AC - Capitalism NC - Post work K Util framework 1AR - Capitalism NR - K 2AR Capitalism
Golden Desert
2
Opponent: Appleton North | Judge: Shampurna Mitra
AC - Mining Collisions Militarism NC - T Appropriation Asteroid mining DA LTD CP 1AR - All T NR - T 2AR - T
Golden Desert
4
Opponent: Brophy CC | Judge: Nick Flemming
AC - Asteroid Mining Collisions USRussia War NC - T Appropriation Asteroid Mining DA LTD CP 1AR - T Appropriation All NR - LTD CP Asteroid Mining DA 2AR - RussiaUS War
Golden Desert
6
Opponent: Harvard Westlake EJ | Judge: Nikhil Navare
AC - Capitalism Epistemology NC - T Appropriation Asteroid Mining DA LTD CP 1AR - All Condo Bad NR - LTD CP Asteroid Mining DA Condo Good 2AR - Capitalism Epistemology
Palm Classic
1
Opponent: Harvard Westlake MT | Judge: Serena Lu
AC - Capitalism NC - Natural Persons PIC 1AR - Capitalism NR - Natural Persons PIC 2AR - Capitalism
Palm Classic
3
Opponent: Harker DSt | Judge: Sruthi Ilangovan
AC - Mining Multilateralism NC - T appropriation LTD CP Asteroid Mining DA 1AR - Mining Multilateralism T appropriation NR - LTD CP Asteroid Mining DA 2AR - All
Peninsula
2
Opponent: LHS Golden State YL | Judge: Jacob Nails
AC - Space Debris NC - LTD CP Asteroid Mining DA 1AR - Space Debris NR - All 1AR - Space Debris
Peninsula
3
Opponent: Troy Independent AP | Judge: Dillon Johnson
AC - Kessler Syndrome NC - T Starlink Bad DA 1AR - Kessler Syndrome T NR - T 2AR - T Kessler Syndrome
Peninsula
6
Opponent: Memorial BD | Judge: Truman Le
AC - Kant Truth Testing Lunar Heritage NC - Legal Trust CP Asteroid Mining DA Util good 1AR - Framework must be in 1st speech Condo bad Kant Lunar Heritage NR - Legal Trust CP Util Condo good 2AR - All
USC
1
Opponent: Harvard Westlake CR | Judge: David Dosch
AC - Income inequality NC - Police PIC Econ DA 1AR - All NR - Police PIC 2AR - All
USC
3
Opponent: Harvard Westlake JH | Judge: Ben Cortez
AC - Brazil NC - T Countries Post-Work K Police PIC 1AR - Brazil Condo Bad NR - T Countries Condo good Police PIC 2AR - Brazil
AC - Cap NC - Postwork K WSDE CP 1AR - Cap Framework NR - WSDE CP 2AR - Cap
WBFL 2
1
Opponent: New Roads CP | Judge: Bernice Matula
AC - Democracy Econ Inequality NC - Organizing DA Econ DA 1AR - Everything NR - Econ DA and Extinction Impact 2AR - Econ Inequality
WBFL 2
3
Opponent: Brentwood HS | Judge: Sorah Han
AC - Freedom Autonomy NC - Econ DA Pro-Union 1AR - Autonomy NR - Econ DA 2AR - Autonomy
To modify or delete round reports, edit the associated round.
Cites
Entry
Date
Contact Information
Tournament: | Round: 1 | Opponent: | Judge: Hello! My name is Siena Grouf and I use she/her/hers pronouns! If you want to contact me, please use my email: Sienagrouf25@marlborough.org
9/25/21
JF NC - Legal Trust CP, Asteroid Mining DA, Util good
Tournament: Peninsula | Round: 6 | Opponent: Memorial BD | Judge: Truman Le Legal Trust Doctrine CP TEXT: The Outer Space Treaty ought to be amended to establish an international legal trust system governing outer space. Finoa 21 Ivan Finoa (Department of Law University of Turin), “Building a New Legal Model for Settlements on Mars,” A. Froehlich (ed.), Assessing a Mars Agreement Including Human Settlements, Studies in Space Policy 30, 2021. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-65013-1_7CT 7.5 A Proposal for...on property rights.
Space regulation scares investors away and spills over to other space activities. Freeland 05 Steven Freeland (BCom, LLB, LLM, University of New South Wales; Senior Lecturer in International Law, University of Western Sydney, Australia; and a member of the Paris-based International Institute of Space Law). “Up, Up and … Back: The Emergence of Space Tourism and Its Impact on the International Law of Outer Space.” Chicago Journal of International Law: Vol. 6: No. 1, Article 4. 2005. JDN. https://chicagounbound.uchicago.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1269andcontext=cjil V. THE NEED ...onboard the ISS.46
Asteroid mining can happen with private sector innovation and is key to solve a laundry list of impacts--climate change, economic decline and asteroid collisions. Taylor 19 Chris Taylor journalist, 19 - ("How asteroid mining will save the Earth — and mint trillionaires," Mashable, 2019, accessed 12-13-2021, https://mashable.com/feature/asteroid-mining-space-economy)//ML How much, exactly?...probably kill you.)
Warming causes extinction. Bill McKibben 19, Schumann Distinguished Scholar at Middlebury College; fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences; holds honorary degrees from 18 colleges and universities; Foreign Policy named him to their inaugural list of the world’s 100 most important global thinkers. "This Is How Human Extinction Could Play Out." Rolling Stone. 4-9-2019. https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/bill-mckibben-falter-climate-change-817310/ Oh, it could...the warmest periods.”
Don’t write our impacts off as low probability – asteroid collision is complex and the existence of space keyholes exponentially increases the risk of collision. Vereš ’19 Peter Vereš ’19, Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, “Chapter 6 Vision of Perfect Observation Capabilities”, 2019, Planetary Defense, Space and Society, https://dl1.cuni.cz/pluginfile.php/634091/mod_resource/content/1/Planetary20Defence.pdf Often, uncertain orbits...agencies (ESA, MPC).
Case: 1AR – Util Good The standard is consistency with utilitarianism
No intent-foresight distinction – If we foresee a consequence, then it becomes part of our deliberation which makes it intrinsic to our action since we intend it to happen. 2. Actor specificity – Util is the only moral system available to policymakers, Goodin 95 Robert E. Goodin 95 professor of government at the University of Essex, and professor of philosophy and social and political theory at Australian National University, “Utilitarianism as a Public Philosophy”, Cambridge Studies in Philosophy and Public Policy, May 1995, BE Consider, first, the ...fine-grained for that.
3. Pleasure and pain are intrinsically valuable. Moen 16 Ole Martin Moen, Research Fellow in Philosophy at University of Oslo “An Argument for Hedonism” Journal of Value Inquiry (Springer), 50 (2) 2016: 267–281 SJDI, brackets in original Let us start...matters of value.
4. Collapses to util: 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.
5. No act-omission distinction – a. Psychology – choosing to omit is an act itself – governments decide not to act which means being presented with the aff creates a choice between two actions, neither of which is an omission. b. Actor specificity – governments are culpable for omissions because their purpose is to protect the constituency – otherwise they would have no obligation to make murder illegal. Only util can escape culpability in the instance of tradeoffs – i.e. it resolves the trolley problem because a deontological theory would hold you responsible for killing regardless. Actor spec o/w – different agents have different ethical standings that affect their obligations and considerations. 6. The assumption that there are self-evident truths is the basic error of Kantian metaethics. A pragmatic, intersubjective conception of truth is preferable. Habermas ’98 - Jurgen Habermas Former Chair of Philosophy and Sociology, Johann Wolfgang Goethe University Frankfurt am Main Institute for Social Research, Permanent Visiting Professor at Northwestern University, "Theodor Heuss Professor" at The New School, New York., The Inclusion of the Other: Studies in Political Theory. Cambridge: MIT Press (1998), p. 36-37 AT A sentence or ...all future objections.
7. Kant’s construction of ‘rational man’ which is dominant in the western tradition justifies oppressing those constructed as insufficiently rational. Minnich ’05 - Elizabeth Kamarck Minnich Senior Scholar, Association of American Colleges and Universities, Ph.D., Philosophy. Graduate Faculty of Political and Social Science, The New School for Social Research, Transforming Knowledge, 2nd ed. Philadelphia: Temple University Press (2005). p. 148-149 AT The point is...judgments are rendered.
Deontology fails to account for the unchosen moral demands of particular identities and so fails to account for indispensable aspects of the moral experience. Sandel ’98 - Michael J. Sandel Professor of Political Philosophy, Harvard University, Liberalism and the Limits of Justice: Second Edition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (1998). P. 178-179 AT If the deontological...what he knows.
2. And hold the neg to a high burden of proof to exclude aff impacts. The neg is going to get up in the next speech and say that the aff impacts don’t link without giving a clearly warranted reason for doing so (and a warrant that actually makes sense), so you give more weight to arguments from the aff about how the AC arguments link in.
Tournament: Peninsula | Round: 3 | Opponent: Troy Independent AP | Judge: Dillon Johnson 1 1 Interpretation—the aff may not defend a subset of appropriation. Appropriation is a generic indefinite singular. Cohen 01 Ariel Cohen (Ben-Gurion University of the Negev), “On the Generic Use of Indefinite Singulars,” Journal of Semantics 18:3, 2001 https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/188590876.pdf *IS generic = Indefinite Singulars French, then, expresses..room is¶ square?
Their plan violates. Rules readings are always generalized – specific instances are not consistent. Cohen 01 Ariel Cohen (Ben-Gurion University of the Negev), “On the Generic Use of Indefinite Singulars,” Journal of Semantics 18:3, 2001 https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/188590876.pdf In general, as,...avoid hitting something.
That outweighs—only our evidence speaks to how indefinite singulars are interpreted in the context of normative statements like the resolution. This means throw out aff counter-interpretations that are purely descriptive Vote neg: 1 Precision –any deviation justifies the aff arbitrarily jettisoning words in the resolution at their whim which decks negative ground and preparation because the aff is no longer bounded by the resolution. 2 Limits—specifying a type of appropriation offers huge explosion in the topic since space is, quite literally, infinite. Drop the debater to preserve fairness and education – use competing interps –reasonability invites arbitrary judge intervention and a race to the bottom of questionable argumentation Hypothetical neg abuse doesn’t justify aff abuse, and theory checks cheaty CPs No RVIs—it’s their burden to be topical.
Starlink is key to democracy movements. Banias 21 Mj Banias editor and co-founder of The Debrief, 21 - ("Uncensored Satellite Internet Will Weaken Dictatorships," Debrief, 4-20-2021, accessed 1-13-2022, https://thedebrief.org/uncensored-satellite-internet-will-weaken-dictatorships/)//ML As low-orbit satellite...access to information. Free internet is crucial to the promotion of democracy. Pirannejad 17: Ali Pirannejad {Department of Public Administration, University of Tehran, Tehran, Iran; Faculty of Technology, Policy and Management, Delft University of Technology, Delft, Netherlands, }, 17 - ("Can the internet promote democracy? A cross-country study based on dynamic panel data models," Taylor andamp; Francis, 4-1-2017, https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/02681102.2017.1289889?journalCode=titd20)//marlborough-wr/ In the age...filter – solves war
Hegre, 14 (Håvard Hegre Department of Peace and Conflict Research, Uppsala University and Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO) “Democracy and armed conflict” SAGE) Henge Although there is...democracy and peace.
