttle that circled the earth in 2005 remarked that “the center of Africa was burning”. She meant the Congo, in which the last great rain forest of the continent is located. Without it there will be no more rain clouds above the sources of the Nile. However, it needs to disappear in order for corporations to gain free access to the Congo’s natural resources that are the reason for the wars that plague the region today. After all, one needs diamonds and coltan for mobile phones. Today, everything on earth is turned into commodities, i.e. everything becomes an object of “trade” and commercialization (which truly means liquidation, the transformation of all into liquid money). In its neoliberal stage it is not enough for capitalism to globally pursue less cost-intensive and preferably “wageless” commodity production. The objective is to transform everyone and everything into commodities, including life itself.35 We are racing blindly towards the violent and absolute conclusion of this “mode of production”, namely total capitalization/liquidation by “monetarization”.36 We are not only witnessing perpetual praise of the market – we are witnessing what can be described as “market fundamentalism”. People believe in the market as if it was a god. There seems to be a sense that nothing could ever happen without it. Total global maximized accumulation of money/capital as abstract wealth becomes the sole purpose of economic activity. A “free” world market for everything has to be established – a world market that functions according to the interests of the corporations and capitalist money. The installment of such a market proceeds with dazzling speed. It creates new profit possibilities where they have not existed before, e.g. in Iraq, Eastern Europe or China. One thing remains generally overlooked: the abstract wealth created for accumulation implies the destruction of nature as concrete wealth. The result is a “hole in the ground” and next to it a garbage dump with used commodities, outdated machinery and money without value.37 However, once all concrete wealth (which today consists mainly of the last natural resources) will be gone, abstract wealth will disappear as well. It will, in Marx’s words, “evaporate”. The fact that abstract wealth is not real wealth will become obvious, and so will the answer to the question of which wealth modern economic activity has really created. In the end it is nothing but monetary wealth (and even this mainly exists virtually or on accounts) that constitutes a monoculture controlled by a tiny minority. Diversity is suffocated and millions of people are left wondering how to survive. And really: how do you survive with neither resources nor means of production nor money? The nihilism of our economic system is evident. The whole world will be transformed into money – and then it will disappear. After all, money cannot be eaten. What no one seems to consider is the fact that it is impossible to re-transform commodities, money, capital and machinery into nature or concrete wealth. It seems that underlying all “economic development” is the assumption that “resources”, the “sources of wealth”,38 are renewable and everlasting – just like the “growth” they create.39 The notion that capitalism and democracy are one is proven a myth by neoliberalism and its “monetary totalitarianism”.40 The primacy of politics over economy has been lost. Politicians of all parties have abandoned it. It is the corporations that dictate politics. Where corporate interests are concerned, there is no place for democratic convention or community control. Public space disappears. The res publica turns into a res privata, or – as we could say today – a res privata transnationale (in its original Latin meaning, privare means “to deprive”). Only those in power still have rights. They give themselves the licenses they need, from the “license to plunder” to the “license to kill”.41 Those who get in their way or challenge their “rights” are vilified, criminalized and to an increasing degree defined as “terrorists” or, in the case of defiant governments, as “rogue states” – a label that usually implies threatened or actual military attack, as we can see in the cases of Yugoslavia, Afghanistan and Iraq, and maybe Syria and Iran in the near future. U.S. President Bush had even spoken of the possibility of “preemptive” nuclear strikes should the U.S. feel endangered by weapons of mass destruction.42 The European Union did not object.43 Neoliberalism and war are two sides of the same coin.44 Free trade, piracy and war are still “an inseparable three” – today maybe more so than ever. War is not only “good for the economy” but is indeed its driving force and can be understood as the “continuation of economy with other means”.45 War and economy have become almost indistinguishable.46 Wars about resources – especially oil and water – have already begun.47 The Gulf Wars are the most obvious examples. Militarism once again appears as the “executor of capital accumulation” – potentially everywhere and enduringly.48 Human rights and rights of sovereignty have been transferred from people, communities and governments to corporations.49 The notion of the people as a sovereign body has practically been abolished. We have witnessed a coup of sorts. The political systems of the West and the nation state as guarantees for and expression of the international division of labor in the modern world system are increasingly dissolving.50 Nation states are developing into “periphery states” according to the inferior role they play in the proto-despotic “New World Order”.51 Democracy appears outdated. After all, it “hinders business”.52 The “New World Order” implies a new division of labor that does no longer distinguish between North and South, East and West – today, everywhere is South. An according International Law is established which effectively functions from top to bottom (“top-down”) and eliminates all local and regional communal rights. And not only that: many such rights are rendered invalid both retroactively and for the future.53 The logic of neoliberalism as a sort of totalitarian neo-mercantilism is that all resources, all markets, all money, all profits, all means of production, all “investment opportunities”, all rights and all power belong to the corporations only. To paraphrase Richard Sennett: “Everything to the Corporations!”54 One might add: “Now!” The corporations are free to do whatever they please with what they get. Nobody is allowed to interfere. Ironically, we are expected to rely on them to find a way out of the crisis we are in. This puts the entire globe at risk since responsibility is something the corporations do not have or know. The times of social contracts are gone.55 In fact, pointing out the crisis alone has become a crime and all critique will soon be defined as “terror” and persecuted as such.56 IMF Economic Medicine Since the 1980s, it is mainly the Structural Adjustment Programs (SAPs) of the World Bank and the IMF that act as the enforcers of neoliberalism. These programs are levied against the countries of the South which can be extorted due to their debts. Meanwhile, numerous military interventions and wars help to take possession of the assets that still remain, secure resources, install neoliberalism as the global economic politics, crush resistance movements (which are cynically labeled as “IMF uprisings”), and facilitate the lucrative business of reconstruction.57 In the 1980s, Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher introduced neoliberalism in Anglo-America. In 1989, the so-called “Washington Consensus” was formulated. It claimed to lead to global freedom, prosperity and economic growth through “deregulation, liberalization and privatization”. This has become the credo and promise of all neoliberals. Today we know that the promise has come true for the corporations only – not for anybody else. In the Middle East, the Western support for Saddam Hussein in the war between Iraq and Iran in the 1980s, and the Gulf War of the early 1990s, announced the permanent U.S. presence in the world’s most contested oil region. In continental Europe, neoliberalism began with the crisis in Yugoslavia caused by the Structural Adjustment Programs (SAPs) of the World Bank and the IMF. The country was heavily exploited, fell apart and finally beset by a civil war over its last remaining resources.58 Since the NATO war in 1999, the Balkans are fragmented, occupied and geopolitically under neoliberal control.59 The region is of main strategic interest for future oil and gas transport from the Caucasus to the West (for example the “Nabucco” gas pipeline that is supposed to start operating from the Caspian Sea through Turkey and the Balkans by 2011.60 The reconstruction of the Balkans is exclusively in the hands of Western corporations. All governments, whether left, right, liberal or green, accept this. There is no analysis of the connection between the politics of neoliberalism, its history, its background and its effects on Europe and other parts of the world. Likewise, there is no analysis of its connection to the new militarism. Plan/Solvency Since, in a just world, outer space would be treated as a global commons, and a global commons model precludes appropriation by private entries, then the appropriation of outer space by private entries is unjust. Thus, the plan: States ought to adopt a binding international agreement that bans the appropriation of outer space by private entities by establishing outer space as a global commons subject to regulatory delimiting and global liability. The aff: - solves debris and space colonialism by ensuring the sustainable and equitable use of outer space resources. - prevents circumvention by aligning the interests of state parties - is normal means since it models numerous successful agreements governing all other global commons. Vollmer 20 Sarah Louise Vollmer (St. Mary's University School of Law), “The Right Stuff in Geospace: Using Mutual Coercion to Avoid an Inevitable Prison for Humanity,” 51 ST. MARY'S L.J. 777 (2020). https://commons.stmarytx.edu/thestmaryslawjournal/vol51/iss3/6?utm_source=commons.stmarytx.edu2Fthestmaryslawjournal2Fvol512Fiss32F6andutm_medium=PDFandutm_campaign=PDFCoverPages CT IV. NECESSITY FOR REGULATION TO PRESERVE THE HERITAGE OF MANKIND—A PROPOSAL ¶ Conceptually, all persons hold an implied property right in the space commons.111 As such, spacefaring entities and developing nations possess an equitable right to access and use orbital resources.112 But the sui generis nature of geospace presents a paradox requiring a unique regime for the sustainable usage of its resources.113 The international community cannot realize the advantages of the common heritage principle under a property regime because any conceivable assignment would violate the non-appropriation clause or unjustly enrich a particular interest.114 This means that only regulatory solutions can protect the interests inherent in a commons protected for the common heritage of mankind. ¶ A. The Motivations for International Compliance¶ The crux of a workable treaty lies in the consent of the parties to the agreement.115 Thereafter, signatories internalize the agreement’s object and purpose into their domestic law, or in the case of international organizations, into an institutional framework.116 To implement a binding international instrument, we must therefore ask the question: Why do nations follow international law,117 and how can we use those behavioral realities to construct a workable framework to ensure geospace survives?118¶ At the dawn of civilized society, depending on a particular jurisdiction’s values, the laws of nature and morality compelled obedience and social order.119 When nation-states concluded international agreements, it represented the coalescence of the various values-based systems, the overlap of which formed a universal understanding of the law of mankind.120 “The fundamental conceptual boundary between municipal and international law . . . views international law largely in terms of contractual relations, therefore assigning to the ‘sovereign’ a central place in the construction of the two orders.”121 In other words, transnational cooperation operated through balancing the competing autonomy and values of the parties involved. Despite centuries of debate, values systems remain the principal motivating factor of compliance with international law.122 Effective regulatory regimes must, therefore, strike at the heart of what nation-states value the most, which is often related to national security.123¶ When entering an international agreement, whether or not a nation-state will ratify it informs us of the value a nation-state places on the instrument’s subject matter. That value equates to the utility a nation-state places on certain allowances or prohibitions.124 Incorporating these motivating factors with Hardin’s regulatory solution, any freedoms infringed upon must manifest a higher utility than currently realized. If COPUOS proposes a protocol for sustainable uses of space, the provisions must either have a negligible effect on the global community’s perceived utility of space access or substantially increase that utility. Assuming the propositioned regulatory scheme aligns with the values system of each nation-state, the probability of internalizing such regulations through domestic codification is high. ¶ To ascertain the interests of nation-states, we must look to the factors motivating current space utilization. Routine access to space undeniably aids our technological advancement. The ISS’s antigravity environment provides unique conditions to study medicine.125 Satellites provide real-time tracking of environmental conditions and transmit crucial information for disaster recovery planning.126 Space telescopes track objects with the potential to cause the extinction of life of Earth.127 Free from the veil of our hazy atmosphere, satellites can produce better imagery and ascertain the composition of potential resource deposits on celestial bodies.128 And simply receiving satellite imagery of our planet forces us to confront the realities of our fragile existence. These benefits signify the tangible realization of the OST’s object and purpose, which flow to all members of the global community.129 If we do not begin active decontamination and mitigation of space debris, the utility of geospace will cease to exist. Imagining our existence without these advances is a potent method to stress the criticality of unabated pollution in geospace.¶ B. Existing Proposals¶ Legal scholars have formulated several frameworks to mitigate space debris. Some recommend implementing a market-share liability regime, which assigns liability according to the volume of each nation-states’ exploits.130 Opponents of this construction rightfully highlight the inequities inherent in such a scheme. Considering the United States, Russia, and China make up the bulk of spacefaring activity, market-share liability would unduly burden these nations, and coerce a categorical exit from the space industry or a repeat of the Moon Treaty.131 Another scholar advocates for an environmental law approach, asserting that the space commons would benefit from a protocol closely mirroring the Madrid Protocol.132 While prospective applications of such a model could prevent additional accumulations, it would not feasibly abate the current collection of debris.133 The strengths of Mary Button’s mitigation proposal lie in the binding nature of the Madrid Protocol and compulsory environmental impact requirements. And though it advocates for a more collaborative conference mechanism, rather than the strict unanimous consent required of UNCOPUOS’s resolutions, it still shies away from compulsory requirements for active debris removal. Along with the Antarctic Treaty (ATS), the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) also served as a model for the Corpus Juris Spatialis. But oddly, the law of salvage was omitted from the treaties. Unlike abandoned objects at sea, once a nation-state places an object into space, ownership exists in perpetuity. Sandra Drago addressed removing the OST’s property-in-perpetuity mechanism134 so as to permit the active salvage of inoperable satellites.135 Drago’s proposal is vital to any mitigation framework. But while this removes a substantial bar currently restricting debris removal, it does not address free-riding, and spacefaring enterprises are free to choose more lucrative space activities other than salvage operations.136 ¶ C. A Coercive Proposal¶ Mutual coercion lies at the core of Hardin’s solution.137 To summarize, law-abiding citizens make concessions to regulatory social constructs in the interest of conserving some utility otherwise lost.138 The coercive element lies in relinquishing one’s ability to exploit some freedom, the detriment of which cannot be realized at that moment in time.139 Conceding to a regime that tempers free exploitation of the commons allows everyone to benefit from the positive externalities of individual usage. Equated to space, nation-states currently concede to non-appropriation in the interest of maintaining equitable access. But because of the sui generis nature of geospace, even non-participants receive a benefit from the use of the commons. In effect, beneficiaries are free-riding from the capital investment of spacefaring nations and entities. This informs the structure of the ensuing two-part framework: geospace delimitation and global liability ¶ 1. Geospace Delimitation ¶ The history of regulatory delimitation illustrates its effectiveness at balancing the rights of individuals, sovereigns, and mankind. Each instance explained in Part II infra, arose out of public necessity to ensure and protect the maximum utility of the global commons, without the deleteriousness of inhabitability, sovereign interference, or over-exploitation.140 The regimes governing Antarctica, the High Seas, the Atmosphere, and the radio-frequency spectrum evidence that mutually coercive delimitation can honor the common heritage of mankind, without encroaching on the peaceful enjoyment and benefits attributable to these areas. ¶ a. Antarctica ¶ In the 1950s, there was concern that Antarctica would succumb to Cold War hysteria, becoming a target for international discord and nuclear arms testing.141 In a move to reestablish global scientific exchange, the international scientific community hosted the International Geophysical Year project, and after identifying the potential of Antarctica, sought to protect it from any ruinous power posturing.142 This necessity for regulating permissible activity resulted in the formation of the ATS.143 Subsequent technological advancement revealed mineral deposits, triggering commercial interest in exploiting its natural resources. The threat catalyzed the promulgation of the Madrid Protocol.144 Again, these delimitations did not sever humanity’s utility in Antarctica. Rather, mankind conceded to the prohibition of deleterious usage in the interest of preserving its scientific utility.145¶ b. The High Seas¶ Similar to Antarctica, the High Seas faced threats in the 1960s when nation-states began unilaterally and arbitrarily, extending resource recovery activities further into the depths of international waters.146 In the interest of equity, particularly the interests of landlocked nations, UNCLOS delimited sovereign access to the seas, allowing usage only within the established exclusive economic zones (EEZs).147 An annex to UNCLOS provided a procedural framework in which resource recovery enterprises could operate in international common areas beyond the EEZs, precluding the unilateral capture of global resources by one nation.148 Once more, a mutually coercive framework removed certain freedoms in the interest of mankind without unjustly limiting equitable access to resources. ¶ c. The Atmosphere¶ Divergent from the problems of the ice and sea, atmospheric regulation resolved an issue more analogous to geospace debris proliferation. Atmospheric utility is quite simple: breathable air and protection from deadly cosmic radiation. When satellite imagery revealed the sizable hole in the ozone layer, the Montreal Protocol to the Vienna Convention placed an outright ban on ozone-depleting chemicals in everyday consumables.149 This prohibition directly addressed the source of the negative externality, forcing humanity to internalize the externality through alternate investment in refrigerants. Recent evidence of the reduction of ozone loss validates the mutually coercive delimitation within the Montreal Protocol.150¶ d. Regulating the Telecommunication Spectrum¶ The business model and financial strategy of telecommunications entities influence satellite deployment planning. Typically, orbital placement aims to “maximize a potential user base,” and if that base happens to encompass, for instance, the continental United States, market competition drastically narrows the availability of slots for satellite positioning.151 Realizing that satellite acquisition becomes moot without conscientious “use of telemetry and control . . . required for spaceflight,”152 the Space Radiocommunication Conference convened to revise the Radio Regulations in 1963,153 granting the ITU authority to allocate radio frequencies among spacefaring entities.154 Originally, the ITU:¶ Allocated orbits and frequencies solely through a first-in-time system. This led to concern that developed countries would secure all of the available slots before developing countries had the technological capacity to use them. Although some orbits and frequencies are still allocated on a first-in-time basis, each state is now guaranteed a certain number of future orbits and frequencies, regardless of its current technological capacity.155¶ The FCC regulates the segment of the electromagnetic spectrum allocated to the United States.156 Arguably, the ITU and agencies like the FCC engage in de facto appropriation of the more highly sought-after orbits.157 Yet to an extent, the ITU’s delimiting of the radio-frequency spectrum remedied the negative externalities of non-appropriation in geospace, such as the overcrowding of active satellites and the resultant interference. Where the ITU’s scheme does not remedy the byproduct of geospace resource use, it succeeds in ensuring communication capabilities remain free from inequitable use.158¶ e. The OST’s Ineffective Delimitations¶ The recurrent theme among the aforementioned regulatory schemes is the preservation of utility within the commons concerned.159 The frameworks each provide a means to enjoy shared resources while removing the potential for destruction. The OST’s nonproliferation provisions properly regulate the usage of the space commons to further the enjoyment of space’s true utility: scientific discovery and telecommunications. Likewise, the Liability Convention reinforces the necessity to maintain heightened situational awareness to guarantee the mutual, uninterrupted enjoyment of activity in space.160 But nation-states exploit the loop-holes within these documents to avoid internalizing some of their externalities. Specifically, the Liability Convention only assigns liability for damage caused to space objects when fault can actually be determined.161 Though it would be simple to assign fault to a collision caused by an intact and inoperative satellite, it is virtually impossible to identify the owner of smaller pieces of debris. Further, while the ITU reserves slots for nations not represented in space,162 it does nothing to stop those capable of reaching geospace from littering the commons and destroying the utility of reserved slots.163 Holistically, none of the delimitations in the Corpus Juris Spatialis negate the cause of the growing belt of debris in geospace.¶ As a sui generis resource, the mere occupation of LEO or GSO equates to the reduction of the overall utility of geospace. When an entity launches a rocket into space, the accompanying payload causes either (1) temporary reduction of the aggregate utility of geospace or (2) permanent reduction of the aggregate utility of geospace.164¶ The first delimitation prong will recommend bifurcating the applicability of the Corpus Juris Spatialis, with separate regimes for outer space and geospace. While the commercialization of outer space is not overly injurious to the international commons or interests of developing nations, the overcrowding of affluent spacefaring entities vying for orbital acquisition puts immense pressure on the finite resources within geospace. Therefore, demarcating the upper limit of geospace will allow entities to continue exploring the universe without imposing the restrictions placed on those seeking geospace positioning.165 This modification will allow continued use of both regions, but coerce more sustainable usage of geospace with the assistance of the secondary prong below. ¶ 2. Global Liability ¶ Operating under the theory that humanity holds an implied property right in the global commons but limited under the non-appropriation clause to protect those interests through traditional property mechanisms, the logical alternative is to impose liability on actions violative of the global interest.166 Further, assuming humanity collectively benefits from utilization of this commons, then humanity likewise must internalize the cost of the negative externalities imposed.167 This means that spacefarers, as members of the global collective, hold both the right and obligation to protect that right for others.168 Therefore, anyone utilizing or benefitting from the utilization of the geospace commons has an equitable duty to ensure its sustainability. Under traditional tort theories, when one has a duty, breach of that duty causally linked to a measurable injury is actionable. In terms of the duty to humanity when utilizing geospace, the culmination of Kessler Syndrome represents the measurable injury.¶ Kessler informed the scientific community in 1970 of the probable cataclysmic chain-reaction and destructive conclusion of unabated geospace debris pollution.169 This theory, reiterated consistently since its dissemination, materialized in 2009.170 Fundamentally, every spacefaring entity and approving launching state knows of this monumental threat to the utility of geospace. Yet to date, mitigation guidelines remain non-binding, and four-figure satellite constellations continue to receive approval.171 To incorporate a time-honored risk calculation method, the Hand Formula is instructive and evidences a trend toward unapologetic endangerment to the utility of geospace in isolation of the associated tort regime.¶ Let us assume the burden to mitigate space debris is $18.5 million172 but the probable magnitude of not mitigating the accumulation of space debris equates to reverting our technological capabilities back to the 1800s. Considering the accumulation of debris from the accidental or intentional breakup of geospace satellites, the probability of Kessler Syndrome fully concluding in the absence of a comprehensive mitigation protocol is one hundred percent.173 While difficult to quantify, the value of our scientific progress attributable to the advent of space travel far outstrips the burden to mitigate space debris. Should Kessler Syndrome become our reality, the measurable injury is the cost of reestablishing global communications without the usage of satellite relays. To add insult to injury, the invaluable utility of geospace will cease to exist.¶ A viable alternative would institute a regime of shared global liability which makes consideration of capital investors as well as nonparticipating beneficiaries in the interest of equity. That is, should the inevitable prison for humanity become a reality, the entire global community will be liable to pay an equitable share of the overall cost of recovery efforts.174 The Liability Convention should undergo a similar trifurcation, adding this new scheme to the current strict and absolute liability mechanisms.175 As such, shared global liability will consider the responsibility of nation-states and private entities in isolation.176 This will coerce cooperation among all agencies, nations, and private entities because the equitable share of responsibility will drive collective resolution. ¶ V. CONCLUSION¶ In light of the emerging global sentiments regarding environmental conservation and sustainability, instituting a regime that clearly defines a legal consequence in the event of environmental ruin boasts greater coercive force than non-binding resolutions. 9 This international agreement aligns with the universal value that the international community places on the utility of geospace.177 In essence, it protects geospace by forcing the signatory to face the reality of their negative externalities. It is unlikely that a nation-state exists that does not value space exploration and the benefits attributable.¶ In April of 2019, in the spirit of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), COPUOS adopted an agenda that focused on the long-term sustainability of the space commons, space traffic management, equitable uses of GSO, and the mitigation of space debris.178 Mindful of space’s critical role in attaining many of the SDGs, the Committee put forth guidelines to facilitate capacity building without prejudice to any one nation-states’ economic capabilities. To be sure, the Guidelines for the Long-Term Sustainability of Outer Space Activities are an important step forward, but many delegates reiterated the importance of developing binding instruments, particularly in light of developments in “space resource exploitation, large constellations, and space debris remediation.”179 ¶ Looking forward, research continues to advance the availability of debris mitigation mechanisms, such as the European Space Agency’s newly-commissioned ClearSpace-1 satellite.180 Mission objectives increasingly include end-of-life procedures to place satellites in appropriate orbits to decrease clutter in areas where active satellites operate.181 In the context of private entities, Planetary Resources—originally positioned to become a principle player in the space mining industry—merged with Consensys Space and quickly launched TruSat, a crowd-sourced situational awareness forum that compiles the reports of private citizens to track objects in geospace.182 These developments instill confidence in the international community’s sentiments toward ameliorating this ever-approaching catastrophe. It is with great hope that this trend continues, and COPUOS promulgates binding regulations to ensure the sustainability of geospace for the common heritage of mankind. “But we can never do nothing. That which we have done for thousands of years is also action. It also produces evils.”183
2/12/22
JFM - Outer Space
Tournament: WBFL | Round: 2 | Opponent: Brentwood - AR | Judge: Nicholas Balfe I affirm. Resolved: The appropriation of outer space by private entities is unjust. Framework Because the resolution asks what is just, my value is Justice.
The criterion is minimizing suffering. No coherent theory of justice can deny that suffering is morally bad. Each of us knows from our own experiences that suffering is a moral evil, and that other people experience suffering in the same way we do. Therefore, if we regard everyone’s pain as morally equal, we are obligated to minimize the amount of suffering people experience.
Moreover, maximizing utility is the only way to affirm equal and unconditional human dignity. Cummiskey ’90 - David Cummiskey. Associate Philosophy Professor at Bates College.Kantian Consequentialism. Ethics, Vol. 100, No. 3. 1990. http://www.jstor.org/stable/2381810.
We must not obscure the issue by characterizing this type of case as the sacrifice of individuals for some abstract “social entity.” It is not a question of some persons having to bear the cost for some elusive “overall social good.” Instead, the question is whether some persons must bear the inescapable cost for the sake of other persons. Robert Nozick, for example, argues that “to use a person in this way does not sufficiently respect and take account of the fact that he is a separate person, that his is the only life he has.” But why is this not equally true of all those whom we do not save through our failure to act? By emphasizing solely the one who must bear the cost if we act, we fail to sufficiently respect and take account of the many other separate persons, each with only one life, who will bear the cost of our inaction. In such a situation, what would a conscientious Kantian agent, an agent motivated by the unconditional value of rational beings, choose? A morally good agent recognizes that the basis of all particular duties is the principle that “rational nature exists as an end in itself” (GMM 429). Rational nature as such is the supreme objective end of all conduct. If one truly believes that all rational beings have an equal value, then the rational solution to such a dilemma involves maximally promoting the lives and liberties of as many rational beings as possible (chapter 5). In order to avoid this conclusion, the non-consequentialist Kantian needs to justify agent-centered constraints. As we saw in chapter 1, however, even most Kantian deontologists recognize that agent-centered constraints require a non- value-based rationale. But we have seen that Kant’s normative theory is based on an unconditionally valuable end. How can a concern for the value of rational beings lead to a refusal to sacrifice rational beings even when this would prevent other more extensive losses of rational beings? If the moral law is based on the value of rational beings and their ends, then what is the rationale for prohibiting a moral agent from maximally promoting these two tiers of value? If I sacrifice some for the sake of others, I do not use them arbitrarily, and I do not deny the unconditional value of rational beings. Persons may have “dignity, that is, an unconditional and incomparable worth” that transcends any market value (GMM 436), but persons also have a fundamental equality that dictates that some must sometimes give way for the sake of others (chapters 5 and 7). The concept of the end-in-itself does not support the view that we may never force another to bear some cost in order to benefit others. If one focuses on the equal value of all rational beings, then equal consideration suggests that one may have to sacrifice some to save many.