1/22/22
ND - Abolition CP
Tournament: Apple Valley | Round: 6 | Opponent: Troy Independent AP | Judge: Collin Smith Abolish Prisons CP CP text: A just government ought to abolish prisons. The CJS is irredeemable and intrinsically anti-black -- only abolition can challenge racialized criminalization Roberts 19 (Dorothy E. Roberts -- George A. Weiss University Professor of Law and Sociology + University of Pennsylvania; Raymond Pace and Sadie Tanner Mossell Alexander Professor of Civil Rights + University of Pennsylvania Law School; Professor of Africana Studies and Professor of Sociology + University of Pennsylvania School of Arts and Sciences, “The Supreme Court 2018 Term”, “Foreword: Abolition Constitutionalism”, Number I, Volum 133, November 2019, pgs. 12-40) The United States stands out from all nations on Earth for its reliance on caging human beings.52 In the last forty years, the U.S. incarcerated population exploded from about 500,000 to more than two million.53 The U.S. federal and state governments lock up more people and at higher rates than do any other governments in the world, and they do so today more than they did at any other period in U.S. history.54 Most people sentenced to prison in the United States today are from politically marginalized groups — poor, black, and brown.55 Not only are black people five times as likely to be incarcerated as white people,56 but also the lifetime probability of incarceration for black boys born in 2001 is estimated to be thirty-two percent compared to six percent for white boys.57 The female incarceration rate has grown twice as quickly as the male incarceration rate over the past few decades, and black women are twice as likely as white women to be behind bars.58 This astounding amount of human confinement should not be seen as an unfortunate consequence of crime prevention policies or as an isolated blemish on America’s otherwise fair system of criminal justice.59 Rather, prisons are part of a larger system of carceral punishment that legitimizes state violence against the nation’s most disempowered people to maintain a racial capitalist order60 for the benefit of a wealthy white elite.61 The prison industrial complex emerged in the second half of the twentieth century from the merger of social welfare programs and crime control policies.62 As Professor Elizabeth Hinton documents in From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime, Democrats and Republicans in the 1960s and 1970s paired federal assistance to urban neighborhoods of color with surveillance, militarized policing, harsh sentencing laws, and prison expansion, based on shared assumptions of innate black criminality.63 Thus, “the roots of mass incarceration had been firmly established by a bipartisan consensus of national policymakers in the two decades prior to Reagan’s War on Drugs in the 1980s.”64 The astronomical expansion of prisons in the last forty years occurred during a process of government restructuring that transferred services from the welfare state to the private realm of market, family, and individual. The United States set the global trend in cutting social programs while promoting free-market conditions conducive to capital accumulation, resulting in one of the slowest growth rates of spending on basic social needs.65 Beginning with “Reaganomics” — the Reagan Administration’s economic policy based on tax cuts, business deregulation, and reductions in federal spending — and extending to the Clinton Administration’s restructuring of welfare, the United States underwent a period of intensified privatization.66 Government policymakers coupled this neoliberal dismantling of the social safety net with intensified carceral intervention in poor communities of color.67 The consolidation of corporate power in recent decades depended not only on increased market-based privatization but also on increased punitive control of marginalized people who are excluded from the market economy because of racism.68 In sum, beginning in the 1960s, U.S. policymakers have supported elites by intensifying carceral measures in order to address the social problems and quell the unrest generated by racial capitalism.69 As Professor Dan Berger explains: “Carceral expansion is a form of political as well as economic repression aimed at managing worklessness among the Black and Brown (and increasingly white) working class for whom global capitalism has limited need.”70 Thus, the relationship between racial capitalism and carceral punishment extends far beyond extracting profits from prison labor and private prisons, which does not characterize most of the prison industrial complex’s operation.71 Rather, prisons are the state’s response to social crises produced by racial capitalism, such as unemployment and unhealthy segregated housing, and to the rebellions waged by marginalized people who suffer most from these conditions.72 The physical expansion of prisons is facilitated by criminalizing subordinated people so that caging them seems ordinary and natural. Indeed, Critical Resistance co-founder Provost Julia Chinyere Oparah identifies as a key “logic of incarceration”73 the “racialization of crime” so that crime is associated with dangerous and violent “black, indigenous, immigrant, or other minority populations.”74 Longstanding stereotypes of black criminality are marshalled to turn everyday black life into criminal activities.75 For example, order-maintenance policing relies on an association between the identification of lawless people and racist notions of criminality to legitimize routine police harassment and arrest of black people.76 Likewise, during the “crack epidemic” of the Reagan era, the longstanding devaluation of black motherhood was crucial to converting the “public health problem of drug use during pregnancy into a crime, addressed by arresting and imprisoning black women rather than providing them with needed health care.”77 Not only does the prison industrial complex serve as the state’s solution to economic and social problems, but carceral approaches to these problems are also ever more common beyond prisons. I described this carceral expansion in a recent issue of this law review: All institutions in the United States increasingly address social inequality by punishing the communities that are most marginalized by it. Systems that ostensibly exist to serve people’s needs — health care, education, and public housing, as well as public assistance and child welfare — have become behavior modification programs that regulate the people who rely on them, and these systems resort to a variety of punitive measures to enforce compliance.78 Public welfare programs are increasingly entangled with criminal law enforcement.79 People who receive Medicaid or Temporary Assistance to Needy Families are subjected to intense surveillance by government agents as a condition of obtaining aid — and if they refuse aid, they are further subjected to child protective services investigations.80 Homelessness, public school misbehavior, and health problems are all criminalized by calling police officers as the first responders to deal with problems that arise in these contexts.81 The prison, foster care, and welfare systems operate together to form a cohesive punitive apparatus that punishes black mothers in particular.82 At the same time, repressive fetal protection laws and abortion restrictions coalesce to criminalize pregnancy itself;83 immigration law makes entering the United States without documentation a crime;84 and militarized border security results in deportation, family separation, and detention in prisons and squalid concentration camps.85 As carceral logics take over ever-expanding aspects of our society, so does the cruelty that government agents visit on people who are the most vulnerable to state surveillance and confinement. Torture has been accepted as a technique of racialized carceral control.86 The nation’s public schools, prisons, detention centers, and hospitals serving poor people of color are marked not only by stark inequalities but also by dehumanizing bodily neglect and abuse committed by police officers and guards.87 Further, as Rodríguez explains, “incarceration as a logic and method of dominance is not reducible to the particular institutional form of jails, prisons, detention centers, and other such brick-and-mortar incarcerating facilities.”88 Although prison abolitionists work to end prisons, their ultimate aspiration is to end carceral society — a society that is governed by a logic of incarceration. B. Abolition Praxis: Past, Present, Future Prison abolition theory has past, present, and future aspects, each of which animates activism simultaneously.89 Prison abolitionists look back to history to trace the roots of today’s carceral state to the racial order established by slavery and look forward to imagine a society without carceral punishment.90 Both are critical motivations for abolishing the prison industrial complex. The case for abolition that is grounded in history and politics provides a compelling framework for understanding the need to eradicate the entire carceral punishment system as well as for identifying strategies to accomplish that goal. Indeed, we can see the extreme cruelty and degradation that characterize today’s penitentiaries, police forces, and executions as the inevitable result of a racially subordinating system.91 1. Slavery Origins. — Many prison abolitionists have found the roots of today’s criminal punishment system in the institution of chattel slavery.92 Even before I thought of myself as a prison abolitionist, my analysis of current criminal justice issues consistently led me to a discussion of slavery. Whether interrogating racism in the prosecution of black women for pregnancy-related crimes,93 the disproportionately high placement of black children in foster care,94 the high rates of incarceration in black neighborhoods,95 police torture of black suspects,96 or gang-loitering policing,97 I found it essential to understand these practices as originating in the enslavement of black people. That analysis helped me to see how these practices emanated from a carceral system that continues to perpetuate black people’s subjugated status and, ultimately, to conclude the carceral system cannot be fixed — it must be abolished.98 The pillars of the U.S. criminal punishment system — police, prisons, and capital punishment — all have roots in racialized chattel slavery.99 After Emancipation, criminal control functioned as a means of legally restricting the freedoms of black people and preserving whites’ dominant status.100 Through these institutions, law enforcement continued to implement the logic of slavery — which regarded black people as inherently enslaveable with no claim to legal rights101 — to keep them in their place in the racial capitalist hierarchy.102 (a) Police. — The first police forces in the United States were slave patrols.103 Beginning in the early 1700s, southern white men formed armed groups that entered slaveholding properties and roamed public roads to ensure that enslaved people did not escape or rebel against their enslavers.104 Slave patrols monitored enslaved people to prevent them from engaging in forbidden activities such as “harboring weapons or fugitives, conducting meetings, or learning to read or write.”105 They also used the threat of violence to intimidate enslaved workers into obedience to enslavers.106 Enslaved people who were caught planning resistance, running away, or defying the slave codes enacted to restrict them were subjected to violent punishments such as beatings, whippings, mutilation, and forced sale away from their families.107 Modern police forces are descendants of armed urban patrols like the Charleston City Guard and Watch, which was established as early as 1783 to constantly monitor and inspect both enslaved and free black residents to “minimize Negro fraternizing and, more especially, to prevent the growth of an organized colored community.”108 Enslaved people who worked on plantations and farms were under the “immediate control and discipline of their respective owners,” who were often aided by hired overseers.109 The overseers’ job was to enforce enslaved workers’ total subjugation to enslavers by violently reprimanding perceived disobedience and failures to meet productivity quotas.110 The violence overseers inflicted on enslaved workers reflected a fundamental aspect of carceral punishment that survives today: the purpose of punishing black people was to reinforce their subjugation to white domination. Hence, enslaved people were punished for committing offenses defined as insubordination to enslavers, but were also punished regardless of their culpability for an offense. The celebrated abolitionist Frederick Douglass, who escaped slavery in Maryland in 1838, 111 emphasizes this point in his portrayal of the overseers he encountered while in captivity. His description of Austin Gore, an overseer who served Colonel Edward Lloyd on a plantation where Douglass spent two years of his childhood, is especially illuminating.112 Gore was an ideal overseer because he “was one of those who could torture the slightest look, word, or gesture, on the part of the slave, into impudence, and would treat it accordingly.”113 Douglass elaborates: There must be no answering back to him; no explanation was allowed a slave, showing himself to have been wrongfully accused. Mr. Gore acted fully up to the maxim laid down by slaveholders, — “It is better that a dozen slaves suffer under the lash, than that the overseer should be convicted, in the presence of the slaves, of having been at fault.” No matter how innocent a slave might be — it availed him nothing, when accused by Mr. Gore of any misdemeanor. To be accused was to be convicted, and to be convicted was to be punished; the one always following the other with immutable certainty.114 An enslaved man named Demby learned the price of refusing to submit to Gore’s rule.115 When Demby plunged into a creek to escape being beaten, Gore shot him dead with a musket.116 Although slave law occasionally permitted the application of criminal homicide to convict slaveholders who killed their slaves, it exonerated those who killed slaves who resisted the slaveholders’ lawful authority.117 A “hostile attitude” or resistance to corporal punishment on the part of enslaved people like Demby provided legal justification for killing them.118 The status of enslaved Africans as the property of their white enslavers meant that, from the enslavers’ perspective, black people were a perpetual threat to white people’s property — a threat seen as so great it necessitated employing armed forces to maintain order among the enslaved.119 In the aftermath of Emancipation, when slaveholders’ human property was no longer protected by slave law, “a new set of innovations and regulations had to emerge, again under the rubric of policing.”120 Like overseers and slave patrols, Jim Crow police and private citizens who abetted them used terror primarily to enforce racial subjugation, not to apprehend people culpable for crimes.121 Take, for example, coercive interrogation techniques, now known as “the third degree,” that have become a staple of modern policing.122 The first stage of lynching, typically carried out with the participation or sanction of the police, was often “extracting a confession by whipping or burning the accused.”123 Prior to Miranda v. Arizona, 124 which barred the admissibility of presumptively coerced confessions, southern police routinely used torture to force blacks to confess to crimes.125 For example, in Brown v. Mississippi, 126 three black tenant farmers were convicted for murdering a white planter; the sole evidence before the jury consisted of their confessions.127 Those confessions were obtained through police torture, including the repeated hanging and whipping of one of the defendants until he confessed to a dictated statement.128 The other two defendants’ confessions were similarly coerced and tailored.129 When overturning the convictions, the Supreme Court observed that “the signs of the rope on one defendant’s neck were plainly visible during the so-called trial.”130 Even after the civil rights movement, “police torture of suspects continues to be a tolerated means of confirming the presumed criminality of blacks.”131 For example, from the 1970s to the 1990s, white police officers in Chicago engaged in systematic torture of black residents.132 Under the command of Lieutenant Jon Burge, police coerced dozens of confessions from suspects by beating them, burning them with radiators and cigarettes, putting guns in their mouths, placing plastic bags over their heads, and delivering electric shocks to their ears, noses, fingers, and genitals.133 Burge’s reign of torture was known and condoned by police officers, the State’s Attorney’s office, judges, and doctors at Cook County Hospital.134 Racialized terror that bridged slave patrols, lynchings, and police whippings remained a feature of policing in the post– Civil Rights Era criminal punishment system.135 Police also serve as an arm of the racial capitalist state by controlling black and other marginalized communities through everyday physical intimidation and by funneling those they arrest into jails, prisons, and detention centers.136 Numerous studies conducted throughout the nation demonstrate that police engage in rampant racial profiling.137 The increasing militarization of police forces accentuates their role as an occupying force in communities of color and on Indian reservations.138 Police harassment and violence against residents in poor, nonwhite neighborhoods is routine.139 Police “brutality” is a misnomer because it suggests police violence is exceptional. Mariame Kaba, the founding director of Project NIA,140 explains she “retired the term ‘police brutality’” because “it is meaningless, as violence is inherent to policing.”141 Similarly, Professor Micol Seigel calls policing “violence work.”142 Police normally treat residents in communities of color in an aggressive fashion — shouting commands, handcuffing even children, throwing people to the ground, and tasing, beating, and kicking them.143 For young men of color, the risk of being killed by the police is shockingly high and police use of force is among the leading causes of death.144 Black women, women of color, and queer women are especially vulnerable to gendered forms of sexual violence at the hands of police.145 These violent tactics are not in response to violent crime. Indeed, police officers actually spend a small fraction of time stopping violent offenders.146 Most of the time, officers are engaged in patrolling ordinary people who are simply going about their everyday activities, generating high-volume arrests for petty infractions.147 Like the Black Codes and the slave codes before them, order maintenance policies give police wide discretion to control black people’s presence on public streets.148 Law enforcement continues to enforce the logic of slave patrols, to view black people as a threat to the security of propertied whites, and to contain the possibility of black rebellion.149 To Professor Fred Moten, police officers killed Michael Brown and Eric Garner because these black men represented “insurgent black life,” which “constituted a threat to the order that police represent and . . . are sworn to protect.”150 There are numerous examples of state officials dispatching police to silence black protest, including the assassination of Black Panther Party leader Fred Hampton by the Chicago Police Department and the military-style assault on protesters in Ferguson, Missouri, after the killing of Michael Brown.151 The recent spate of “BBQ Beckys” — white residents who call 911 on black men, women, and children engaged in harmless public activities like barbequing in a park or selling bottled water on a sidewalk152 — spotlights the role of police to keep black people in their place for the benefit of white citizens.153 Abolitionists also include state surveillance — another descendant of the slave patrol154 — as a major component of carceral punishment.155 Today’s computerized predictive policing is a high-tech version of vague loitering and vagrancy laws, which historically gave “‘license to police officers to arrest people purely on the basis of race-based suspicion’ by categorically identifying black people as lawless apart from their criminal conduct.”156 I previously described the situation in this law review as follows: Law enforcement agencies nationwide collect and store vast amounts of data about past crimes, analyze these data using mathematical algorithms to predict future criminal activity, and incorporate these forecasts in their strategies for policing individuals, groups, and neighborhoods. Judges use big-data predictive analytics to inform their decisions about pretrial detention, bail, sentencing, and parole. Automated risk assessments help to determine whether or not defendants go to prison, the type of facility to which they are assigned, how long they are incarcerated, and the conditions of their release.157 Some proponents of artificial intelligence claim these technologies help people make more objective decisions that are not tainted by human biases.158 However, predictive algorithms have been revealed to “disproportionately identify African Americans as likely to commit crimes in the future.”159 This is because “crime data collection reflects discriminatory policing. . . . Police routinely bias data collection against black residents by patrolling their neighborhoods with far greater intensity than white neighborhoods.”160 Risk assessment models that import institutionally biased data become a “self-fulfilling feedback loop” where the prediction ensures future detection.161 The rise of computerized risk assessments in the carceral punishment system reinforces the detachment of punishment from culpability and furthers the criminalization of whole communities. Computerized predictions identify people for government agencies to regulate from the moment of birth, without any regard to their actual responsibility for causing social harm: police gang databases have included toddlers.162 Thus, the state uses artificial intelligence and predictive technologies to reproduce existing inequalities while creating new modes of carceral control and foreclosing imagination of a more democratic future.163 (b) Prisons. — During the slavery era, prison populations were composed almost exclusively of white people.164 When slavery was abolished, the demographics of prisons shifted dramatically.165 Southern law enforcement began to charge formerly enslaved African Americans with crimes and incarcerate them in growing numbers.166 Imprisonment and the convict leasing system maintained black people’s status as a disenfranchised and involuntary labor force for whites.167 In its 1871 decision Ruffin v. Commonwealth, 168 the Virginia Supreme Court of Appeals affirmed the similar status of slave and prisoner when it ruled that an incarcerated convict was “for the time being the slave of the State. He is civiliter mortuus; and his estate, if he has any, is administered like that of a dead man.”169 Likewise, black people convicted of petty offenses were “sold as punishment for crime” at public auctions as if they were still enslaved.170 A key assertion of prison abolition theory is that criminalization of black people following Emancipation served to maintain the racial capitalist system that had been built on slavery.171 In an interview published in 2005, Professor Angela Y. Davis explained her ideas on the link between slavery and prison abolition: Now I am trying to think about the ways that the prison reproduces forms of racism based on the traces of slavery that can still be discovered within the contemporary criminal justice system. There is, I believe, a clear relationship between the rise of the prison-industrial-complex in the era of global capitalism and the persistence of structures in the punishment system that originated with slavery.172 In other words, the criminalization and imprisonment of black people following the Civil War are a critical link in the historical chain that ties the prison industrial complex to slavery. Criminal punishment was a chief way the southern states nullified the Reconstruction Amendments, reinstated the white power regime, and made free blacks vulnerable to labor exploitation and disenfranchisement. Following the formal abolition of slavery, southern states targeted black men, women, and children for imprisonment by passing criminal laws known as Black Codes, modeled after the slave codes, which prohibited their freedom of movement, contract, and family life.173 Between 1865 and 1866, legislatures “enacted harsh vagrancy laws, apprenticeship laws, criminal penalties for breach of contract, and extreme punishments for blacks, all in an effort to control black labor.”174 Black people who were out of work or simply present in public without adequate reason were routinely arrested for vagrancy, giving white officials license to jail them.175 Blacks were also arrested and given long sentences for petty offenses that whites engaged in without consequence. Writing in 1893, journalist and activist Ida B. Wells gave the example of twelve black men who were imprisoned in South Carolina “on no other finding but a misdemeanor commonly atoned for by a fine of a few dollars, and which thousands of the state’s inhabitants white are constantly committing with impunity — the carrying of concealed weapons.”176 As the Court’s Timbs v. Indiana177 decision last Term discussed, Black Codes also employed economic sanctions to consign blacks to a form of debt slavery that coerced them into onerous involuntary labor.178 In the decades after Reconstruction, fines kept many formerly enslaved people in