Contention 1: Space Debris Private companies are cramming satellites into the Earth’s orbit which are quickly becoming defunct pieces of “space junk.” Therese Wood, 20 - ("Who owns our orbit: Just how many satellites are there in space?," World Economic Forum, 10-23-2020, 12-8-2021https:www.weforum.org/agenda/2020/10/visualizing-easrth-satellites-sapce-spacex)AW There are nearly 6,000 satellites circling the Earth, but only 40 are operational. Satellites are a vital part of our infrastructure, helping us to use GPS, access the internet and support studies of the Earth. Out of the 2,666 operational satellites circling the globe in April 2020, 1,007 were for communication services. 446 are used for observing the Earth and 97 for navigation/ GPS purposes. Over half of satellites in space are non-operational. For centuries, humans have looked to space and the stars for answers. The fascination is more than philosophical—it’s coupled with the need to solve problems here on Earth. Today, there are seemingly countless benefits and applications of space technology. Satellites, for instance, are becoming critical for everything from internet connectivity and precision agriculture, to border security and archaeological study. Right now, there are nearly 6,000 satellites circling our tiny planet. About 60 of those are defunct satellites—space junk—and roughly 40 are operational. As highlighted in the chart above, The Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS), determined that 2,666 operational satellites circled the globe in April of 2020. Over the coming decade, it’s estimated by Euroconsult that 990 satellites will be launched every year. This means that by 2028, there could be 15,000 satellites in orbit. Nearly 10,000 satellites will be launched form 2019-2028. Image: Visual Capitalist With SpaceX’s planned Starlink constellation of 12,000 satellites and Amazon’s proposed constellation in the works, the new space race continues its acceleration. Let’s take a closer look at who operates those satellites and how they apply their technology. Technology with a purpose Humans have long used space for navigation. While sailors once relied on the stars, today we use satellites for GPS, navigation, and various other applications. More than half of Earth’s operational satellites are launched for commercial purposes. About 61 of those provide communications, including everything from satellite TV and Internet of Things (IoT) connectivity to global internet. Over 1,000 satellites are for communication purposes. Image: Visual Capitalist Second to communications, 27 of commercial satellites have been launched for Earth Observation (EO) purposes, including environmental monitoring and border security. Commercial satellites, however, can serve multiple purposes. One week, a satellite may be ‘tasked’ to image a contested border. It could later be tasked to monitor the reclamation of a mining site or even the aftermath of a natural disaster. 54 of operational satellites are for commercial use. Image: Visual Capitalist Government and civil purposes make up 21 of all of Earth’s operational satellites, and military purposes come in at 13. Who owns Earth’s orbit? Space operators SpaceX—founded by Elon Musk—is not only a disruptive launch provider for missions to the International Space Station (saving NASA millions). It’s also the largest commercial operator of satellites on the planet. With 358 satellites launched as of April, part of SpaceX’s mission is to boost navigation capabilities and supply the world with space-based internet. While the company operated 22 of the world’s operational satellites as of April, it went on to launch an additional 175 satellites in the span of one month, from August to September 2020 Increasing space debris levels will inevitably set off a chain of collisions. Chelsea MuñOz-Patchen, 19 - ("Regulating the Space Commons: Treating Space Debris as Abandoned Property in Violation of the Outer Space Treaty," University of Chicago, 2019, 12-6-2021, https://cjil.uchicago.edu/publication/regulating-space-commons-treating-space-debris-abandoned-property-violation-outer-space)//AW Debris poses a threat to functioning space objects and astronauts in space, and may cause damage to the earth’s surface upon re-entry.29 Much of the small debris cannot be tracked due to its size and the velocity at which it travels, making it impossible to anticipate and maneuver to avoid collisions.30 To remain in orbit, debris must travel at speeds of up to 17,500 miles per hour.31 At this speed even very small pieces of debris can cause serious damage, threatening a spacecraft and causing expensive damage.32 There are millions of these very small pieces, and thousands of larger ones.33 The small-to-medium pieces of debris “continuously shed fragments like lens caps, booster upper stages, nuts, bolts, paint chips, motor sprays of aluminum particles, glass splinters, waste water, and bits of foil,” and may stay in orbit for decades or even centuries, posing an ongoing risk.34 Debris ten centimeters or larger in diameter creates the likelihood of complete destruction for any functioning satellite with which it collides.35 Large nonfunctional objects remaining in orbit are a collision threat, capable of creating huge amounts of space debris and taking up otherwise useful orbit space.36 This issue is of growing importance as more nations and companies gain the ability to launch satellites and other objects into space.37 From February 2009 through the end of 2010, more than thirty-two collision-avoidance maneuvers were reportedly used to avoid debris by various space agencies and satellite companies, and as of March 2012, the crew of the International Space Station (ISS) had to take shelter three times due to close calls with passing debris.38 These maneuvers require costly fuel usage and place a strain on astronauts.39 Furthermore, the launches of some spacecraft have “been delayed because of the presence of space debris in the planned flight paths.”40 In 2011, Euroconsult, a satellite consultant, projected that there would be “a 51 increase in satellites launched in the next decade over the number launched in the past decade.”41 In addition to satellites, the rise of commercial space tourism will also increase the number of objects launched into space and thus the amount of debris.42 The more objects are sent into space, and the more collisions create cascades of debris, the greater the risk of damage to vital satellites and other devices relied on for “weather forecasting, telecommunications, commerce, and national security.”43 The Space Debris Mitigation Guidelines44 were created by UNCOPUOS with input from the IADC and adopted in 2007.45 The guidelines were developed to address the problem of space debris and were intended to “increase mutual understanding on acceptable activities in space.”46 These guidelines are nonbinding but suggest best practices to implement at the national level when planning for a launch. Many nations have adopted the guidelines to some degree, and some have gone beyond what the guidelines suggest.47 While the guidelines do not address existing debris, they do much to prevent the creation of new debris. The Kessler Syndrome is the biggest concern with space debris. The Kessler Syndrome is a cascade created when debris hits a space object, creating new debris and setting off a chain reaction of collisions that eventually closes off entire orbits.48 The concern is that this cascade will occur when a tipping point is reached at which the natural removal rate cannot keep up with the amount of new debris added.49 At this point a collision could set off a cascade destroying all space objects within the orbit.50 In 2011, The National Research Council predicted that the Kessler Syndrome could happen within ten to twenty years.51 Donald J. Kessler, the astrophysicist and NASA scientist who theorized the Kessler Syndrome in 1978, believes this cascade may be a century away, meaning that there is still time to develop a solution.52 Space debris collisions cascade causing nuclear war, mass starvation, and economic destruction. Les Johnson 13, Deputy Manager for NASA's Advanced Concepts Office at the Marshall Space Flight Center, Co-Investigator for the JAXA T-Rex Space Tether Experiment and PI of NASA's ProSEDS Experiment, Master's Degree in Physics from Vanderbilt University, Popular Science Writer, and NASA Technologist, Frequent Contributor to the Journal of the British Interplanetary Sodety and Member of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, National Space Society, the World Future Society, and MENSA, Sky Alert!: When Satellites Fail, p. 9-12 language modified Whatever the initial cause, the result may be the same. A satellite destroyed in orbit will break apart into thousands of pieces, each traveling at over 8 km/sec. This virtual shotgun blast, with pellets traveling 20 times faster than a bullet, will quickly spread out, with each pellet now following its own orbit around the Earth. With over 300,000 other pieces of junk already there, the tipping point is crossed and a runaway series of collisions begins. A few orbits later, two of the new debris pieces strike other satellites, causing them to explode into thousands more pieces of debris. The rate of collisions increases, now with more spacecraft being destroyed. Called the "Kessler Effect", after the NASA scientist who first warned of its dangers, these debris objects, now numbering in the millions, cascade around the Earth, destroying every satellite in low Earth orbit. Without an atmosphere to slow them down, thus allowing debris pieces to bum up, most debris (perhaps numbering in the millions) will remain in space for hundreds or thousands of years. Any new satellite will be threatened by destruction as soon as it enters space, effectively rendering many Earth orbits unusable. But what about us on the ground? How will this affect us? Imagine a world that suddenly loses all of its space technology. If you are like most people, then you would probably have a few fleeting thoughts about the Apollo-era missions to the Moon, perhaps a vision of the Space Shuttle launching astronauts into space for a visit to the International Space Station (ISS), or you might fondly recall the "wow" images taken by the orbiting Hubble Space Telescope. In short, you would know that things important to science would be lost, but you would likely not assume that their loss would have any impact on your daily life. Now imagine a world that suddenly loses network and cable television, accurate weather forecasts, Global Positioning System (GPS) navigation, some cellular phone networks, on-time delivery of food and medical supplies via truck and train to stores and hospitals in virtually every community in America, as well as science useful in monitoring such things as climate change and agricultural sustainability. Add to this the disabling crippling of the US military who now depend upon spy satellites, space-based communications systems, and GPS to know where their troops and supplies are located at all times and anywhere in the world. The result is a nightmarish world, one step away from nuclear war, economic disaster, and potential mass starvation. This is the world in which we are now perilously close to living. Space satellites now touch our lives in many ways. And, unfortunately, these satellites are extremely vulnerable to risks arising from a half-century of carelessness regarding protecting the space environment around the Earth as well as from potential adversaries such as China, North Korea, and Iran. No government policy has put us at risk. It has not been the result of a conspiracy. No, we are dependent upon them simply because they offer capabilities that are simply unavailable any other way. Individuals, corporations, and governments found ways to use the unique environment of space to provide services, make money, and better defend the country. In fact, only a few space visionaries and futurists could have foreseen where the advent of rocketry and space technology would take us a mere 50 years since those first satellites orbited the Earth. It was the slow progression of capability followed by dependence that puts us at risk. The exploration and use of space began in 1957 with the launch of Sputnik 1 by the Soviet Union. The United States soon followed with Explorer 1. Since then, the nations of the world have launched over 8,000 spacecraft. Of these, several hundred are still providing information and services to the global economy and the world's governments. Over time, nations, corporations, and individuals have grown accustomed to the services these spacecraft provide and many are dependent upon them. Commercial aviation, shipping, emergency services, vehicle fleet tracking, financial transactions, and agriculture are areas of the economy that are increasingly reliant on space. Telestar 1, launched into space in the year of my birth, 1962, relayed the world's first live transatlantic news feed and showed that space satellites can be used to relay television signals, telephone calls, and data. The modern telecommunications age was born. We've come a long way since Telstar; most television networks now distribute most, if not ali, of their programming via satellite. Cable television signals are received by local providers from satellite relays before being sent to our homes and businesses using cables. With 65 of US households relying on cable television and a growing percentage using satellite dishes to receive signals from direct-to-home satellite television providers, a large number of people would be cut off from vital information in an emergency should these satellites be destroyed. And communications satellites relay more than television signals. They serve as hosts to corporate video conferences and convey business, banking, and other commercial information to and from all areas of the planet. The first successful weather satellite was TIROS. Launched in 1960, TIROS operated for only 78 days but it served as the precursor for today's much more long-lived weather satellites, which provide continuous monitoring of weather conditions around the world. Without them, providing accurate weather forecasts for virtually any place on the globe more than a day in advance would be nearly impossible. Figure !.1 shows a satellite image of Hurricane Ivan approaching the Alabama Gulf coast in 2004. Without this type of information, evacuation warnings would have to be given more generally, resulting in needless evacuations and lost economic activity (from areas that avoid landfall) and potentially increasing loss of life in areas that may be unexpectedly hit. The formerly top-secret Corona spy satellites began operation in 1959 and provided critical information about the Soviet Union's military and industrial capabilities to a nervous West in a time of unprecedented paranoia and nuclear risk. With these satellites, US military planners were able to understand and assess the real military threat posed by the Soviet Union. They used information provided by spy satellites to help avert potential military confrontations on numerous occasions. Conversely, the Soviet Union's spy satellites were able to observe the United States and its allies, with similar results. It is nearly impossible to move an army and hide it from multiple eyes in the sky. Satellite information is critical to all aspects of US intelligence and military planning. Spy satellites are used to monitor compliance with international arms treaties and to assess the military activities of countries such as China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea. Figure 1.2 shows the capability of modem unclassified space-based imaging. The capability of the classified systems is presumed to be significantly better, providing much more detail. Losing these satellites would place global militaries on high alert and have them operating, literally, in the blind. Our military would suddenly become vulnerable in other areas as well. GPS, a network of 24-32 satellites in medium-Earth orbit, was developed to provide precise position information to the military, and it is now in common use by individuals and industry. The network, which became fully operational in 1993, allows our armed forces to know their exact locations anywhere in the world. It is used to guide bombs to their targets with unprecedented accuracy, requiring that only one bomb be used to destroy a target that would have previously required perhaps hundreds of bombs to destroy in the pre-GPS world (which, incidentally, has resulted in us reducing our stockpile of non-GPS-guided munitions dramatically). It allows soldiers to navigate in the dark or in adverse weather or sandstorms. Without GPS, our military advantage over potential adversaries would be dramatically reduced or eliminated. Instead of allowing for the private appropriation of space, states must work together to prevent space debris through enacting policies that prevent overcrowding orbits. Silverstein and Panda ‘3/9 - Benjamin Silverstein research analyst for the Space Project at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. MA, International Relations, Syracuse University Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs BA, International Affairs, George Washington University and Ankit Panda Stanton Senior Fellow in the Nuclear Policy Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. AB, Princeton University, “Space Is a Great Commons. It’s Time to Treat It as Such.” Carnegie Endowment for International Peace (Web). March 9, 2021. Accessed Dec. 13, 2021. https://carnegieendowment.org/2021/03/09/space-is-great-commons.-it-s-time-to-treat-it-as-such-pub-84018 AT The failure to manage Earth orbits as a commons undermines safety and predictability, exposing space operators to growing risks such as collisions with other satellites and debris. The long-standing debris problem has been building for decades and demands an international solution.¶ Competing states need to coalesce behind a commons-based understanding of Earth orbits to set the table for a governance system to organize space traffic and address rampant debris. New leadership in the United States can spur progress on space governance by affirming that Earth orbits are a great commons. So far, President Joe Biden and his administration have focused on major space projects, but a relatively simple policy declaration that frames Earth orbits as a great commons can support efforts to negotiate space governance models for issues like debris mitigation and remediation. The Biden administration can set the stage to pursue broad space policy goals by establishing a consensus among states, particularly those with the most invested in Earth orbits, that space is a great commons.¶ THE PRESSING NEED FOR SPACE GOVERNANCE¶ The Earth orbits that provide the majority of benefits to states and commercial ventures represent only a tiny fraction of outer space as a whole. Competition for the limited volume of these Earth orbits is especially fierce since two satellites cannot be in the same place at the same time and not all orbits are equally useful for all missions. The number of objects residing in Earth orbits is now at an all-time high, with most new objects introduced into orbits at altitudes of between 400 and 700 kilometers above sea level. Millions of pieces of debris in Earth orbits pose a threat to continuing space operations. For instance, the final U.S. space shuttle missions faced 1-in-300 odds of losing a space vehicle or crew member to orbital debris or micrometeoroid impacts.¶ Collisions with fragments of orbital litter as small as a few millimeters across can ruin satellites and end missions. Current technologies cannot track all of these tiny pieces of debris, leaving space assets at the mercy of undetectable, untraceable, and unpredictable pieces of space junk. Some researchers have determined that the debris population in low Earth orbit is already self-sustaining, meaning that collisions between space objects will produce debris more rapidly than natural forces, like atmospheric drag, can remove it from orbit.¶ States—namely the United States, Russia, China, and India—have exacerbated this debris accumulation trend by testing kinetic anti-satellite capabilities or otherwise purposefully fragmenting their satellites in orbit. These states, along with the rest of the multilateral disarmament community, are currently at an impasse on establishing future space governance mechanisms that can address the debris issue. A portion of this impasse may be attributable to disparate views of the nature of outer space in the international context. Establishing a clear view among negotiating parties that Earth orbits should be treated as a great commons would establish a basis for future agreements that reduce debris-related risks.¶ Beyond debris-generating, kinetic anti-satellite weapons tests, revolutionary operating concepts challenge existing space traffic management practices. For instance, commercial ventures are planning networks of thousands of satellites to provide low-latency connectivity on Earth and deploying them by the dozens. States are following this trend. Some are considering transitioning away from using single (or few) exquisite assets in higher orbits and toward using many satellites in low Earth orbits. These new operational concepts could lead to an increase in collision risks.¶ Without new governance agreements, problems related to debris, heavy orbital traffic, and harmful interference will only intensify. Debris in higher orbits can persist for a century or more. The costs of adapting to increasingly polluted orbits would be immense, and the opportunity costs would be even higher. For instance, all else being equal, hardening satellites against collisions increases their mass and volume, in turn raising launch costs per satellite. These costs, rooted in a failure to govern space as a commons, will be borne by all space actors, including emerging states and commercial entities.¶ EXISTING FORMS OF SPACE GOVERNANCE¶ A well-designed governance system, founded on a widespread understanding of Earth orbits as a great commons, could temper these risks. Currently, space is not wholly unregulated, but existing regulations are limited both in scope and implementation. Many operators pledge to follow national regulations and international guidelines, but decentralized accountability mechanisms limit enforcement. These guidelines also do not cover the full range of potentially risky behaviors in space. For example, while some space operators can maneuver satellites to avoid collisions, there are no compulsory rules or standards on who has the right of way.¶ At the interstate level, seminal multilateral agreements provide some more narrow guidance on what is and is not acceptable in space. Most famously, the Outer Space Treaty affirms that outer space “shall be free for exploration and use by all states without discrimination of any kind” and that “there shall be free access to all areas of celestial bodies.” Similar concepts of Earth orbits being a great commons arise in subsequent international texts. Agreements like the Liability Convention impose fault-based liability for debris-related collisions in space, but it is difficult to prove fault in this regime in part because satellite owners and operators have yet to codify a standard of care in space, and thus the regime does not clearly disincentivize debris creation in orbit. Other rules of behavior in Earth orbits have been more successful in reducing harmful interference between satellite operations, but even these efforts are limited in scope.¶ States have acceded to supranational regulations of the most limited (and thus most valuable) Earth orbits. The International Telecommunication Union (ITU) coordinates, but does not authorize, satellite deployments and operations in geosynchronous orbits and manages radiofrequency spectrum assignments in other regions of space to reduce interference between satellites. These coordination activities are underpinned by the ITU’s constitution, which reminds states “that radio frequencies and any associate orbits . . . are limited natural resources,” indicating a commons-based approach to governing the radiofrequency spectrum. However, the union’s processes are still adapting to new operational realities in low Earth orbit, and these rules were never designed to address issues like debris.
Contention 2: inequality The private appropriation of space perpetuates inequality on Earth and in space. Mccormick 21 Ted McCormick writes about the history of science, empire, and economic thought. He has a Ph.D. in history from Columbia University and teaches at Concordia University in Montreal. “The billionaire space race reflects a colonial mindset that fails to imagine a different world”. 8-15-2021. The Conversation. https://theconversation.com/the-billionaire-space-race-reflects-a-colonial-mindset-that-fails-to-imagine-a-different-world-165235. Accessed 12-15-2021; marlborough JH It was a time of political uncertainty, cultural conflict and social change. Private ventures exploited technological advances and natural resources, generating unprecedented fortunes while wreaking havoc on local communities and environments. The working poor crowded cities, spurring property-holders to develop increased surveillance and incarceration regimes. Rural areas lay desolate, buildings vacant, churches empty — the stuff of moralistic elegies. ¶Epidemics raged, forcing quarantines in the ports and lockdowns in the streets. Mortality data was the stuff of weekly news and commentary. ¶Depending on the perspective, mobility — chosen or compelled — was either the cause or the consequence of general disorder. Uncontrolled mobility was associated with political instability, moral degeneracy and social breakdown. However, one form of planned mobility promised to solve these problems: colonization. ¶Europe and its former empires have changed a lot since the 17th century. But the persistence of colonialism as a supposed panacea suggests we are not as far from the early modern period as we think. ¶Colonial promise of limitless growth ¶Seventeenth-century colonial schemes involved plantations around the Atlantic, and motivations that now sound archaic. Advocates of expansion such as the English writer Richard Hakluyt, whose Discourse of Western Planting (1584) outlined the benefits of empire for Queen Elizabeth: the colonization of the New World would prevent Spanish Catholic hegemony and provide a chance to claim Indigenous souls for Protestantism. ¶But a key promise was the economic and social renewal of the mother country through new commodities, trades and territory. Above all, planned mobility would cure the ills of apparent overpopulation. Sending the poor overseas to cut timber, mine gold or farm cane would, according to Hakluyt, turn the “multitudes of loiterers and idle vagabonds” that “swarm(ed)” England’s streets and “pestered and stuffed” its prisons into industrious workers, providing raw materials and a reason to multiply. Colonization would fuel limitless growth. ¶As English plantations took shape in Ulster, Virginia, New England and the Caribbean, “projectors” — individuals (nearly always men) who promised to use new kinds of knowledge to radically and profitably transform society — tied mobility to new sciences and technologies. They were inspired as much by English philosopher Francis Bacon’s vision of a tech-centred state in The New Atlantis as by his advocacy of observation and experiment. ¶Discovery and invention ¶The English agriculturalist Gabriel Plattes cautioned in 1639 that “the finding of new worlds is not like to be a perpetual trade.” But many more saw a supposedly vacant America as an invitation to transplant people, plants and machinery. ¶The inventor Cressy Dymock (from Lincolnshire, where fen-drainage schemes were turning wetlands dry) sought support for a “perpetual motion engine” that would plough fields in England, clear forest in Virginia and drive sugar mills in Barbados. Dymock identified private profit and the public good by speeding plantation and replacing costly draught animals with cheaper enslaved labour. Projects across the empire would employ the idle, create “elbow-room,” heal “unnatural divisions” and make England “the garden of the world.” ¶Extraterrestrial exploration ¶Today, the moon and Mars are in projectors’ sights. And the promises billionaires Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos make for colonization are similar in ambition to those of four centuries ago. ¶As Bezos told an audience at the International Space Development Conference in 2018: “We will have to leave this planet, and we’re going to leave it, and it’s going to make this planet better.” Bezos traces his thinking to Princeton physicist Gerald O’Neill, whose 1974 article “The Colonization of Space” (and 1977 book, The High Frontier) presented orbiting settlements as solutions to nearly every major problem facing the Earth. Bezos echoes O’Neill’s proposal to move heavy industry — and industrial labour — off the planet, rezoning Earth as a mostly residential, green space. A garden, as it were. ¶Musk’s plans for Mars are at once more cynical and more grandiose, in timeline and technical requirements if not in ultimate extent. They center on the dubious possibility of “terraforming” Mars using resources and technologies that don’t yet exist. ¶Musk planned to send the first humans to Mars in 2024, and by 2030, he envisioned breaking ground on a city, launching as many as 100,000 voyages from Earth to Mars within a century. ¶As of 2020, the timeline had been pushed back slightly, in part because terraforming may require bombarding Mars with 10,000 nuclear missiles to start. But the vision – a Mars of thriving crops, pizza joints and “entrepreneurial opportunities,” preserving life and paying dividends while Earth becomes increasingly uninhabitable — remains. Like the colonial company-states of the 17th and 18th centuries, Musk’s SpaceX leans heavily on government backing but will make its own laws on its newly settled planet. ¶A failure of the imagination ¶The techno-utopian visions of Musk and Bezos betray some of the same assumptions as their early modern forebears. They offer colonialism as a panacea for complex social, political and economic ills, rather than attempting to work towards a better world within the constraints of our environment. ¶And rather than facing the palpably devastating consequences of an ideology of limitless growth on our planet, they seek to export it, unaltered, into space. They imagine themselves capable of creating liveable environments where none exist. ¶But for all their futuristic imagery, they have failed to imagine a different world. And they have ignored the history of colonialism on this one. Empire never recreated Eden, but it did fuel centuries of growth based on expropriation, enslavement and environmental transformation in defiance of all limits. We are struggling with these consequences today. Private space colonization would destroy space’s scientific value and increase inequality on Earth – Spencer ‘17 Spencer, Keith A. senior editor at Salon “Keep the Red Planet Red.” Jacobin, 2 May 2017, https://www.jacobinmag.com/2017/02/mars-elon-musk-space-exploration-nasa-colonization. Accesserd 12/15/2021 marlborough JH As the Western liberal order continues to unravel, can you really blame anyone who wants to get off this planet? Since space travel became technologically feasible in the twentieth century, many thinkers — from Arthur C. Clarke to Buckminster Fuller — envisioned the human colonization of other planets as all but inevitable. “Man will not always stay on Earth,” wrote Soviet rocket scientist Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, “the pursuit of light and space will lead him to penetrate the bounds of the atmosphere, timidly at first, but in the end to conquer the whole of solar space.” In their heydays, both the American and Soviet space programs funded research into Mars colonization, viewing it as the next logical step for humanity. In the past two decades however, people have started to pin their hopes for intergalactic travel on private groups instead of public agencies. While President Obama was privatizing much of the American space program, a flurry of ventures released competing proposals to visit and/or colonize the red planet. These schemes’ feasibility and harebrained-ness vary: the Mars Foundation, run by multimillionaire former investor Dennis Tito, is soliciting private donations to send a couple on a flyby of the red planet. Mars One, a Dutch nonprofit, wants to fund a permanent human colony through “merchandise sales, ads on video content, brand partnerships, speaking engagements, broadcasting rights, intellectual property rights, games and apps, and events.” The most famous — and perhaps most likely to succeed — comes from entrepreneur and engineer Elon Musk, the multibillionaire CEO of SpaceX and Tesla Motors. Musk’s articulation of his Mars mission reveals not only what’s wrong with how we think about extraterrestrial colonies and resources, but also how little faith most people have in democracy here on Earth. Interplanetary Technocracy Given his reputation as an engineering genius, Musk’s vision for colonization seems the most plausible of the private missions to Mars. After all, SpaceX, which he admitted to founding specifically to colonize the solar system, became the first private company to successfully launch a rocket into orbit in 2008. In September 2016, at the International Astronautical Congress in Guadalajara, Musk laid out a detailed vision for his colonization project, including financial estimates, engineering specs for the reusable “Interplanetary Transit System,” and the price of a passenger ticket — around $200,000. Musk’s presentation even included a snazzy computer-animated video of the transit system in action and details about the long trip there, which would offer colonists games, restaurants, and entertainment. “It’ll be, like, really fun to go . . . You’re gonna have a great time,” Musk said. His approach to colonizing Mars comes straight out of Silicon Valley’s playbook: Musk has taken a “problem” — how to colonize Mars — and hacked a feasible “solution” that is one part engineering, one part moxie. Just add investors and we’ll be building cities on the red planet in no time. Though vague, Musk reiterated that his vision would need funding. His talk of “tickets” implies that colonists will likely pay for much of the mission. Unlike a space agency’s astronaut selection process, then, his Mars mission will be limited to those who can afford it. In that sense, Musk’s colonization plan looks a lot like joining a country club or gated community — or any other model of private access to space for those who can afford it. Musk’s proposal — heavy on the engineering and business details, light on the philosophical or political implications of colonization — epitomizes technocracy. He doesn’t seem interested in thinking through Mars’s policy or governance, the labor necessitated by building a civilization from scratch, or the problems that will arise from sending rich tourists to self-manage in a place with scant resources demanding communal organization and thinking. The True Value of Mars For some, sending a few rich folks off to Mars seems like a great idea. After all, it’s hardly an Eden waiting to be destroyed. Unlike previous colonial projects, there are no natives to exploit; no wildlife to hunt to extinction; no ecosystem to radically alter; no fossil fuels to extract; and no climate in danger of destruction from carbon emission. Mars’s atmosphere is already 96 percent carbon dioxide! Why not let Musk and his millionaire buddies take off for a few rounds of golf on the frosted dunes? If they get stuck there, all the better. From a humanistic perspective, however, even a lifeless world like Mars holds incredible scientific, educational, and environmental value. To let private interests colonize, terraform, or populate it without considering this collective value would be short-sighted. Indeed, when it comes to colonization, we should hope humanity has learned from its past mistakes and is ready to set upon a more democratic process. Perhaps Earth can agree to hold a public discussion before we set about strip-mining Mars’s glorious dunes, vistas, and mountains, lest the tallest mountain in the solar system become a trash heap like Everest. Government space agencies have gone to great lengths to keep the scientific and social benefits of publicly funded exploration intact. This is why NASA makes all its mission data public, and also why it insists on sterilizing space probes to avoid contaminating other worlds with cellular life from Earth — one stray terrestrial extremophile could confuse the search for microbial life off-planet. The agency, recognizing its work’s educational value, has sent elementary school children’s experiments into space and hosted public naming competitions for geographic features. Likewise, NASA thinks beyond the engineering challenges: they also consider space travel’s psychological and biological effects, surely an important field of study in anticipation of the long space flights required for interplanetary travel. Private industry will be unlikely to follow these collective practices, as its desire for profit or for exclusive property rights — physical and intellectual — will outweigh any public benefit. I Want to Believe The public and media reaction to Musk’s presentation — more than the presentation itself —reflects the current state of our politics. “The mood at the conference was almost as giddy as a rock concert or the launch of a new Apple product, with people lining up for Mr. Musk’s presentation a couple of hours in advance,” wrote Kenneth Chang in the New York Times, who devoted 1,200 words to it. “Elon Musk finally told the world his vision for colonizing Mars, and it turned out to be one hell of a show,” exclaimed Loren Grush in a video article for the Verge. Grush noted that Musk drew an “insane crowd,” describing how “people actually stampeded into the hall where his lecture was in order to get a good seat.” He began in lofty tones: “I want to . . . make Mars seem possible. Make it seem as though it is something we can do in our lifetimes.” This statement implied that we needed some great technological leap forward before embarking on this adventure, but, in fact, travel to Mars has been possible for well over half a century. Given the political will, we can go right now. The subtext of Musk’s message, then, was that our democratic governments will never execute big science and engineering projects. People should trust in the private vision for colonization and space travel instead. In Earth politics, this lack of faith in democratic institutions is nothing new. This idea’s policy implications — that collectively we can’t have big public projects or any sort of real democratic decision-making, and must cede our whims to privately funded foundations and technocratic “experts” — have already taken hold of most countries. As far as I could find, none of the magazines that covered Musk’s announcement mentioned this metatheme, namely, that a public and democratically organized colonization of Mars will never happen. No one questioned the premise that we must let billionaires decide how and when to go to Mars — or that it is the only possible way to get there. Musk’s tech-industry social circle benefits from branding technology as synonymous with progress. As a result, many tech employees work long hours to achieve this invisible notion of progress, but their work just fattens their employer’s profit margins. One can imagine the grueling labor required to make an inhospitable planet habitable. On Mars, employees would exhaust themselves for a corporation under the guise of “survival.” After all, regardless of whether a foundation or a corporation spearheads the colonization effort, they will be incentivized, even forty million miles away, to squeeze as much labor out of their workers at the lowest cost. Further, the question of who is allowed to go to Mars will become as important as the question of who isn’t. If, as Musk proposes, the trip requires a “ticket” — which, as he claims, will eventually drop to only $100,000 — it seems probable that those who can afford to go will mostly resemble, ethnically and politically, Earth’s ruling class. Imagine: the red planet turned racist country club. These questions matter more than how to engineer a rocket or how to build greenhouses or how to harvest water. In fact, state-funded research has already largely solved these technical problems — or, at the least, led to numerous creative ideas about making a Mars colony self-sufficient. The Martian Commons Any colonization effort on Mars — even if only a small number of humans go — will present huge political challenges in terms of the labor and personal rights of its citizens. To wit: what kinds of reproductive restrictions will exist on a planet of scarce resources? How will colonists ration food and activity? What about personal privacy? If Martian citizens are working in a life-or-death situation, can the workers strike? At least in its early years, Mars would have a scarcity economy — in other words, resources would likely have to be rationed in order for the collective to survive. A private colony would be unlikely to make any kind of egalitarian guarantee — after all, if there’s a ticket price, there will certainly be a Martian service economy pampering the space tourists. Inequalities will emerge in terms of labor, housing, food, and access to other resources. In fact, we already know what a privatized Mars might resemble: Mount Everest. At higher elevations, it becomes a barren, lifeless, cold world, where climbers require oxygen tanks to survive. The cost of ascending is as steep as the mountain: between $30,000 to $100,000. Climbers’ journeys are only made possible by their Sherpas’ exploited labor, many of whom die in accidents and are paid as little as $5,000 a year by