forced servitude to white landowners.179 Activist Mary Church Terrell warned in 1907 that the peonage system kept black people perpetually enslaved. “There are scores, hundreds perhaps, of coloured men in the South to-day who are vainly trying to repay fines and sentences imposed upon them five, six, or even ten years ago,” she wrote.180 By compelling emancipated blacks to work for whites in payment of debts on threat of incarceration, the law substituted the unconstitutional system of chattel slavery with a legal system of peonage.181 Also adjoined to these forms of legally enforced servitude was the practice of systematically forcing black prisoners to toil on chain gangs and leasing black convicts as labor to planters and companies. By making free black people criminals, white authorities could compel them to work against their will in a system that not only constituted “slavery by another name,”182 but also was so violent that it was “worse than slavery.”183 Between 1865 and 1880, every former Confederate state except Virginia established a system of leasing large numbers of black prisoners to railroads, coal mines, and other industries that were rebuilding infrastructures devastated by the Civil War.184 Private lessees had complete custody and control of prisoners and were motivated to maximize their profits by extracting as much labor as possible with little incentive to preserve prisoners’ welfare or lives.185 The result was rampant punishment, torture, and killing of prisoners with complete impunity.186 State exploitation of prison labor reinforced a gendered and sexualized form of white domination of black women.187 Black women were not protected by Victorian norms of femininity, which shielded most white women from the degradation of carceral violence and forced labor.188 To the contrary, black women were far more likely than white women to be arrested for violating racialized gender standards by engaging in behavior deemed to be masculine, like public quarreling.189 The wildly disparate treatment of white women and black women arrested for similar crimes is mind-boggling: for example, “between 1908 and 1938, only four white women were ever sentenced to the chain gang in Georgia, compared with almost two thousand Black women.”190 Recent investigations by Professors Sarah Haley and Talitha LeFlouria provide critical documentation of the previously unacknowledged extent of black women’s involvement in convict leasing, chain gangs, and forced domestic labor, dramatically expanding our understanding of antiblack violence and carceral control during the Jim Crow era.191 Haley frames the common practice of chain-gang overseers whipping black female convict laborers as “sexualized gender- and racespecific rituals of violence marking the convict camp as a pornographic site” and producing a spectacle of gendered racial terror.192 Newspapers also routinely vilified black women accused of crimes.193 Black women resisted in multiple ways, including as organized club women, blues lyricists, and incarcerated petitioners and saboteurs.194 Violence against enslaved and incarcerated black women was essential to preserving the racial capitalist state.195 This state, in turn, constructed an ideology of black female depravity and deviance,196 which undergirds black women’s higher rates of incarceration to this day.197 I have emphasized how during the slavery and Jim Crow eras, state agents meted out punishment to black people without regard to their guilt or innocence. Criminalizing black people entailed both defining crimes so as to make black people’s harmless, everyday activities legally punishable and punishing black people regardless of their culpability for crimes. Thus, for more than a century, vague vagrancy and antiloitering ordinances have given police officers license to arrest black people for standing in public streets — with no attention to whether or not their presence caused any harm to anyone.198 The purpose of carceral punishment was to maintain a racial capitalist order rather than to redress social harms — not to give black people what they deserved, but to keep them in their place. Today, the state still aims to control populations rather than judge individual guilt or innocence, to “manage socialinequalities” rather than remedy them.199 A large body of social scienceliterature explains criminal punishment as a form of social control of marginalized people.200 Professor Issa Kohler-Hausmann, for example, argues that New York City criminal courts that handle misdemeanors “have largely abandoned the adjudicative model of criminal law administration — concerned with deciding guilt and punishment in specific cases” — and instead follow a “managerial model — concerned with managing people through engagement with the criminal justice system over time.”201 By marking people for involvement in “misdemeanorland,” forcing them to engage in burdensome procedural hassles, and requiring them to engage in disciplinary activities,202 this gargantuan branch of the criminal punishment system exerts social control over the city’s black communities, with no real regard for residents’ culpability for crime. The explosion in imprisonment of African Americans at the end of the twentieth century represents the continuation of trends that originated even before the century’s start. In describing the rise of convict leasing, W.E.B. Du Bois notes a fundamental feature of post-slavery carceral punishment: the disconnect between the rise of prisons and crime rates. “The whole criminal system came to be used as a method of keeping Negroes at work and intimidating them,” Du Bois writes in Black Reconstruction. 203 “Consequently there began to be a demand of jails and penitentiaries beyond the natural demand due to the rise in crime.”204 In a complement to Du Bois’s observations about the economic motivations for incarcerating black people, Professor Alex Lichtenstein argues that social and political forces also produce higher incarceration rates: Stable incarceration rates appear in periods of white racial hegemony and a stable racial order, such as that secured by slavery in the first half of the 19th century or Jim Crow during the first half of the 20th. Correspondingly, sudden rises in incarceration, especially of minorities, tend to appear one generation after this racial hegemony has been cracked, as in the first and second Reconstructions of emancipation and civil rights.205 Thus, the skyrocketing prison population in the second half of the twentieth century cannot be explained solely as a response to increases in crime.206 Prison expansion instead reflects a response to the needs of rising neoliberal racial capitalism that addresses growing socioeconomic inequality with punitive measures.207 The disconnect between social harm and carceral punishment is evident not only in state regulation of marginalized people but also in the immunity granted to state agents who commit social harms.208 For reasons both legal and political, police,209 prosecutors,210 and corporate executives211 generally avoid criminal liability even for inflicting serious harm. As I have explored previously, “current legal doctrine condones police violence and makes individual acts of abuse — even homicides — appear isolated, aberrational, and acceptable rather than part of a systematic pattern of official violence.”212 Prosecutors who have used unconstitutional methods for obtaining wrongful convictions have not been criminally prosecuted themselves.213 Few corporate executives have been charged with crimes for actions that caused billions of dollars in losses during the financial crisis of 2008. 214 Moreover, government officials responsible for devastating environmental harms, such as lead-poisoned water in Flint, Michigan, typically escape criminal prosecution.215 In sum, criminal law treats prisons as essential to prevent or redress crimes committed by economically and racially marginalized people but unnecessary to address even greater social harms inflicted by the wealthy and powerful. The criminal punishment system extends its subordinating impact beyond prison walls by imposing collateral penalties that deny critical rights and resources to formerly incarcerated people.216 Felon disenfranchisement laws, for example, restrict incarcerated people’s ability to vote during their sentences and after they are released,217 and significantly dilute black political power.218 The stigma of conviction, imposition of fines and fees, and exclusion from public benefits inflict a nearly insurmountable burden on people caught in the carceral web.219 The association between slavery and prison makes these deprivations seem natural — despite the injustice of punishing people beyond the sentence they served and in a way that bears no relation to the crimes they committed. Just as it seemed unremarkable that enslaved people could not vote because they were not citizens, so today many people think: “Of course prisoners aren’t supposed to vote. They aren’t really citizens any more.”220 Thus, the inherent denial of citizenship rights to enslaved people is mirrored in the unquestioned denial of those rights to incarcerated people. (c) Death Penalty. — Capital punishment, like police and prisons, has its roots in slavery and the preservation of white supremacy.221 State executions have persisted in the United States because they function similarly to the extreme punishments inflicted on enslaved people and the state-sanctioned lynchings that replaced these punishments after Emancipation.222 As Davis points out, “the institution of slavery served as a receptacle for those forms of punishment considered to be too uncivilized to be inflicted on white citizens within a democratic society.”223 Historically, race-based criminal codes imposed the death penalty on enslaved individuals for many more offenses than they did for whites.224 Blacks were “commonly hanged” for “rape, slave revolt, attempted murder, burglary, and arson.”225 Moreover, condemned slaves were subjected to extra cruelty through what Professor Stuart Banner calls “super-capital punishment” — burning them alive at the stake.226 Executions were also made especially degrading by displaying slaves’ severed heads on poles in front of the courthouse, or allowing their corpses to decompose in public view.227 After Emancipation, white southerners began ritualistically kidnapping and killing black people to publicly reinforce white supremacy.228 In 1893, Ida B. Wells observed that “the Convict Lease System and Lynch Law are twin infamies which flourish hand in hand in many of the United States.”229 Public torture proclaimed white dominion overblack people, repudiated blacks’ citizenship status,230 and “literally reinstated black bodies as the property of whites that could be chopped to pieces for their entertainment.”231 Many lynchings were of black men accused of breaching racialized sexual boundaries by raping or disrespecting white women.232 However, the majority of terroristic murders between 1890 and 1920 were intended to facilitate white theft of black people’s property.233 As Frederick Douglass observed in 1893, displaying insolence was sufficient excuse for lethal victimization: The crime of insolence for which the Negro was formerly killed and for which his killing was justified, is as easily pleaded in excuse now, as it was in the old time and what is worse, it is sufficient to make the charge of insolence to provoke the knife or bullet. This done, it is only necessary to say in the newspapers, that this dead Negro was impudent and about to raise an insurrection and kill all the white people, or that a white woman was insulted by a Negro, to lull the conscience of the north into indifference and reconcile its people to such murder. No proof of guilt is required. It is enough to accuse, to condemn and punish the accused with death. 234 Here, Douglass links his childhood observations of overseers’ punishment of enslaved blacks to the lynchings of emancipated blacks occurring after the Civil War. The same logic of slavery that called for punishment of black insubordination to enforce white supremacy, regardless of culpability for a crime, was revived in lynching and persists in the modern prison industrial complex. The hundreds of “public torture lynchings” that were a feature of southern society until almost 1940235 call into question the dominant narrative that as civilizations have evolved, punishments have become more humane.236 Instead, southern whites sent a message through medieval forms of punishment: Archaic forms of execution involving torture, burning, and mutilation . . . showed that “regular justice” was “too dignified” for black offenders. The public torture of blacks accused of offending the racial order demonstrated whites’ unlimited power and blacks’ utter worthlessness. This nation’s rights, liberties, and justice were meant for white people only; blacks meant nothing before the law.237 Lynchings were the terrorist counterpart to state-supported debt peonage, convict leasing, disenfranchisement, and segregation laws that kept blacks subject to white domination.238 Lynching black people was not an exception to the law; it was part of the administration of justice and the larger system of legally sanctioned racial control.239 In the mid-twentieth century, the practice of lynching black people was replaced by the practice of subjecting them to the death penalty.240 These legally sanctioned hangings, which deliberately resembled lynchings of the past,241 purported to punish black men for raping white women.242 New methods of execution were also implemented: in the 1950s in Mississippi, crowds of white onlookers gathered at southern courthouses to witness the electrocutions of black men in portable electric chairs that traveled from town to town.243 After one such killing in Mississippi in 1951, the crowd on the lawn outside the courthouse “burst into cheers, then crushed forward in an effort to glimpse the corpse as it was removed from the building.”244 There was a smooth transition from lynching to state execution because “a culture that carried out so much public unofficial capital punishment could hardly grow squeamish about the official variety.”245 Capital punishment continues to function as it did in the slavery and Jim Crow eras to reinforce the subordinated status of black people.246 Today, states primarily use lethal injection in an attempt to make capital punishment “more palatable,”247 on the logic that this method bears less resemblance to lynching than electrocution or hanging.248 The fact that lethal injection carries its own risks of inflicting pain249 has not undermined its constitutional status: last Term, in Bucklew v. Precythe, 250 a divided Court was unmoved by evidence that Missouri’s lethal injection protocol would inflict cruel and unusual punishment on a prisoner, reasoning that “the Eighth Amendment does not guarantee . . . a painless death.”251 Although Bucklew was white, the Court’s decision upheld lethal state violence that is disproportionately imposed on black men accused of killing white people.252 Like the torture rituals of lynching, the death penalty survives in modern America as an uncivilized form of punishment because it continues to represent white domination over black people. 2. Not a Malfunction. — A first step to demonstrating the political illegitimacy of today’s carceral punishment system is finding its origins in the institution of slavery. A second step is understanding that prisons, police, and the death penalty function to subordinate black people and maintain a racial capitalist regime. Efforts to fix the criminal punishment system to make it fairer or more inclusive are inadequate or even harmful because the system’s repressive outcomes don’t result from any systemic malfunction.253 Rather, the prison industrial complex works effectively to contain and control black communities as a result of its structural design. Therefore, reforms that correct problems perceived as aberrational flaws in the system only help to legitimize and strengthen its operation. Indeed, reforming prisons results in more prisons.254 3. A Society Without Prisons. — An essential component of prison abolitionist theory is the principle that eliminating current carceral practices must occur alongside creating a radically different society that has no need for them.255 Prison abolitionists frequently define their work as consisting of two simultaneous activities, one destructive and the other creative. “It’s the complete and utter dismantling of prisons, policing, and surveillance as they currently exist within our culture,” Kaba explains.256 “And it’s also the building up of new ways of . . . relating with each other.”257 This duality is essential to abolition both because prisons will only cease to exist when social, economic, and political conditions eliminate the need for them and because installing radical democracy is crucial to preventing another white backlash and reincarnation of slavery-like institutions in response to the abolition of current ones.258 Moreover, the success of nonpunitive approaches developed by abolitionists for addressing human needs and social problems can be a compelling reason to abandon current dehumanizing and ineffective practices.259 Above all, it is their vision of a world without prisons that gives abolitionists their lodestar. Abolitionists are working toward a society where prisons are inconceivable — a world where its inhabitants “would laugh off the outrageous idea of putting people into cages, thinking such actions as morally perverse and fatally counterproductive.”260 Because the current carceral system is rooted in the logic of slavery, abolitionists must look to a radically different logic of human relations to guide their activism.261 That guiding philosophy cannot be invented theoretically, but must emerge from the practice of collectively building communities that have no need for prisons. Citing Du Bois’s critique of the post-Emancipation period in Black Reconstruction, Davis attributes the rise of prisons to the failure to institute a revolutionary “abolition democracy” that incorporated freed African Americans into the social order.262 Slavery could not be truly and comprehensively abolished without economic redistribution, equal educational access, and voting rights. In Davis’s words, “DuBois . . . argues that a host of democratic institutions are needed to fully achieve abolition — thus abolition democracy.”263 Understanding that prisons are not primarily designed to protect people from crime, but rather to address human needs and social problems with punitive measures, opens the possibility that we can eradicate prisons by addressing these needs and problems in radically different ways.264 The prison has extended outside of its walls – the Prison Reentry Industry (PRI) is built on setting up oppressed populations for failure. Material improvements to post-release quality of life are crucial to break cycles of structural violence Ortiz and Jackey, 19 Jennifer M., and Hayley. “The System Is Not Broken, It Is Intentional: The Prisoner Reentry Industry as Deliberate Structural Violence.” The Prison Journal, vol. 99, no. 4, Sept. 2019, pp. 484–503, doi:10.1177/0032885519852090. The PRI operates using mechanisms that ensure the formerly incarcerated remain ensnared in a cycle of failure. Traditional criminological studies point to high recidivism rates as proof that reentry in the United States is failing to rehabilitate offenders (Travis, 2005). We disagree. The PRI is not a broken system but, rather, it is an intentional form of structural violence—employment exclusion, housing discrimination, reentry service fees, and parole reporting requirements that interfere with gainful employment or in which clients’ needs are not sufficiently addressed—that perpetuate the oppression of the most marginalized groups in our society. One need only look at the current state of reentry to understand this argument. Although federal and state governments have enacted reentry legislation such as the Second Chance Act and Kentucky’s Senate Bill 120, which established a reentry division of the Kentucky Department of Corrections, these bills are ceremonial and do not translate to meaningful change at the ground level. Our data indicate that formerly incarcerated individuals enter prisoner reentry programs hoping for a better future, only to discover that the PRI is an illusion. Reentry programming in prison is either nonexistent or requires one to meet strict eligibility standards. The incarcerated are denied access to services based on meaningless standards such as sentence length instead of receiving services based on their immediate needs. Existing programs are severely underfunded and dependent on volunteers. Once released from prison, the formerly incarcerated must contend with burdensome supervision requirements and exorbitant reentry fees that hinder employment and create motives for absconding. Thus, recidivism rates do not indicate that the PRI is failing but rather that it is working as designed to ensure the continued marginalization of “undesirable populations”. “Reentering prisoners are treated especially severely in part because of their association with an oppressed group in a historical and social context of racial hierarchy” (Martin, 2013, p. 502). As the United States experiences carceral devolution (Miller, 2014), a new peculiar institution (Wacquant, 2000) is emerging to maintain an oppressed class of poor persons of color. The PRI system is structured to give the illusion of rehabilitation but operates using mechanisms that ensure the formerly incarcerated are unable to succeed. Ironically, an overarching rugged individualism narrative dominates our societal views of the formerly incarcerated. If the formerly incarcerated recidivate or relapse, many argue it is because they made bad individual choices. “By activating the individualistic logic of personal responsibility, post-custodial bureaucracies put the onus of failed reintegration on former convicts” (Wacquant, 2010, p. 617) while ignoring the myriad of structural barriers to reentry. The reality remains that the reentry industry has made reentry nearly impossible. Individuals cannot focus on the underlying causes of their initial deviance because their focus is on oppressive supervision conditions, fees, and debt. The system does not rehabilitate offenders; it replicates and perpetuates inequality and poverty. Perhaps even more troubling is that many criminologists support this system by promoting and lauding meaningless legislation, “evidence-based” programming, and positivist research while simultaneously ignoring the plight and suffering at the ground level. The desire of orthodox scholars to remain “objective” and “neutral” when conducting research contributes to the production of nominal reentry research. Criminologists are infatuated with developing experimental and program evaluation research that is devoid of critical analyses of structural violence (Hallett, 2012) and which largely ignores the role of race (Olusanya and Cancino, 2012). Because we are obliged to the justice system for grant funding and because we are indoctrinated into the “publish or perish” mind-set, many academics develop and promote reentry research that reinforces and replicates the system instead of assessing its inherent structural violence. Given the racist and oppressive history of our country, good reentry scholarship “can never be written from a distance of detachment or with an attitude of objectivity” (Crenshaw et al., 1995, p. xiiv). We must enter the trenches and reveal the human suffering caused by the PRI. “The sudden policy and scholarly infatuation with reentry . . . must not hide the fact that such reentry programs are an integral component of prison fare” (Wacquant, 2010, p. 616). Reentry has become but a mere extension of a racist justice system that utilizes law enforcement, the courts, and other state actors to control the most “undesirable” among us. In true capitalist form, countless institutions and corporations profit from the PRI while creating a system that ensures a steady supply of clientele. The PRI manufactures the “raw materials” necessary to perpetuate the reentry system (Clear, 2010). Consequently, “most released convicts experience not reentry but ongoing circulation between the prison and their dispossessed neighborhoods” (Wacquant, 2010, p. 605). Thus, we should not conceptualize reentry as a binary but as a carceral mesh reminiscent of the prison-ghetto symbiosis (Wacquant, 2001). PRI is a system structured to reinforce the prison’s control over marginalized group much the same way that mass incarceration reinforced the oppressive conditions in the ghetto (Wacquant, 2001). On its surface, the efforts of PRI actors appear well-intentioned. However, in practice—and as illustrated in our respondents’ interviews—the PRI saddles the formerly incarcerated with obligations and debts that guarantee they are incapable of reintegrating into society. Hence, the true cost of freedom for the formerly incarcerated is a never-ending cycle of debts, threats, and increased likelihood of reincarceration. If the PRI were determined to rehabilitate individuals, it would shift its focus to improving the quality of life experienced by the formerly incarcerated. “The mission of those working for the PRI should be to work themselves out of a job by reducing the number of people returning to prison . . . and linking the formerly incarcerated to legitimate resources” (Thompkins, 2010, p. 603). In practice, however, the PRI uses surveillance and financial debts to ensure the formerly incarcerated remain a permanent underclass in our society. The reality remains that although the formerly incarcerated are living beyond the prison walls, they are not truly free.