Western companies. Now imagine this situation replicated forty million miles off, on a lifeless planet, where two-way Earth communication takes almost an hour, and you can envision how dire things could get. A New Hope Musk spent nearly an hour of his speech detailing the technological aspects of Mars travel: the landers, the rockets, the fuel costs, and so on. Musk takes a technology-first approach and rarely mentions the numerous social aspects. His speech and its collective reactions attest to a naïve, John Galt fantasy about how policy and engineering come to pass: through the mind of the lone genius, who alone holds the key to humanity’s future. We saw the same fantasy at work last week when, in the wake of President Trump’s executive order banning emigration from seven majority-Muslim countries, Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz announced his plan to hire ten thousand refugees and was immediately hailed as a liberal hero. The message was clear: we can’t hope to help refugees ourselves, or on a democratic basis — we must rely on the whims of the rich to push forward progressive causes. Alas, the reaction to Musk’s speech also demonstrates how public sentiment has changed: collectively, we no longer believe in public space exploration. Even if we know state agencies can launch a Mars mission, few think it will happen. This doesn’t bode well for how we think of the commons. Are rich people and their foundations the only ones who can save us? The plethora of private Mars proposals reflects a lack of faith in democracy on Earth, in particular in our democratic influence over the directions science and engineering research take. And while faith in public institutions sits at an all-time low, we seem more than happy to hear what the rich can make possible and to believe their promises. Musk is just one of many technocrats who think of a Mars voyage as a technological problem. Not only is it not a technological problem, it’s not even a problem. Colonization of Mars should be seen as a complex social and political policy, with so much potential to create inequality and oppression that it cannot rationally be undertaken without political consensus and a stratagem for maintaining democracy and egalitarianism. We are ready to colonize Mars, and have been for half a century. Doing so without a democratic plan will present unimaginable dangers for the planet and colonists alike. As socialists, our rallying cry should be this: Keep the red planet red! Space resources must be distributed democratically—this requires challenging private control of outer space Levine 15 Nick Levine, MPhil candidate in history of science at the University of Cambridge, 3-21-2015, "Democratize the Universe," Jacobin, https://jacobinmag.com/2015/03/space-industry-extraction-levine The privatization of the Milky Way has begun. Last summer, the bipartisan ASTEROIDS Act was introduced in Congress. The legislation’s aim is to grant US corporations property rights over any natural resources — like the platinum-group metals used in electronics — that they extract from asteroids. The bill took advantage of an ambiguity in the United Nations’ 1967 Outer Space Treaty. That agreement forbade nations and private organizations from claiming territory on celestial bodies, but was unclear about whether the exploitation of their natural resources would be allowed, and if so, on what terms. The legal framework governing the economic development of outer space will have enormous effects on the distribution of wealth and income in the Milky Way and beyond. We could fight for a galactic democracy, where the proceeds of the space economy are distributed widely. Or we could accept the trickle-down astronomics anticipated by the ASTEROIDS Act, which would allow for the concentration of vast amounts of economic and political power in the hands of a few corporations and the most technologically developed nations. Given the pressing problems of inequality and climate change on Earth, the US left has been understandably uninterested in or largely dismissive of any space pursuits. For this reason, it remains unprepared to organize around extraterrestrial economic justice. The Left’s rejection of space has effectively ceded the celestial commons to the business interests who would literally universalize laissez-faire. Organizing around extraterrestrial politics wasn’t always treated as an escapist distraction. In the 1970s, fighting for a celestial commons was a pillar of developing countries’ struggle to create a more equitable economic order. Starting in the 1960s, a coalition of underdeveloped nations, many recently decolonized, asserted their strength in numbers in the United Nations by forming a caucus known as the Group of 77. In the early 1970s, this bloc announced its intention to establish a “new international economic order,” which found its expression in a series of UN treaties governing international regions, like sea beds and outer space, that they hoped would spread the economic benefits of the commons more equitably, with special attention to less developed nations. For these countries — as well as for the nervous US business interests that opposed them — their plan to “socialize the moon,” as some put it at the time, was the first step toward a more egalitarian distribution of wealth and power in human society. It will be years before the industrialization of outer space is economically viable, if it ever is. But the legal framework that would shape that transition is being worked out now. The ASTEROIDS Act was submitted on behalf of those who would benefit most from a laissez-faire extraterrestrial system. If we leave the discussion about celestial property rights to the business interests that monopolize it now, any dream of economic democracy in outer space will go the way of jetpacks, flying cars, and the fifteen-hour workweek. As Below, So Above Left critics of space proposals make the same mistakes as the most techno-utopian starry-eyed industrialists. From the point of view of the latter, celestial development will provide ultimate salvation to the human race by making us a multi-planetary species; the former see outer space as an infinite void essentially antagonistic to human life, interest in which is only orchestrated for cynical political ends. Each side misconceives extraterrestrial pursuits as qualitatively different from economic activities on Earth. Venturing into space may be a greater technical challenge; it may cost more, be more dangerous, or be a mistaken use of resources. But to understand these prospects in existential terms rather than as a new episode in the familiar history of industrial development and resource extraction — with all the political-strategic dangers and organizing opportunities that come with them — is to be blinded by the space romanticism that is a peculiar vestige of Cold War geopolitics. Whether and how we should go to space are not profound philosophical questions, at least not primarily. What’s at stake is not just the “stature of man,” as Hannah Arendt put it, but a political-economic struggle over the future of the celestial commons, which could result in a dramatic intensification of inequality — or a small step for humankind toward a more egalitarian state of affairs on our current planet. Undoubtedly, there are good reasons to be skeptical about going to space. Some have argued that it shifts attention away from solving the difficult problems of economic and environmental justice on Earth — think of Gil Scott-Heron’s spoken-word poem “Whitey on the Moon,” which juxtaposes the deprivation of the American underclass with the vast resources diverted to space. Scott-Heron’s critique is powerful, but it’s important to remember that he was denouncing an unjust economic system. He wasn’t issuing a timeless condemnation of space pursuits as such. Whether the aims of providing for all and developing outer space are mutually exclusive depends on the political forces on the ground. We might also question whether mining asteroids would be detrimental to our current planet’s environment in the medium term. If we don’t find a renewable way to blast off into outer space, the exploitation of these resources could lead to an intensification of, not a move away from, the fossil-fuel economy. If the environmental impact of space mining turns out to be large, it would be analogous to fracking — a technological development that gives us access to new resources, but with devastating ecological side effects — and ought to be opposed on similar grounds. On the other hand, some speculate that mining the Moon’s Helium-3 reserves, for example, could provide an abundant source of clean energy. The terrestrial environmental impact of space activity remains an open question that must be explored before we stake our hopes on the economic development of outer space. Philosophers have suggested that we might have ethical duties to preserve the “natural” states of celestial bodies. Others fear that our activities might unknowingly wipe out alien microbial life. We should remain sensitive to the aesthetic and cultural value of outer space, as well as the potential for extinction and the exhaustion of resources misleadingly proclaimed to be limitless. But if the Left rejects space on these grounds we abandon its fate to the will of private interests. These concerns shouldn’t cause us to write off space altogether — rather, they should motivate us even more to fight for the careful, democratic use of celestial resources for the benefit of all. There is also reason to be cautiously optimistic about extending economic activity to outer space. For one, the resources there — whether platinum-group metals useful in electronics, or fuels that could be central to the semi-independent functioning of an outer space economy — have the potential to raise our standards of living. Imagine, a superabundance of asteroid metals that are scarce on Earth, like platinum, driving the sort of automation that could expand output and reduce the need to work. Of course, there’s nothing inevitable about the benefits of productivity gains being distributed widely, as we’ve seen in the United States over the past forty years. This is a problem not limited to space, and the myth of the “final frontier” must not distract us from the already existing problems of wealth and income distribution on Earth. While the industrialization of the solar system isn’t a panacea for all economic ills, it does offer a significant organizing opportunity, since it will force a confrontation over the future of the vast celestial commons. The democratic possibilities of such a struggle have been recognized before: one conservative American citizens’ group in the 1970s called a progressive UN space treaty a “vital component of Third World demands for massive redistribution of wealth so as ultimately to equate the economic positions of the two hemispheres.” Many in the 1970s identified the egalitarian potential in the development of outer space, and the Left must not overlook it today. Back to the Future One of the Group of 77’s major goals was to apply some of the redistributive functions of the welfare state on a global scale. In 1974, that coalition issued a “Declaration on the Establishment of a New International Economic Order,” which called for a fairer system of global trade and resource distribution, one that could alleviate historical inequality. One of the battlegrounds for the Group of 77 was the negotiation over extraterrestrial property rights. The Outer Space Treaty of 1967, signed by over ninety countries in the heat of the first sprint to the moon, rejected the notion that celestial bodies fell under the legal principle of res nullius — meaning that outer space was empty territory that could be claimed for a nation through occupation. It forbade the “national appropriation by claim of sovereignty, by means of use or occupation, or by any other means” of outer space. But the treaty was not just restrictive. It also had a positive requirement for extraterrestrial conduct: “The exploration and use of outer space,” it declared, “shall be carried out for the benefit and in the interests of all countries, irrespective of their degree of economic or scientific development, and shall be the province of all mankind.” However, nobody knew what this would mean in practice: was it a call for egalitarian economics, or an empty proclamation of liberal benevolence? Complicating matters, it was unclear whether the extraction and sale of natural resources from outer space fell under the category of “appropriation,” which had been forbidden. And what exactly was this benefit to all countries that our outer space pursuits were supposed to bring? How would its distribution be enforced? Which interpretation would win out was more a question of political power than of esoteric legal maneuvers. The Group of 77 took an activist approach to these issues, proposing amendments to the Outer Space Treaty regime that would spread the economic benefits of the celestial commons to less developed countries that did not have the resources to get to space, let alone mine it. Thus in 1970, the Argentine delegate to the UN Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space proposed to legally designate outer space and its resources “the common heritage of mankind.” First applied in negotiations over maritime law a few years earlier, the “common heritage” concept was intended to give legal grounding to the peaceful international governance of the commons. As an alternative to the laissez-faire approach advocated by many private interests, the “common heritage” principle also provided a legal framework for the democratic distribution of revenues derived from the international commons. In 1973, the Indian delegation to the Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space tried to put this idea into celestial practice, proposing an amendment to the Outer Space Treaty that called for equitable sharing of space benefits, particularly with developing countries.
1/8/22
JFM - Outer Space
Tournament: WBFL | Round: 4 | Opponent: Loyola - CW | Judge: Riya Thakre I affirm. Resolved: The appropriation of outer space by private entities is unjust. Framework Because the resolution asks what is just, my value is Justice.
The criterion is minimizing suffering. No coherent theory of justice can deny that suffering is morally bad. Each of us knows from our own experiences that suffering is a moral evil, and that other people experience suffering in the same way we do. Therefore, if we regard everyone’s pain as morally equal, we are obligated to minimize the amount of suffering people experience.
Moreover, maximizing utility is the only way to affirm equal and unconditional human dignity. Cummiskey ’90 - David Cummiskey. Associate Philosophy Professor at Bates College.Kantian Consequentialism. Ethics, Vol. 100, No. 3. 1990. http://www.jstor.org/stable/2381810.
We must not obscure the issue by characterizing this type of case as the sacrifice of individuals for some abstract “social entity.” It is not a question of some persons having to bear the cost for some elusive “overall social good.” Instead, the question is whether some persons must bear the inescapable cost for the sake of other persons. Robert Nozick, for example, argues that “to use a person in this way does not sufficiently respect and take account of the fact that he is a separate person, that his is the only life he has.” But why is this not equally true of all those whom we do not save through our failure to act? By emphasizing solely the one who must bear the cost if we act, we fail to sufficiently respect and take account of the many other separate persons, each with only one life, who will bear the cost of our inaction. In such a situation, what would a conscientious Kantian agent, an agent motivated by the unconditional value of rational beings, choose? A morally good agent recognizes that the basis of all particular duties is the principle that “rational nature exists as an end in itself” (GMM 429). Rational nature as such is the supreme objective end of all conduct. If one truly believes that all rational beings have an equal value, then the rational solution to such a dilemma involves maximally promoting the lives and liberties of as many rational beings as possible (chapter 5). In order to avoid this conclusion, the non-consequentialist Kantian needs to justify agent-centered constraints. As we saw in chapter 1, however, even most Kantian deontologists recognize that agent-centered constraints require a non- value-based rationale. But we have seen that Kant’s normative theory is based on an unconditionally valuable end. How can a concern for the value of rational beings lead to a refusal to sacrifice rational beings even when this would prevent other more extensive losses of rational beings? If the moral law is based on the value of rational beings and their ends, then what is the rationale for prohibiting a moral agent from maximally promoting these two tiers of value? If I sacrifice some for the sake of others, I do not use them arbitrarily, and I do not deny the unconditional value of rational beings. Persons may have “dignity, that is, an unconditional and incomparable worth” that transcends any market value (GMM 436), but persons also have a fundamental equality that dictates that some must sometimes give way for the sake of others (chapters 5 and 7). The concept of the end-in-itself does not support the view that we may never force another to bear some cost in order to benefit others. If one focuses on the equal value of all rational beings, then equal consideration suggests that one may have to sacrifice some to save many.
Contention 1: Space Debris Private companies are cramming satellites into the Earth’s orbit which are quickly becoming defunct pieces of “space junk.” Therese Wood, 20 - ("Who owns our orbit: Just how many satellites are there in space?," World Economic Forum, 10-23-2020, 12-8-2021https:www.weforum.org/agenda/2020/10/visualizing-easrth-satellites-sapce-spacex)AW There are nearly 6,000 satellites circling the Earth, but only 40 are operational. Satellites are a vital part of our infrastructure, helping us to use GPS, access the internet and support studies of the Earth. Out of the 2,666 operational satellites circling the globe in April 2020, 1,007 were for communication services. 446 are used for observing the Earth and 97 for navigation/ GPS purposes. Over half of satellites in space are non-operational. For centuries, humans have looked to space and the stars for answers. The fascination is more than philosophical—it’s coupled with the need to solve problems here on Earth. Today, there are seemingly countless benefits and applications of space technology. Satellites, for instance, are becoming critical for everything from internet connectivity and precision agriculture, to border security and archaeological study. Right now, there are nearly 6,000 satellites circling our tiny planet. About 60 of those are defunct satellites—space junk—and roughly 40 are operational. As highlighted in the chart above, The Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS), determined that 2,666 operational satellites circled the globe in April of 2020. Over the coming decade, it’s estimated by Euroconsult that 990 satellites will be launched every year. This means that by 2028, there could be 15,000 satellites in orbit. Nearly 10,000 satellites will be launched form 2019-2028. Image: Visual Capitalist With SpaceX’s planned Starlink constellation of 12,000 satellites and Amazon’s proposed constellation in the works, the new space race continues its acceleration. Let’s take a closer look at who operates those satellites and how they apply their technology. Technology with a purpose Humans have long used space for navigation. While sailors once relied on the stars, today we use satellites for GPS, navigation, and various other applications. More than half of Earth’s operational satellites are launched for commercial purposes. About 61 of those provide communications, including everything from satellite TV and Internet of Things (IoT) connectivity to global internet. Over 1,000 satellites are for communication purposes. Image: Visual Capitalist Second to communications, 27 of commercial satellites have been launched for Earth Observation (EO) purposes, including environmental monitoring and border security. Commercial satellites, however, can serve multiple purposes. One week, a satellite may be ‘tasked’ to image a contested border. It could later be tasked to monitor the reclamation of a mining site or even the aftermath of a natural disaster. 54 of operational satellites are for commercial use. Image: Visual Capitalist Government and civil purposes make up 21 of all of Earth’s operational satellites, and military purposes come in at 13. Who owns Earth’s orbit? Space operators SpaceX—founded by Elon Musk—is not only a disruptive launch provider for missions to the International Space Station (saving NASA millions). It’s also the largest commercial operator of satellites on the planet. With 358 satellites launched as of April, part of SpaceX’s mission is to boost navigation capabilities and supply the world with space-based internet. While the company operated 22 of the world’s operational satellites as of April, it went on to launch an additional 175 satellites in the span of one month, from August to September 2020 Increasing space debris levels will inevitably set off a chain of collisions. Chelsea MuñOz-Patchen, 19 - ("Regulating the Space Commons: Treating Space Debris as Abandoned Property in Violation of the Outer Space Treaty," University of Chicago, 2019, 12-6-2021, https://cjil.uchicago.edu/publication/regulating-space-commons-treating-space-debris-abandoned-property-violation-outer-space)//AW Debris poses a threat to functioning space objects and astronauts in space, and may cause damage to the earth’s surface upon re-entry.29 Much of the small debris cannot be tracked due to its size and the velocity at which it travels, making it impossible to anticipate and maneuver to avoid collisions.30 To remain in orbit, debris must travel at speeds of up to 17,500 miles per hour.31 At this speed even very small pieces of debris can cause serious damage, threatening a spacecraft and causing expensive damage.32 There are millions of these very small pieces, and thousands of larger ones.33 The small-to-medium pieces of debris “continuously shed fragments like lens caps, booster upper stages, nuts, bolts, paint chips, motor sprays of aluminum particles, glass splinters, waste water, and bits of foil,” and may stay in orbit for decades or even centuries, posing an ongoing risk.34 Debris ten centimeters or larger in diameter creates the likelihood of complete destruction for any functioning satellite with which it collides.35 Large nonfunctional objects remaining in orbit are a collision threat, capable of creating huge amounts of space debris and taking up otherwise useful orbit space.36 This issue is of growing importance as more nations and companies gain the ability to launch satellites and other objects into space.37 From February 2009 through the end of 2010, more than thirty-two collision-avoidance maneuvers were reportedly used to avoid debris by various space agencies and satellite companies, and as of March 2012, the crew of the International Space Station (ISS) had to take shelter three times due to close calls with passing debris.38 These maneuvers require costly fuel usage and place a strain on astronauts.39 Furthermore, the launches of some spacecraft have “been delayed because of the presence of space debris in the planned flight paths.”40 In 2011, Euroconsult, a satellite consultant, projected that there would be “a 51 increase in satellites launched in the next decade over the number launched in the past decade.”41 In addition to satellites, the rise of commercial space tourism will also increase the number of objects launched into space and thus the amount of debris.42 The more objects are sent into space, and the more collisions create cascades of debris, the greater the risk of damage to vital satellites and other devices relied on for “weather forecasting, telecommunications, commerce, and national security.”43 The Space Debris Mitigation Guidelines44 were created by UNCOPUOS with input from the IADC and adopted in 2007.45 The guidelines were developed to address the problem of space debris and were intended to “increase mutual understanding on acceptable activities in space.”46 These guidelines are nonbinding but suggest best practices to implement at the national level when planning for a launch. Many nations have adopted the guidelines to some degree, and some have gone beyond what the guidelines suggest.47 While the guidelines do not address existing debris, they do much to prevent the creation of new debris. The Kessler Syndrome is the biggest concern with space debris. The Kessler Syndrome is a cascade created when debris hits a space object, creating new debris and setting off a chain reaction of collisions that eventually closes off entire orbits.48 The concern is that this cascade will occur when a tipping point is reached at which the natural removal rate cannot keep up with the amount of new debris added.49 At this point a collision could set off a cascade destroying all space objects within the orbit.50 In 2011, The National Research Council predicted that the Kessler Syndrome could happen within ten to twenty years.51 Donald J. Kessler, the astrophysicist and NASA scientist who theorized the Kessler Syndrome in 1978, believes this cascade may be a century away, meaning that there is still time to develop a solution.52 Space debris collisions cascade causing nuclear war, mass starvation, and economic destruction. Les Johnson 13, Deputy Manager for NASA's Advanced Concepts Office at the Marshall Space Flight Center, Co-Investigator for the JAXA T-Rex Space Tether Experiment and PI of NASA's ProSEDS Experiment, Master's Degree in Physics from Vanderbilt University, Popular Science Writer, and NASA Technologist, Frequent Contributor to the Journal of the British Interplanetary Sodety and Member of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, National Space Society, the World Future Society, and MENSA, Sky Alert!: When Satellites Fail, p. 9-12 language modified Whatever the initial cause, the result may be the same. A satellite destroyed in orbit will break apart into thousands of pieces, each traveling at over 8 km/sec. This virtual shotgun blast, with pellets traveling 20 times faster than a bullet, will quickly spread out, with each pellet now following its own orbit around the Earth. With over 300,000 other pieces of junk already there, the tipping point is crossed and a runaway series of collisions begins. A few orbits later, two of the new debris pieces strike other satellites, causing them to explode into thousands more pieces of debris. The rate of collisions increases, now with more spacecraft being destroyed. Called the "Kessler Effect", after the NASA scientist who first warned of its dangers, these debris objects, now numbering in the millions, cascade around the Earth, destroying every satellite in low Earth orbit. Without an atmosphere to slow them down, thus allowing debris pieces to bum up, most debris (perhaps numbering in the millions) will remain in space for hundreds or thousands of years. Any new satellite will be threatened by destruction as soon as it enters space, effectively rendering many Earth orbits unusable. But what about us on the ground? How will this affect us? Imagine a world that suddenly loses all of its space technology. If you are like most people, then you would probably have a few fleeting thoughts about the Apollo-era missions to the Moon, perhaps a vision of the Space Shuttle launching astronauts into space for a visit to the International Space Station (ISS), or you might fondly recall the "wow" images taken by the orbiting Hubble Space Telescope. In short, you would know that things important to science would be lost, but you would likely not assume that their loss would have any impact on your daily life. Now imagine a world that suddenly loses network and cable television, accurate weather forecasts, Global Positioning System (GPS) navigation, some cellular phone networks, on-time delivery of food and medical supplies via truck and train to stores and hospitals in virtually every community in America, as well as science useful in monitoring such things as climate change and agricultural sustainability. Add to this the disabling crippling of the US military who now depend upon spy satellites, space-based communications systems, and GPS to know where their troops and supplies are located at all times and anywhere in the world. The result is a nightmarish world, one step away from nuclear war, economic disaster, and potential mass starvation. This is the world in which we are now perilously close to living. Space satellites now touch our lives in many ways. And, unfortunately, these satellites are extremely vulnerable to risks arising from a half-century of carelessness regarding protecting the space environment around the Earth as well as from potential adversaries such as China, North Korea, and Iran. No government policy has put us at risk. It has not been the result of a conspiracy. No, we are dependent upon them simply because they offer capabilities that are simply unavailable any other way. Individuals, corporations, and governments found ways to use the unique environment of space to provide services, make money, and better defend the country. In fact, only a few space visionaries and futurists could have foreseen where the advent of rocketry and space technology would take us a mere 50 years since those first satellites orbited the Earth. It was the slow progression of capability followed by dependence that puts us at risk. The exploration and use of space began in 1957 with the launch of Sputnik 1 by the Soviet Union. The United States soon followed with Explorer 1. Since then, the nations of the world have launched over 8,000 spacecraft. Of these, several hundred are still providing information and services to the global economy and the world's governments. Over time, nations, corporations, and individuals have grown accustomed to the services these spacecraft provide and many are dependent upon them. Commercial aviation, shipping, emergency services, vehicle fleet tracking, financial transactions, and agriculture are areas of the economy that are increasingly reliant on space. Telestar 1, launched into space in the year of my birth, 1962, relayed the world's first live transatlantic news feed and showed that space satellites can be used to relay television signals, telephone calls, and data. The modern telecommunications age was born. We've come a long way since Telstar; most television networks now distribute most, if not ali, of their programming via satellite. Cable television signals are received by local providers from satellite relays before being sent to our homes and businesses using cables. With 65 of US households relying on cable television and a growing percentage using satellite dishes to receive signals from direct-to-home satellite television providers, a large number of people would be cut off from vital information in an emergency should these satellites be destroyed. And communications satellites relay more than television signals. They serve as hosts to corporate video conferences and convey business, banking, and other commercial information to and from all areas of the planet. The first successful weather satellite was TIROS. Launched in 1960, TIROS operated for only 78 days but it served as the precursor for today's much more long-lived weather satellites, which provide continuous monitoring of weather conditions around the world. Without them, providing accurate weather forecasts for virtually any place on the globe more than a day in advance would be nearly impossible. Figure !.1 shows a satellite image of Hurricane Ivan approaching the Alabama Gulf coast in 2004. Without this type of information, evacuation warnings would have to be given more generally, resulting in needless evacuations and lost economic activity (from areas that avoid landfall) and potentially increasing loss of life in areas that may be unexpectedly hit. The formerly top-secret Corona spy satellites began operation in 1959 and provided critical information about the Soviet Union's military and industrial capabilities to a nervous West in a time of unprecedented paranoia and nuclear risk. With these satellites, US military planners were able to understand and assess the real military threat posed by the Soviet Union. They used information provided by spy satellites to help avert potential military confrontations on numerous occasions. Conversely, the Soviet Union's spy satellites were able to observe the United States and its allies, with similar results. It is nearly impossible to move an army and hide it from multiple eyes in the sky. Satellite information is critical to all aspects of US intelligence and military planning. Spy satellites are used to monitor compliance with international arms treaties and to assess the military activities of countries such as China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea. Figure 1.2 shows the capability of modem unclassified space-based imaging. The capability of the classified systems is presumed to be significantly better, providing much more detail. Losing these satellites would place global militaries on high alert and have them operating, literally, in the blind. Our military would suddenly become vulnerable in other areas as well. GPS, a network of 24-32 satellites in medium-Earth orbit, was developed to provide precise position information to the military, and it is now in common use by individuals and industry. The network, which became fully operational in 1993, allows our armed forces to know their exact locations anywhere in the world. It is used to guide bombs to their targets with unprecedented accuracy, requiring that only one bomb be used to destroy a target that would have previously required perhaps hundreds of bombs to destroy in the pre-GPS world (which, incidentally, has resulted in us reducing our stockpile of non-GPS-guided munitions dramatically). It allows soldiers to navigate in the dark or in adverse weather or sandstorms. Without GPS, our military advantage over potential adversaries would be dramatically reduced or eliminated. Instead of allowing for the private appropriation of space, states must work together to prevent space debris through enacting policies that prevent overcrowding orbits. Silverstein and Panda ‘3/9 - Benjamin Silverstein research analyst for the Space Project at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. MA, International Relations, Syracuse University Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs BA, International Affairs, George Washington University and Ankit Panda Stanton Senior Fellow in the Nuclear Policy Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. AB, Princeton University, “Space Is a Great Commons. It’s Time to Treat It as Such.” Carnegie Endowment for International Peace (Web). March 9, 2021. Accessed Dec. 13, 2021. https://carnegieendowment.org/2021/03/09/space-is-great-commons.-it-s-time-to-treat-it-as-such-pub-84018 AT The failure to manage Earth orbits as a commons undermines safety and predictability, exposing space operators to growing risks such as collisions with other satellites and debris. The long-standing debris problem has been building for decades and demands an international solution.¶ Competing states need to coalesce behind a commons-based understanding of Earth orbits to set the table for a governance system to organize space traffic and address rampant debris. New leadership in the United States can spur progress on space governance by affirming that Earth orbits are a great commons. So far, President Joe Biden and his administration have focused on major space projects, but a relatively simple policy declaration that frames Earth orbits as a great commons can support efforts to negotiate space governance models for issues like debris mitigation and remediation. The Biden administration can set the stage to pursue broad space policy goals by establishing a consensus among states, particularly those with the most invested in Earth orbits, that space is a great commons.¶ THE PRESSING NEED FOR SPACE GOVERNANCE¶ The Earth orbits that provide the majority of benefits to states and commercial ventures represent only a tiny fraction of outer space as a whole. Competition for the limited volume of these Earth orbits is especially fierce since two satellites cannot be in the same place at the same time and not all orbits are equally useful for all missions. The number of objects residing in Earth orbits is now at an all-time high, with most new objects introduced into orbits at altitudes of between 400 and 700 kilometers above sea level. Millions of pieces of debris in Earth orbits pose a threat to continuing space operations. For instance, the final U.S. space shuttle missions faced 1-in-300 odds of losing a space vehicle or crew member to orbital debris or micrometeoroid impacts.¶ Collisions with fragments of orbital litter as small as a few millimeters across can ruin satellites and end missions. Current technologies cannot track all of these tiny pieces of debris, leaving space assets at the mercy of undetectable, untraceable, and unpredictable pieces of space junk. Some researchers have determined that the debris population in low Earth orbit is already self-sustaining, meaning that collisions between space objects will produce debris more rapidly than natural forces, like atmospheric drag, can remove it from orbit.¶ States—namely the United States, Russia, China, and India—have exacerbated this debris accumulation trend by testing kinetic anti-satellite capabilities or otherwise purposefully fragmenting their satellites in orbit. These states, along with the rest of the multilateral disarmament community, are currently at an impasse on establishing future space governance mechanisms that can address the debris issue. A portion of this impasse may be attributable to disparate views of the nature of outer space in the international context. Establishing a clear view among negotiating parties that Earth orbits should be treated as a great commons would establish a basis for future agreements that reduce debris-related risks.¶ Beyond debris-generating, kinetic anti-satellite weapons tests, revolutionary operating concepts challenge existing space traffic management practices. For instance, commercial ventures are planning networks of thousands of satellites to provide low-latency connectivity on Earth and deploying them by the dozens. States are following this trend. Some are considering transitioning away from using single (or few) exquisite assets in higher orbits and toward using many satellites in low Earth orbits. These new operational concepts could lead to an increase in collision risks.¶ Without new governance agreements, problems related to debris, heavy orbital traffic, and harmful interference will only intensify. Debris in higher orbits can persist for a century or more. The costs of adapting to increasingly polluted orbits would be immense, and the opportunity costs would be even higher. For instance, all else being equal, hardening satellites against collisions increases their mass and volume, in turn raising launch costs per satellite. These costs, rooted in a failure to govern space as a commons, will be borne by all space actors, including emerging states and commercial entities.¶ EXISTING FORMS OF SPACE GOVERNANCE¶ A well-designed governance system, founded on a widespread understanding of Earth orbits as a great commons, could temper these risks. Currently, space is not wholly unregulated, but existing regulations are limited both in scope and implementation. Many operators pledge to follow national regulations and international guidelines, but decentralized accountability mechanisms limit enforcement. These guidelines also do not cover the full range of potentially risky behaviors in space. For example, while some space operators can maneuver satellites to avoid collisions, there are no compulsory rules or standards on who has the right of way.¶ At the interstate level, seminal multilateral agreements provide some more narrow guidance on what is and is not acceptable in space. Most famously, the Outer Space Treaty affirms that outer space “shall be free for exploration and use by all states without discrimination of any kind” and that “there shall be free access to all areas of celestial bodies.” Similar concepts of Earth orbits being a great commons arise in subsequent international texts. Agreements like the Liability Convention impose fault-based liability for debris-related collisions in space, but it is difficult to prove fault in this regime in part because satellite owners and operators have yet to codify a standard of care in space, and thus the regime does not clearly disincentivize debris creation in orbit. Other rules of behavior in Earth orbits have been more successful in reducing harmful interference between satellite operations, but even these efforts are limited in scope.¶ States have acceded to supranational regulations of the most limited (and thus most valuable) Earth orbits. The International Telecommunication Union (ITU) coordinates, but does not authorize, satellite deployments and operations in geosynchronous orbits and manages radiofrequency spectrum assignments in other regions of space to reduce interference between satellites. These coordination activities are underpinned by the ITU’s constitution, which reminds states “that radio frequencies and any associate orbits . . . are limited natural resources,” indicating a commons-based approach to governing the radiofrequency spectrum. However, the union’s processes are still adapting to new operational realities in low Earth orbit, and these rules were never designed to address issues like debris.