ROB Our interpretation --- the ballot’s sole purpose is to answer the resolutional question: Is the outcome of the enactment of a topical plan better than the status quo or a competitive policy option?
This is best:
1) Grammar: the resolution is decidedly policy-oriented ---
“Resolved” before a colon reflects a legislative forum
The colon introduces the following: a. A list, but only after "as follows," "the following," or a noun for which the list is an appositive: Each scout will carry the following: (colon) meals for three days, a survival knife, and his sleeping bag. The company had four new officers: (colon) Bill Smith, Frank Tucker, Peter Fillmore, and Oliver Lewis. b. A long quotation (one or more paragraphs): In The Killer Angels Michael Shaara wrote: (colon) You may find it a different story from the one you learned in school. There have been many versions of that battle Gettysburg and that war the Civil War. (The quote continues for two more paragraphs.) c. A formal quotation or question: The President declared: (colon) "The only thing we have to fear is fear itself." The question is: (colon) what can we do about it? d. A second independent clause which explains the first: Potter's motive is clear: (colon) he wants the assignment. e. After the introduction of a business letter: Dear Sirs: (colon) Dear Madam: (colon) f. The details following an announcement For sale: (colon) large lakeside cabin with dock g. A formal resolution, after the word "resolved:" Resolved: (colon) That this council petition the mayor.
Grammar is the biggest impact --- allowing other frameworks justifies arbitrarily changing the question of the debate to an infinite number of alternatives, destroying predictable limits and ensuring the Neg always wins. Grammar is the only predictable basis for determining meaning; it’s the foundation for how words interact. Ignoring it justifies changing the focus of the debate, mooting the resolution altogether.
2) Plan focus:
Critical frameworks change the role of the ballot from a yes/no question about the desirability of the plan to something else. This undermines the singular logical purpose of debate: the search for the best policy. It results in illogical outcomes where good ideas are rejected for the wrong reasons.
This is the biggest educational impact --- learning is useless if it’s not connected to the real world
Strait and Wallace ‘07 (L. Paul, USC and Brett, George Mason U., The Scope of Negative Fiat and the Logic of Decision Making, Policy Cures? Health Assistance to Africa, Debaters Research Guide, p. A2) More to the point, debate certainly helps teach a lot of skills, yet we believe that the way policy debate participation encourages you to think is the most valuable educational benefit, because how someone makes decisions determines how they will employ the rest of their abilities, including the research and communication skills that debate builds. Plenty of debate theory articles have explained either the value of debate, or the way in which alternate actor strategies are detrimental to real-world education, but none so far have attempted to tie these concepts together. We will now explain how decision-making skill development is the foremost value of policy debate and how this benefit is the decision-rule to resolving all theoretical discussions about negative fiat. Why debate? Some do it for scholarships, some do it for social purposes, and many just believe it is fun. These are certainly all relevant considerations when making the decision to join the debate team, but as debate theorists they aren’t the focus of our concern. Our concern is finding a framework for debate that educates the largest quantity of students with the highest quality of skills, while at the same time preserving competitive equity. The ability to make decisions deriving from discussions, argumentation or debate, is the key skill. It is the one thing every single one of us will do every day of our lives besides breathing. Decision-making transcends boundaries between categories of learning learning like “policy education” and “kritik education,” it makes irrelevant considerations of whether we will eventually be policymakers, and it transcends questions of what substantive content a debate round should contain. The implication for this analysis is that the critical thinking and argumentative skills offered by real-world decision-making are comparatively greater than any educational disadvantage weighed against them. It is the skills we learn, not the content of our arguments, that can best improve all of our lives. While policy comparison skills are going to be learned through debate in one way or another, those skills are useless if they are not grounded in the kind of logic actually used to make decisions. The academic studies and research supporting this position are numerous. Richard Fulkerson (1996) explains that “argumentation… is the chief cognitive activity by which a democracy, a field of study, a corporation, or a committee functions. . . And it is vitally important that high school and college students learn both to argue well and to critique the arguments of others” (p. 16). Stuart Yeh (1998) comes to the conclusion that debate allows even cultural minority students to “identify an issue, consider different views, form and defend a viewpoint, and consider and respond to counterarguments…The ability to write effective arguments influences grades, academic success, and preparation for college and employment” (p. 49). Certainly, these are all reasons why debate and argumentation themselves are valuable, so why is real world decision-making critical to argumentative thinking? Although people might occasionally think about problems from the position of an ideal decisionmaker (c.f. Ulrich, 1981, quoted in Korcok, 2001), in debate we should be concerned with what type of argumentative thinking is the most relevant to real-world intelligence and the decisions that people make every day in their lives, not academic trivialities. It is precisely because it is rooted in real-world logic that argumentative thinking has value. Deanna Kuhn’s research in “Thinking as Argument” explains this by stating that “no other kind of thinking matters more-or contributes more to the quality and fulfillment of people’s lives, both individually and collectively” (p. 156).
The aff is a refusal to engage in traditional politics, abdicating social responsibility and causing extinction
The decline of the public sphere in late twentieth-century America poses a series of great dilemmas and challenges. Many ideological currents scrutinized here – localism, metaphysics, spontaneism, post-modernism, Deep Ecology – intersect with and reinforce each other. While these currents have deep origins in popular movements of the 1960s and 1970s, they remain very much alive in the 1990s. Despite their different outlooks and trajectories, they all share one thing in common: a depoliticized expression of struggles to combat and overcome alienation. The false sense of empowerment that comes with such mesmerizing impulses is accompanied by a loss of public engagement, an erosion of citizenship and a depleted capacity of individuals in large groups to work for social change. As this ideological quagmire worsens, urgent problems that are destroying the fabric of American society will go unsolved – perhaps even unrecognized – only to fester more ominously in the future. And such problems (ecological crisis, poverty, urban decay, spread of infectious diseases, technological displacement of workers) cannot be understood outside the larger social and global context of internationalized markets, finance, and communications. Paradoxically, the widespread retreat from politics, often inspired by localist sentiment, comes at a time when agendas that ignore or sidestep these global realities will, more than ever, be reduced to impotence. In his commentary on the state of citizenship today, Wolin refers to the increasing sublimation and dilution of politics, as larger numbers of people turn away from public concerns toward private ones. By diluting the life of common involvements, we negate the very idea of politics as a source of public ideals and visions. 74 In the meantime, the fate of the world hangs in the balance. The unyielding truth is that, even as the ethos of anti-politics becomes more compelling and even fashionable in the United States, it is the vagaries of political power that will continue to decide the fate of human societies. This last point demands further elaboration. The shrinkage of politics hardly means that corporate colonization will be less of a reality, that social hierarchies will somehow disappear, or that gigantic state and military structures will lose their hold over people’s lives. Far from it: the space abdicated by a broad citizenry, well-informed and ready to participate at many levels, can in fact be filled by authoritarian and reactionary elites – an already familiar dynamic in many lesser-developed countries. The fragmentation and chaos of a Hobbesian world, not very far removed from the rampant individualism, social Darwinism, and civic violence that have been so much a part of the American landscape, could be the prelude to a powerful Leviathan designed to impose order in the face of disunity and atomized retreat. In this way the eclipse of politics might set the stage for a reassertion of politics in more virulent guise – or it might help further rationalize the existing power structure. In either case, the state would likely become what Hobbes anticipated: the embodiment of those universal, collective interests that had vanished from civil society. 75
This failure to engage the political process turns the affirmative into spectators who are powerless to produce real change. Rorty 98 – professor emeritus of comparative literature and philosophy, by courtesy, at Stanford University (Richard, “ACHIEVING OUR COUNTRY: Leftist Thought in Twentieth-Century America”, 1998, Pg. 7-9) Such people find pride in American citizenship impossi¬ble, and vigorous participation in electoral politics pointless. They associate American patriotism with an endorsement of atrocities: the importation of African slaves, the slaughter of Native Americans, the rape of ancient forests, and the Viet¬nam War. Many of them think of national pride as appropri¬ate only for chauvinists: for the sort of American who re¬joices that America can still orchestrate something like the Gulf War, can still bring deadly force to bear whenever and wherever it chooses. When young intellectuals watch John Wayne war movies after reading Heidegger, Foucault, Stephenson, or Silko, they often become convinced that they live in a violent, inhuman, corrupt country. They begin to think of themselves as a saving remnant-as the happy few who have the insight to see through nationalist rhetoric to the ghastly reality of contemporary America. But this insight does not move them to formulate a legislative program, to join a political movement, or to share in a national hope. The contrast between national hope and national self¬-mockery and self-disgust becomes vivid when one compares novels like Snow Crash and Almanac of the Dead with socialist novels of the first half of the century-books like The Jungle, An American Tragedy, and The Grapes of Wrath. The latter were written in the belief that the tone of the Gettysburg Address was absolutely right, but that our country would have to transform itself in order to fulfill Lincoln's hopes. Transfor¬mation would be needed because the rise of industrial capi¬talism had made the individualist rhetoric of America's first century obsolete. The authors of these novels thought that this rhetoric should be replaced by one in which America is destined to become the first cooperative commonwealth, the first class¬less society. This America would be one in which income and wealth are equitably distributed, and in which the govern¬ment ensures equality of opportunity as well as individual liberty. This new, quasi-communitarian rhetoric was at the heart of the Progressive Movement and the New Deal. It set the tone for the American Left during the first six decades of the twentieth century. Walt Whitman and John Dewey, as we shall see, did a great deal to shape this rhetoric. The difference between early twentieth-century leftist in¬tellectuals and the majority of their contemporary counter¬parts is the difference between agents and spectators. In the early decades of this century, when an intellectual stepped back from his or her country's history and looked at it through skeptical eyes, the chances were that he or she was about to propose a new political initiative. Henry Adams was, of course, the great exception-the great abstainer from ·politics. But William James thought that Adams' diagnosis of the First Gilded Age as a symptom of irreversible moral and political decline was merely perverse. James's pragmatist theory of truth was in part a reaction against the sort of de¬tached spectators hip which Adams affected. For James, disgust with American hypocrisy and self¬-deception was pointless unless accompanied by an effort to give America reason to be proud of itself in the future. The kind of proto- Heideggerian cultural pessimism which Adams cultivated seemed, to James, decadent and cowardly. "Democracy," James wrote, "is a kind of religion, and we are bound not to admit its failure. Faiths and utopias are the no¬blest exercise of human reason, and no one with a spark of reason in him will sit down fatalistically before the croaker's picture. "2
Case Reform makes revolution more likely. Rejecting it condescendingly asserts the possibility of radical change is better than the certainty of real improvement. Delgado ’87 - Delgado, Richard teaches civil rights and critical race theory at University of Alabama School of Law. He has written and co-authored numerous articles and books, “The Ethereal Scholar: Does Critical Legal Studies Have What Minorities Want?”, Harvard Civil Rights - Civil Liberties Law Review, 1987 Critical scholars reject the idea of piecemeal reform. Incremental change, they argue, merely postpones the wholesale reformation that must occur to create a decent society.38 Even worse, an unfair social system survives by using piecemeal reform to disguise and legitimize oppression. 39 Those who control the system weaken resistance by pointing to the occasional concession to, or periodic court victory of, a black plaintiff or worker as evidence that the system is fair and just.40 In fact, Crits believe that teaching the common law or using the case method in law school is a disguised means of preaching incrementalism and thereby maintaining the current power structure.41 To avoid this, CLS scholars urge law professors to abandon the case method, give up the effort to find rationality and order in the case law, and teach in an unabashedly political fashion. 42 The CLS critique of piecemeal reform is familiar, imperialistic and wrong. Minorities know from bitter experience that occasional court victories do not mean the Promised Land is at hand.43 The critique is imperialistic in that it tells minorities and other oppressed peoples how they should interpret events affecting them.44 A court order directing a housing authority to disburse funds for heating in subsidized housing may postpone the revolution, or it may not. In the meantime, the order keeps a number of poor families warm. This may mean more to them than it does to a comfortable academic working in a warm office. It smacks of paternalism to assert that the possibility of revolution later outweighs the certainty of heat now, unless there is evidence for that possibility. The Crits do not offer such evidence. Indeed, some incremental changes may bring revolutionary changes closer, not push them further away. Not all small reforms induce complacency; some may whet the appetite for further combat. The welfare family may hold a tenants' union meeting in their heated living room. CLS scholars' critique of piecemeal reform often misses these possibilities, and neglects the question of whether total change, when it comes, will be what we want.
PRISON STRIKES HAVE HAPPENED, BUT PRISONS CONTINUE TO EXIST, AND THE ABOLITION MOVEMENT HAS NOT PROGRESSED. 15 states from August 29-September 9 in 2018. Other strikes in 2013 and 2012. Many strikes have occurred and have not only not caused abolition but have led to retaliation and further abuse from prisons. Strikes are not a reliable way to help the issue.
11/6/21
ND NC - Econ DA, Organizing DA
Tournament: WBFL 2 | Round: 1 | Opponent: New Roads CP | Judge: Bernice Matula FRAMING Preventing extinction is the most ethical outcome Bostrom 13 (Nick, Professor at Oxford University, Faculty of Philosophy and Oxford Martin School, Director, Future of Humanity Institute, Director, Oxford Martin Programme on the Impacts of Future Technology University of Oxford, “Existential Risk Prevention as Global Priority”, Global Policy Volume 4, Issue 1, February 2013 AKONG) Some other ethical perspectives We have thus far considered existential risk from the perspective of utilitarianism (combined with several simplify- ing assumptions). We may briefly consider how the issue might appear when viewed through the lenses of some other ethical outlooks. For example, the philosopher Robert Adams outlines a different view on these matters: I believe a better basis for ethical theory in this area can be found in quite a different direction—in a commitment to the future of human- ity as a vast project, or network of overlapping projects, that is generally shared by the human race. The aspiration for a better society—more just, more rewarding, and more peaceful—is a part of this project. So are the potentially end- less quests for scientific knowledge and philo- sophical understanding, and the development of artistic and other cultural traditions. This includes the particular cultural traditions to which we belong, in all their accidental historic and ethnic diversity. It also includes our interest in the lives of our children and grandchildren, and the hope that they will be able, in turn, to have the lives of their children and grandchil- dren as projects. To the extent that a policy or practice seems likely to be favorable or unfavor- able to the carrying out of this complex of pro- jects in the nearer or further future, we have reason to pursue or avoid it. ... Continuity is as important to our commitment to the project of the future of humanity as it is to our commit- ment to the projects of our own personal futures. Just as the shape of my whole life, and its connection with my present and past, have an interest that goes beyond that of any iso- lated experience, so too the shape of human history over an extended period of the future, and its connection with the human present and past, have an interest that goes beyond that of the (total or average) quality of life of a popula- tion-at-a-time, considered in isolation from how it got that way. We owe, I think, some loyalty to this project of the human future. We also owe it a respect that we would owe it even if we were not of the human race ourselves, but beings from another planet who had some understanding of it (Adams, 1989, pp. 472–473). Since an existential catastrophe would either put an end to the project of the future of humanity or drasti- cally curtail its scope for development, we would seem to have a strong prima facie reason to avoid it, in Adams’ view. We also note that an existential catastrophe would entail the frustration of many strong preferences, sug- gesting that from a preference-satisfactionist perspective it would be a bad thing. In a similar vein, an ethical view emphasising that public policy should be determined through informed democratic deliberation by all stake- holders would favour existential-risk mitigation if we suppose, as is plausible, that a majority of the world’s population would come to favour such policies upon reasonable deliberation (even if hypothetical future peo- ple are not included as stakeholders). We might also have custodial duties to preserve the inheritance of humanity passed on to us by our ancestors and convey it safely to our descendants.23 We do not want to be the failing link in the chain of generations, and we ought not to delete or abandon the great epic of human civili- sation that humankind has been working on for thou- sands of years, when it is clear that the narrative is far from having reached a natural terminus. Further, many theological perspectives deplore naturalistic existential catastrophes, especially ones induced by human activi- ties: If God created the world and the human species, one would imagine that He might be displeased if we took it upon ourselves to smash His masterpiece (or if, through our negligence or hubris, we allowed it to come to irreparable harm).24 We might also consider the issue from a less theoreti- cal standpoint and try to form an evaluation instead by considering analogous cases about which we have defi- nite moral intuitions. Thus, for example, if we feel confident that committing a small genocide is wrong, and that committing a large genocide is no less wrong, we might conjecture that committing omnicide is also wrong.25 And if we believe we have some moral reason to prevent natural catastrophes that would kill a small number of people, and a stronger moral reason to pre- vent natural catastrophes that would kill a larger number of people, we might conjecture that we have an even stronger moral reason to prevent catastrophes that would kill the entire human population. Econ DA Growth is surging. Halloran ’9-14 Michael; 2021; M.B.A. from Carnegie Mellon University, former aerospace research engineer, Equity Strategist; Janney, “Despite Potential Headwinds, Key Labor Market Indicators Bode Well for the Economy,” https://www.janney.com/latest-articles-commentary/all-insights/insights/2021/09/14/despite-potential-headwinds-key-labor-market-indicators-bode-well-for-the-economy However, we remain encouraged by the recovery that has been unfolding since the economy began reopening. We continue to see improvement in important cyclical sectors of the economy while consumers are historically healthy and still have pent-up demand. Business confidence has rebounded with strong corporate profits that should support further capital spending and hiring (there are now more job openings than there are unemployed people by a record amount). We expect to see further improvement in the international backdrop, supported by unprecedented fiscal and monetary stimulus and accelerating rates of vaccination. Although the impact of the Delta wave is still being felt, recent evidence confirms the effectiveness of vaccines in limiting deaths and hospitalizations. With the pace of vaccination now picking up in the areas most impacted by this wave—Asia and Australia—the case for fading headwinds leading to improving economic growth later this year remains positive. The signals from financial markets themselves remain positive. Despite consolidating last week, stocks remain near record highs while the 10-year Treasury remains well above the lows of earlier this summer when concerns about Delta first emerged. These factors support our view of a durable economic recovery from the pandemic that should continue supporting stock prices. A healthy labor market is a critical element for a sustainable recovery that supports profit growth and last week’s news from the labor market remains COVID creates an economic brink---recovery is strong now because of effective monetary policy, but we’ve hit the zero-lower bound. Christopher Rugaber 21. Associated Press. “Federal Reserve keeps key interest rate near zero, signals COVID-19 economic risks receding.” https://www.chicagotribune.com/business/ct-biz-fed-interest-rates-economy-20210428-bumyc3ynpza6ri4ygsntmdsmya-story.html. WASHINGTON — The Federal Reserve is keeping its ultra-low interest rate policies in place, a sign that it wants to see more evidence of a strengthening economic recovery before it would consider easing its support. In a statement Wednesday, the Fed expressed a brighter outlook, saying the economy has improved along with the job market. And while the policymakers noted that inflation has risen, they ascribed the increase to temporary factors. The Fed also signaled its belief that the pandemic’s threat to the economy has diminished, a significant point given Chair Jerome Powell’s long-stated view that the recovery depends on the virus being brought under control. Last month, the Fed had cautioned that the virus posed “considerable risks to the economic outlook.” On Wednesday, it said only that “risks to the economic outlook remain” because of the pandemic. The central bank left its benchmark short-term rate near zero, where it’s been since the pandemic erupted nearly a year ago, to help keep loan rates down to encourage borrowing and spending. It also said in a statement after its latest policy meeting that it would keep buying $120 billion in bonds each month to try to keep longer-term borrowing rates low. The U.S. economy has been posting unexpectedly strong gains in recent weeks, with barometers of hiring, spending and manufacturing all surging. Most economists say they detect the early stages of what could be a robust and sustained recovery, with coronavirus case counts declining, vaccinations rising and Americans spending their stimulus-boosted savings. Strikes hurt critical core industries that is necessary for economic growth John McElroy, 2019, Strikes Hurt Everybody.Wards Auto Industry News, October 25, https://www.wardsauto.com/ideaxchange/strikes-hurt-everybody This creates a poisonous relationship between the company and its workforce. Many GM hourly workers don’t identify as GM employees. They identify as UAW members. And they see the union as the source of their jobs, not the company. It’s an unhealthy dynamic that puts GM at a disadvantage to non-union automakers in the U.S. like Honda and Toyota, where workers take pride in the company they work for and the products they make. Attacking the company in the media also drives away customers. Who wants to buy a shiny new car from a company that’s accused of underpaying its workers and treating them unfairly? Data from the Center for Automotive Research (CAR) in Ann Arbor, MI, show that GM loses market share during strikes and never gets it back. GM lost two percentage points during the 1998 strike, which in today’s market would represent a loss of 340,000 sales. Because GM reports sales on a quarterly basis we’ll only find out at the end of December if it lost market share from this strike. UAW members say one of their greatest concerns is job security. But causing a company to lose market share is a sure-fire path to more plant closings and layoffs. Even so, unions are incredibly important for boosting wages and benefits for working-class people. GM’s UAW-represented workers earn considerably more than their non-union counterparts, about $26,000 more per worker, per year, in total compensation. Without a union they never would have achieved that. Strikes are a powerful weapon for unions. They usually are the only way they can get management to accede to their demands. If not for the power of collective bargaining and the threat of a strike, management would largely ignore union demands. If you took away that threat, management would pay its workers peanuts. Just ask the Mexican line workers who are paid $1.50 an hour to make $50,000 BMWs. But strikes don’t just hurt the people walking the picket lines or the company they’re striking against. They hurt suppliers, car dealers and the communities located near the plants. The Anderson Economic Group estimates that 75,000 workers at supplier companies were temporarily laid off because of the GM strike. Unlike UAW picketers, those supplier workers won’t get any strike pay or an $11,000 contract signing bonus. No, most of them lost close to a month’s worth of wages, which must be financially devastating for them. GM’s suppliers also lost a lot of money. So now they’re cutting budgets and delaying capital investments to make up for the lost revenue, which is a further drag on the economy. According to CAR, the communities and states where GM’s plants are located collectively lost a couple of hundred million dollars in payroll and tax revenue. Some economists warn that if the strike were prolonged it could knock the state of Michigan – home to GM and the UAW – into a recession. That prompted the governor of Michigan, Gretchen Whitmer, to call GM CEO Mary Barra and UAW leaders and urge them to settle as fast as possible. So, while the UAW managed to get a nice raise for its members, the strike left a path of destruction in its wake. That’s not fair to the innocent bystanders who will never regain what they lost. John McElroyI’m not sure how this will ever be resolved. I understand the need for collective bargaining and the threat of a strike. But there’s got to be a better way to get workers a raise without torching the countryside. Strikes create a stigmatization effect over labor and consumption that devastates the economy Tenza 20, Mlungisi. "The effects of violent strikes on the economy of a developing country: a case of South Africa." Obiter 41.3 (2020): 519-537. (Senior Lecturer, University of KwaZulu-Natal) When South Africa obtained democracy in 1994, there was a dream of a better country with a new vision for industrial relations.5 However, the number of violent strikes that have bedevilled this country in recent years seems to have shattered-down the aspirations of a better South Africa. South Africa recorded 114 strikes in 2013 and 88 strikes in 2014, which cost the country about R6.1 billion according to the Department of Labour.6 The impact of these strikes has been hugely felt by the mining sector, particularly the platinum industry. The biggest strike took place in the platinum sector where about 70 000 mineworkers’ downed tools for better wages. Three major platinum producers (Impala, Anglo American and Lonmin Platinum Mines) were affected. The strike started on 23 January 2014 and ended on 25 June 2014. Business Day reported that “the five-month-long strike in the platinum sector pushed the economy to the brink of recession”. 7 This strike was closely followed by a four-week strike in the metal and engineering sector. All these strikes (and those not mentioned here) were characterised with violence accompanied by damage to property, intimidation, assault and sometimes the killing of people. Statistics from the metal and engineering sector showed that about 246 cases of intimidation were reported, 50 violent incidents occurred, and 85 cases of vandalism were recorded.8 Large-scale unemployment, soaring poverty levels and the dramatic income inequality that characterise the South African labour market provide a broad explanation for strike violence.9 While participating in a strike, workers’ stress levels leave them feeling frustrated at their seeming powerlessness, which in turn provokes further violent behaviour.10 These strikes are not only violent but take long to resolve. Generally, a lengthy strike has a negative effect on employment, reduces business confidence and increases the risk of economic stagflation. In addition, such strikes have a major setback on the growth of the economy and investment opportunities. It is common knowledge that consumer spending is directly linked to economic growth. At the same time, if the economy is not showing signs of growth, employment opportunities are shed, and poverty becomes the end result. The economy of South Africa is in need of rapid growth to enable it to deal with the high levels of unemployment and resultant poverty. One of the measures that may boost the country’s economic growth is by attracting potential investors to invest in the country. However, this might be difficult as investors would want to invest in a country where there is a likelihood of getting returns for their investments. The wish of getting returns for investment may not materialise if the labour environment is not fertile for such investments as a result of, for example, unstable labour relations. Therefore, investors may be reluctant to invest where there is an unstable or fragile labour relations environment. 3 THE COMMISSION OF VIOLENCE DURING A STRIKE AND CONSEQUENCES The Constitution guarantees every worker the right to join a trade union, participate in the activities and programmes of a trade union, and to strike. 11 The Constitution grants these rights to a “worker” as an individual.12 However, the right to strike and any other conduct in contemplation or furtherance of a strike such as a picket13 can only be exercised by workers acting collectively.14 The right to strike and participation in the activities of a trade union were given more effect through the enactment of the Labour Relations Act 66 of 199515 (LRA). The main purpose of the LRA is to “advance economic development, social justice, labour peace and the democratisation of the workplace”. 16 The advancement of social justice means that the exercise of the right to strike must advance the interests of workers and at the same time workers must refrain from any conduct that can affect those who are not on strike as well members of society. Even though the right to strike and the right to participate in the activities of a trade union that often flow from a strike17 are guaranteed in the Constitution and specifically regulated by the LRA, it sometimes happens that the right to strike is exercised for purposes not intended by the Constitution and the LRA, generally. 18 For example, it was not the intention of the Constitutional Assembly and the legislature that violence should be used during strikes or pickets. As the Constitution provides, pickets are meant to be peaceful. 19 Contrary to section 17 of the Constitution, the conduct of workers participating in a strike or picket has changed in recent years with workers trying to emphasise their grievances by causing disharmony and chaos in public. A media report by the South African Institute of Race Relations pointed out that between the years 1999 and 2012 there were 181 strike-related deaths, 313 injuries and 3,058 people were arrested for public violence associated with strikes.20 The question is whether employers succumb easily to workers’ demands if a strike is accompanied by violence? In response to this question, one worker remarked as follows: “There is no sweet strike, there is no Christian strike … A strike is a strike. You want to get back what belongs to you ... you won’t win a strike with a Bible. You do not wear high heels and carry an umbrella and say ‘1992 was under apartheid, 2007 is under ANC’. You won’t win a strike like that.” 21 The use of violence during industrial action affects not only the strikers or picketers, the employer and his or her business but it also affects innocent members of the public, non-striking employees, the environment and the economy at large. In addition, striking workers visit non-striking workers’ homes, often at night, threaten them and in some cases, assault or even murder workers who are acting as replacement labour. 