Contention 2: inequality The private appropriation of space perpetuates inequality on Earth and in space. Mccormick 21 Ted McCormick writes about the history of science, empire, and economic thought. He has a Ph.D. in history from Columbia University and teaches at Concordia University in Montreal. “The billionaire space race reflects a colonial mindset that fails to imagine a different world”. 8-15-2021. The Conversation. https://theconversation.com/the-billionaire-space-race-reflects-a-colonial-mindset-that-fails-to-imagine-a-different-world-165235. Accessed 12-15-2021; marlborough JH It was a time of political uncertainty, cultural conflict and social change. Private ventures exploited technological advances and natural resources, generating unprecedented fortunes while wreaking havoc on local communities and environments. The working poor crowded cities, spurring property-holders to develop increased surveillance and incarceration regimes. Rural areas lay desolate, buildings vacant, churches empty — the stuff of moralistic elegies. ¶Epidemics raged, forcing quarantines in the ports and lockdowns in the streets. Mortality data was the stuff of weekly news and commentary. ¶Depending on the perspective, mobility — chosen or compelled — was either the cause or the consequence of general disorder. Uncontrolled mobility was associated with political instability, moral degeneracy and social breakdown. However, one form of planned mobility promised to solve these problems: colonization. ¶Europe and its former empires have changed a lot since the 17th century. But the persistence of colonialism as a supposed panacea suggests we are not as far from the early modern period as we think. ¶Colonial promise of limitless growth ¶Seventeenth-century colonial schemes involved plantations around the Atlantic, and motivations that now sound archaic. Advocates of expansion such as the English writer Richard Hakluyt, whose Discourse of Western Planting (1584) outlined the benefits of empire for Queen Elizabeth: the colonization of the New World would prevent Spanish Catholic hegemony and provide a chance to claim Indigenous souls for Protestantism. ¶But a key promise was the economic and social renewal of the mother country through new commodities, trades and territory. Above all, planned mobility would cure the ills of apparent overpopulation. Sending the poor overseas to cut timber, mine gold or farm cane would, according to Hakluyt, turn the “multitudes of loiterers and idle vagabonds” that “swarm(ed)” England’s streets and “pestered and stuffed” its prisons into industrious workers, providing raw materials and a reason to multiply. Colonization would fuel limitless growth. ¶As English plantations took shape in Ulster, Virginia, New England and the Caribbean, “projectors” — individuals (nearly always men) who promised to use new kinds of knowledge to radically and profitably transform society — tied mobility to new sciences and technologies. They were inspired as much by English philosopher Francis Bacon’s vision of a tech-centred state in The New Atlantis as by his advocacy of observation and experiment. ¶Discovery and invention ¶The English agriculturalist Gabriel Plattes cautioned in 1639 that “the finding of new worlds is not like to be a perpetual trade.” But many more saw a supposedly vacant America as an invitation to transplant people, plants and machinery. ¶The inventor Cressy Dymock (from Lincolnshire, where fen-drainage schemes were turning wetlands dry) sought support for a “perpetual motion engine” that would plough fields in England, clear forest in Virginia and drive sugar mills in Barbados. Dymock identified private profit and the public good by speeding plantation and replacing costly draught animals with cheaper enslaved labour. Projects across the empire would employ the idle, create “elbow-room,” heal “unnatural divisions” and make England “the garden of the world.” ¶Extraterrestrial exploration ¶Today, the moon and Mars are in projectors’ sights. And the promises billionaires Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos make for colonization are similar in ambition to those of four centuries ago. ¶As Bezos told an audience at the International Space Development Conference in 2018: “We will have to leave this planet, and we’re going to leave it, and it’s going to make this planet better.” Bezos traces his thinking to Princeton physicist Gerald O’Neill, whose 1974 article “The Colonization of Space” (and 1977 book, The High Frontier) presented orbiting settlements as solutions to nearly every major problem facing the Earth. Bezos echoes O’Neill’s proposal to move heavy industry — and industrial labour — off the planet, rezoning Earth as a mostly residential, green space. A garden, as it were. ¶Musk’s plans for Mars are at once more cynical and more grandiose, in timeline and technical requirements if not in ultimate extent. They center on the dubious possibility of “terraforming” Mars using resources and technologies that don’t yet exist. ¶Musk planned to send the first humans to Mars in 2024, and by 2030, he envisioned breaking ground on a city, launching as many as 100,000 voyages from Earth to Mars within a century. ¶As of 2020, the timeline had been pushed back slightly, in part because terraforming may require bombarding Mars with 10,000 nuclear missiles to start. But the vision – a Mars of thriving crops, pizza joints and “entrepreneurial opportunities,” preserving life and paying dividends while Earth becomes increasingly uninhabitable — remains. Like the colonial company-states of the 17th and 18th centuries, Musk’s SpaceX leans heavily on government backing but will make its own laws on its newly settled planet. ¶A failure of the imagination ¶The techno-utopian visions of Musk and Bezos betray some of the same assumptions as their early modern forebears. They offer colonialism as a panacea for complex social, political and economic ills, rather than attempting to work towards a better world within the constraints of our environment. ¶And rather than facing the palpably devastating consequences of an ideology of limitless growth on our planet, they seek to export it, unaltered, into space. They imagine themselves capable of creating liveable environments where none exist. ¶But for all their futuristic imagery, they have failed to imagine a different world. And they have ignored the history of colonialism on this one. Empire never recreated Eden, but it did fuel centuries of growth based on expropriation, enslavement and environmental transformation in defiance of all limits. We are struggling with these consequences today. Private space colonization would destroy space’s scientific value and increase inequality on Earth – Spencer ‘17 Spencer, Keith A. senior editor at Salon “Keep the Red Planet Red.” Jacobin, 2 May 2017, https://www.jacobinmag.com/2017/02/mars-elon-musk-space-exploration-nasa-colonization. Accesserd 12/15/2021 marlborough JH As the Western liberal order continues to unravel, can you really blame anyone who wants to get off this planet? Since space travel became technologically feasible in the twentieth century, many thinkers — from Arthur C. Clarke to Buckminster Fuller — envisioned the human colonization of other planets as all but inevitable. “Man will not always stay on Earth,” wrote Soviet rocket scientist Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, “the pursuit of light and space will lead him to penetrate the bounds of the atmosphere, timidly at first, but in the end to conquer the whole of solar space.” In their heydays, both the American and Soviet space programs funded research into Mars colonization, viewing it as the next logical step for humanity. In the past two decades however, people have started to pin their hopes for intergalactic travel on private groups instead of public agencies. While President Obama was privatizing much of the American space program, a flurry of ventures released competing proposals to visit and/or colonize the red planet. These schemes’ feasibility and harebrained-ness vary: the Mars Foundation, run by multimillionaire former investor Dennis Tito, is soliciting private donations to send a couple on a flyby of the red planet. Mars One, a Dutch nonprofit, wants to fund a permanent human colony through “merchandise sales, ads on video content, brand partnerships, speaking engagements, broadcasting rights, intellectual property rights, games and apps, and events.” The most famous — and perhaps most likely to succeed — comes from entrepreneur and engineer Elon Musk, the multibillionaire CEO of SpaceX and Tesla Motors. Musk’s articulation of his Mars mission reveals not only what’s wrong with how we think about extraterrestrial colonies and resources, but also how little faith most people have in democracy here on Earth. Interplanetary Technocracy Given his reputation as an engineering genius, Musk’s vision for colonization seems the most plausible of the private missions to Mars. After all, SpaceX, which he admitted to founding specifically to colonize the solar system, became the first private company to successfully launch a rocket into orbit in 2008. In September 2016, at the International Astronautical Congress in Guadalajara, Musk laid out a detailed vision for his colonization project, including financial estimates, engineering specs for the reusable “Interplanetary Transit System,” and the price of a passenger ticket — around $200,000. Musk’s presentation even included a snazzy computer-animated video of the transit system in action and details about the long trip there, which would offer colonists games, restaurants, and entertainment. “It’ll be, like, really fun to go . . . You’re gonna have a great time,” Musk said. His approach to colonizing Mars comes straight out of Silicon Valley’s playbook: Musk has taken a “problem” — how to colonize Mars — and hacked a feasible “solution” that is one part engineering, one part moxie. Just add investors and we’ll be building cities on the red planet in no time. Though vague, Musk reiterated that his vision would need funding. His talk of “tickets” implies that colonists will likely pay for much of the mission. Unlike a space agency’s astronaut selection process, then, his Mars mission will be limited to those who can afford it. In that sense, Musk’s colonization plan looks a lot like joining a country club or gated community — or any other model of private access to space for those who can afford it. Musk’s proposal — heavy on the engineering and business details, light on the philosophical or political implications of colonization — epitomizes technocracy. He doesn’t seem interested in thinking through Mars’s policy or governance, the labor necessitated by building a civilization from scratch, or the problems that will arise from sending rich tourists to self-manage in a place with scant resources demanding communal organization and thinking. The True Value of Mars For some, sending a few rich folks off to Mars seems like a great idea. After all, it’s hardly an Eden waiting to be destroyed. Unlike previous colonial projects, there are no natives to exploit; no wildlife to hunt to extinction; no ecosystem to radically alter; no fossil fuels to extract; and no climate in danger of destruction from carbon emission. Mars’s atmosphere is already 96 percent carbon dioxide! Why not let Musk and his millionaire buddies take off for a few rounds of golf on the frosted dunes? If they get stuck there, all the better. From a humanistic perspective, however, even a lifeless world like Mars holds incredible scientific, educational, and environmental value. To let private interests colonize, terraform, or populate it without considering this collective value would be short-sighted. Indeed, when it comes to colonization, we should hope humanity has learned from its past mistakes and is ready to set upon a more democratic process. Perhaps Earth can agree to hold a public discussion before we set about strip-mining Mars’s glorious dunes, vistas, and mountains, lest the tallest mountain in the solar system become a trash heap like Everest. Government space agencies have gone to great lengths to keep the scientific and social benefits of publicly funded exploration intact. This is why NASA makes all its mission data public, and also why it insists on sterilizing space probes to avoid contaminating other worlds with cellular life from Earth — one stray terrestrial extremophile could confuse the search for microbial life off-planet. The agency, recognizing its work’s educational value, has sent elementary school children’s experiments into space and hosted public naming competitions for geographic features. Likewise, NASA thinks beyond the engineering challenges: they also consider space travel’s psychological and biological effects, surely an important field of study in anticipation of the long space flights required for interplanetary travel. Private industry will be unlikely to follow these collective practices, as its desire for profit or for exclusive property rights — physical and intellectual — will outweigh any public benefit. I Want to Believe The public and media reaction to Musk’s presentation — more than the presentation itself —reflects the current state of our politics. “The mood at the conference was almost as giddy as a rock concert or the launch of a new Apple product, with people lining up for Mr. Musk’s presentation a couple of hours in advance,” wrote Kenneth Chang in the New York Times, who devoted 1,200 words to it. “Elon Musk finally told the world his vision for colonizing Mars, and it turned out to be one hell of a show,” exclaimed Loren Grush in a video article for the Verge. Grush noted that Musk drew an “insane crowd,” describing how “people actually stampeded into the hall where his lecture was in order to get a good seat.” He began in lofty tones: “I want to . . . make Mars seem possible. Make it seem as though it is something we can do in our lifetimes.” This statement implied that we needed some great technological leap forward before embarking on this adventure, but, in fact, travel to Mars has been possible for well over half a century. Given the political will, we can go right now. The subtext of Musk’s message, then, was that our democratic governments will never execute big science and engineering projects. People should trust in the private vision for colonization and space travel instead. In Earth politics, this lack of faith in democratic institutions is nothing new. This idea’s policy implications — that collectively we can’t have big public projects or any sort of real democratic decision-making, and must cede our whims to privately funded foundations and technocratic “experts” — have already taken hold of most countries. As far as I could find, none of the magazines that covered Musk’s announcement mentioned this metatheme, namely, that a public and democratically organized colonization of Mars will never happen. No one questioned the premise that we must let billionaires decide how and when to go to Mars — or that it is the only possible way to get there. Musk’s tech-industry social circle benefits from branding technology as synonymous with progress. As a result, many tech employees work long hours to achieve this invisible notion of progress, but their work just fattens their employer’s profit margins. One can imagine the grueling labor required to make an inhospitable planet habitable. On Mars, employees would exhaust themselves for a corporation under the guise of “survival.” After all, regardless of whether a foundation or a corporation spearheads the colonization effort, they will be incentivized, even forty million miles away, to squeeze as much labor out of their workers at the lowest cost. Further, the question of who is allowed to go to Mars will become as important as the question of who isn’t. If, as Musk proposes, the trip requires a “ticket” — which, as he claims, will eventually drop to only $100,000 — it seems probable that those who can afford to go will mostly resemble, ethnically and politically, Earth’s ruling class. Imagine: the red planet turned racist country club. These questions matter more than how to engineer a rocket or how to build greenhouses or how to harvest water. In fact, state-funded research has already largely solved these technical problems — or, at the least, led to numerous creative ideas about making a Mars colony self-sufficient. The Martian Commons Any colonization effort on Mars — even if only a small number of humans go — will present huge political challenges in terms of the labor and personal rights of its citizens. To wit: what kinds of reproductive restrictions will exist on a planet of scarce resources? How will colonists ration food and activity? What about personal privacy? If Martian citizens are working in a life-or-death situation, can the workers strike? At least in its early years, Mars would have a scarcity economy — in other words, resources would likely have to be rationed in order for the collective to survive. A private colony would be unlikely to make any kind of egalitarian guarantee — after all, if there’s a ticket price, there will certainly be a Martian service economy pampering the space tourists. Inequalities will emerge in terms of labor, housing, food, and access to other resources. In fact, we already know what a privatized Mars might resemble: Mount Everest. At higher elevations, it becomes a barren, lifeless, cold world, where climbers require oxygen tanks to survive. The cost of ascending is as steep as the mountain: between $30,000 to $100,000. Climbers’ journeys are only made possible by their Sherpas’ exploited labor, many of whom die in accidents and are paid as little as $5,000 a year by Western companies. Now imagine this situation replicated forty million miles off, on a lifeless planet, where two-way Earth communication takes almost an hour, and you can envision how dire things could get. A New Hope Musk spent nearly an hour of his speech detailing the technological aspects of Mars travel: the landers, the rockets, the fuel costs, and so on. Musk takes a technology-first approach and rarely mentions the numerous social aspects. His speech and its collective reactions attest to a naïve, John Galt fantasy about how policy and engineering come to pass: through the mind of the lone genius, who alone holds the key to humanity’s future. We saw the same fantasy at work last week when, in the wake of President Trump’s executive order banning emigration from seven majority-Muslim countries, Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz announced his plan to hire ten thousand refugees and was immediately hailed as a liberal hero. The message was clear: we can’t hope to help refugees ourselves, or on a democratic basis — we must rely on the whims of the rich to push forward progressive causes. Alas, the reaction to Musk’s speech also demonstrates how public sentiment has changed: collectively, we no longer believe in public space exploration. Even if we know state agencies can launch a Mars mission, few think it will happen. This doesn’t bode well for how we think of the commons. Are rich people and their foundations the only ones who can save us? The plethora of private Mars proposals reflects a lack of faith in democracy on Earth, in particular in our democratic influence over the directions science and engineering research take. And while faith in public institutions sits at an all-time low, we seem more than happy to hear what the rich can make possible and to believe their promises. Musk is just one of many technocrats who think of a Mars voyage as a technological problem. Not only is it not a technological problem, it’s not even a problem. Colonization of Mars should be seen as a complex social and political policy, with so much potential to create inequality and oppression that it cannot rationally be undertaken without political consensus and a stratagem for maintaining democracy and egalitarianism. We are ready to colonize Mars, and have been for half a century. Doing so without a democratic plan will present unimaginable dangers for the planet and colonists alike. As socialists, our rallying cry should be this: Keep the red planet red! Space resources must be distributed democratically—this requires challenging private control of outer space Levine 15 Nick Levine, MPhil candidate in history of science at the University of Cambridge, 3-21-2015, "Democratize the Universe," Jacobin, https://jacobinmag.com/2015/03/space-industry-extraction-levine The privatization of the Milky Way has begun. Last summer, the bipartisan ASTEROIDS Act was introduced in Congress. The legislation’s aim is to grant US corporations property rights over any natural resources — like the platinum-group metals used in electronics — that they extract from asteroids. The bill took advantage of an ambiguity in the United Nations’ 1967 Outer Space Treaty. That agreement forbade nations and private organizations from claiming territory on celestial bodies, but was unclear about whether the exploitation of their natural resources would be allowed, and if so, on what terms. The legal framework governing the economic development of outer space will have enormous effects on the distribution of wealth and income in the Milky Way and beyond. We could fight for a galactic democracy, where the proceeds of the space economy are distributed widely. Or we could accept the trickle-down astronomics anticipated by the ASTEROIDS Act, which would allow for the concentration of vast amounts of economic and political power in the hands of a few corporations and the most technologically developed nations. Given the pressing problems of inequality and climate change on Earth, the US left has been understandably uninterested in or largely dismissive of any space pursuits. For this reason, it remains unprepared to organize around extraterrestrial economic justice. The Left’s rejection of space has effectively ceded the celestial commons to the business interests who would literally universalize laissez-faire. Organizing around extraterrestrial politics wasn’t always treated as an escapist distraction. In the 1970s, fighting for a celestial commons was a pillar of developing countries’ struggle to create a more equitable economic order. Starting in the 1960s, a coalition of underdeveloped nations, many recently decolonized, asserted their strength in numbers in the United Nations by forming a caucus known as the Group of 77. In the early 1970s, this bloc announced its intention to establish a “new international economic order,” which found its expression in a series of UN treaties governing international regions, like sea beds and outer space, that they hoped would spread the economic benefits of the commons more equitably, with special attention to less developed nations. For these countries — as well as for the nervous US business interests that opposed them — their plan to “socialize the moon,” as some put it at the time, was the first step toward a more egalitarian distribution of wealth and power in human society. It will be years before the industrialization of outer space is economically viable, if it ever is. But the legal framework that would shape that transition is being worked out now. The ASTEROIDS Act was submitted on behalf of those who would benefit most from a laissez-faire extraterrestrial system. If we leave the discussion about celestial property rights to the business interests that monopolize it now, any dream of economic democracy in outer space will go the way of jetpacks, flying cars, and the fifteen-hour workweek. As Below, So Above Left critics of space proposals make the same mistakes as the most techno-utopian starry-eyed industrialists. From the point of view of the latter, celestial development will provide ultimate salvation to the human race by making us a multi-planetary species; the former see outer space as an infinite void essentially antagonistic to human life, interest in which is only orchestrated for cynical political ends. Each side misconceives extraterrestrial pursuits as qualitatively different from economic activities on Earth. Venturing into space may be a greater technical challenge; it may cost more, be more dangerous, or be a mistaken use of resources. But to understand these prospects in existential terms rather than as a new episode in the familiar history of industrial development and resource extraction — with all the political-strategic dangers and organizing opportunities that come with them — is to be blinded by the space romanticism that is a peculiar vestige of Cold War geopolitics. Whether and how we should go to space are not profound philosophical questions, at least not primarily. What’s at stake is not just the “stature of man,” as Hannah Arendt put it, but a political-economic struggle over the future of the celestial commons, which could result in a dramatic intensification of inequality — or a small step for humankind toward a more egalitarian state of affairs on our current planet. Undoubtedly, there are good reasons to be skeptical about going to space. Some have argued that it shifts attention away from solving the difficult problems of economic and environmental justice on Earth — think of Gil Scott-Heron’s spoken-word poem “Whitey on the Moon,” which juxtaposes the deprivation of the American underclass with the vast resources diverted to space. Scott-Heron’s critique is powerful, but it’s important to remember that he was denouncing an unjust economic system. He wasn’t issuing a timeless condemnation of space pursuits as such. Whether the aims of providing for all and developing outer space are mutually exclusive depends on the political forces on the ground. We might also question whether mining asteroids would be detrimental to our current planet’s environment in the medium term. If we don’t find a renewable way to blast off into outer space, the exploitation of these resources could lead to an intensification of, not a move away from, the fossil-fuel economy. If the environmental impact of space mining turns out to be large, it would be analogous to fracking — a technological development that gives us access to new resources, but with devastating ecological side effects — and ought to be opposed on similar grounds. On the other hand, some speculate that mining the Moon’s Helium-3 reserves, for example, could provide an abundant source of clean energy. The terrestrial environmental impact of space activity remains an open question that must be explored before we stake our hopes on the economic development of outer space. Philosophers have suggested that we might have ethical duties to preserve the “natural” states of celestial bodies. Others fear that our activities might unknowingly wipe out alien microbial life. We should remain sensitive to the aesthetic and cultural value of outer space, as well as the potential for extinction and the exhaustion of resources misleadingly proclaimed to be limitless. But if the Left rejects space on these grounds we abandon its fate to the will of private interests. These concerns shouldn’t cause us to write off space altogether — rather, they should motivate us even more to fight for the careful, democratic use of celestial resources for the benefit of all. There is also reason to be cautiously optimistic about extending economic activity to outer space. For one, the resources there — whether platinum-group metals useful in electronics, or fuels that could be central to the semi-independent functioning of an outer space economy — have the potential to raise our standards of living. Imagine, a superabundance of asteroid metals that are scarce on Earth, like platinum, driving the sort of automation that could expand output and reduce the need to work. Of course, there’s nothing inevitable about the benefits of productivity gains being distributed widely, as we’ve seen in the United States over the past forty years. This is a problem not limited to space, and the myth of the “final frontier” must not distract us from the already existing problems of wealth and income distribution on Earth. While the industrialization of the solar system isn’t a panacea for all economic ills, it does offer a significant organizing opportunity, since it will force a confrontation over the future of the vast celestial commons. The democratic possibilities of such a struggle have been recognized before: one conservative American citizens’ group in the 1970s called a progressive UN space treaty a “vital component of Third World demands for massive redistribution of wealth so as ultimately to equate the economic positions of the two hemispheres.” Many in the 1970s identified the egalitarian potential in the development of outer space, and the Left must not overlook it today. Back to the Future One of the Group of 77’s major goals was to apply some of the redistributive functions of the welfare state on a global scale. In 1974, that coalition issued a “Declaration on the Establishment of a New International Economic Order,” which called for a fairer system of global trade and resource distribution, one that could alleviate historical inequality. One of the battlegrounds for the Group of 77 was the negotiation over extraterrestrial property rights. The Outer Space Treaty of 1967, signed by over ninety countries in the heat of the first sprint to the moon, rejected the notion that celestial bodies fell under the legal principle of res nullius — meaning that outer space was empty territory that could be claimed for a nation through occupation. It forbade the “national appropriation by claim of sovereignty, by means of use or occupation, or by any other means” of outer space. But the treaty was not just restrictive. It also had a positive requirement for extraterrestrial conduct: “The exploration and use of outer space,” it declared, “shall be carried out for the benefit and in the interests of all countries, irrespective of their degree of economic or scientific development, and shall be the province of all mankind.” However, nobody knew what this would mean in practice: was it a call for egalitarian economics, or an empty proclamation of liberal benevolence? Complicating matters, it was unclear whether the extraction and sale of natural resources from outer space fell under the category of “appropriation,” which had been forbidden. And what exactly was this benefit to all countries that our outer space pursuits were supposed to bring? How would its distribution be enforced? Which interpretation would win out was more a question of political power than of esoteric legal maneuvers. The Group of 77 took an activist approach to these issues, proposing amendments to the Outer Space Treaty regime that would spread the economic benefits of the celestial commons to less developed countries that did not have the resources to get to space, let alone mine it. Thus in 1970, the Argentine delegate to the UN Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space proposed to legally designate outer space and its resources “the common heritage of mankind.” First applied in negotiations over maritime law a few years earlier, the “common heritage” concept was intended to give legal grounding to the peaceful international governance of the commons. As an alternative to the laissez-faire approach advocated by many private interests, the “common heritage” principle also provided a legal framework for the democratic distribution of revenues derived from the international commons. In 1973, the Indian delegation to the Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space tried to put this idea into celestial practice, proposing an amendment to the Outer Space Treaty that called for equitable sharing of space benefits, particularly with developing countries.
1/9/22
ND - Unions
Tournament: Novice Circuit Tournament | Round: 1 | Opponent: Harvard Westlake MB | Judge: Naomi Alan Novice AC I Affirm: Resolved – A just government ought to recognize the unconditional right of workers to strike. Advantage 1: Economic Inequality Unions give workers enough leverage to effectively negotiate with their employers. Hayes ‘ 21 - Hayes, Lydia, et al. “Trade Unions and Economic Inequality.” Institute of Employment Rights Journal, vol. 4, no., Pluto Journals, 2021, pp. 118–41, https://doi.org/10.13169/instemplrighj.4.0.0118. AK How trade unions promote economic equality. The economic clout of an employer is much stronger than the negotiating capacity of an individual worker who needs to earn a living. Trade unions aim to balance out this uneven power relationship. As democratic organisations, trade unions represent their membership independently of managerial or government control. Having access to a collective voice through trade unions offers opportunities that are not otherwise available to individual workers.. Without trade unions, the realities of working life mean that individual workers are under pressure to simply accept the pay and conditions that an employer presents to them. To do otherwise risks missing out on the chance of a job or being dismissed. The bargaining power of trade unions has the potential to defend existing employment conditions, so that new workers are not brought in on lower rates of pay or forced to accept other terms which are inferior. Even when a worker is well-established in a job, should an employer decide to make cut backs or change hours of work, it can be exceptionally difficult to protect pay or terms and conditions on an individual basis. Employers are attentive to economic peaks and troughs and they are acutely aware of the potential benefits of cheap replacement labour when employment opportunities are scarce. Trade unions can introduce some balance into an otherwise very one-sided situation by requiring that an employer negotiate with the whole workforce. A right to strike for workers would improve working conditions, reduce inequality, and raise worker pay. Myall ’19 - James Myall James is MECEP’s lead on the inclusive economy, including research on labor issues, gender and racial equity, and health care policy. James conducts research and impact analyses, writes educational materials, and collaborates with partners. He is skilled in data collection, research, and statistical and policy analysis. He studied public policy and management at the University of Southern Maine and holds a master’s degree in ancient history and archaeology from the University of St. Andrews in Scotland., 4-17-2019, "Right to strike would level the playing field for public workers, with benefits for all of us," MECEP, https://www.mecep.org/blog/right-to-strike-would-level-the-playing-field-for-public-workers-with-benefits-for-all-of-us/ accessed 10/19/2021 Marlborough JH The right of workers to organize and bargain with their employer benefits all Mainers. Collective bargaining leads to better wages, safer workplaces, and a fairer and more robust economy for everyone — not just union members. The right to strike is critical to collective organizing and bargaining. Without it, Maine’s public employees are unable to negotiate on a level playing field. ¶Maine’s Legislature is considering a bill that would give public-sector workers the right to strike. MECEP supports the legislation, and is urging legislators to enact it. ¶The right to strike would enable fairer negotiations between public workers and the government. All of us have reason to support that outcome. Research shows that union negotiations set the bar for working conditions with other employers. And as the largest employer in Maine, the state’s treatment of its workers has a big impact on working conditions in the private sector. ¶Unions support a fairer economy. Periods of high union membership are associated with lower levels of income inequality, both nationally and in Maine. Strong unions, including public-sector unions, have a critical role to play in rebuilding a strong middle class. ¶Unions help combat inequities within work places. Women and people of color in unions face less wage discrimination than those in nonunion workplaces. On average, wages for nonunionized white women in Maine are 18 percent less than of those of white men. Among unionized workers, that inequality shrinks to just 9 percent. Similarly, women of color earn 26 percent less than men in nonunionized jobs; for unionized women of color, the wage gap shrinks to 17 percent.i ¶All of us have a stake in the success of collective bargaining. But a union without the right to strike loses much of its negotiating power. The right to withdraw your labor is the foundation of collective worker action. When state employees or teachers are sitting across the negotiating table from their employers, how much leverage do they really have when they can be made to work without a contract? It’s like negotiating the price of a car when the salesman knows you’re going to have to buy it — whatever the final price is. ¶Research confirms that public-sector unions are less effective without the right to strike. Public employees with a right to strike earn between 2 percent and 5 percent more than those without it.ii While that’s a meaningful increase for those workers, it also should assuage any fears that a right to strike would lead to excessive pay increases or employees abusing their new right. ¶LD 900, “An Act to Expand the Rights of Public Employees Under the Maine Labor Laws,” ensures that Maine’s public-sector workers will have the same collective bargaining rights as other employees in Maine. The bill would strengthen the ability of Maine’s public-sector workers to negotiate, resulting in higher wagers, a more level playing field, and a fairer economy for all of us. Unions reduce inequality Kerrissey ’15 - Kerrissey, Jasmine. “Collective Labor Rights and Income Inequality.” American Sociological Review 80, no. 3 (2015): 626–53. http://www.jstor.org/stable/44289582. AK Class-based collective actors are central to understanding income inequality in industrialized democracies. Strong working-class organizational power, usually measured as union density, reduces inequality (Brady et al. 2013; Jacobs and Myers 2014; Western and Rosenfeld 2011). Moreover, the share of the national income that goes to labor relative to capital increases when workers' relative bargaining power is strong (Kristai 2010; Lin and Tomaskovic-Devey 2013). Scholars in the power resource tradition argue that class- based collective actors affect the distributive process at two points: directly through reducing pre-tax and transfer income inequality (market mechanisms) and indirectly through supporting state policies that bolster taxes and transfers (political mechanisms). Through markets, unions directly reduce inequality by securing better wages and benefits for large groups of workers (Bradley et al. 2003; Western and Rosenfeld 2011). Unions' ability to raise wages for substantial numbers of workers is partially affected by the existenence of centralized bargaining structures (Kristai and Cohen 2007; Wallerstein 1999; but see Scheve and Stasavage 2009). However, even in decen- tralized contexts, like the United States, unions have had some success in raising wages for non-union workers through the threat of union- ization (Freeman and Medoff 1984). Although unions typically aim to increase wages, then- ability to do so varies. For instance, beginning in the 1940s in the United States, unions had high density and were relatively successful in increasing wages across entire industries (Free- man and Medoff 1984). As union density fell at the end of the twentieth century, strikes declined and were less effective in achieving higher wages (Rhomberg 2012; Rosenfeld 2006). Moreover, the rise of financialization in the United States has shifted power away from workers and resulted in increased inequality (Lin and Tomaskovic-Devey 2013). However, even in this weak position, workers are less impoverished in highly unionized states (Brady et al. 2013). Worker organizations also affect inequal- ity through political processes. Labor movements often support left parties and rally around policies that redistribute income. Unions influence elections and policies by mobilizing members to vote, protest, and work on political campaigns (Kerrissey and Schofer 2013; Norris 2002; Wood 2000). Through this collective political action, worker organizations aligned with social- democratic parties have been able to shift the relative bargaining power from capital toward labor (Bradley et al. 2003; Esping- Andersen 1985; Korpi 1989; Kristai 2010). Income inequality kills one in three people in the US through structural violence. Bezruchka, Senior Lecturer in Global Health at the University of Washington, 14 (Stephen, 2014, New Press, “Inequality Kills,” https://depts.washington.edu/eqhlth/pages/BezruchkaInequalityKillsBkPubInfo14.pdf, accessed 6/30/17, pg. 194-195, CD) Everyone in a society gains when children grow up to be healthy adults. The rest of the world seems to understand this simple fact, and only three countries in the world don’t have a policy, at least on the books, for paid maternal leave – Liberia, Papua New Guinea, and the United States. What does that say about our understanding , or concern about the health of our youth? Differences in mortality rates are not just a statistical concern—they reflect suffering and pain for very real individuals and families. The higher mortality in the United States is an example of what Paul Farmer, the noted physician and anthropologist, calls structural violence. The forty-seven infant deaths occur every day because of the way society in the United States is structured, resulting in our health status being that of a middle-income country, not a rich country. There is growing evidence that the factor most responsible for the relatively poor health in the United States is the vast and rising inequality in wealth and income that we not only tolerate, but resist changing. Inequality is the central element, the upstream cause of the social disadvantage described in the IOM report. A political system that fosters inequality limits the attainment of health. The claim that economic inequality is a major reason for our poor health requires that several standard criteria for claiming causality are satisfied: the results are confirmed by many different studies by different investigators over different time periods; there is a dose-response relationship, meaning more inequality leads to worse health; no other contending explanation is posited; and the relationship is biologically plausible, with likely mechanisms through which inequality works. The field of study called stress biology of social comparisons is one such way inequality acts. Those studies confirm that all the criteria for linking inequality to poorer health are met, concluding that the extent of inequality in society reflects the range of caring and sharing, with more unequal populations sharing less. Those who are poorer struggle to be accepted in society and the rich also suffer its effects. A recent Harvard study estimated that about one death in three in this country results from our very high income inequality. Inequality kills through structural violence. There is no smoking gun with this form of violence, which simply produces a lethally large social and economic gap between rich and poor.
Solvency Plan Text: The United States ought to recognize the unconditional right of workers to strike.
Conditions on the right to strike discourage unions from the practice of striking and lead them to agree to no-strike clauses. Janice Fine 2017, Forum Response: The Right To Strike. Boston Review. https://bostonreview.net/forum/right-strike/janice-fine-fine- responds-pope As Pope, Bruno, and Kellman point out, the trouble started long ago. The principle underlying the National Labor Relations Act was a kind of industrial citizenship in which unions would be the vehicle and collective bargaining the mechanism through which American workers would have a say in their workplaces, industries, and economic policy more broadly. The theory of collective bargaining underwriting the act was that each side needed to be able to exercise economic power sufficient to compel the other to negotiate. For workers, that fundamental power was the ability to withhold labor and stop production. That power, however, was undermined from the beginning. The act never outlawed permanent striker replacement, and a series of Supreme Court rulings even expanded employers’ right to do so. A decade after its passage, the Labor Management Relations Act of 1947 (also known as Taft-Hartley) delivered major blows to labor’s power by outlawing closed shops and secondary strikes. And, despite subsequent NLRB decisions more favorable to unions, employers routinely engage in intimidation, firings, lockouts, and striker-replacement actions. Justice, when it does come for affected workers, is far too limited and far too late. Workers during a union drive have to contend with employer interference at a level that, as Gordon Lafer argues, completely contradicts the American ideal of the free and fair election. Likewise, striking union workers are protected from permanent replacement only under an extremely constricted set of conditions. Perhaps it is for this reason that unions have accepted no-strike clauses in their contracts. Given how compromised the right to strike actually is, why not trade it away?
Restrictions on the right to strike have reduced it to meaninglessness. Pope et al. 17 James Gray Pope, et al, 2017, Pope is a Professor of Law and Sidney Reitman Scholar at Rutgers University, Ed Bruno (former director of the United Electrical Radio and Machine Workers of America, and past southern director for the National Nurses Union), and Peter Kellman (past president of the Southern Maine Labor Council and is currently working with the Movement Building/Education Committee of the Maine AFL-CIO)., The Right to Strike Boston Review, Spring 2017. https://bostonreview.net/forum/james-gray-pope-ed-bruno-peter-kellman-right-strike The prospects for union revival may seem bleaker than ever during the Trump administration, even as the triumph of right-wing populism makes more urgent what was already apparent: the need to build a labor movement that can fight for the interests of the working class in the face of corporate power.¶ But prospects are not as grim as they appear. Over the past decade, there has been an undeniable shift toward class politics, most visibly evidenced by Occupy Wall Street, the Bernie Sanders campaign, the Fight for Fifteen, and the rise of a Black Lives Matter movement that supports economic justice demands, including the right to organize. Building the labor movement in this period of danger and opportunity will require not only heeding Lerner’s call for a strategic shift and extralegal action; labor must also reclaim the right to strike and confront the deep structural disabilities that impede unions from challenging corporate power. As Lerner diagnosed twenty years ago, U.S. labor law blocks unions and workers from effective organizing and striking. Then as now, the law’s protections for workers’ rights amount to little more than paper guarantees, while its restrictions are downright deadly. Indeed the Committee on Freedom of Association of the International Labor Organization (ILO) has held that the United States is violating international standards by failing to protect the right to organize, by banning secondary strikes and boycotts across the board, and by allowing employers to permanently replace workers who strike. The ban on secondary strikes is especially debilitating, because it prevents workers who have economic power, such as organized grocery workers, from aiding workers who do not, for example unorganized packing house workers. If the grocery workers support striking packers by refusing to handle food packed by strikebreakers, they are said to be engaging in an illegal secondary strike. But the law cuts even deeper, deforming workers’ organizations at their inception. As amended by the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947 (tagged by unionists as the “Slave Labor Law”), the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) confronts workers with a choice between two inadequate forms of organization: statutory “labor organizations,” popularly known as unions, and “others,” for example workers’ centers that organize outside the statutory framework. At first glance, the choice seems obvious. Only unions can demand and engage in collective bargaining. But unions are subject to so many restrictions that some workers’ organizations (such as the Restaurant Opportunities Centers United) are willing to forego collective bargaining in order to avoid them, while others (including the Coalition of Immokalee Workers) consider themselves lucky to be excluded from the NLRA altogether. In the 1960s Cesar Chavez of the United Farm Workers rejected NLRA coverage for farm workers on the ground that it would inscribe “a glowing epitaph on our tombstone.”
11/13/21
ND - Unions
Tournament: Novice Circuit Tournament | Round: 4 | Opponent: Harvard Westlake CC | Judge: Chris Castillo Novice AC I Affirm: Resolved – A just government ought to recognize the unconditional right of workers to strike. Advantage 1: Economic Inequality Unions give workers enough leverage to effectively negotiate with their employers. Hayes ‘ 21 - Hayes, Lydia, et al. “Trade Unions and Economic Inequality.” Institute of Employment Rights Journal, vol. 4, no., Pluto Journals, 2021, pp. 118–41, https://doi.org/10.13169/instemplrighj.4.0.0118. AK How trade unions promote economic equality. The economic clout of an employer is much stronger than the negotiating capacity of an individual worker who needs to earn a living. Trade unions aim to balance out this uneven power relationship. As democratic organisations, trade unions represent their membership independently of managerial or government control. Having access to a collective voice through trade unions offers opportunities that are not otherwise available to individual workers.. Without trade unions, the realities of working life mean that individual workers are under pressure to simply accept the pay and conditions that an employer presents to them. To do otherwise risks missing out on the chance of a job or being dismissed. The bargaining power of trade unions has the potential to defend existing employment conditions, so that new workers are not brought in on lower rates of pay or forced to accept other terms which are inferior. Even when a worker is well-established in a job, should an employer decide to make cut backs or change hours of work, it can be exceptionally difficult to protect pay or terms and conditions on an individual basis. Employers are attentive to economic peaks and troughs and they are acutely aware of the potential benefits of cheap replacement labour when employment opportunities are scarce. Trade unions can introduce some balance into an otherwise very one-sided situation by requiring that an employer negotiate with the whole workforce. A right to strike for workers would improve working conditions, reduce inequality, and raise worker pay. Myall ’19 - James Myall James is MECEP’s lead on the inclusive economy, including research on labor issues, gender and racial equity, and health care policy. James conducts research and impact analyses, writes educational materials, and collaborates with partners. He is skilled in data collection, research, and statistical and policy analysis. He studied public policy and management at the University of Southern Maine and holds a master’s degree in ancient history and archaeology from the University of St. Andrews in Scotland., 4-17-2019, "Right to strike would level the playing field for public workers, with benefits for all of us," MECEP, https://www.mecep.org/blog/right-to-strike-would-level-the-playing-field-for-public-workers-with-benefits-for-all-of-us/ accessed 10/19/2021 Marlborough JH The right of workers to organize and bargain with their employer benefits all Mainers. Collective bargaining leads to better wages, safer workplaces, and a fairer and more robust economy for everyone — not just union members. The right to strike is critical to collective organizing and bargaining. Without it, Maine’s public employees are unable to negotiate on a level playing field. ¶Maine’s Legislature is considering a bill that would give public-sector workers the right to strike. MECEP supports the legislation, and is urging legislators to enact it. ¶The right to strike would enable fairer negotiations between public workers and the government. All of us have reason to support that outcome. Research shows that union negotiations set the bar for working conditions with other employers. And as the largest employer in Maine, the state’s treatment of its workers has a big impact on working conditions in the private sector. ¶Unions support a fairer economy. Periods of high union membership are associated with lower levels of income inequality, both nationally and in Maine. Strong unions, including public-sector unions, have a critical role to play in rebuilding a strong middle class. ¶Unions help combat inequities within work places. Women and people of color in unions face less wage discrimination than those in nonunion workplaces. On average, wages for nonunionized white women in Maine are 18 percent less than of those of white men. Among unionized workers, that inequality shrinks to just 9 percent. Similarly, women of color earn 26 percent less than men in nonunionized jobs; for unionized women of color, the wage gap shrinks to 17 percent.i ¶All of us have a stake in the success of collective bargaining. But a union without the right to strike loses much of its negotiating power. The right to withdraw your labor is the foundation of collective worker action. When state employees or teachers are sitting across the negotiating table from their employers, how much leverage do they really have when they can be made to work without a contract? It’s like negotiating the price of a car when the salesman knows you’re going to have to buy it — whatever the final price is. ¶Research confirms that public-sector unions are less effective without the right to strike. Public employees with a right to strike earn between 2 percent and 5 percent more than those without it.ii While that’s a meaningful increase for those workers, it also should assuage any fears that a right to strike would lead to excessive pay increases or employees abusing their new right. ¶LD 900, “An Act to Expand the Rights of Public Employees Under the Maine Labor Laws,” ensures that Maine’s public-sector workers will have the same collective bargaining rights as other employees in Maine. The bill would strengthen the ability of Maine’s public-sector workers to negotiate, resulting in higher wagers, a more level playing field, and a fairer economy for all of us. Unions reduce inequality Kerrissey ’15 - Kerrissey, Jasmine. “Collective Labor Rights and Income Inequality.” American Sociological Review 80, no. 3 (2015): 626–53. http://www.jstor.org/stable/44289582. AK Class-based collective actors are central to understanding income inequality in industrialized democracies. Strong working-class organizational power, usually measured as union density, reduces inequality (Brady et al. 2013; Jacobs and Myers 2014; Western and Rosenfeld 2011). Moreover, the share of the national income that goes to labor relative to capital increases when workers' relative bargaining power is strong (Kristai 2010; Lin and Tomaskovic-Devey 2013). Scholars in the power resource tradition argue that class- based collective actors affect the distributive process at two points: directly through reducing pre-tax and transfer income inequality (market mechanisms) and indirectly through supporting state policies that bolster taxes and transfers (political mechanisms). Through markets, unions directly reduce inequality by securing better wages and benefits for large groups of workers (Bradley et al. 2003; Western and Rosenfeld 2011). Unions' ability to raise wages for substantial numbers of workers is partially affected by the existenence of centralized bargaining structures (Kristai and Cohen 2007; Wallerstein 1999; but see Scheve and Stasavage 2009). However, even in decen- tralized contexts, like the United States, unions have had some success in raising wages for non-union workers through the threat of union- ization (Freeman and Medoff 1984). Although unions typically aim to increase wages, then- ability to do so varies. For instance, beginning in the 1940s in the United States, unions had high density and were relatively successful in increasing wages across entire industries (Free- man and Medoff 1984). As union density fell at the end of the twentieth century, strikes declined and were less effective in achieving higher wages (Rhomberg 2012; Rosenfeld 2006). Moreover, the rise of financialization in the United States has shifted power away from workers and resulted in increased inequality (Lin and Tomaskovic-Devey 2013). However, even in this weak position, workers are less impoverished in highly unionized states (Brady et al. 2013). Worker organizations also affect inequal- ity through political processes. Labor movements often support left parties and rally around policies that redistribute income. Unions influence elections and policies by mobilizing members to vote, protest, and work on political campaigns (Kerrissey and Schofer 2013; Norris 2002; Wood 2000). Through this collective political action, worker organizations aligned with social- democratic parties have been able to shift the relative bargaining power from capital toward labor (Bradley et al. 2003; Esping- Andersen 1985; Korpi 1989; Kristai 2010). Income inequality kills one in three people in the US through structural violence. Bezruchka, Senior Lecturer in Global Health at the University of Washington, 14 (Stephen, 2014, New Press, “Inequality Kills,” https://depts.washington.edu/eqhlth/pages/BezruchkaInequalityKillsBkPubInfo14.pdf, accessed 6/30/17, pg. 194-195, CD) Everyone in a society gains when children grow up to be healthy adults. The rest of the world seems to understand this simple fact, and only three countries in the world don’t have a policy, at least on the books, for paid maternal leave – Liberia, Papua New Guinea, and the United States. What does that say about our understanding , or concern about the health of our youth? Differences in mortality rates are not just a statistical concern—they reflect suffering and pain for very real individuals and families. The higher mortality in the United States is an example of what Paul Farmer, the noted physician and anthropologist, calls structural violence. The forty-seven infant deaths occur every day because of the way society in the United States is structured, resulting in our health status being that of a middle-income country, not a rich country. There is growing evidence that the factor most responsible for the relatively poor health in the United States is the vast and rising inequality in wealth and income that we not only tolerate, but resist changing. Inequality is the central element, the upstream cause of the social disadvantage described in the IOM report. A political system that fosters inequality limits the attainment of health. The claim that economic inequality is a major reason for our poor health requires that several standard criteria for claiming causality are satisfied: the results are confirmed by many different studies by different investigators over different time periods; there is a dose-response relationship, meaning more inequality leads to worse health; no other contending explanation is posited; and the relationship is biologically plausible, with likely mechanisms through which inequality works. The field of study called stress biology of social comparisons is one such way inequality acts. Those studies confirm that all the criteria for linking inequality to poorer health are met, concluding that the extent of inequality in society reflects the range of caring and sharing, with more unequal populations sharing less. Those who are poorer struggle to be accepted in society and the rich also suffer its effects. A recent Harvard study estimated that about one death in three in this country results from our very high income inequality. Inequality kills through structural violence. There is no smoking gun with this form of violence, which simply produces a lethally large social and economic gap between rich and poor.
Solvency Plan Text: The United States ought to recognize the unconditional right of workers to strike.
Conditions on the right to strike discourage unions from the practice of striking and lead them to agree to no-strike clauses. Janice Fine 2017, Forum Response: The Right To Strike. Boston Review. https://bostonreview.net/forum/right-strike/janice-fine-fine- responds-pope As Pope, Bruno, and Kellman point out, the trouble started long ago. The principle underlying the National Labor Relations Act was a kind of industrial citizenship in which unions would be the vehicle and collective bargaining the mechanism through which American workers would have a say in their workplaces, industries, and economic policy more broadly. The theory of collective bargaining underwriting the act was that each side needed to be able to exercise economic power sufficient to compel the other to negotiate. For workers, that fundamental power was the ability to withhold labor and stop production. That power, however, was undermined from the beginning. The act never outlawed permanent striker replacement, and a series of Supreme Court rulings even expanded employers’ right to do so. A decade after its passage, the Labor Management Relations Act of 1947 (also known as Taft-Hartley) delivered major blows to labor’s power by outlawing closed shops and secondary strikes. And, despite subsequent NLRB decisions more favorable to unions, employers routinely engage in intimidation, firings, lockouts, and striker-replacement actions. Justice, when it does come for affected workers, is far too limited and far too late. Workers during a union drive have to contend with employer interference at a level that, as Gordon Lafer argues, completely contradicts the American ideal of the free and fair election. Likewise, striking union workers are protected from permanent replacement only under an extremely constricted set of conditions. Perhaps it is for this reason that unions have accepted no-strike clauses in their contracts. Given how compromised the right to strike actually is, why not trade it away?
Restrictions on the right to strike have reduced it to meaninglessness. Pope et al. 17 James Gray Pope, et al, 2017, Pope is a Professor of Law and Sidney Reitman Scholar at Rutgers University, Ed Bruno (former director of the United Electrical Radio and Machine Workers of America, and past southern director for the National Nurses Union), and Peter Kellman (past president of the Southern Maine Labor Council and is currently working with the Movement Building/Education Committee of the Maine AFL-CIO)., The Right to Strike Boston Review, Spring 2017. https://bostonreview.net/forum/james-gray-pope-ed-bruno-peter-kellman-right-strike The prospects for union revival may seem bleaker than ever during the Trump administration, even as the triumph of right-wing populism makes more urgent what was already apparent: the need to build a labor movement that can fight for the interests of the working class in the face of corporate power.¶ But prospects are not as grim as they appear. Over the past decade, there has been an undeniable shift toward class politics, most visibly evidenced by Occupy Wall Street, the Bernie Sanders campaign, the Fight for Fifteen, and the rise of a Black Lives Matter movement that supports economic justice demands, including the right to organize. Building the labor movement in this period of danger and opportunity will require not only heeding Lerner’s call for a strategic shift and extralegal action; labor must also reclaim the right to strike and confront the deep structural disabilities that impede unions from challenging corporate power. As Lerner diagnosed twenty years ago, U.S. labor law blocks unions and workers from effective organizing and striking. Then as now, the law’s protections for workers’ rights amount to little more than paper guarantees, while its restrictions are downright deadly. Indeed the Committee on Freedom of Association of the International Labor Organization (ILO) has held that the United States is violating international standards by failing to protect the right to organize, by banning secondary strikes and boycotts across the board, and by allowing employers to permanently replace workers who strike. The ban on secondary strikes is especially debilitating, because it prevents workers who have economic power, such as organized grocery workers, from aiding workers who do not, for example unorganized packing house workers. If the grocery workers support striking packers by refusing to handle food packed by strikebreakers, they are said to be engaging in an illegal secondary strike. But the law cuts even deeper, deforming workers’ organizations at their inception. As amended by the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947 (tagged by unionists as the “Slave Labor Law”), the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) confronts workers with a choice between two inadequate forms of organization: statutory “labor organizations,” popularly known as unions, and “others,” for example workers’ centers that organize outside the statutory framework. At first glance, the choice seems obvious. Only unions can demand and engage in collective bargaining. But unions are subject to so many restrictions that some workers’ organizations (such as the Restaurant Opportunities Centers United) are willing to forego collective bargaining in order to avoid them, while others (including the Coalition of Immokalee Workers) consider themselves lucky to be excluded from the NLRA altogether. In the 1960s Cesar Chavez of the United Farm Workers rejected NLRA coverage for farm workers on the ground that it would inscribe “a glowing epitaph on our tombstone.”