22 This points to the fact that for many workers and their families’ living conditions remain unsafe and vulnerable to damage due to violence. In Security Services Employers Organisation v SA Transport and Allied Workers Union (SATAWU),23 it was reported that about 20 people were thrown out of moving trains in the Gauteng province; most of them were security guards who were not on strike and who were believed to be targeted by their striking colleagues. Two of them died, while others were admitted to hospitals with serious injuries.24 In SA Chemical Catering and Allied Workers Union v Check One (Pty) Ltd,25 striking employees were carrying various weapons ranging from sticks, pipes, planks and bottles. One of the strikers Mr Nqoko was alleged to have threatened to cut the throats of those employees who had been brought from other branches of the employer’s business to help in the branch where employees were on strike. Such conduct was held not to be in line with good conduct of striking.26 These examples from case law show that South Africa is facing a problem that is affecting not only the industrial relations’ sector but also the economy at large. For example, in 2012, during a strike by workers employed by Lonmin in Marikana, the then-new union Association of Mine and Construction Workers Union (AMCU) wanted to exert its presence after it appeared that many workers were not happy with the way the majority union, National Union of Mine Workers (NUM), handled negotiations with the employer (Lonmin Mine). AMCU went on an unprotected strike which was violent and resulted in the loss of lives, damage to property and negative economic consequences including a weakened currency, reduced global investment, declining productivity, and increase unemployment in the affected sectors.27 Further, the unreasonably long time it takes for strikes to get resolved in the Republic has a negative effect on the business of the employer, the economy and employment. 3 1 Effects of violent and long strikes on the economy Generally, South Africa’s economy is on a downward scale. First, it fails to create employment opportunities for its people. The recent statistics on unemployment levels indicate that unemployment has increased from 26.5 to 27.2. 28 The most prominent strike which nearly brought the platinum industries to its knees was the strike convened by AMCU in 2014. The strike started on 23 January 2014 and ended on 24 June 2014. It affected the three big platinum producers in the Republic, which are the Anglo American Platinum, Lonmin Plc and Impala Platinum. It was the longest strike since the dawn of democracy in 1994. As a result of this strike, the platinum industries lost billions of rands.29 According to the report by Economic Research Southern Africa, the platinum group metals industry is South Africa’s second-largest export earner behind gold and contributes just over 2 of the country’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP).30 The overall metal ores in the mining industry which include platinum sells about 70 of its output to the export market while sales to local manufacturers of basic metals, fabricated metal products and various other metal equipment and machinery make up to 20. 31 The research indicates that the overall impact of the strike in 2014 was driven by a reduction in productive capital in the mining sector, accompanied by a decrease in labour available to the economy. This resulted in a sharp increase in the price of the output by 5.8 with a GDP declined by 0.72 and 0.78.32 Economic decline causes nuclear war – collapses faith in deterrence Tønnesson, 15—Research Professor, Peace Research Institute Oslo; Leader of East Asia Peace program, Uppsala University (Stein, “Deterrence, interdependence and Sino–US peace,” International Area Studies Review, Vol. 18, No. 3, p. 297-311, dml) Several recent works on China and Sino–US relations have made substantial contributions to the current understanding of how and under what circumstances a combination of nuclear deterrence and economic interdependence may reduce the risk of war between major powers. At least four conclusions can be drawn from the review above: first, those who say that interdependence may both inhibit and drive conflict are right. Interdependence raises the cost of conflict for all sides but asymmetrical or unbalanced dependencies and negative trade expectations may generate tensions leading to trade wars among inter-dependent states that in turn increase the risk of military conflict (Copeland, 2015: 1, 14, 437; Roach, 2014). The risk may increase if one of the interdependent countries is governed by an inward-looking socio-economic coalition (Solingen, 2015); second, the risk of war between China and the US should not just be analysed bilaterally but include their allies and partners. Third party countries could drag China or the US into confrontation; third, in this context it is of some comfort that the three main economic powers in Northeast Asia (China, Japan and South Korea) are all deeply integrated economically through production networks within a global system of trade and finance (Ravenhill, 2014; Yoshimatsu, 2014: 576); and fourth, decisions for war and peace are taken by very few people, who act on the basis of their future expectations. International relations theory must be supplemented by foreign policy analysis in order to assess the value attributed by national decision-makers to economic development and their assessments of risks and opportunities. If leaders on either side of the Atlantic begin to seriously fear or anticipate their own nation’s decline then they may blame this on external dependence, appeal to anti-foreign sentiments, contemplate the use of force to gain respect or credibility, adopt protectionist policies, and ultimately refuse to be deterred by either nuclear arms or prospects of socioeconomic calamities. Such a dangerous shift could happen abruptly, i.e. under the instigation of actions by a third party – or against a third party.Yet as long as there is both nuclear deterrence and interdependence, the tensions in East Asia are unlikely to escalate to war. As Chan (2013) says, all states in the region are aware that they cannot count on support from either China or the US if they make provocative moves. The greatest risk is not that a territorial dispute leads to war under present circumstances but that changes in the world economy alter those circumstances in ways that render inter-state peace more precarious. If China and the US fail to rebalance their financial and trading relations (Roach, 2014) then a trade war could result, interrupting transnational production networks, provoking social distress, and exacerbating nationalist emotions. This could have unforeseen consequences in the field of security, with nuclear deterrence remaining the only factor to protect the world from Armageddon, and unreliably so. Deterrence could lose its credibility: one of the two great powers might gamble that the other yield in a cyber-war or conventional limited war, or third party countries might engage in conflict with each other, with a view to obliging Washington or Beijing to intervene. The best way to enhance global peace is no doubt to multiply the factors protecting it: build a Pacific security community by topping up economic interdependence with political rapprochement and trust, institutionalized cooperation, and shared international norms. Yet even without such accomplishments, the combination of deterrence and economic interdependence may be enough to prevent war among the major powers. Because the leaders of nuclear armed nations are fearful of getting into a situation where peace relies uniquely on nuclear deterrence, and because they know that their adversaries have the same fear, they may accept the risks entailed by depending economically on others. And then there will be neither trade wars nor shooting wars, just disputes and diplomacy. Organizing DA Turn: Strikes lead to backlash bills that weaken unions – empirically proven. Partelow ‘19 Lisette Partelow Lisette Partelow is the director of K-12 Strategic Initiatives at American Progress. Her previous experience includes teaching first grade in Washington, D.C., working as a senior legislative assistant for Rep. Dave Loebsack (D-IA), and working as a legislative associate at the Alliance for Excellent Education. She has also worked at the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Education and Labor and the American Institutes for Research. “Analysis: A Looming Legislative Backlash Against Teacher Strikes? Why Walkouts Could Become Illegal in Some States, With Strikers Facing Fines, Jail, or Loss of Their License”. 02-18-2019. The 74. https://www.the74million.org/article/analysis-a-looming-legislative-backlash-against-teacher-strikes-why-walkouts-could-become-illegal-in-some-states-with-strikers-facing-fines-jail-or-loss-of-their-license/. Accessed 11-3-2021; MJen In 2018 and 2019, after a decade of disinvestment in education that led to stagnant teacher salaries, policymakers have introduced proposals in states across the country to begin reinvesting, spurred in part by teacher walkouts and activism nationwide. While it is wonderful to finally see broad support for raising teacher salaries and investing in public schools, a predictable backlash has also emerged. Legislators in some states that were hotbeds of teacher activism are introducing bills to explicitly prohibit walkouts or punish teachers who participate, often with a sprinkling of additional anti-union provisions. Weakening unions and refusing to invest in education are long-standing conservative tenets, and these bills are evidence that we should expect conservative policymakers to return to them as soon as they believe them to be politically viable. The consequences of a decade of education funding cuts came into sharp relief last spring, after teachers staged walkouts in half a dozen states. The decade of disinvestment in education had its roots in the Great Recession, when many states were forced to drastically cut their K-12 education funding. But as the recovery got underway, many governors — particularly in red states — made intentional policy choices to cut taxes for wealthy residents and corporations rather than allow education funding to rebound to pre-recession levels as revenue increased. As a result, teacher wages stagnated, school budgets were strapped, and expenses such as building repairs and learning materials were deferred year after year. By 2018, reports of crumbling schools, students learning from decades-old textbooks, high teacher turnover, and staff shortages in these states became common. Teachers had reached their boiling point. The teacher walkouts have been very effective. Though they were a last resort, they finally got lawmakers’ attention in states that had seen the most chronic and severe cuts to education. In the states where teachers walked out, governors who hadn’t historically supported education funding agreed to enact significant pay raises and increases in education funding. For example, in Arizona, Republican Gov. Doug Ducey was forced to sign off on a teacher pay bill he had previously opposed that provided a 20 percent raise to the state’s teachers — some of the lowest-paid in the nation — and invested an additional $100 million in schools in the state. And now, in several states with low teacher pay that have so far avoided major protests, some governors have proposed salary increases. Remarkably, much of this movement is happening in deep-red states with historically low education spending. In South Carolina, Gov. Henry McMaster wants to give teachers a 5 percent pay raise; in Texas, Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick has proposed a $5,000 increase; and in Georgia, Gov. Brian Kemp has proposed a $3,000 increase. In all three of these states, teachers are paid less than the national average. It’s likely that last year’s walkouts nudged these governors to consider teacher pay in a way that they wouldn’t have otherwise. Though it goes against traditional conservative principles, supporting these raises is smart politics for these governors. There is widespread public support for increasing teacher pay, particularly in the states where walkouts occurred. But even as some conservative policymakers agree to raise teacher salaries, as the 2019 legislative sessions have begun, others in Arizona, Oklahoma, and West Virginia have introduced bills that would make walkouts illegal and penalize teachers with fines, loss of their teaching licenses, or even jail time. Some of the bills also contain provisions designed specifically to weaken teachers unions, such as a requirement that teachers must opt in to dues each year, which sponsors hope will reduce membership by adding an extra step to the process. Legislators in walkout states have also introduced stand-alone proposals designed to make union membership more difficult and, therefore, less likely, such as a prohibition on districts withholding union dues from teachers’ paychecks. These backlash bills hint at a much more familiar conservative education agenda of slashing funding and working to weaken teachers unions. After all, it is this agenda that led to stagnant teacher salaries, deplorable conditions in many school buildings, and consequences for students whose schools were chronically underfunded in the first place. Supporting increases to teacher pay and greater investment in schools is the right thing to do for America’s students. Unfortunately, this wave of backlash makes clear that for some policymakers, it’s all about politics — and as soon as they have the chance, they’ll once again slash education funding and attack hardworking teachers.
Turn again: The right to strike just leads businesses to take stronger steps to stop unionization. Gordon Lafer, 20 - ("Fear at work: An inside account of how employers threaten, intimidate, and harass workers to stop them from exercising their right to collective bargaining," Economic Policy Institute, 7-23-2020, https://www.epi.org/publication/fear-at-work-how-employers-scare-workers-out-of-unionizing/)//va NLRB elections are fundamentally framed by one-sided control over communication, with no free-speech rights for workers. Under current law, employers may require workers to attend mass anti-union meetings as often as once a day (mandatory meetings at which the employer delivers anti-union messaging are dubbed “captive audience meetings” in labor law). Not only is the union not granted equal time, but pro-union employees may be required to attend on condition that they not ask questions; those who speak up despite this condition can be legally fired on the spot.19 The most recent data show that nearly 90 of employers force employees to attend such anti-union campaign rallies, with the average employer holding 10 such mandatory meetings during the course of an election campaign.20 ¶ In addition to group meetings, employers typically have supervisors talk one-on-one with each of their direct subordinates.21 In these conversations, the same person who controls one’s schedule, assigns job duties, approves vacation requests, grants raises, and has the power to terminate employees “at will” conveys how important it is that their underlings oppose unionization. As one longtime consultant explained, a supervisor’s message is especially powerful because “the warnings…come from…the people counted on for that good review and that weekly paycheck.”22 ¶ Within this lopsided campaign environment, the employer’s message typically focuses on a few key themes: unions will drive employers out of business, unions only care about extorting dues payments from workers, and unionization is futile because employees can’t make management do something it doesn’t want to do.23 Many of these arguments are highly deceptive or even mutually contradictory. For instance, the dues message stands in direct contradiction to management’s warnings that unions inevitably lead to strikes and unemployment. If a union were primarily interested in extracting dues money from workers, it would never risk a strike or bankruptcy, because no one pays dues when they are on strike or out of work. But in an atmosphere in which pro-union employees have little effective right of reply, these messages may prove extremely powerful. ¶ It is common for unionization drives to start with two-thirds of employees supporting unionization and still end in a “no” vote. This reversal points to the anti-democratic dynamics of NLRB elections: voters are not being convinced of the merits of remaining without representation—they are being intimidated into the belief that unionization is at best futile and at worst dangerous. When a large national survey asked workers who had been through an election to name “the most important reason people voted against union representation,” the single most common response was management pressure, including fear of job loss.24 Those who vote on this basis are not expressing a preference to remain unrepresented. Indeed, many might still prefer unionization if they believed it could work. Where fear is the motivator, what is captured in the snapshot of the ballot is not preference but despair. ¶To understand what union elections look like in reality, we have profiled two cases in which workers sought to create a union and met with a harsh (and typical) employer backlash. In both cases—a tire plant in Georgia and a satellite TV company in Texas—the employer response ranges from illegally firing union activists to engaging in acts of coercion and intimidation that are illegal in any normal election to public office but are allowed under the NLRA. ¶
The turns outweigh the Aff. Their solvency is all about how unionization is key, not a stronger right to strike. Whatever marginal increase in bargaining power they achieve is drowned out by the fact that there will be much lower union density in the first place.
11/13/21
ND NC - Econ DA, Police PIC
Tournament: USC | Round: 1 | Opponent: Harvard Westlake CR | Judge: David Dosch 1 CP Text: A just government should recognize the unconditional right of non-police workers to strike by abolishing police unions. The aff makes police collective bargaining worse and gives more power to police unions. Andrew Grim, 20 Ph.D. candidate in history at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, is at work on a dissertation on anti-police brutality activism in post-WWII Newark - ("What is The Blue Flue and How Has It Increased Police Power," Washington Post, 7-1-2020, 11-2-2021https:www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2020/07/01/what-is-blue-flu-how-has-it-increased-police-power/)AW This weekend, officers ...concessions from municipalities.
Police unions use collective bargaining to reinforce systems of racism and violence. Clark ‘19 Paul F. Clark School Director and Professor of Labor and Employment Relations, Penn State, 10-10-2019, "Why police unions are not part of the American labor movement," Conversation, https://theconversation.com/why-police-unions-are-not-part-of-the-american-labor-movement-142538accessed 10/20/2021 marlborough jh In the wake... nation at large.