11/16/21
ND - Unions
Tournament: USC | Round: 1 | Opponent: Bartmess, Isabella | Judge: Harvard Westlake AT Novice AC I Affirm: Resolved – A just government ought to recognize the unconditional right of workers to strike. Advantage 1: Economic Inequality Unions give workers enough leverage to effectively negotiate with their employers. Hayes ‘ 21 - Hayes, Lydia, et al. “Trade Unions and Economic Inequality.” Institute of Employment Rights Journal, vol. 4, no., Pluto Journals, 2021, pp. 118–41, https://doi.org/10.13169/instemplrighj.4.0.0118. AK How trade unions promote economic equality. The economic clout of an employer is much stronger than the negotiating capacity of an individual worker who needs to earn a living. Trade unions aim to balance out this uneven power relationship. As democratic organisations, trade unions represent their membership independently of managerial or government control. Having access to a collective voice through trade unions offers opportunities that are not otherwise available to individual workers.. Without trade unions, the realities of working life mean that individual workers are under pressure to simply accept the pay and conditions that an employer presents to them. To do otherwise risks missing out on the chance of a job or being dismissed. The bargaining power of trade unions has the potential to defend existing employment conditions, so that new workers are not brought in on lower rates of pay or forced to accept other terms which are inferior. Even when a worker is well-established in a job, should an employer decide to make cut backs or change hours of work, it can be exceptionally difficult to protect pay or terms and conditions on an individual basis. Employers are attentive to economic peaks and troughs and they are acutely aware of the potential benefits of cheap replacement labour when employment opportunities are scarce. Trade unions can introduce some balance into an otherwise very one-sided situation by requiring that an employer negotiate with the whole workforce. A right to strike for workers would improve working conditions, reduce inequality, and raise worker pay. Myall ’19 - James Myall James is MECEP’s lead on the inclusive economy, including research on labor issues, gender and racial equity, and health care policy. James conducts research and impact analyses, writes educational materials, and collaborates with partners. He is skilled in data collection, research, and statistical and policy analysis. He studied public policy and management at the University of Southern Maine and holds a master’s degree in ancient history and archaeology from the University of St. Andrews in Scotland., 4-17-2019, "Right to strike would level the playing field for public workers, with benefits for all of us," MECEP, https://www.mecep.org/blog/right-to-strike-would-level-the-playing-field-for-public-workers-with-benefits-for-all-of-us/ accessed 10/19/2021 Marlborough JH The right of workers to organize and bargain with their employer benefits all Mainers. Collective bargaining leads to better wages, safer workplaces, and a fairer and more robust economy for everyone — not just union members. The right to strike is critical to collective organizing and bargaining. Without it, Maine’s public employees are unable to negotiate on a level playing field. ¶Maine’s Legislature is considering a bill that would give public-sector workers the right to strike. MECEP supports the legislation, and is urging legislators to enact it. ¶The right to strike would enable fairer negotiations between public workers and the government. All of us have reason to support that outcome. Research shows that union negotiations set the bar for working conditions with other employers. And as the largest employer in Maine, the state’s treatment of its workers has a big impact on working conditions in the private sector. ¶Unions support a fairer economy. Periods of high union membership are associated with lower levels of income inequality, both nationally and in Maine. Strong unions, including public-sector unions, have a critical role to play in rebuilding a strong middle class. ¶Unions help combat inequities within work places. Women and people of color in unions face less wage discrimination than those in nonunion workplaces. On average, wages for nonunionized white women in Maine are 18 percent less than of those of white men. Among unionized workers, that inequality shrinks to just 9 percent. Similarly, women of color earn 26 percent less than men in nonunionized jobs; for unionized women of color, the wage gap shrinks to 17 percent.i ¶All of us have a stake in the success of collective bargaining. But a union without the right to strike loses much of its negotiating power. The right to withdraw your labor is the foundation of collective worker action. When state employees or teachers are sitting across the negotiating table from their employers, how much leverage do they really have when they can be made to work without a contract? It’s like negotiating the price of a car when the salesman knows you’re going to have to buy it — whatever the final price is. ¶Research confirms that public-sector unions are less effective without the right to strike. Public employees with a right to strike earn between 2 percent and 5 percent more than those without it.ii While that’s a meaningful increase for those workers, it also should assuage any fears that a right to strike would lead to excessive pay increases or employees abusing their new right. ¶LD 900, “An Act to Expand the Rights of Public Employees Under the Maine Labor Laws,” ensures that Maine’s public-sector workers will have the same collective bargaining rights as other employees in Maine. The bill would strengthen the ability of Maine’s public-sector workers to negotiate, resulting in higher wagers, a more level playing field, and a fairer economy for all of us. Unions reduce inequality Kerrissey ’15 - Kerrissey, Jasmine. “Collective Labor Rights and Income Inequality.” American Sociological Review 80, no. 3 (2015): 626–53. http://www.jstor.org/stable/44289582. AK Class-based collective actors are central to understanding income inequality in industrialized democracies. Strong working-class organizational power, usually measured as union density, reduces inequality (Brady et al. 2013; Jacobs and Myers 2014; Western and Rosenfeld 2011). Moreover, the share of the national income that goes to labor relative to capital increases when workers' relative bargaining power is strong (Kristai 2010; Lin and Tomaskovic-Devey 2013). Scholars in the power resource tradition argue that class- based collective actors affect the distributive process at two points: directly through reducing pre-tax and transfer income inequality (market mechanisms) and indirectly through supporting state policies that bolster taxes and transfers (political mechanisms). Through markets, unions directly reduce inequality by securing better wages and benefits for large groups of workers (Bradley et al. 2003; Western and Rosenfeld 2011). Unions' ability to raise wages for substantial numbers of workers is partially affected by the existenence of centralized bargaining structures (Kristai and Cohen 2007; Wallerstein 1999; but see Scheve and Stasavage 2009). However, even in decen- tralized contexts, like the United States, unions have had some success in raising wages for non-union workers through the threat of union- ization (Freeman and Medoff 1984). Although unions typically aim to increase wages, then- ability to do so varies. For instance, beginning in the 1940s in the United States, unions had high density and were relatively successful in increasing wages across entire industries (Free- man and Medoff 1984). As union density fell at the end of the twentieth century, strikes declined and were less effective in achieving higher wages (Rhomberg 2012; Rosenfeld 2006). Moreover, the rise of financialization in the United States has shifted power away from workers and resulted in increased inequality (Lin and Tomaskovic-Devey 2013). However, even in this weak position, workers are less impoverished in highly unionized states (Brady et al. 2013). Worker organizations also affect inequal- ity through political processes. Labor movements often support left parties and rally around policies that redistribute income. Unions influence elections and policies by mobilizing members to vote, protest, and work on political campaigns (Kerrissey and Schofer 2013; Norris 2002; Wood 2000). Through this collective political action, worker organizations aligned with social- democratic parties have been able to shift the relative bargaining power from capital toward labor (Bradley et al. 2003; Esping- Andersen 1985; Korpi 1989; Kristai 2010). Income inequality kills one in three people in the US through structural violence. Bezruchka, Senior Lecturer in Global Health at the University of Washington, 14 (Stephen, 2014, New Press, “Inequality Kills,” https://depts.washington.edu/eqhlth/pages/BezruchkaInequalityKillsBkPubInfo14.pdf, accessed 6/30/17, pg. 194-195, CD) Everyone in a society gains when children grow up to be healthy adults. The rest of the world seems to understand this simple fact, and only three countries in the world don’t have a policy, at least on the books, for paid maternal leave – Liberia, Papua New Guinea, and the United States. What does that say about our understanding , or concern about the health of our youth? Differences in mortality rates are not just a statistical concern—they reflect suffering and pain for very real individuals and families. The higher mortality in the United States is an example of what Paul Farmer, the noted physician and anthropologist, calls structural violence. The forty-seven infant deaths occur every day because of the way society in the United States is structured, resulting in our health status being that of a middle-income country, not a rich country. There is growing evidence that the factor most responsible for the relatively poor health in the United States is the vast and rising inequality in wealth and income that we not only tolerate, but resist changing. Inequality is the central element, the upstream cause of the social disadvantage described in the IOM report. A political system that fosters inequality limits the attainment of health. The claim that economic inequality is a major reason for our poor health requires that several standard criteria for claiming causality are satisfied: the results are confirmed by many different studies by different investigators over different time periods; there is a dose-response relationship, meaning more inequality leads to worse health; no other contending explanation is posited; and the relationship is biologically plausible, with likely mechanisms through which inequality works. The field of study called stress biology of social comparisons is one such way inequality acts. Those studies confirm that all the criteria for linking inequality to poorer health are met, concluding that the extent of inequality in society reflects the range of caring and sharing, with more unequal populations sharing less. Those who are poorer struggle to be accepted in society and the rich also suffer its effects. A recent Harvard study estimated that about one death in three in this country results from our very high income inequality. Inequality kills through structural violence. There is no smoking gun with this form of violence, which simply produces a lethally large social and economic gap between rich and poor.
Solvency Plan Text: The United States ought to recognize the unconditional right of workers to strike.
Conditions on the right to strike discourage unions from the practice of striking and lead them to agree to no-strike clauses. Janice Fine 2017, Forum Response: The Right To Strike. Boston Review. https://bostonreview.net/forum/right-strike/janice-fine-fine- responds-pope As Pope, Bruno, and Kellman point out, the trouble started long ago. The principle underlying the National Labor Relations Act was a kind of industrial citizenship in which unions would be the vehicle and collective bargaining the mechanism through which American workers would have a say in their workplaces, industries, and economic policy more broadly. The theory of collective bargaining underwriting the act was that each side needed to be able to exercise economic power sufficient to compel the other to negotiate. For workers, that fundamental power was the ability to withhold labor and stop production. That power, however, was undermined from the beginning. The act never outlawed permanent striker replacement, and a series of Supreme Court rulings even expanded employers’ right to do so. A decade after its passage, the Labor Management Relations Act of 1947 (also known as Taft-Hartley) delivered major blows to labor’s power by outlawing closed shops and secondary strikes. And, despite subsequent NLRB decisions more favorable to unions, employers routinely engage in intimidation, firings, lockouts, and striker-replacement actions. Justice, when it does come for affected workers, is far too limited and far too late. Workers during a union drive have to contend with employer interference at a level that, as Gordon Lafer argues, completely contradicts the American ideal of the free and fair election. Likewise, striking union workers are protected from permanent replacement only under an extremely constricted set of conditions. Perhaps it is for this reason that unions have accepted no-strike clauses in their contracts. Given how compromised the right to strike actually is, why not trade it away?
Restrictions on the right to strike have reduced it to meaninglessness. Pope et al. 17 James Gray Pope, et al, 2017, Pope is a Professor of Law and Sidney Reitman Scholar at Rutgers University, Ed Bruno (former director of the United Electrical Radio and Machine Workers of America, and past southern director for the National Nurses Union), and Peter Kellman (past president of the Southern Maine Labor Council and is currently working with the Movement Building/Education Committee of the Maine AFL-CIO)., The Right to Strike Boston Review, Spring 2017. https://bostonreview.net/forum/james-gray-pope-ed-bruno-peter-kellman-right-strike The prospects for union revival may seem bleaker than ever during the Trump administration, even as the triumph of right-wing populism makes more urgent what was already apparent: the need to build a labor movement that can fight for the interests of the working class in the face of corporate power.¶ But prospects are not as grim as they appear. Over the past decade, there has been an undeniable shift toward class politics, most visibly evidenced by Occupy Wall Street, the Bernie Sanders campaign, the Fight for Fifteen, and the rise of a Black Lives Matter movement that supports economic justice demands, including the right to organize. Building the labor movement in this period of danger and opportunity will require not only heeding Lerner’s call for a strategic shift and extralegal action; labor must also reclaim the right to strike and confront the deep structural disabilities that impede unions from challenging corporate power. As Lerner diagnosed twenty years ago, U.S. labor law blocks unions and workers from effective organizing and striking. Then as now, the law’s protections for workers’ rights amount to little more than paper guarantees, while its restrictions are downright deadly. Indeed the Committee on Freedom of Association of the International Labor Organization (ILO) has held that the United States is violating international standards by failing to protect the right to organize, by banning secondary strikes and boycotts across the board, and by allowing employers to permanently replace workers who strike. The ban on secondary strikes is especially debilitating, because it prevents workers who have economic power, such as organized grocery workers, from aiding workers who do not, for example unorganized packing house workers. If the grocery workers support striking packers by refusing to handle food packed by strikebreakers, they are said to be engaging in an illegal secondary strike. But the law cuts even deeper, deforming workers’ organizations at their inception. As amended by the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947 (tagged by unionists as the “Slave Labor Law”), the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) confronts workers with a choice between two inadequate forms of organization: statutory “labor organizations,” popularly known as unions, and “others,” for example workers’ centers that organize outside the statutory framework. At first glance, the choice seems obvious. Only unions can demand and engage in collective bargaining. But unions are subject to so many restrictions that some workers’ organizations (such as the Restaurant Opportunities Centers United) are willing to forego collective bargaining in order to avoid them, while others (including the Coalition of Immokalee Workers) consider themselves lucky to be excluded from the NLRA altogether. In the 1960s Cesar Chavez of the United Farm Workers rejected NLRA coverage for farm workers on the ground that it would inscribe “a glowing epitaph on our tombstone.” Legal recognition of the right to strike is the ONLY way to protect workers. James Gray Pope {James Gray Pope is a distinguished professor of law at Rutgers Law School and serves on the executive council of the Rutgers Council of AAUP/AFT Chapters, AFL-CIO.}, 18 - ("Labor’s right to strike is essential," PSC CUNY, 9-21-2018, https://www.psc-cuny.org/clarion/september-2018/laborE28099s-right-strike-essential)//marlborough-wr/ What provoked Cuomo and de Blasio to close ranks and launch a simultaneous attack on workers’ rights? Gubernatorial candidate Cynthia Nixon had the audacity to include in her platform a plank endorsing public workers’ right to strike. No wonder Cuomo and de Blasio struck back: Like Bernie Sanders, Nixon threatened the grip of Wall Street-backed politicians on what was once the party of working people. ¶ The right to strike should be a no-brainer for any self-respecting candidate who claims to care about working people. It isn’t some transitory policy fix; it’s a fundamental human right, recognized in international law. Without the right to strike, workers have no effective recourse against unhealthy conditions, inadequate wages, or employer tyranny. Before the American labor movement began its long decline, unions made the right to strike a litmus test for supporting candidates. Labor leaders held that anti-strike laws imposed “involuntary servitude” in violation of the Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution. Corporate interests ridiculed this claim, arguing that the Amendment guaranteed only the individual right to quit and go elsewhere. But workers and unions held their ground. “The simple fact is that the right of individual workers to quit their jobs has meaning only when they may quit in concert, so that in their quitting or in their threat to quit they have a real bargaining strength,” Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) General Counsel Lee Pressman explained. “It is thus hypocritical to suggest that a prohibition on the right to strike is not in practical effect a prohibition on the right to quit individually.”
12/11/21
SO-Covid Aff
Tournament: Heart of Texas | Round: 1 | Opponent: Harvard-Westlake MB | Judge: Qing Li Novice AC I affirm – Resolved: The member nations of the World Trade Organization ought to reduce intellectual property protections for medicines.
Because the resolution asks what we ought to do, my value is Morality.
The criterion for determining morality is minimizing suffering. No coherent theory of justice or morality can deny that suffering is morally bad. Each of us knows from our own experiences that suffering is a moral evil, and that other people experience suffering in the same way we do. Therefore, if we regard everyone’s pain as morally equal, we are obligated to minimize the amount of suffering people experience.
Moreover, maximizing utility is the only way to affirm equal and unconditional human dignity. Cummiskey ’90 - David Cummiskey. Associate Philosophy Professor at Bates College.Kantian Consequentialism. Ethics, Vol. 100, No. 3. 1990. http://www.jstor.org/stable/2381810.
We must not … to save many.
Contention 1: Covid-19
The only way to solve the pandemic is global vaccination, but current production is woefully short. Public Citizen 3/29 - Public Citizen “Public Citizen is a nonprofit consumer advocacy organization that champions the public interest in the halls of power. We defend democracy, resist corporate power and work to ensure that government works for the people – not for big corporations. Founded in 1971, we now have 500,000 members and supporters throughout the country. We don’t participate in partisan political activities or endorse any candidates for elected office. We take no government or corporate money, which enables us to remain fiercely independent and call out bad actors – no matter who they are or how much power and money they have.”, “Waiver of the WTO’s Intellectual Property Rules: Facts vs. Common Myths,” Public Citizen Global Trade Watch Series. March 29, 2021. Accessed Aug. 10, 2021. https://www.citizen.org/article/waiver-of-the-wtos-intellectual-property-rules-myths-vs-facts/ AT The COVID-19 public … the COVID-19 pandemic. The vaccine shortfall causes widespread death and poverty. Public Citizen 3/1 - Public Citizen “Public Citizen is a nonprofit consumer advocacy organization that champions the public interest in the halls of power. We defend democracy, resist corporate power and work to ensure that government works for the people – not for big corporations. Founded in 1971, we now have 500,000 members and supporters throughout the country. We don’t participate in partisan political activities or endorse any candidates for elected office. We take no government or corporate money, which enables us to remain fiercely independent and call out bad actors – no matter who they are or how much power and money they have.”, “Backgrounder: WTO-Required Monopolies for Pharmaceutical Corporations Obstruct Global Production of COVID-19 Vaccines and Treatment,” Public Citizen Global Trade Watch Series. March 1, 2021. Accessed Aug. 12, 2021. https://www.citizen.org/article/wto-required-monopolies-for-pharmaceutical-corporations-obstruct-global-production-of-covid-19-vaccines-and-treatments/ AT It is obvious… losses by $5.5 trillion. A waiver provides legal certainty that unlocks global production. Public Citizen 3/29 - Public Citizen “Public Citizen is a nonprofit consumer advocacy organization that champions the public interest in the halls of power. We defend democracy, resist corporate power and work to ensure that government works for the people – not for big corporations. Founded in 1971, we now have 500,000 members and supporters throughout the country. We don’t participate in partisan political activities or endorse any candidates for elected office. We take no government or corporate money, which enables us to remain fiercely independent and call out bad actors – no matter who they are or how much power and money they have.”, “Waiver of the WTO’s Intellectual Property Rules: Facts vs. Common Myths,” Public Citizen Global Trade Watch Series. March 29, 2021. Accessed Aug. 10, 2021. https://www.citizen.org/article/waiver-of-the-wtos-intellectual-property-rules-myths-vs-facts/ AT Most critically, there … Johnson and Johnson vaccine uses. Manufacturing capacity is widespread around the world. Public Citizen 3/29 - Public Citizen “Public Citizen is a nonprofit consumer advocacy organization that champions the public interest in the halls of power. We defend democracy, resist corporate power and work to ensure that government works for the people – not for big corporations. Founded in 1971, we now have 500,000 members and supporters throughout the country. We don’t participate in partisan political activities or endorse any candidates for elected office. We take no government or corporate money, which enables us to remain fiercely independent and call out bad actors – no matter who they are or how much power and money they have.”, “Waiver of the WTO’s Intellectual Property Rules: Facts vs. Common Myths,” Public Citizen Global Trade Watch Series. March 29, 2021. Accessed Aug. 10, 2021. https://www.citizen.org/article/waiver-of-the-wtos-intellectual-property-rules-myths-vs-facts/ AT In the press a…class pharmaceutical firms already are making generic versions of new cutting-edge HIV-AIDS medicines and pumping out vaccines based on the platform that, for instance, the Johnson and Johnson vaccine uses. Contention II: Innovation Limiting IP protections increases the incentive to create new drugs. Light and Warburton ’11 - Donald W. Light Visiting professor at Stanford University and a professor of comparative health-care at the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey. He is an economic and organizational sociologist who studies health care systems and pharmaceu- tical policy. and Rebecca Warburton associate professor and a health economist, specializing in the cost- benefit analysis of health-related public projects. Her current research primarily concerns assessing the validity of industry-sponsored estimates of the cost of drug development, and assessing the costs and effects of patient safety improvements. She has a PhD in economics from the University of London (1995), and an M.Sc. in economics from the London School of Economics (1980); School of Public Administration, University of Victoria, British Columbia, “Demythologizing the high costs of pharmaceutical research BioSocieties (2011) 6, 34–50. doi:10.1057/biosoc.2010.40; published online 7 February 2011. JH Industry executives, well … (Light and Lexchin, 2005). IP stifles innovation by allowing firms to prevent new competition from entering the market, driving down the incentive for R and D. MSF ’17 – Médecins Sans Frontières Doctors Without Borders - Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) is an international, independent, medical humanitarian organisation that delivers emergency aid to people affected by armed conflict, epidemics, healthcare exclusion and natural or man-made disasters., “A Fair Shot for Vaccine Affordability: Understanding and addressing the effects of patents on access to newer vaccines,” September, 2017. Accessed Aug. 12, 2021. https://msfaccess.org/sites/default/files/2018-06/VAC_report_A20Fair20Shot20for20Vaccine20Affordability_ENG_2017.pdf AT Patents are increasingly …sell competitor vaccines.
Contention 3: Medicine Prices IP undermines competition and keeps medicine prices high. MSF ’17 – Médecins Sans Frontières Doctors Without Borders - Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) is an international, independent, medical humanitarian organisation that delivers emergency aid to people affected by armed conflict, epidemics, healthcare exclusion and natural or man-made disasters., “A Fair Shot for Vaccine Affordability: Understanding and addressing the effects of patents on access to newer vaccines,” September, 2017. Accessed Aug. 12, 2021. https://msfaccess.org/sites/default/files/2018-06/VAC_report_A20Fair20Shot20for20Vaccine20Affordability_ENG_2017.pdf AT Intellectual property undermines …o K¶ vaccine patent landscape. Poverty and disease are mutually reinforcing, causing staggering suffering and injustice. Hollis and Pogge ’08 - Aidan Hollis Associate Professor of Economics, the University of Calgary and Thomas Pogge Leitner Professor of Philosophy and International Affairs, Yale University, “The Health Impact Fund Making New Medicines Accessible for All,” Incentives for Global Health (2008) AT In 2004, some… 9 (Fogarty n.d., the global poor. For these reasons, I urge an affirmative ballot.
10/16/21
SO-Covid Aff
Tournament: Meadows Novice Scrimmage | Round: 2 | Opponent: Harvard Westlake-EL | Judge: Zachary Nemec Novice AC I affirm – Resolved: The member nations of the World Trade Organization ought to reduce intellectual property protections for medicines.
Because the resolution asks what we ought to do, my value is Morality.
The criterion for determining morality is minimizing suffering. No coherent theory of justice or morality can deny that suffering is morally bad. Each of us knows from our own experiences that suffering is a moral evil, and that other people experience suffering in the same way we do. Therefore, if we regard everyone’s pain as morally equal, we are obligated to minimize the amount of suffering people experience.
Moreover, maximizing utility is the only way to affirm equal and unconditional human dignity. Cummiskey ’90 - David Cummiskey. Associate Philosophy Professor at Bates College.Kantian Consequentialism. Ethics, Vol. 100, No. 3. 1990. http://www.jstor.org/stable/2381810.
We must not obscure the issue by characterizing this type of case as the sacrifice of individuals for some abstract “social entity.” It is not a question of some persons having to bear the cost for some elusive “overall social good.” Instead, the question is whether some persons must bear the inescapable cost for the sake of other persons. Robert Nozick, for example, argues that “to use a person in this way does not sufficiently respect and take account of the fact that he is a separate person, that his is the only life he has.” But why is this not equally true of all those whom we do not save through our failure to act? By emphasizing solely the one who must bear the cost if we act, we fail to sufficiently respect and take account of the many other separate persons, each with only one life, who will bear the cost of our inaction. In such a situation, what would a conscientious Kantian agent, an agent motivated by the unconditional value of rational beings, choose? A morally good agent recognizes that the basis of all particular duties is the principle that “rational nature exists as an end in itself” (GMM 429). Rational nature as such is the supreme objective end of all conduct. If one truly believes that all rational beings have an equal value, then the rational solution to such a dilemma involves maximally promoting the lives and liberties of as many rational beings as possible (chapter 5). In order to avoid this conclusion, the non-consequentialist Kantian needs to justify agent-centered constraints. As we saw in chapter 1, however, even most Kantian deontologists recognize that agent-centered constraints require a non- value-based rationale. But we have seen that Kant’s normative theory is based on an unconditionally valuable end. How can a concern for the value of rational beings lead to a refusal to sacrifice rational beings even when this would prevent other more extensive losses of rational beings? If the moral law is based on the value of rational beings and their ends, then what is the rationale for prohibiting a moral agent from maximally promoting these two tiers of value? If I sacrifice some for the sake of others, I do not use them arbitrarily, and I do not deny the unconditional value of rational beings. Persons may have “dignity, that is, an unconditional and incomparable worth” that transcends any market value (GMM 436), but persons also have a fundamental equality that dictates that some must sometimes give way for the sake of others (chapters 5 and 7). The concept of the end-in-itself does not support the view that we may never force another to bear some cost in order to benefit others. If one focuses on the equal value of all rational beings, then equal consideration suggests that one may have to sacrifice some to save many.
Contention 1: Covid-19
The only way to solve the pandemic is global vaccination, but current production is woefully short. Public Citizen 3/29 - Public Citizen “Public Citizen is a nonprofit consumer advocacy organization that champions the public interest in the halls of power. We defend democracy, resist corporate power and work to ensure that government works for the people – not for big corporations. Founded in 1971, we now have 500,000 members and supporters throughout the country. We don’t participate in partisan political activities or endorse any candidates for elected office. We take no government or corporate money, which enables us to remain fiercely independent and call out bad actors – no matter who they are or how much power and money they have.”, “Waiver of the WTO’s Intellectual Property Rules: Facts vs. Common Myths,” Public Citizen Global Trade Watch Series. March 29, 2021. Accessed Aug. 10, 2021. https://www.citizen.org/article/waiver-of-the-wtos-intellectual-property-rules-myths-vs-facts/ AT The COVID-19 public health disaster and resulting economic crises won’t end anywhere unless people everywhere are vaccinated. Despite this obvious truth, rich countries with only 14 of the global population have secured preferential access to over 50 of projected global vaccine supplies. Ongoing outbreaks anywhere allow the virus to mutate, threatening the whole world with vaccine-resistant variants or more deadly or easily spread variants. Governments invested billions to create the vaccines. But, there is a dire shortage, with no end in sight. As we enter the second quarter, about one billion doses have been produced in 2021. We need 10 to 12 billion to reach global herd immunity. And we will need far more if, like flu vaccines, they must be repeated or require booster shots. In every region, there are existing firms that could gear up production and governments willing to invest in expanding supply. But WTO rules require countries to guarantee pharmaceutical corporations monopoly control. More than 100 countries support a temporary, emergency suspension of these WTO rules, so more vaccines, treatments and diagnostic tests can be manufactured in as many places as possible. The United States and a handful of other WTO members are blocking the waiver: They won’t even agree to negotiate about waiver language to address whatever concerns that they may have with the current text. Donald Trump started this self-defeating blockade. President Joe Biden must reverse it to speed the end of the COVID-19 pandemic. The vaccine shortfall causes widespread death and poverty. Public Citizen 3/1 - Public Citizen “Public Citizen is a nonprofit consumer advocacy organization that champions the public interest in the halls of power. We defend democracy, resist corporate power and work to ensure that government works for the people – not for big corporations. Founded in 1971, we now have 500,000 members and supporters throughout the country. We don’t participate in partisan political activities or endorse any candidates for elected office. We take no government or corporate money, which enables us to remain fiercely independent and call out bad actors – no matter who they are or how much power and money they have.”, “Backgrounder: WTO-Required Monopolies for Pharmaceutical Corporations Obstruct Global Production of COVID-19 Vaccines and Treatment,” Public Citizen Global Trade Watch Series. March 1, 2021. Accessed Aug. 12, 2021. https://www.citizen.org/article/wto-required-monopolies-for-pharmaceutical-corporations-obstruct-global-production-of-covid-19-vaccines-and-treatments/ AT It is obvious that current production capacity cannot supply enough vaccines for the entire world. Many people in low- and middle-income countries around the globe will not get vaccinated until at least 2022 unless the world manufactures many more doses, according to the British Medical Journal. The world’s poorest countries may wait until 2024 for mass immunization, if it happens at all, reports the Economist Intelligence Unit. The global vaccine apartheid unfolding right now could cost millions of lives and push tens of millions more into poverty. The devastation will be felt for a generation. A new International Chamber of Commerce report concluded that the world could face economic losses of more than $9 trillion under the scenario of wealthy nations being fully vaccinated by mid-2021, but poor countries largely shut out. Wealthy countries like the United States would bear nearly half of that hit. Vaccinating just half of low- and middle-income countries’ populations could reduce global losses by $5.5 trillion. A waiver provides legal certainty that unlocks global production. Public Citizen 3/29 - Public Citizen “Public Citizen is a nonprofit consumer advocacy organization that champions the public interest in the halls of power. We defend democracy, resist corporate power and work to ensure that government works for the people – not for big corporations. Founded in 1971, we now have 500,000 members and supporters throughout the country. We don’t participate in partisan political activities or endorse any candidates for elected office. We take no government or corporate money, which enables us to remain fiercely independent and call out bad actors – no matter who they are or how much power and money they have.”, “Waiver of the WTO’s Intellectual Property Rules: Facts vs. Common Myths,” Public Citizen Global Trade Watch Series. March 29, 2021. Accessed Aug. 10, 2021. https://www.citizen.org/article/waiver-of-the-wtos-intellectual-property-rules-myths-vs-facts/ AT Most critically, there simply is not enough supply to go around now or for every year in the future during which the whole world will need regular COVID vaccination to keep the virus under control. Thankfully, scores of countries are ready to invest in building new or repurposing existing production capacity. That is why more than 100 countries support a waiver of the WTO’s Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property (TRIPS). These countries seek certainty that if they adjust their domestic laws and practices to support that investment by providing access to the necessary technology, they will not get dragged into expansive WTO litigation or face retaliatory sanctions from countries claiming WTO violations. The waiver will also serve as a worldwide buffer against the political pressure and legal harassment to which Big Pharma subjects countries that seek to promote affordable access to medicines.¶ In many countries, the regulatory authorities that had to approve domestic use of various vaccines and other COVID-related medical products have significant information from the firms that they could share with skilled teams from local universities, government agencies and pharmaceutical manufacturers — if they were not obliged by WTO rules to guarantee monopoly control of it. And world-class pharmaceutical firms already are making generic versions of new cutting-edge HIV-AIDS medicines and pumping out vaccines based on the platform that, for instance, the Johnson and Johnson vaccine uses. Manufacturing capacity is widespread around the world. Public Citizen 3/29 - Public Citizen “Public Citizen is a nonprofit consumer advocacy organization that champions the public interest in the halls of power. We defend democracy, resist corporate power and work to ensure that government works for the people – not for big corporations. Founded in 1971, we now have 500,000 members and supporters throughout the country. We don’t participate in partisan political activities or endorse any candidates for elected office. We take no government or corporate money, which enables us to remain fiercely independent and call out bad actors – no matter who they are or how much power and money they have.”, “Waiver of the WTO’s Intellectual Property Rules: Facts vs. Common Myths,” Public Citizen Global Trade Watch Series. March 29, 2021. Accessed Aug. 10, 2021. https://www.citizen.org/article/waiver-of-the-wtos-intellectual-property-rules-myths-vs-facts/ AT In the press and on Capitol Hill, Big Pharma is pushing a Big Lie. The claim is that a lack of manufacturing capacity, not pharmaceutical corporation’s monopoly intellectual property (IP) protections, are thwarting greater production of COVID-19 vaccines. A related argument, with decidedly racist overtones, is that COVID-19 vaccines are too complicated for producers in developing countries to make successfully. The reality is that in every region of the world, there are multiple producers that could be greatly increasing global vaccine supplies if the technology and know-how were shared.¶ Just in Africa, “Biovac and Aspen in South Africa, Institute Pasteur in Senegal, and Vacsera in Egypt could rapidly retool factories to make mRNA vaccines,” notes a group of medicine-production experts in a recent Foreign Policy article. Indeed, a former Moderna director of chemistry revealed that with enough technology transfer and know- how-sharing, a modern factory should be able to get mRNA vaccine production online in, at most, three to four months. The Serum Institute in India already is slated to produce the AstraZeneca and Novavax vaccines, while Moderna declined to partner with a qualified Bangladeshi vaccine maker, claiming its engineers were too busy to focus beyond U.S. and EU production. In Latin America, existing facilities in Brazil, Argentina and Mexico under contract to monopoly holders are already pumping out vials, and in countries like Chile and Colombia, the pharmaceutical industry has expressed willingness to kickstart vaccine production.¶ Existing and planned contract manufacturing arrangements prove facilities in developing countries certainly can produce COVID-19 vaccines. But unless technology and know-how are shared more openly, the monopoly holders maintain absolute control over how much can be produced, what the price is and where it will be sold. So, 91 of the Johnson and Johnson vaccine that South African firm Aspen will manufacture must be shipped for sale outside South Africa, according to South Africa’s WTO Counselor. And the Serum Institute is barred from supplying upper- middle-income and high-income countries with the AstraZeneca vaccines it makes, meaning AstraZeneca can artificially segment the global market and ensure that it is the only supplier of the Oxford vaccine in the most profitable national markets, according to Doctors Without Borders.¶ Most critically, there simply is not enough supply to go around now or for every year in the future during which the whole world will need regular COVID vaccination to keep the virus under control. Thankfully, scores of countries are ready to invest in building new or repurposing existing production capacity. That is why more than 100 countries support a waiver of the WTO’s Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property (TRIPS). These countries seek certainty that if they adjust their domestic laws and practices to support that investment by providing access to the necessary technology, they will not get dragged into expansive WTO litigation or face retaliatory sanctions from countries claiming WTO violations. The waiver will also serve as a worldwide buffer against the political pressure and legal harassment to which Big Pharma subjects countries that seek to promote affordable access to medicines.¶ In many countries, the regulatory authorities that had to approve domestic use of various vaccines and other COVID-related medical products have significant information from the firms that they could share with skilled teams from local universities, government agencies and pharmaceutical manufacturers — if they were not obliged by WTO rules to guarantee monopoly control of it. And world-class pharmaceutical firms already are making generic versions of new cutting-edge HIV-AIDS medicines and pumping out vaccines based on the platform that, for instance, the Johnson and Johnson vaccine uses. Contention II: Innovation Limiting IP protections increases the incentive to create new drugs. Light and Warburton ’11 - Donald W. Light Visiting professor at Stanford University and a professor of comparative health-care at the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey. He is an economic and organizational sociologist who studies health care systems and pharmaceu- tical policy. and Rebecca Warburton associate professor and a health economist, specializing in the cost- benefit analysis of health-related public projects. Her current research primarily concerns assessing the validity of industry-sponsored estimates of the cost of drug development, and assessing the costs and effects of patient safety improvements. She has a PhD in economics from the University of London (1995), and an M.Sc. in economics from the London School of Economics (1980); School of Public Administration, University of Victoria, British Columbia, “Demythologizing the high costs of pharmaceutical research BioSocieties (2011) 6, 34–50. doi:10.1057/biosoc.2010.40; published online 7 February 2011. JH Industry executives, well supplied with facts and figures by the industry’s global press network, awe audiences with staggering figures for the cost of a single trial, like tribal chieftains and their scribes who recount the mythic costs of a great victory in a remote pass where no outside witnesses saw the battle. Companies tightly control access to verifiable facts about their risks and costs, allowing access only to supported economists at consulting firms and universities, who develop methods for showing how large costs and risks are; and then the public, politicians and journalists often take them at face value, accepting them as fact. The global press network never tells audiences about the detailed reconstruction of RandD costs for RotaTeq and Rotarix that found costs and risks were remarkably low up to the large final trials, and that concluded the companies recovered their investments within the first 18 months (Light et al, 2009). The companies could now sell these vaccines for rotavirus for one-tenth their Western price and still earn profits. ¶Pharmaceutical companies have a strong vested interest in maximizing figures for RandD and supporting centres or researchers who help them do so. Since the Kefauver hearings in 1959–1962, the industry’s principal justification for its high prices on patented drugs has been the high cost of RandD, and it has sought further government protections from normal price competition. These include increasing patent terms and extending data exclusivity, without good evidence that these measures increase innovation (National Institute for Health Care Management, 2000; European Commission for Competition, 2008 (28 November); Adamini et al, 2009). Industry leaders and lobbyists routinely warn that lower prices will reduce funds for RandD and result in suffering and death that future medicines could reduce. Marcia Angell, the former editor of the New England Journal of Medicine, describes this as ‘ya kind of blackmail’ (Angell, 2004, pp. 38–39). She quotes the president of the US industry’s trade association as saying, ‘Believe me, if we impose price controls on the pharmaceutical industry, and if you reduce the RandD that this industry is able to provide, it’s going to harm my kids and it’s going to harm those millions of other Americans who have life-threatening conditions’. Merrill Goozner, former chief economic correspondent for the Chicago Tribune, points out that no other research-oriented industry makes this kind of argument (Goozner, 2004). In fact, they do the opposite: when profits decline, they redouble their research efforts to find new products that will generate more profits. Not to do so guarantees their decline. The industry’s view of European ‘price controls’ (actually, large-volume discounts) is that they do not allow recovery of huge RandD costs so that Europeans are ‘free riders’ on Americans and force US prices higher to pay for unrecovered costs the ‘free riders’ refuse to pay. This claim has been shown not to be supported by industry and government reports and to be illogical as well (Light and Lexchin, 2005). IP stifles innovation by allowing firms to prevent new competition from entering the market, driving down the incentive for R and D. MSF ’17 – Médecins Sans Frontières Doctors Without Borders - Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) is an international, independent, medical humanitarian organisation that delivers emergency aid to people affected by armed conflict, epidemics, healthcare exclusion and natural or man-made disasters., “A Fair Shot for Vaccine Affordability: Understanding and addressing the effects of patents on access to newer vaccines,” September, 2017. Accessed Aug. 12, 2021. https://msfaccess.org/sites/default/files/2018-06/VAC_report_A20Fair20Shot20for20Vaccine20Affordability_ENG_2017.pdf AT Patents are increasingly an issue for development of newer vaccines Patent activity in the field of vaccine development and manufacturing has been increasingly recognised as problematic over the past 15 years, according to manufacturers interviewed for this report. International organisations with vaccines expertise such as WHO and Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance, have similarly noted that patent thickets are an increasing concern for vaccines.16 For medical products such as PCV and HPV vaccines, patent barriers can slow the development process, increase costs, increase uncertainty and deter or even block other manufacturers considering entering the market.17 A recent analysis by Chandrasekharan et al. found 106 Patent Cooperation Treaty (PCT) applications “potentially relevant to the manufacturing of pneumococcal vaccines”† and 93 patents applications “relevant to the manufacturing of HPV vaccines.”18 The patent applications and discussions with manufacturers indicate that broad monopolies are being pursued for these vaccines, through tactics such as using overly general language in patent claims concerning the scope of the inventions. According to national criteria, many of these patents or applications could be challenged or rejected due to their weak technical merits. With patents sought for PCV and HPV vaccine technology in major and emerging markets, like Brazil, China, Europe, India, and the US, governments and other stakeholders seeking to encourage competition and access to affordable vaccines must consider how to mitigate the constraints that pending and granted patents in developing countries place on the ability of potential competitor vaccine manufacturers to develop or sell competitor vaccines.
Contention 3: Medicine Prices IP undermines competition and keeps medicine prices high. MSF ’17 – Médecins Sans Frontières Doctors Without Borders - Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) is an international, independent, medical humanitarian organisation that delivers emergency aid to people affected by armed conflict, epidemics, healthcare exclusion and natural or man-made disasters., “A Fair Shot for Vaccine Affordability: Understanding and addressing the effects of patents on access to newer vaccines,” September, 2017. Accessed Aug. 12, 2021. https://msfaccess.org/sites/default/files/2018-06/VAC_report_A20Fair20Shot20for20Vaccine20Affordability_ENG_2017.pdf AT Intellectual property undermines competition and keeps prices high¶ As MSF has seen repeatedly for medical products critical to our operations, competition among multiple manufacturers is a proven way to reduce prices and increase access. Without competition, single suppliers can set prices high, and limited supply options leave vulnerabilities, including dependence on a sole manufacturer’s ability to maintain consistent supply. The effects of IP monopolies like patents on competition and supply for pharmaceutical products are well documented.11,12,13 Yet, as increasingly recognised, and discussed in more detail within this document, patent-based monopolies can also be a barrier in the field of vaccine production and have posed challenges to vaccine development for decades.¶ Traditional narrative of technology transfers and lack of consideration of patent barriers ¶ Prior experiences of developing vaccines for diphtheria, whole-cell pertussis, polio, measles, mumps, influenza, rubella, and yellow fever in World Bank-classified low- and middle-income countries had suggested that patents do not play a major role in modifying the behaviour of vaccine manufacturers. Historically, these vaccines have been developed using conventional egg-based and cell culture-based methods generally not protected by patents. In these cases, the process of manufacturing and key ‘know how’* was considered a barrier to entry for new competitors.14¶ When looking at the manufacturing experiences of some older vaccines, this perception is an oversimplification. The development of the hepatitis B vaccine, for example, dating back nearly half a century, faced patent barriers resulting in monopolies and high prices.15 The two manufacturers of recombinant hepatitis B vaccines, Merck and SmithKline Beecham, needed licences to more than 90 patents from universities, public institutes and private companies to produce their vaccines. Despite the contributions of publicly funded RandD, product prices at introduction were as high as $40 per dose for this 3-dose regimen (equivalent to more than $87 per dose in real terms in 2016).¶ Patents are increasingly an issue for development of newer vaccines¶ Patent activity in the field of vaccine development and manufacturing has been increasingly recognised as problematic over the past 15 years, according to manufacturers interviewed for this report. International organisations with vaccines expertise such as WHO and Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance, have similarly noted that patent thickets are an increasing concern for vaccines.16¶ For medical products such as PCV and HPV vaccines, patent barriers can slow the development process, increase costs, increase uncertainty and deter or even block other manufacturers considering entering the market.17 A recent analysis by Chandrasekharan et al. found 106 Patent Cooperation Treaty (PCT) applications “potentially relevant to the manufacturing of pneumococcal vaccines”† and 93 patents applications “relevant to the manufacturing of HPV vaccines.”18¶ The patent applications and discussions with manufacturers indicate that broad monopolies are being pursued for these vaccines, through tactics such as using overly general language in patent claims concerning the scope of the inventions. According to national criteria, many of these patents or applications could be challenged or rejected due to their weak technical merits. With patents sought for PCV and HPV vaccine technology in major and emerging markets, like Brazil, China, Europe, India, and the US, governments and other stakeholders seeking to encourage competition and access to affordable vaccines must consider how to mitigate the constraints that pending and granted patents in developing countries place on the ability of potential competitor vaccine manufacturers to develop or sell competitor vaccines.¶ Patents undermine competition throughout PCV and HPV vaccine manufacturing and beyond¶ Patents can act as barriers throughout vaccine development, manufacturing and administration processes. PCV and HPV vaccine products are protected by a series of patents and patent applications, covering all aspects including starting materials, composition, process technologies, and methods of using vaccines, including age groups, vaccine presentations and schedules. Potential competitor vaccine manufacturers considering entering the market may face patent challenges “in any step of the development process starting from preclinical RandD, to scale up, formulation and licensure in the markets of choice, and hence may alter their decision pathways… at each step.”19¶ The typical strategy for a vaccine manufacturer seeking a patent monopoly is to use broad, non-specific claim language to define what they claim is the invention. Many of those patents and applications do not merit patent protection according to national laws, and many are used mainly to maximise the scope of monopoly.¶ Starting materials¶ Starting materials patents cover the inputs/initial ingredients for making a vaccine, including various chemical reagents, host cells, vectors, and DNA and/or RNA sequences of various types. These inputs are highly likely to be required for vaccine production. If the rights to use these materials in vaccine manufacturing are not obtained by a company, it may be very difficult to ‘design around’ the need for these materials. These materials have often been patented years ago and they may now be in the public domain, as is the case for PCV and HPV vaccines.¶ Several patent applications were filed on HPV vaccine starting materials from the mid-1990s. For instance, Merck filed a patent application on the basic HPV DNA,20 covering the most common antigen types HPV 16 and HPV 18. The application attempts to protect recombinant DNA sequences encoding the important antigenic proteins of papillomavirus and purified virus-like particles comprised of the recombinant proteins. It also tries to cover the methods of making and using the recombinant proteins. Merck additionally filed a patent application seeking monopoly protection over virus-like particles containing HPV 18.21 Where granted as claimed, these patents could block anyone who plans to develop alternative HPV vaccines during the patent term. These two Merck applications, where granted, should have started to expire around the world beginning in 2015-2016.¶ A number of newer patent applications since the 2000s on HPV vaccines are also related to starting materials. It is a common practice to file such ‘second-generation’ applications to seek additional commercial advantages. For instance, GSK filed a patent application22 claiming modified DNA sequences of HPV which provide enhanced levels of expressed antigen. This patent would expire in 2023 where granted. Another example is a GSK patent application23 related to cross-reactivity, where HPV 16 and HPV 18-containing constructs can be used in a vaccine that protects against other HPV antigens besides 16 and 18. The detailed effects of these newer patent applications on follow-on development of alternative HPV vaccines require further analysis.¶ Vaccine composition¶ Vaccine composition patents typically seek to cover the resulting combination of immunologically important parts of the vaccine, plus associated materials, such as adjuvants, buffers and preservatives. These types of patents can potentially have strong blocking effects.¶ One of the key patents that Pfizer is seeking for its PCV13 product relates to the vaccine’s composition.24 See more details on this PCV13 patent application and why it represents an unwarranted obstacle to pricelowering competition for PCV in the PCV13 patent opposition case study.¶ There are numerous other examples of vaccine composition patents and these may also warrant further analysis for the effects they may have on competition. For example, Pfizer, GSK and other companies have further filed a series of patent applications claiming different aspects of PCV compositions including those covering up to 20 and 26 valent PCV vaccines.25¶ Process technologies¶ Patents related to vaccine process technologies grant monopolies on the way a vaccine is manufactured. The specific manufacturing methods depend on the type of vaccine. Many different patents and patent applications have been identified that cover or attempt to cover various aspects of vaccine process technologies. ¶ For example, basic conjugation technology needed for PCV manufacturing is patent protected in at least six countries.26 This patent is broad and non-specific, blocking competitors from using a general process for combining several vaccine elements (a polysaccharide, e.g., derived from a Pneumococcus, activated with a specific organic compound and then joined to a carrier protein) to obtain a conjugated immunogenic product. These patents have already begun to expire as of 2016. Until expiry, a vaccine manufacturer wanting to offer a more affordable PCV is required to address this barrier in countries where the patent has been filed or granted.¶ Some other examples of patents filed by different applicants claiming different process technologies related to PCV production may also warrant further analysis to assess their potential impact on competition for PCV vaccines.27¶ Methods of using vaccines¶ ‘Methods of use’ patents seek a monopoly on the way a product is used, for example how a vaccine is administered to children. Depending on the specific claim language, this can include patents on various vial presentations, dose regimens, populations or age groups covered, other elements related to the presentation and packaging of the vaccine itself, or the use of the vaccine in people.¶ These patents are highly problematic because they may undermine the ability of Ministries of Health and clinicians to practise medicine and immunise children in the most appropriate way, free from any potential patent infringement risks. Additionally, these patents may also make potential competitors liable if their product labels and package inserts include information on dosage regimens or methods of use that are under the scope of the concerned patents. This can be the case even if more affordable competitor vaccine products themselves do not infringe on an originator’s patents on a given vaccine.¶ One example of this is a GSK patent application28, which essentially seeks a monopoly on administering PCV after a child has received tetanus and/or diphtheria vaccines.* This ‘preimmunisation’ claim term is particularly broad; many national immunisation programmes could have a national vaccination protocol through which a child may receive tetanus or diphtheria vaccines before getting PCV.¶ If granted, this patent may have a strong blocking effect on the use of any alternative PCV in national immunisation schedules. GSK has applied for this PCV patent in Great Britain (withdrawn in 2011), Brazil, Eurasian Patent Organisation and Morocco.29 The application was also filed, but subsequently withdrawn, in various other jurisdictions, including Australia, Canada, China, Germany and the European Patent Office, South Korea, and abandoned in India, following pre-grant opposition.30 It has already been granted in South Africa.31¶ Patents related to age groups¶ Patent claims can also cover specific age groups to which the vaccine can be administered. If granted, these patents can restrict competition by blocking other manufacturers from selling vaccines for administration to the specified (and likely necessary) age groups. For example, the European Patent Office granted a patent32 to GSK for a method of using a ‘two dose’ HPV16/18 vaccine.33 The patent application includes a patent claim stating that the vaccine is formulated for administration ‘to a subject 14 years of age or below’.34 It indicates a monopoly on immunising people who are 14 years old or younger, which covers the full age range of girls recommended by WHO to receive HPV vaccines.35 This may well be a patent that blocks competition in Europe and prevents competitor manufacturers from offering more affordable versions of HPV vaccines that protect against these two critical strains of HPV. In its PCT application36, the initial claims of the equivalent patent are even broader, covering the use of the concerned method for females aged ‘25 years or under’, ‘9 to 25 years’, ‘9 to 14 years’, ‘15 to 19 years’ and ‘20 to 25 years’, thereby seeking to cover all possible vaccination schedules for the full ranges of ages for whom HPV vaccine would be most effective.¶ Patents related to vaccination schedule and presentation¶ Dose regimens are formalised schedules by which medicines or vaccines are administered, including the dose of the vaccine, the number of doses in a period of time and the time between doses. The patenting of these regimens, including for vaccines, effectively grants a patent holder a monopoly that inhibits the development of competitor products that may need to be administered in the same or a similar dosing regimen, and undermines the ability of medical professionals to prescribe the most medically sound regimens based on health needs.¶ For example, a GSK patent application on the HPV vaccine37 contains very broad claims. The technology in this GSK patent application covers both bivalent* and quadrivalent† HPV vaccines and claims a process of administering a ‘two-dose regimen’ consisting of a first dose and a second dose, wherein both doses can be either bivalent or quadrivalent, covering all virus types causing cervical cancer. It is sufficiently broad to affect manufacturers who intend to move towards two-dose regimen administration for their bivalent or quadrivalent HPV products, while a two-dose schedule is currently recommended by WHO for HPV.38 This patent application has been issued in Europe39 for the ‘two-dose’ bivalent HPV vaccine, and the vaccine was approved for marketing by the European Commission in December 2013. Applications have also been filed in Australia, Canada, China, India, New Zealand, South Korea and the US. It has been withdrawn in the Philippines and refused in Ukraine.40¶ In other situations, broad claims in patent applications could also seek monopoly protection over the vial presentation and carry concerning implications for the launch of alternative versions of the vaccine by followon manufacturers. Vial presentation refers to the format of the vaccine, in terms of the number of doses, the volume and the weight contained within one unit of production. For example, it could refer to a single-dose pre-filled syringe, a 10-dose vial with 2 ml per dose, a 20-dose vial and so on.¶ Multi-dose vial presentations, where more than one dose of the vaccine is contained in a vial, are an advantage for developing country immunisation programmes because they decrease cold chain capacity requirements and ease vaccination programme logistics. Multi-dose vials, in general, also have a lower price per dose compared to single-dose vial and/or syringe formats. Pfizer filed a patent application concerning a multidose vial PCV13,41 which includes broad claims related to specific presentations, including pre-filled vaccine delivery devices (such as a syringe) as well as a vial container. If granted as claimed, it might effectively block the development and launching of alternative versions of multi-dose vial PCV13 and secure the market of using such presentations (multi-dose vials) for only Pfizer’s product. The monopoly associated with this patent could mean that public health programmes looking to switch to multi-dose vial PCV13 or a pre-filled ‘device,’ such as a pre-filled syringe, would either have to stay with a single dose vial format or have to use Pfizer’s version only. This patent has been granted in Australia, South Korea, the US and by the European Patent Office.42 An equivalent application has also been filed in China43 and India44, where the applications are pending examination.¶ Summary¶ There are many different aspects of vaccines that are being patented, in many cases undeservingly so per national laws. These patents pose significant barriers for other manufacturers to enter the market and contribute to a competitive environment that could help lower prices and increase access. Taken together, these patents indicate that throughout the vaccine development process and beyond, patents pose a threat to affordable vaccines by impeding, and possibly outright blocking price-lowering follow-on competition. In some cases, potential competitors have opportunities to address and overcome these barriers providing they have the time, resources, technical know-how and an accurate assessment of the vaccine patent landscape. Poverty and disease are mutually reinforcing, causing staggering suffering and injustice. Hollis and Pogge ’08 - Aidan Hollis Associate Professor of Economics, the University of Calgary and Thomas Pogge Leitner Professor of Philosophy and International Affairs, Yale University, “The Health Impact Fund Making New Medicines Accessible for All,” Incentives for Global Health (2008) AT In 2004, some 970 million people, around 15 percent of the world’s population, were living below the extreme poverty line of $1 a day (more strictly defi ned, $392.88 annually) in 1993 Purchasing Power Parity (PPP) terms (Chen and Ravallion 2007, 16579).3 Furthermore, those living below this very low poverty line fell on average around 28 percent below it. Th eir average annual purchasing power therefore corresponded to approximately $420 in the US in 2008 dollars.4¶ Th ese are the poorest of the poor. Th e World Bank also uses a somewhat less miserly poverty line, namely $2 dollar a day, or an annual amount of $785.76 PPP 1993. Th e Bank’s data show that around 40 percent of the world’s population, or over 2.5 billion people, lived in income poverty so defi ned in 2004,5 with this population falling on average 41 percent below this higher line.6 Individuals I;\pp
\n this much larger group could buy, on average, about as much in 2004 as could be bought in the US in 2008 for $690.¶ The Effects of Global Income Poverty on Health¶ The effects of such extreme income poverty are foreseeable and extensively documented. It is estimated that around 13 percent of all human beings (830 million) are chronically undernourished, 17 percent (1.1 billion) lack access to safe water, and 41 percent (2.6 billion) lack access to basic sanitation (UNDP 2006, 174, 33). About 31 percent (2 billion) lack access to crucial drugs and 25 percent (1.6 billion) lack electricity (Fogarty n.d., IEA 2002). Some 780 million adults are illiterate (UNESCO 2006), and 14 percent of children aged between fi ve and 17 (218 million) are child laborers, more than half in hazardous work (ILO 2006, 6).¶ Worldwide, diseases related to poverty, including communicable, maternal, perinatal, and nutritionrelated diseases, comprise over 50 percent of the burden of disease in low-income countries, nearly ten times their relative burden in developed countries (WHO 2006b, 3). If the developed world had its proportional share of poverty-related deaths (onethird of all deaths), severe poverty would kill some 16,000 Americans and 26,000 citizens of the European Union each week.¶ The cycle of mutually reinforcing poverty and disease besetting low income countries, and particularly the poorer communities in these countries, could be broken by signifi cantly reducing severe poverty. But it is also possible to make substantial progress against the global burden of disease more directly by improving health care in developing countries.¶ Poverty does not merely render poor people more vulnerable to disease, but also makes it less likely that they can obtain medical treatment for the diseases they contract. This is because in poor countries medical care is rarely available for free, and poor people are typically unable to buy either the care needed by themselves or their families or the insurance policies that would guarantee them such care. The price of health care in poor countries therefore also plays a crucial role in explaining the catastrophic health situation among the global poor. For these reasons, I urge an affirmative ballot.
10/23/21
SO-Covid Aff
Tournament: Meadows Novice Scrimmage | Round: 3 | Opponent: Harvard Westlake-NW | Judge: Gerard Grigsby Novice AC I affirm – Resolved: The member nations of the World Trade Organization ought to reduce intellectual property protections for medicines.
Because the resolution asks what we ought to do, my value is Morality.
The criterion for determining morality is minimizing suffering. No coherent theory of justice or morality can deny that suffering is morally bad. Each of us knows from our own experiences that suffering is a moral evil, and that other people experience suffering in the same way we do. Therefore, if we regard everyone’s pain as morally equal, we are obligated to minimize the amount of suffering people experience.
Moreover, maximizing utility is the only way to affirm equal and unconditional human dignity. Cummiskey ’90 - David Cummiskey. Associate Philosophy Professor at Bates College.Kantian Consequentialism. Ethics, Vol. 100, No. 3. 1990. http://www.jstor.org/stable/2381810.
We must not obscure the issue by characterizing this type of case as the sacrifice of individuals for some abstract “social entity.” It is not a question of some persons having to bear the cost for some elusive “overall social good.” Instead, the question is whether some persons must bear the inescapable cost for the sake of other persons. Robert Nozick, for example, argues that “to use a person in this way does not sufficiently respect and take account of the fact that he is a separate person, that his is the only life he has.” But why is this not equally true of all those whom we do not save through our failure to act? By emphasizing solely the one who must bear the cost if we act, we fail to sufficiently respect and take account of the many other separate persons, each with only one life, who will bear the cost of our inaction. In such a situation, what would a conscientious Kantian agent, an agent motivated by the unconditional value of rational beings, choose? A morally good agent recognizes that the basis of all particular duties is the principle that “rational nature exists as an end in itself” (GMM 429). Rational nature as such is the supreme objective end of all conduct. If one truly believes that all rational beings have an equal value, then the rational solution to such a dilemma involves maximally promoting the lives and liberties of as many rational beings as possible (chapter 5). In order to avoid this conclusion, the non-consequentialist Kantian needs to justify agent-centered constraints. As we saw in chapter 1, however, even most Kantian deontologists recognize that agent-centered constraints require a non- value-based rationale. But we have seen that Kant’s normative theory is based on an unconditionally valuable end. How can a concern for the value of rational beings lead to a refusal to sacrifice rational beings even when this would prevent other more extensive losses of rational beings? If the moral law is based on the value of rational beings and their ends, then what is the rationale for prohibiting a moral agent from maximally promoting these two tiers of value? If I sacrifice some for the sake of others, I do not use them arbitrarily, and I do not deny the unconditional value of rational beings. Persons may have “dignity, that is, an unconditional and incomparable worth” that transcends any market value (GMM 436), but persons also have a fundamental equality that dictates that some must sometimes give way for the sake of others (chapters 5 and 7). The concept of the end-in-itself does not support the view that we may never force another to bear some cost in order to benefit others. If one focuses on the equal value of all rational beings, then equal consideration suggests that one may have to sacrifice some to save many.