Police backed by unions are more violent than non-unionized police. Ingraham ’20. Christopher Ingraham Reporter 20. ("Police Unions and Police Misconduct: What the Research Says About the Connection," Washington Post, 6-10-2020, 10-27-2021 https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2020/06/10/police-unions-violence-research-george-floyd/)//AW Some of the ... said on Twitter. Turns Union: Police unions are anti-labor- means the aff can never solve without getting rid of them AND turns case. Modak 20. Ria Modak Student Coordinator, Muslim American Studies Working Group, Harvard Student Labor Action Movement and the Harvard Graduate Students Union 20 - ("Police Unions Are Anti-Labor," Ria Modak, Harvard Political Review, 9-9-2020, 10-27-2021 https://harvardpolitics.com/police-unions-are-anti-labor/)//AW My own experiences ...anti-worker interests.
2 The economy is steadily recovering now, but is fragile. Rugaber 11/8 - Christopher Rugaber Economics Reporter, Associated Press, “'A struggle and a journey': Report shows US economy recovering,” Christian Science Monitor (Web). Nov. 8, 2021. Accessed Nov. 8, 2021. https://www.csmonitor.com/Business/2021/1108/A-struggle-and-a-journey-Report-shows-US-economy-recovering AT America’s employers accelerated ... months of declines.
Economic downturns devastate people’s lives. EPI ’09 – Economic Policy Institute, “Economic Scarring: The long-term impacts of the recession,” Economic Policy Institute (Web). Briefing Paper #243. Sept. 30, 2009. Accessed Nov. 8, 2021. https://www.epi.org/publication/bp243/ AT Economic recessions are ... years to come.
Poverty and unemployment are cyclical Gaillie et al ’03- Duncan Gallie, Serge Paugam and Sheila Jacobs (2003) UNEMPLOYMENT, POVERTY AND SOCIAL ISOLATION: Is there a vicious circle of social exclusion?, European Societies, 5:1, 1-32, DOI: 10.1080/1461669032000057668. AK The concept of... problem of poverty.
Case
Overview 1) They do not have a piece of evidence saying that the RTS is key to solve income inequality. Even if their ev is right that income inequality writ large is bad they dont resovle a large enough portion. Read their uniqueness evidence it cites education and healthcare. 2) Their argument about income inequality is about the global differences between states wealth and average incomes. Even if there is an increase in income in some sectors, that doesnt mean the disparities between the countries get resolved.
12/11/21
ND NC - Econ DA, Pro-Union DA
Tournament: WBFL 2 | Round: 3 | Opponent: Brentwood HS | Judge: Sorah Han Framework Preventing extinction is the most ethical outcome Bostrom 13 (Nick, Professor at Oxford University, Faculty of Philosophy and Oxford Martin School, Director, Future of Humanity Institute, Director, Oxford Martin Programme on the Impacts of Future Technology University of Oxford, “Existential Risk Prevention as Global Priority”, Global Policy Volume 4, Issue 1, February 2013 AKONG) Some other ethical ...entire human population. Econ DA The economy is steadily recovering now, but is fragile. Rugaber 11/8 - Christopher Rugaber Economics Reporter, Associated Press, “'A struggle and a journey': Report shows US economy recovering,” Christian Science Monitor (Web). Nov. 8, 2021. Accessed Nov. 8, 2021. https://www.csmonitor.com/Business/2021/1108/A-struggle-and-a-journey-Report-shows-US-economy-recovering AT America’s employers accelerated ...months of declines. Strikes cause widespread economic harm - GM strikes prove. John McElroy, 2019, Strikes Hurt Everybody.Wards Auto Industry News, October 25, https://www.wardsauto.com/ideaxchange/strikes-hurt-everybody But strikes don’t ...fast as possible. Strikes now trigger food shortages, undermine health care and threaten the economy. Shannon Pettypiece, 10-24, 21, Biden on the sidelines of 'Striketober,' with economy in the balance, NBC News, https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/white-house/biden-sidelines-striketober-economy-balance-n1282094 But President Biden ... feels is appropriate." Economic downturns devastate people’s lives. EPI ’09 – Economic Policy Institute, “Economic Scarring: The long-term impacts of the recession,” Economic Policy Institute (Web). Briefing Paper #243. Sept. 30, 2009. Accessed Nov. 8, 2021. https://www.epi.org/publication/bp243/ AT Economic recessions are ... years to come. Union support
As an alternative to strengthening strikes, we should be strengthening unions. Strengthening unions solves the whole aff. Lafer and Loustanau ‘20 Gordon Lafer political economist and is a Professor at the University of Oregon’s Labor Education and Research Center and Lola Loustaunau assistant research fellow at the Labor Education and Research Center, University of Oregon, Eugene. 7-23-2020, "Fear at work: An inside account of how employers threaten, intimidate, and harass workers to stop them from exercising their right to collective bargaining," Economic Policy Institute, https://www.epi.org/publication/fear-at-work-how-employers-scare-workers-out-of-unionizing/ accessed 11/3/2021marlborough jh What this report ...federal labor law.
Striketober is temporary and predicated on a onetime labor shortage that’s leaving employers desperate for labor, not the power of strikes – making union organizing easier is the only long-term way to ensure worker protection Greenhouse, 21 - ("‘Striketober’ is showing workers’ rising power – but will it lead to lasting change?," 10-23-2021, https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/oct/23/striketober-unions-strikes-workers-lasting-change)//va Despite the recent ...winning union drives. ¶
Case Turn: Strikes lead to backlash bills that weaken unions – empirically proven. Partelow ‘19 Lisette Partelow Lisette Partelow is the director of K-12 Strategic Initiatives at American Progress. Her previous experience includes teaching first grade in Washington, D.C., working as a senior legislative assistant for Rep. Dave Loebsack (D-IA), and working as a legislative associate at the Alliance for Excellent Education. She has also worked at the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Education and Labor and the American Institutes for Research. “Analysis: A Looming Legislative Backlash Against Teacher Strikes? Why Walkouts Could Become Illegal in Some States, With Strikers Facing Fines, Jail, or Loss of Their License”. 02-18-2019. The 74. https://www.the74million.org/article/analysis-a-looming-legislative-backlash-against-teacher-strikes-why-walkouts-could-become-illegal-in-some-states-with-strikers-facing-fines-jail-or-loss-of-their-license/. Accessed 11-3-2021; MJen In 2018 and ...attack hardworking teachers.
Turn again: The right to strike just leads businesses to take stronger steps to stop unionization. Gordon Lafer, 20 - ("Fear at work: An inside account of how employers threaten, intimidate, and harass workers to stop them from exercising their right to collective bargaining," Economic Policy Institute, 7-23-2020, https://www.epi.org/publication/fear-at-work-how-employers-scare-workers-out-of-unionizing/)//va NLRB elections are ... under the NLRA. ¶
The turns outweigh the Aff. Their solvency is all about how unionization is key, not a stronger right to strike. Whatever marginal increase in bargaining power they achieve is drowned out by the fact that there will be much lower union density in the first place.
11/13/21
ND NC - Postwork K
Tournament: Alta | Round: 3 | Opponent: Newman Smith SJ | Judge: Josh Weingarten The role of the ballot is to determine who did the best debating. Evaluate the plan relative to opportunity costs – anything else is self-serving and arbitrary. Anything else erases the AC which means we can’t catch up which crushes competitive equity. Prior questions are regressive, unpredictable, and make generating offense impossible. Postwork K The aff’s refusal to work is not a refusal of work – their endorsement of striking reinforces the belief that withholding labor puts people in a position of power. This reduces humans to labor capital, which causes work-dependency and inhibits alternatives. Hoffmann, 20 (Maja, "Resolving the ‘jobs-environment-dilemma’? The case for critiques of work in sustainability research. Taylor and Francis, 4-1-2020, https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/23251042.2020.1790718)//usc-br/ The societal dependence on work If work is... in sustainability research. Work necessitates material throughput and waste that destroys the environment, even when the jobs are ‘green’ Hoffmann, 20 (Maja, "Resolving the ‘jobs-environment-dilemma’? The case for critiques of work in sustainability research. Taylor and Francis, 4-1-2020, https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/23251042.2020.1790718)//usc-br/ An ecological critique ...beyond sustainable limits (Haberl et al. 2009).
Unions are intrinsically invested in labor being good – they don’t strike to get rid of work; they strike to get people back to work. Lundström 14: Lundström, Ragnar; Räthzel, Nora; Uzzell, David {Uzell is Professor (Emeritus) of Environmental Psychology at the University of Surrey with a BA Geography from the University of Liverpool, a PhD Psychology from the University of Surrey, and a MSc in Social Psychology from London School of Economics and Political Science, University of London. Lundstrom is Associate professor at Department of Sociology at Umea University. Rathzel is an Affiliated as professor emerita at Department of Sociology at Umea University.}, 14 - ("Disconnected spaces: introducing environmental perspectives into the trade union agenda top-down and bottom-up," Taylor and Francis, 12-11-2014, https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/23251042.2015.1041212?scroll=topandamp;needAccess=true)//marlborough-wr/ Even though there ... hand becomes elusive.
The alternative is rejecting the affirmative to embrace postwork – it questions the centrality of work and ontological attachments to productivity to enable emancipatory transformation of society to an ecologically sustainable form. Your ballot symbolizes an answer to the question of whether work can be used as the solution to social ills. The plan doesn’t “happen,” and you are conditioned to valorize work – vote neg to interrogate these ideological assumptions. Hoffmann, 20 (Maja, "Resolving the ‘jobs-environment-dilemma’? The case for critiques of work in sustainability research. Taylor and Francis, 4-1-2020, https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/23251042.2020.1790718)//usc-br/ What is postwork? How can a ... for the future.
Case
Conditional RTS is enough. Countries generally restrict the right to strike, even where Unions are effective and powerful. Wass ’13 - Dr. Bernd Waas, Goethe University Frankfurt, Germany, 2012, Strike as a Fundamental Right of the Workers and its Risks of Conflicting with other Fundamental Rights of the Citizens, https://www.islssl.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/Strike-Waas.pdf Limitations of the ... a collective agreement.
2. Turn: More strikes lead to backlash bills that weaken unions – empirically proven and especially true for teachers. Partelow ‘19 Lisette Partelow Lisette Partelow is the director of K-12 Strategic Initiatives at American Progress. Her previous experience includes teaching first grade in Washington, D.C., working as a senior legislative assistant for Rep. Dave Loebsack (D-IA), and working as a legislative associate at the Alliance for Excellent Education. She has also worked at the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Education and Labor and the American Institutes for Research. “Analysis: A Looming Legislative Backlash Against Teacher Strikes? Why Walkouts Could Become Illegal in Some States, With Strikers Facing Fines, Jail, or Loss of Their License”. 02-18-2019. The 74. https://www.the74million.org/article/analysis-a-looming-legislative-backlash-against-teacher-strikes-why-walkouts-could-become-illegal-in-some-states-with-strikers-facing-fines-jail-or-loss-of-their-license/. Accessed 11-3-2021; MJen In 2018 and ...attack hardworking teachers.
12/3/21
ND NC - Postwork K
Tournament: Alta | Round: 6 | Opponent: Corner Canyon JN | Judge: Heaven Montegue Standard The standard is consistency with utilitarianism 1 No intent-foresight distinction – If we foresee a consequence, then it becomes part of our deliberation which makes it intrinsic to our action since we intend it to happen.
2 Actor specificity – Util is the only moral system available to policymakers. Goodin 95 Robert E. Goodin 95 professor of government at the University of Essex, and professor of philosophy and social and political theory at Australian National University, “Utilitarianism as a Public Philosophy”, Cambridge Studies in Philosophy and Public Policy, May 1995, BE Consider, first, the ...fine-grained for that.
3 Pleasure and pain are intrinsically valuable. Moen 16 Ole Martin Moen, Research Fellow in Philosophy at University of Oslo “An Argument for Hedonism” Journal of Value Inquiry (Springer), 50 (2) 2016: 267–281 SJDI, brackets in original Let us start ... matters of value.
Post-Work K The aff’s refusal to work is not a refusal of work – their endorsement of striking reinforces the belief that withholding labor puts people in a position of power. This reduces humans to labor capital, which causes work-dependency and inhibits alternatives. Hoffmann, 20 (Maja, "Resolving the ‘jobs-environment-dilemma’? The case for critiques of work in sustainability research. Taylor and Francis, 4-1-2020, https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/23251042.2020.1790718)//usc-br/ The societal dependence on work If work is ... in sustainability research. Work necessitates material throughput and waste that destroys the environment, even when the jobs are ‘green’ Hoffmann, 20 (Maja, "Resolving the ‘jobs-environment-dilemma’? The case for critiques of work in sustainability research. Taylor and Francis, 4-1-2020, https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/23251042.2020.1790718)//usc-br/ An ecological critique of work What is the ...hand becomes elusive.
The alternative is rejecting the affirmative to embrace postwork – it questions the centrality of work and ontological attachments to productivity to enable emancipatory transformation of society to an ecologically sustainable form. Your ballot symbolizes an answer to the question of whether work can be used as the solution to social ills. The plan doesn’t “happen,” and you are conditioned to valorize work – vote neg to interrogate these ideological assumptions. Hoffmann, 20 (Maja, "Resolving the ‘jobs-environment-dilemma’? The case for critiques of work in sustainability research. Taylor and Francis, 4-1-2020, https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/23251042.2020.1790718)//usc-br/ What is postwork? How can a ...for the future.
12/4/21
ND NC - Postwork K, T Countries, Police PICs
Tournament: USC | Round: 3 | Opponent: Harvard Westlake JH | Judge: Ben Cortez Postwork K The aff’s refusal to work is not a refusal of work – their endorsement of striking reinforces the belief that withholding labor puts people in a position of power AND centers political organizing and resistance to capitalism around identifying oneself first and foremost as a worker. This reduces humans to labor capital, which causes work-dependency and inhibits alternatives. Hoffmann, 20 (Maja, "Resolving the ‘jobs-environment-dilemma’? The case for critiques of work in sustainability research. Taylor and Francis, 4-1-2020, https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/23251042.2020.1790718)//usc-br/ The societal dependence on work If work is ...in sustainability research.
Work necessitates material throughput and waste that destroys the environment, even when the jobs are ‘green’ Hoffmann, 20 (Maja, "Resolving the ‘jobs-environment-dilemma’? The case for critiques of work in sustainability research. Taylor and Francis, 4-1-2020, https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/23251042.2020.1790718)//usc-br/ An ecological critique of work What is the ...beyond sustainable limits (Haberl et al. 2009).
Unions are intrinsically invested in labor being good – they don’t strike to get rid of work; they strike to get people back to work. Lundström 14: Lundström, Ragnar; Räthzel, Nora; Uzzell, David {Uzell is Professor (Emeritus) of Environmental Psychology at the University of Surrey with a BA Geography from the University of Liverpool, a PhD Psychology from the University of Surrey, and a MSc in Social Psychology from London School of Economics and Political Science, University of London. Lundstrom is Associate professor at Department of Sociology at Umea University. Rathzel is an Affiliated as professor emerita at Department of Sociology at Umea University.}, 14 - ("Disconnected spaces: introducing environmental perspectives into the trade union agenda top-down and bottom-up," Taylor and Francis, 12-11-2014, https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/23251042.2015.1041212?scroll=topandamp;needAccess=true)//marlborough-wr/ Even though there ...hand becomes elusive.