Contention 1: Covid-19
The only way to solve the pandemic is global vaccination, but current production is woefully short. Public Citizen 3/29 - Public Citizen “Public Citizen is a nonprofit consumer advocacy organization that champions the public interest in the halls of power. We defend democracy, resist corporate power and work to ensure that government works for the people – not for big corporations. Founded in 1971, we now have 500,000 members and supporters throughout the country. We don’t participate in partisan political activities or endorse any candidates for elected office. We take no government or corporate money, which enables us to remain fiercely independent and call out bad actors – no matter who they are or how much power and money they have.”, “Waiver of the WTO’s Intellectual Property Rules: Facts vs. Common Myths,” Public Citizen Global Trade Watch Series. March 29, 2021. Accessed Aug. 10, 2021. https://www.citizen.org/article/waiver-of-the-wtos-intellectual-property-rules-myths-vs-facts/ AT The COVID-19 public health disaster and resulting economic crises won’t end anywhere unless people everywhere are vaccinated. Despite this obvious truth, rich countries with only 14 of the global population have secured preferential access to over 50 of projected global vaccine supplies. Ongoing outbreaks anywhere allow the virus to mutate, threatening the whole world with vaccine-resistant variants or more deadly or easily spread variants. Governments invested billions to create the vaccines. But, there is a dire shortage, with no end in sight. As we enter the second quarter, about one billion doses have been produced in 2021. We need 10 to 12 billion to reach global herd immunity. And we will need far more if, like flu vaccines, they must be repeated or require booster shots. In every region, there are existing firms that could gear up production and governments willing to invest in expanding supply. But WTO rules require countries to guarantee pharmaceutical corporations monopoly control. More than 100 countries support a temporary, emergency suspension of these WTO rules, so more vaccines, treatments and diagnostic tests can be manufactured in as many places as possible. The United States and a handful of other WTO members are blocking the waiver: They won’t even agree to negotiate about waiver language to address whatever concerns that they may have with the current text. Donald Trump started this self-defeating blockade. President Joe Biden must reverse it to speed the end of the COVID-19 pandemic. The vaccine shortfall causes widespread death and poverty. Public Citizen 3/1 - Public Citizen “Public Citizen is a nonprofit consumer advocacy organization that champions the public interest in the halls of power. We defend democracy, resist corporate power and work to ensure that government works for the people – not for big corporations. Founded in 1971, we now have 500,000 members and supporters throughout the country. We don’t participate in partisan political activities or endorse any candidates for elected office. We take no government or corporate money, which enables us to remain fiercely independent and call out bad actors – no matter who they are or how much power and money they have.”, “Backgrounder: WTO-Required Monopolies for Pharmaceutical Corporations Obstruct Global Production of COVID-19 Vaccines and Treatment,” Public Citizen Global Trade Watch Series. March 1, 2021. Accessed Aug. 12, 2021. https://www.citizen.org/article/wto-required-monopolies-for-pharmaceutical-corporations-obstruct-global-production-of-covid-19-vaccines-and-treatments/ AT It is obvious that current production capacity cannot supply enough vaccines for the entire world. Many people in low- and middle-income countries around the globe will not get vaccinated until at least 2022 unless the world manufactures many more doses, according to the British Medical Journal. The world’s poorest countries may wait until 2024 for mass immunization, if it happens at all, reports the Economist Intelligence Unit. The global vaccine apartheid unfolding right now could cost millions of lives and push tens of millions more into poverty. The devastation will be felt for a generation. A new International Chamber of Commerce report concluded that the world could face economic losses of more than $9 trillion under the scenario of wealthy nations being fully vaccinated by mid-2021, but poor countries largely shut out. Wealthy countries like the United States would bear nearly half of that hit. Vaccinating just half of low- and middle-income countries’ populations could reduce global losses by $5.5 trillion. A waiver provides legal certainty that unlocks global production. Public Citizen 3/29 - Public Citizen “Public Citizen is a nonprofit consumer advocacy organization that champions the public interest in the halls of power. We defend democracy, resist corporate power and work to ensure that government works for the people – not for big corporations. Founded in 1971, we now have 500,000 members and supporters throughout the country. We don’t participate in partisan political activities or endorse any candidates for elected office. We take no government or corporate money, which enables us to remain fiercely independent and call out bad actors – no matter who they are or how much power and money they have.”, “Waiver of the WTO’s Intellectual Property Rules: Facts vs. Common Myths,” Public Citizen Global Trade Watch Series. March 29, 2021. Accessed Aug. 10, 2021. https://www.citizen.org/article/waiver-of-the-wtos-intellectual-property-rules-myths-vs-facts/ AT Most critically, there simply is not enough supply to go around now or for every year in the future during which the whole world will need regular COVID vaccination to keep the virus under control. Thankfully, scores of countries are ready to invest in building new or repurposing existing production capacity. That is why more than 100 countries support a waiver of the WTO’s Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property (TRIPS). These countries seek certainty that if they adjust their domestic laws and practices to support that investment by providing access to the necessary technology, they will not get dragged into expansive WTO litigation or face retaliatory sanctions from countries claiming WTO violations. The waiver will also serve as a worldwide buffer against the political pressure and legal harassment to which Big Pharma subjects countries that seek to promote affordable access to medicines.¶ In many countries, the regulatory authorities that had to approve domestic use of various vaccines and other COVID-related medical products have significant information from the firms that they could share with skilled teams from local universities, government agencies and pharmaceutical manufacturers — if they were not obliged by WTO rules to guarantee monopoly control of it. And world-class pharmaceutical firms already are making generic versions of new cutting-edge HIV-AIDS medicines and pumping out vaccines based on the platform that, for instance, the Johnson and Johnson vaccine uses. Manufacturing capacity is widespread around the world. Public Citizen 3/29 - Public Citizen “Public Citizen is a nonprofit consumer advocacy organization that champions the public interest in the halls of power. We defend democracy, resist corporate power and work to ensure that government works for the people – not for big corporations. Founded in 1971, we now have 500,000 members and supporters throughout the country. We don’t participate in partisan political activities or endorse any candidates for elected office. We take no government or corporate money, which enables us to remain fiercely independent and call out bad actors – no matter who they are or how much power and money they have.”, “Waiver of the WTO’s Intellectual Property Rules: Facts vs. Common Myths,” Public Citizen Global Trade Watch Series. March 29, 2021. Accessed Aug. 10, 2021. https://www.citizen.org/article/waiver-of-the-wtos-intellectual-property-rules-myths-vs-facts/ AT In the press and on Capitol Hill, Big Pharma is pushing a Big Lie. The claim is that a lack of manufacturing capacity, not pharmaceutical corporation’s monopoly intellectual property (IP) protections, are thwarting greater production of COVID-19 vaccines. A related argument, with decidedly racist overtones, is that COVID-19 vaccines are too complicated for producers in developing countries to make successfully. The reality is that in every region of the world, there are multiple producers that could be greatly increasing global vaccine supplies if the technology and know-how were shared.¶ Just in Africa, “Biovac and Aspen in South Africa, Institute Pasteur in Senegal, and Vacsera in Egypt could rapidly retool factories to make mRNA vaccines,” notes a group of medicine-production experts in a recent Foreign Policy article. Indeed, a former Moderna director of chemistry revealed that with enough technology transfer and know- how-sharing, a modern factory should be able to get mRNA vaccine production online in, at most, three to four months. The Serum Institute in India already is slated to produce the AstraZeneca and Novavax vaccines, while Moderna declined to partner with a qualified Bangladeshi vaccine maker, claiming its engineers were too busy to focus beyond U.S. and EU production. In Latin America, existing facilities in Brazil, Argentina and Mexico under contract to monopoly holders are already pumping out vials, and in countries like Chile and Colombia, the pharmaceutical industry has expressed willingness to kickstart vaccine production.¶ Existing and planned contract manufacturing arrangements prove facilities in developing countries certainly can produce COVID-19 vaccines. But unless technology and know-how are shared more openly, the monopoly holders maintain absolute control over how much can be produced, what the price is and where it will be sold. So, 91 of the Johnson and Johnson vaccine that South African firm Aspen will manufacture must be shipped for sale outside South Africa, according to South Africa’s WTO Counselor. And the Serum Institute is barred from supplying upper- middle-income and high-income countries with the AstraZeneca vaccines it makes, meaning AstraZeneca can artificially segment the global market and ensure that it is the only supplier of the Oxford vaccine in the most profitable national markets, according to Doctors Without Borders.¶ Most critically, there simply is not enough supply to go around now or for every year in the future during which the whole world will need regular COVID vaccination to keep the virus under control. Thankfully, scores of countries are ready to invest in building new or repurposing existing production capacity. That is why more than 100 countries support a waiver of the WTO’s Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property (TRIPS). These countries seek certainty that if they adjust their domestic laws and practices to support that investment by providing access to the necessary technology, they will not get dragged into expansive WTO litigation or face retaliatory sanctions from countries claiming WTO violations. The waiver will also serve as a worldwide buffer against the political pressure and legal harassment to which Big Pharma subjects countries that seek to promote affordable access to medicines.¶ In many countries, the regulatory authorities that had to approve domestic use of various vaccines and other COVID-related medical products have significant information from the firms that they could share with skilled teams from local universities, government agencies and pharmaceutical manufacturers — if they were not obliged by WTO rules to guarantee monopoly control of it. And world-class pharmaceutical firms already are making generic versions of new cutting-edge HIV-AIDS medicines and pumping out vaccines based on the platform that, for instance, the Johnson and Johnson vaccine uses. Contention II: Innovation Limiting IP protections increases the incentive to create new drugs. Light and Warburton ’11 - Donald W. Light Visiting professor at Stanford University and a professor of comparative health-care at the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey. He is an economic and organizational sociologist who studies health care systems and pharmaceu- tical policy. and Rebecca Warburton associate professor and a health economist, specializing in the cost- benefit analysis of health-related public projects. Her current research primarily concerns assessing the validity of industry-sponsored estimates of the cost of drug development, and assessing the costs and effects of patient safety improvements. She has a PhD in economics from the University of London (1995), and an M.Sc. in economics from the London School of Economics (1980); School of Public Administration, University of Victoria, British Columbia, “Demythologizing the high costs of pharmaceutical research BioSocieties (2011) 6, 34–50. doi:10.1057/biosoc.2010.40; published online 7 February 2011. JH Industry executives, well supplied with facts and figures by the industry’s global press network, awe audiences with staggering figures for the cost of a single trial, like tribal chieftains and their scribes who recount the mythic costs of a great victory in a remote pass where no outside witnesses saw the battle. Companies tightly control access to verifiable facts about their risks and costs, allowing access only to supported economists at consulting firms and universities, who develop methods for showing how large costs and risks are; and then the public, politicians and journalists often take them at face value, accepting them as fact. The global press network never tells audiences about the detailed reconstruction of RandD costs for RotaTeq and Rotarix that found costs and risks were remarkably low up to the large final trials, and that concluded the companies recovered their investments within the first 18 months (Light et al, 2009). The companies could now sell these vaccines for rotavirus for one-tenth their Western price and still earn profits. ¶Pharmaceutical companies have a strong vested interest in maximizing figures for RandD and supporting centres or researchers who help them do so. Since the Kefauver hearings in 1959–1962, the industry’s principal justification for its high prices on patented drugs has been the high cost of RandD, and it has sought further government protections from normal price competition. These include increasing patent terms and extending data exclusivity, without good evidence that these measures increase innovation (National Institute for Health Care Management, 2000; European Commission for Competition, 2008 (28 November); Adamini et al, 2009). Industry leaders and lobbyists routinely warn that lower prices will reduce funds for RandD and result in suffering and death that future medicines could reduce. Marcia Angell, the former editor of the New England Journal of Medicine, describes this as ‘ya kind of blackmail’ (Angell, 2004, pp. 38–39). She quotes the president of the US industry’s trade association as saying, ‘Believe me, if we impose price controls on the pharmaceutical industry, and if you reduce the RandD that this industry is able to provide, it’s going to harm my kids and it’s going to harm those millions of other Americans who have life-threatening conditions’. Merrill Goozner, former chief economic correspondent for the Chicago Tribune, points out that no other research-oriented industry makes this kind of argument (Goozner, 2004). In fact, they do the opposite: when profits decline, they redouble their research efforts to find new products that will generate more profits. Not to do so guarantees their decline. The industry’s view of European ‘price controls’ (actually, large-volume discounts) is that they do not allow recovery of huge RandD costs so that Europeans are ‘free riders’ on Americans and force US prices higher to pay for unrecovered costs the ‘free riders’ refuse to pay. This claim has been shown not to be supported by industry and government reports and to be illogical as well (Light and Lexchin, 2005). IP stifles innovation by allowing firms to prevent new competition from entering the market, driving down the incentive for R and D. MSF ’17 – Médecins Sans Frontières Doctors Without Borders - Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) is an international, independent, medical humanitarian organisation that delivers emergency aid to people affected by armed conflict, epidemics, healthcare exclusion and natural or man-made disasters., “A Fair Shot for Vaccine Affordability: Understanding and addressing the effects of patents on access to newer vaccines,” September, 2017. Accessed Aug. 12, 2021. https://msfaccess.org/sites/default/files/2018-06/VAC_report_A20Fair20Shot20for20Vaccine20Affordability_ENG_2017.pdf AT Patents are increasingly an issue for development of newer vaccines Patent activity in the field of vaccine development and manufacturing has been increasingly recognised as problematic over the past 15 years, according to manufacturers interviewed for this report. International organisations with vaccines expertise such as WHO and Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance, have similarly noted that patent thickets are an increasing concern for vaccines.16 For medical products such as PCV and HPV vaccines, patent barriers can slow the development process, increase costs, increase uncertainty and deter or even block other manufacturers considering entering the market.17 A recent analysis by Chandrasekharan et al. found 106 Patent Cooperation Treaty (PCT) applications “potentially relevant to the manufacturing of pneumococcal vaccines”† and 93 patents applications “relevant to the manufacturing of HPV vaccines.”18 The patent applications and discussions with manufacturers indicate that broad monopolies are being pursued for these vaccines, through tactics such as using overly general language in patent claims concerning the scope of the inventions. According to national criteria, many of these patents or applications could be challenged or rejected due to their weak technical merits. With patents sought for PCV and HPV vaccine technology in major and emerging markets, like Brazil, China, Europe, India, and the US, governments and other stakeholders seeking to encourage competition and access to affordable vaccines must consider how to mitigate the constraints that pending and granted patents in developing countries place on the ability of potential competitor vaccine manufacturers to develop or sell competitor vaccines.
Contention 3: Medicine Prices IP undermines competition and keeps medicine prices high. MSF ’17 – Médecins Sans Frontières Doctors Without Borders - Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) is an international, independent, medical humanitarian organisation that delivers emergency aid to people affected by armed conflict, epidemics, healthcare exclusion and natural or man-made disasters., “A Fair Shot for Vaccine Affordability: Understanding and addressing the effects of patents on access to newer vaccines,” September, 2017. Accessed Aug. 12, 2021. https://msfaccess.org/sites/default/files/2018-06/VAC_report_A20Fair20Shot20for20Vaccine20Affordability_ENG_2017.pdf AT Intellectual property undermines competition and keeps prices high¶ As MSF has seen repeatedly for medical products critical to our operations, competition among multiple manufacturers is a proven way to reduce prices and increase access. Without competition, single suppliers can set prices high, and limited supply options leave vulnerabilities, including dependence on a sole manufacturer’s ability to maintain consistent supply. The effects of IP monopolies like patents on competition and supply for pharmaceutical products are well documented.11,12,13 Yet, as increasingly recognised, and discussed in more detail within this document, patent-based monopolies can also be a barrier in the field of vaccine production and have posed challenges to vaccine development for decades.¶ Traditional narrative of technology transfers and lack of consideration of patent barriers ¶ Prior experiences of developing vaccines for diphtheria, whole-cell pertussis, polio, measles, mumps, influenza, rubella, and yellow fever in World Bank-classified low- and middle-income countries had suggested that patents do not play a major role in modifying the behaviour of vaccine manufacturers. Historically, these vaccines have been developed using conventional egg-based and cell culture-based methods generally not protected by patents. In these cases, the process of manufacturing and key ‘know how’* was considered a barrier to entry for new competitors.14¶ When looking at the manufacturing experiences of some older vaccines, this perception is an oversimplification. The development of the hepatitis B vaccine, for example, dating back nearly half a century, faced patent barriers resulting in monopolies and high prices.15 The two manufacturers of recombinant hepatitis B vaccines, Merck and SmithKline Beecham, needed licences to more than 90 patents from universities, public institutes and private companies to produce their vaccines. Despite the contributions of publicly funded RandD, product prices at introduction were as high as $40 per dose for this 3-dose regimen (equivalent to more than $87 per dose in real terms in 2016).¶ Patents are increasingly an issue for development of newer vaccines¶ Patent activity in the field of vaccine development and manufacturing has been increasingly recognised as problematic over the past 15 years, according to manufacturers interviewed for this report. International organisations with vaccines expertise such as WHO and Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance, have similarly noted that patent thickets are an increasing concern for vaccines.16¶ For medical products such as PCV and HPV vaccines, patent barriers can slow the development process, increase costs, increase uncertainty and deter or even block other manufacturers considering entering the market.17 A recent analysis by Chandrasekharan et al. found 106 Patent Cooperation Treaty (PCT) applications “potentially relevant to the manufacturing of pneumococcal vaccines”† and 93 patents applications “relevant to the manufacturing of HPV vaccines.”18¶ The patent applications and discussions with manufacturers indicate that broad monopolies are being pursued for these vaccines, through tactics such as using overly general language in patent claims concerning the scope of the inventions. According to national criteria, many of these patents or applications could be challenged or rejected due to their weak technical merits. With patents sought for PCV and HPV vaccine technology in major and emerging markets, like Brazil, China, Europe, India, and the US, governments and other stakeholders seeking to encourage competition and access to affordable vaccines must consider how to mitigate the constraints that pending and granted patents in developing countries place on the ability of potential competitor vaccine manufacturers to develop or sell competitor vaccines.¶ Patents undermine competition throughout PCV and HPV vaccine manufacturing and beyond¶ Patents can act as barriers throughout vaccine development, manufacturing and administration processes. PCV and HPV vaccine products are protected by a series of patents and patent applications, covering all aspects including starting materials, composition, process technologies, and methods of using vaccines, including age groups, vaccine presentations and schedules. Potential competitor vaccine manufacturers considering entering the market may face patent challenges “in any step of the development process starting from preclinical RandD, to scale up, formulation and licensure in the markets of choice, and hence may alter their decision pathways… at each step.”19¶ The typical strategy for a vaccine manufacturer seeking a patent monopoly is to use broad, non-specific claim language to define what they claim is the invention. Many of those patents and applications do not merit patent protection according to national laws, and many are used mainly to maximise the scope of monopoly.¶ Starting materials¶ Starting materials patents cover the inputs/initial ingredients for making a vaccine, including various chemical reagents, host cells, vectors, and DNA and/or RNA sequences of various types. These inputs are highly likely to be required for vaccine production. If the rights to use these materials in vaccine manufacturing are not obtained by a company, it may be very difficult to ‘design around’ the need for these materials. These materials have often been patented years ago and they may now be in the public domain, as is the case for PCV and HPV vaccines.¶ Several patent applications were filed on HPV vaccine starting materials from the mid-1990s. For instance, Merck filed a patent application on the basic HPV DNA,20 covering the most common antigen types HPV 16 and HPV 18. The application attempts to protect recombinant DNA sequences encoding the important antigenic proteins of papillomavirus and purified virus-like particles comprised of the recombinant proteins. It also tries to cover the methods of making and using the recombinant proteins. Merck additionally filed a patent application seeking monopoly protection over virus-like particles containing HPV 18.21 Where granted as claimed, these patents could block anyone who plans to develop alternative HPV vaccines during the patent term. These two Merck applications, where granted, should have started to expire around the world beginning in 2015-2016.¶ A number of newer patent applications since the 2000s on HPV vaccines are also related to starting materials. It is a common practice to file such ‘second-generation’ applications to seek additional commercial advantages. For instance, GSK filed a patent application22 claiming modified DNA sequences of HPV which provide enhanced levels of expressed antigen. This patent would expire in 2023 where granted. Another example is a GSK patent application23 related to cross-reactivity, where HPV 16 and HPV 18-containing constructs can be used in a vaccine that protects against other HPV antigens besides 16 and 18. The detailed effects of these newer patent applications on follow-on development of alternative HPV vaccines require further analysis.¶ Vaccine composition¶ Vaccine composition patents typically seek to cover the resulting combination of immunologically important parts of the vaccine, plus associated materials, such as adjuvants, buffers and preservatives. These types of patents can potentially have strong blocking effects.¶ One of the key patents that Pfizer is seeking for its PCV13 product relates to the vaccine’s composition.24 See more details on this PCV13 patent application and why it represents an unwarranted obstacle to pricelowering competition for PCV in the PCV13 patent opposition case study.¶ There are numerous other examples of vaccine composition patents and these may also warrant further analysis for the effects they may have on competition. For example, Pfizer, GSK and other companies have further filed a series of patent applications claiming different aspects of PCV compositions including those covering up to 20 and 26 valent PCV vaccines.25¶ Process technologies¶ Patents related to vaccine process technologies grant monopolies on the way a vaccine is manufactured. The specific manufacturing methods depend on the type of vaccine. Many different patents and patent applications have been identified that cover or attempt to cover various aspects of vaccine process technologies. ¶ For example, basic conjugation technology needed for PCV manufacturing is patent protected in at least six countries.26 This patent is broad and non-specific, blocking competitors from using a general process for combining several vaccine elements (a polysaccharide, e.g., derived from a Pneumococcus, activated with a specific organic compound and then joined to a carrier protein) to obtain a conjugated immunogenic product. These patents have already begun to expire as of 2016. Until expiry, a vaccine manufacturer wanting to offer a more affordable PCV is required to address this barrier in countries where the patent has been filed or granted.¶ Some other examples of patents filed by different applicants claiming different process technologies related to PCV production may also warrant further analysis to assess their potential impact on competition for PCV vaccines.27¶ Methods of using vaccines¶ ‘Methods of use’ patents seek a monopoly on the way a product is used, for example how a vaccine is administered to children. Depending on the specific claim language, this can include patents on various vial presentations, dose regimens, populations or age groups covered, other elements related to the presentation and packaging of the vaccine itself, or the use of the vaccine in people.¶ These patents are highly problematic because they may undermine the ability of Ministries of Health and clinicians to practise medicine and immunise children in the most appropriate way, free from any potential patent infringement risks. Additionally, these patents may also make potential competitors liable if their product labels and package inserts include information on dosage regimens or methods of use that are under the scope of the concerned patents. This can be the case even if more affordable competitor vaccine products themselves do not infringe on an originator’s patents on a given vaccine.¶ One example of this is a GSK patent application28, which essentially seeks a monopoly on administering PCV after a child has received tetanus and/or diphtheria vaccines.* This ‘preimmunisation’ claim term is particularly broad; many national immunisation programmes could have a national vaccination protocol through which a child may receive tetanus or diphtheria vaccines before getting PCV.¶ If granted, this patent may have a strong blocking effect on the use of any alternative PCV in national immunisation schedules. GSK has applied for this PCV patent in Great Britain (withdrawn in 2011), Brazil, Eurasian Patent Organisation and Morocco.29 The application was also filed, but subsequently withdrawn, in various other jurisdictions, including Australia, Canada, China, Germany and the European Patent Office, South Korea, and abandoned in India, following pre-grant opposition.30 It has already been granted in South Africa.31¶ Patents related to age groups¶ Patent claims can also cover specific age groups to which the vaccine can be administered. If granted, these patents can restrict competition by blocking other manufacturers from selling vaccines for administration to the specified (and likely necessary) age groups. For example, the European Patent Office granted a patent32 to GSK for a method of using a ‘two dose’ HPV16/18 vaccine.33 The patent application includes a patent claim stating that the vaccine is formulated for administration ‘to a subject 14 years of age or below’.34 It indicates a monopoly on immunising people who are 14 years old or younger, which covers the full age range of girls recommended by WHO to receive HPV vaccines.35 This may well be a patent that blocks competition in Europe and prevents competitor manufacturers from offering more affordable versions of HPV vaccines that protect against these two critical strains of HPV. In its PCT application36, the initial claims of the equivalent patent are even broader, covering the use of the concerned method for females aged ‘25 years or under’, ‘9 to 25 years’, ‘9 to 14 years’, ‘15 to 19 years’ and ‘20 to 25 years’, thereby seeking to cover all possible vaccination schedules for the full ranges of ages for whom HPV vaccine would be most effective.¶ Patents related to vaccination schedule and presentation¶ Dose regimens are formalised schedules by which medicines or vaccines are administered, including the dose of the vaccine, the number of doses in a period of time and the time between doses. The patenting of these regimens, including for vaccines, effectively grants a patent holder a monopoly that inhibits the development of competitor products that may need to be administered in the same or a similar dosing regimen, and undermines the ability of medical professionals to prescribe the most medically sound regimens based on health needs.¶ For example, a GSK patent application on the HPV vaccine37 contains very broad claims. The technology in this GSK patent application covers both bivalent* and quadrivalent† HPV vaccines and claims a process of administering a ‘two-dose regimen’ consisting of a first dose and a second dose, wherein both doses can be either bivalent or quadrivalent, covering all virus types causing cervical cancer. It is sufficiently broad to affect manufacturers who intend to move towards two-dose regimen administration for their bivalent or quadrivalent HPV products, while a two-dose schedule is currently recommended by WHO for HPV.38 This patent application has been issued in Europe39 for the ‘two-dose’ bivalent HPV vaccine, and the vaccine was approved for marketing by the European Commission in December 2013. Applications have also been filed in Australia, Canada, China, India, New Zealand, South Korea and the US. It has been withdrawn in the Philippines and refused in Ukraine.40¶ In other situations, broad claims in patent applications could also seek monopoly protection over the vial presentation and carry concerning implications for the launch of alternative versions of the vaccine by followon manufacturers. Vial presentation refers to the format of the vaccine, in terms of the number of doses, the volume and the weight contained within one unit of production. For example, it could refer to a single-dose pre-filled syringe, a 10-dose vial with 2 ml per dose, a 20-dose vial and so on.¶ Multi-dose vial presentations, where more than one dose of the vaccine is contained in a vial, are an advantage for developing country immunisation programmes because they decrease cold chain capacity requirements and ease vaccination programme logistics. Multi-dose vials, in general, also have a lower price per dose compared to single-dose vial and/or syringe formats. Pfizer filed a patent application concerning a multidose vial PCV13,41 which includes broad claims related to specific presentations, including pre-filled vaccine delivery devices (such as a syringe) as well as a vial container. If granted as claimed, it might effectively block the development and launching of alternative versions of multi-dose vial PCV13 and secure the market of using such presentations (multi-dose vials) for only Pfizer’s product. The monopoly associated with this patent could mean that public health programmes looking to switch to multi-dose vial PCV13 or a pre-filled ‘device,’ such as a pre-filled syringe, would either have to stay with a single dose vial format or have to use Pfizer’s version only. This patent has been granted in Australia, South Korea, the US and by the European Patent Office.42 An equivalent application has also been filed in China43 and India44, where the applications are pending examination.¶ Summary¶ There are many different aspects of vaccines that are being patented, in many cases undeservingly so per national laws. These patents pose significant barriers for other manufacturers to enter the market and contribute to a competitive environment that could help lower prices and increase access. Taken together, these patents indicate that throughout the vaccine development process and beyond, patents pose a threat to affordable vaccines by impeding, and possibly outright blocking price-lowering follow-on competition. In some cases, potential competitors have opportunities to address and overcome these barriers providing they have the time, resources, technical know-how and an accurate assessment of the vaccine patent landscape. Poverty and disease are mutually reinforcing, causing staggering suffering and injustice. Hollis and Pogge ’08 - Aidan Hollis Associate Professor of Economics, the University of Calgary and Thomas Pogge Leitner Professor of Philosophy and International Affairs, Yale University, “The Health Impact Fund Making New Medicines Accessible for All,” Incentives for Global Health (2008) AT In 2004, some 970 million people, around 15 percent of the world’s population, were living below the extreme poverty line of $1 a day (more strictly defi ned, $392.88 annually) in 1993 Purchasing Power Parity (PPP) terms (Chen and Ravallion 2007, 16579).3 Furthermore, those living below this very low poverty line fell on average around 28 percent below it. Th eir average annual purchasing power therefore corresponded to approximately $420 in the US in 2008 dollars.4¶ Th ese are the poorest of the poor. Th e World Bank also uses a somewhat less miserly poverty line, namely $2 dollar a day, or an annual amount of $785.76 PPP 1993. Th e Bank’s data show that around 40 percent of the world’s population, or over 2.5 billion people, lived in income poverty so defi ned in 2004,5 with this population falling on average 41 percent below this higher line.6 Individuals I;\pp
\n this much larger group could buy, on average, about as much in 2004 as could be bought in the US in 2008 for $690.¶ The Effects of Global Income Poverty on Health¶ The effects of such extreme income poverty are foreseeable and extensively documented. It is estimated that around 13 percent of all human beings (830 million) are chronically undernourished, 17 percent (1.1 billion) lack access to safe water, and 41 percent (2.6 billion) lack access to basic sanitation (UNDP 2006, 174, 33). About 31 percent (2 billion) lack access to crucial drugs and 25 percent (1.6 billion) lack electricity (Fogarty n.d., IEA 2002). Some 780 million adults are illiterate (UNESCO 2006), and 14 percent of children aged between fi ve and 17 (218 million) are child laborers, more than half in hazardous work (ILO 2006, 6).¶ Worldwide, diseases related to poverty, including communicable, maternal, perinatal, and nutritionrelated diseases, comprise over 50 percent of the burden of disease in low-income countries, nearly ten times their relative burden in developed countries (WHO 2006b, 3). If the developed world had its proportional share of poverty-related deaths (onethird of all deaths), severe poverty would kill some 16,000 Americans and 26,000 citizens of the European Union each week.¶ The cycle of mutually reinforcing poverty and disease besetting low income countries, and particularly the poorer communities in these countries, could be broken by signifi cantly reducing severe poverty. But it is also possible to make substantial progress against the global burden of disease more directly by improving health care in developing countries.¶ Poverty does not merely render poor people more vulnerable to disease, but also makes it less likely that they can obtain medical treatment for the diseases they contract. This is because in poor countries medical care is rarely available for free, and poor people are typically unable to buy either the care needed by themselves or their families or the insurance policies that would guarantee them such care. The price of health care in poor countries therefore also plays a crucial role in explaining the catastrophic health situation among the global poor. For these reasons, I urge an affirmative ballot.