The alternative is rejecting the affirmative to embrace postwork – it questions the centrality of work and ontological attachments to productivity to enable emancipatory transformation of society to an ecologically sustainable form. Your ballot symbolizes an answer to the question of whether work can be used as the solution to social ills. The plan doesn’t “happen,” and you are conditioned to valorize work – vote neg to interrogate these ideological assumptions. Hoffmann, 20 (Maja, "Resolving the ‘jobs-environment-dilemma’? The case for critiques of work in sustainability research. Taylor and Francis, 4-1-2020, https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/23251042.2020.1790718)//usc-br/ What is postwork? How can a ...for the future. T Interpretation—the aff may not specify a just government A is an generic indefinite singular. Cohen 01 Ariel Cohen (Ben-Gurion University of the Negev), “On the Generic Use of Indefinite Singulars,” Journal of Semantics 18:3, 2001 https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/188590876.pdf *IS generic = Indefinite Singulars French, then, expresses...room is¶ square? That outweighs—only our evidence speaks to how indefinite singulars are interpreted in the context of normative statements like the resolution. This means throw out aff counter-interpretations that are purely descriptive Violation—they specified US Vote neg: 1 Precision –any deviation justifies the aff arbitrarily jettisoning words in the resolution at their whim which decks negative ground and preparation because the aff is no longer bounded by the resolution. 2 Limits—specifying a just government offers huge explosion in the topic since they get permutations of hundreds of governments in the world depending on their definition of “just government”. DTD – same thing as drop the arg Topicality is a voting issue that should be evaluated through competing interpretations – it tells the negative what they do and do not have to prepare for No RVIs—it’s your burden to be topical.
Police PIC CP Text: Brazil should abolish police unions and recognize the unconditional right of all other workers to strike. The aff makes police collective bargaining worse and gives more power to police unions. Andrew Grim, 20 Ph.D. candidate in history at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, is at work on a dissertation on anti-police brutality activism in post-WWII Newark - ("What is The Blue Flue and How Has It Increased Police Power," Washington Post, 7-1-2020, 11-2-2021https:www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2020/07/01/what-is-blue-flu-how-has-it-increased-police-power/)AW This weekend, officers...concessions from municipalities. Turn Unions Police unions are anti-labor- means the aff can never solve without getting rid of them AND turns case. Modak 20. Ria Modak Student Coordinator, Muslim American Studies Working Group, Harvard Student Labor Action Movement and the Harvard Graduate Students Union 20 - ("Police Unions Are Anti-Labor," Ria Modak, Harvard Political Review, 9-9-2020, 10-27-2021 https://harvardpolitics.com/police-unions-are-anti-labor/)//AW My own experiences... anti-worker interests.
Case
No solvency for first advantage—they have zero ev that an uncondo RTS prevents Bolsonaro’s reelection 2. AP is from 2019 and they say strikes are imminent — a) if strikes are happening without the AC, no need for it but b) if strikes had major momentum two years ago and nothing happened, the aff isn’t likely to solve a. (This card is about protests and marches, not strikes - they link to the postwork K because they require political organizing to be linked to work and work-based self-identification) 3. Watts says an election is coming soon - means no need for impeachment because presumably either Bolsonaro is so unpopular he’ll get voted out or he’s so popular and/or oppressive that impeachment, a more rigorous process, has no chance 4. Zero solvency for why the aff makes Bolsonaro less popular 5. They have no evidence that RTS in Brazil specifically will result in more strikes—their Gourevitch card is generic Turn: More strikes lead to backlash bills that weaken unions – empirically proven. Partelow ‘19 Lisette Partelow Lisette Partelow is the director of K-12 Strategic Initiatives at American Progress. Her previous experience includes teaching first grade in Washington, D.C., working as a senior legislative assistant for Rep. Dave Loebsack (D-IA), and working as a legislative associate at the Alliance for Excellent Education. She has also worked at the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Education and Labor and the American Institutes for Research. “Analysis: A Looming Legislative Backlash Against Teacher Strikes? Why Walkouts Could Become Illegal in Some States, With Strikers Facing Fines, Jail, or Loss of Their License”. 02-18-2019. The 74. https://www.the74million.org/article/analysis-a-looming-legislative-backlash-against-teacher-strikes-why-walkouts-could-become-illegal-in-some-states-with-strikers-facing-fines-jail-or-loss-of-their-license/. Accessed 11-3-2021; MJen In 2018 and ...attack hardworking teachers.
The turns outweigh the Aff. Their solvency is all about how unionization is key, not a stronger right to strike. Whatever marginal increase in bargaining power they achieve is drowned out by the fact that there will be much lower union density in the first place.
No reason why this strike has to be unconditional 2. Non uq – says unions are laying plans for more protests so they don’t need the aff 3. Their card says that workers have threatened a general strike to fight pension reform, not environmental policies. Means they won't solve their advantage. 4. Their solvency cards are only about public sector workers, they highlighted the card to disguise that. 5. There is no uniqueness for why private sector workers need a stronger right to strike, and they read evidence that they are already winning concessions 6. The oil policies are a small internal link to climate change overall, the aff doesn't solve Chinese, American, or Indian emissions so no uniqueness on climate anyway.
12/11/21
ND NC - Postwork K, WSDE CP
Tournament: USC | Round: 6 | Opponent: Harvard Westlake LM | Judge: Julian Kuffour Postwork K The aff’s refusal to work is not a refusal of work – their endorsement of striking reinforces the belief that withholding labor puts people in a position of power AND centers political organizing and resistance to capitalism around identifying oneself first and foremost as a worker. This reduces humans to labor capital, which causes work-dependency and inhibits alternatives. Hoffmann, 20 (Maja, "Resolving the ‘jobs-environment-dilemma’? The case for critiques of work in sustainability research. Taylor and Francis, 4-1-2020, https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/23251042.2020.1790718)//usc-br/ The societal dependence on work If work is ...in sustainability research.
Work necessitates material throughput and waste that destroys the environment, even when the jobs are ‘green’ Hoffmann, 20 (Maja, "Resolving the ‘jobs-environment-dilemma’? The case for critiques of work in sustainability research. Taylor and Francis, 4-1-2020, https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/23251042.2020.1790718)//usc-br/ An ecological critique of work What is the ...beyond sustainable limits (Haberl et al. 2009).
Unions are intrinsically invested in labor being good – they don’t strike to get rid of work; they strike to get people back to work. Lundström 14: Lundström, Ragnar; Räthzel, Nora; Uzzell, David {Uzell is Professor (Emeritus) of Environmental Psychology at the University of Surrey with a BA Geography from the University of Liverpool, a PhD Psychology from the University of Surrey, and a MSc in Social Psychology from London School of Economics and Political Science, University of London. Lundstrom is Associate professor at Department of Sociology at Umea University. Rathzel is an Affiliated as professor emerita at Department of Sociology at Umea University.}, 14 - ("Disconnected spaces: introducing environmental perspectives into the trade union agenda top-down and bottom-up," Taylor and Francis, 12-11-2014, https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/23251042.2015.1041212?scroll=topandamp;needAccess=true)//marlborough-wr/ Even though there ...hand becomes elusive.
The alternative is rejecting the affirmative to embrace postwork – it questions the centrality of work and ontological attachments to productivity to enable emancipatory transformation of society to an ecologically sustainable form. Your ballot symbolizes an answer to the question of whether work can be used as the solution to social ills. The plan doesn’t “happen,” and you are conditioned to valorize work – vote neg to interrogate these ideological assumptions. Hoffmann, 20 (Maja, "Resolving the ‘jobs-environment-dilemma’? The case for critiques of work in sustainability research. Taylor and Francis, 4-1-2020, https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/23251042.2020.1790718)//usc-br/ What is postwork? How can a ...for the future.
WSDE CP Plan text: Firms should be transformed into worker self-directed enterprises. Wolff ND - Richard D. Wolff professor of economics emeritus at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst and a visiting professor at the New School in New York City. He has also taught economics at Yale University, the City University of New York, and the University of Paris I (Sorbonne), “Start with Worker Self-Directed Enterprises,” The Next System Project. https://thenextsystem.org/sites/default/files/2017-08/RickWolff.pdf AT We therefore propose ...the capitalist sector. Empirics prove that self-directed firms are more democratic and successful. Jerry Ashton, 13 (EVP and Co-Founder of RIP Medical Debt and patient advocate, Huffpost writer) - ("The Worker Self-Directed Enterprise: A "Cure" for Capitalism, or a Slippery Slope to Socialism?," HuffPost, 1-2-2013, accessed 11-16-2021, https://www.huffpost.com/entry/worker-self-directed-enterprise_b_2385334)//MS Decidedly so, Wolff ...benefits and risks." ¶
Case 1) The right to strike is not anticapitalist – it ties people more strongly to work-related identities and organizations like unions Turn--The telos of the 1ac’s politics is the strike – that naturalizes capital’s control and is parasitic on political organizing. Eidlin 20 Barry Eidlin (assistant professor of sociology at McGill University and the author of Labor and the Class Idea in the United States and Canada), 1-6-2020, “Why Unions Are Good – But Not Good Enough,” Jacobin, https://www.jacobinmag.com/2020/01/marxism-trade-unions-socialism-revolutionary-organizing Labor unions have ... as a whole.”
No aff solvency
Strikes do not create revolutionary movements or the creation of a communist society—generations of strikes against bad working conditions prove that it does not lead to communism, and that climate change can still exist
2) Backlash Turn Turn: More strikes lead to backlash bills that weaken unions – empirically proven. Partelow ‘19 Lisette Partelow Lisette Partelow is the director of K-12 Strategic Initiatives at American Progress. Her previous experience includes teaching first grade in Washington, D.C., working as a senior legislative assistant for Rep. Dave Loebsack (D-IA), and working as a legislative associate at the Alliance for Excellent Education. She has also worked at the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Education and Labor and the American Institutes for Research. “Analysis: A Looming Legislative Backlash Against Teacher Strikes? Why Walkouts Could Become Illegal in Some States, With Strikers Facing Fines, Jail, or Loss of Their License”. 02-18-2019. The 74. https://www.the74million.org/article/analysis-a-looming-legislative-backlash-against-teacher-strikes-why-walkouts-could-become-illegal-in-some-states-with-strikers-facing-fines-jail-or-loss-of-their-license/. Accessed 11-3-2021; MJen In 2018 and ...attack hardworking teachers. Turn: Increasing the cost of labor will just accelerate automation, outsourcing, and offshoring. Alt causes and backlash from firms deck aff solvency. Groshen and Holzer ’19 - Erica Groshen Senior Economics Advisor at the Cornell University School of Industrial and Labor Relations and Research Fellow at the Upjohn Institute for Employment Research and Harry J. Holzer Prof. of Public Policy, Georgetown U., “Helping workers requires more than silver bullets,” Brookings Institution (Web). Nov. 25, 2019. Accessed Nov. 19, 2021. https://www.brookings.edu/opinions/helping-workers-requires-more-than-silver-bullets/ AT But no single...the wrong direction. Automation only benefits owners while workers suffer Jacobs 21 Julian Jacobs graduated from Brown University, where he studied Philosophy, Politics, and Economics; he was a Fulbright Scholar and a Political Economy graduate student at the London School of Economics. For the past three years, his academic research has focused on the effects of artificial intelligence and digitalization on economic inequality. “Automation and the radicalization of America”. 11-22-2021. Brookings. https://www.brookings.edu/blog/techtank/2021/11/22/automation-and-the-radicalization-of-america/. Accessed 12-1-2021; MJen As digital technology ... of these mechanisms.
12/12/21
ND NC - Pro-Union CP, Organizing DA
Tournament: Apple Valley | Round: 2 | Opponent: Peninsula SM | Judge: Samantha McLaughlin Pro-Union CP
Strengthening unions solves the whole aff. Lafer and Loustanau ‘20 Gordon Lafer political economist and is a Professor at the University of Oregon’s Labor Education and Research Center and Lola Loustaunau assistant research fellow at the Labor Education and Research Center, University of Oregon, Eugene. 7-23-2020, "Fear at work: An inside account of how employers threaten, intimidate, and harass workers to stop them from exercising their right to collective bargaining," Economic Policy Institute, https://www.epi.org/publication/fear-at-work-how-employers-scare-workers-out-of-unionizing/ accessed 11/3/2021marlborough jh What this report finds: Most American workers want a union in their workplace but very few have it, because the right to organize—supposedly guaranteed by federal law—has been effectively cancelled out by a combination of legal and illegal employer intimidation tactics. This report focuses on the legal tactics—heavy-handed tactics that would be illegal in any election for public office but are regularly deployed by employers under the broken National Labor Relations Board’s union election system. Under this system, employees in workplace elections have no right to free speech or a free press, are threatened with losing their jobs if they vote to establish a union, and can be forced to hear one-sided propaganda with no right to ask questions or hear from opposing viewpoints. Employers—including many respectable, name-brand companies—collectively spend $340 million per year on “union avoidance” consultants who teach them how to exploit these weakness of federal labor law to effectively scare workers out of exercising their legal right to collective bargaining. ¶Inside accounts of unionization drives at a tire manufacturing plant in Georgia and at a pay TV services company in Texas illustrate what those campaigns look like in real life. Below are some of the common employer tactics that often turn overwhelming support for unions at the outset of a campaign into a “no” vote just weeks later. All of these are legal under current law: ¶Forcing employees to attend daily anti-union meetings where pro-union workers have no right to present alternative views and can be fired on the spot if they ask a question. ¶Plastering the workplace with anti-union posters, banners, and looping video ads—and denying pro-union employees access to any of these media. ¶Instructing managers to tell employees that there’s a good chance they will lose their jobs if they vote to unionize. ¶Having supervisors hold multiple one-on-one talks with each of their employees, stressing why it would be bad for them to vote in a union. ¶Having managers tell employees that pro-union workers are “the enemy within.” ¶Telling supervisors to grill subordinates about their views on unionization, effectively destroying the principle of a secret ballot. ¶Why it matters: The right to collective bargaining is key to solving the crisis of economic inequality. When workers have the ability to bargain collectively with their employers, the division of corporate profits is more equally shared between employees, management, and shareholders. When workers can’t exercise this right, inequality grows and wages stagnate, as shown in the long-term decline of workers’ wages over the past 40 years: CEO compensation has grown 940 since 1978, while typical worker compensation has risen only 12—and that was before the coronavirus pandemic hit. ¶The importance of unions has been even further heightened by both the COVID-19 pandemic and the national protests around racial justice. In recent months, thousands of nonunion workers walked off their jobs demanding personal protective equipment, hazard pay, and access to sick leave. The concrete realization that these things could only be won through collective action has also led many of these workers to seek to unionize in order to protect themselves and their families. At the same time, the importance of the power of collective bargaining for essential workers and Black workers has become clearer. Unionization has helped bring living wages to once low-wage jobs in industries such as health care and is a key tool for closing racial wage gaps. In recent years the Black Lives Matter movement has joined with the fight for a $15 minimum wage and other union efforts in order to win economic dignity for African American workers. ¶What we can do about it: Congress must act to ensure that workers have a right to vote to unionize in an atmosphere defined by free speech and open communication, and without fear of retaliation for one’s political views. The House of Representatives took an important step in this direction when it passed the Protecting the Right to Organize (PRO) Act in February 2020. If adopted by the Senate, the PRO Act would help ensure that workers have a meaningful right to organize and bargain collectively by streamlining the process when workers form a union, bolstering workers’ chances of success at negotiating a first agreement, and holding employers accountable when they violate the law. Beyond passing the PRO Act, legislators should back a package of proposals advanced by a group of 70 economists, academics, and labor leaders led by Harvard University’s Center for Labor and Worklife program. Their Clean Slate for Worker Power agenda includes extending labor rights to farmworkers, domestic workers, and independent contractors who are now excluded from federal union rights; requiring meaningful employee representation on corporate boards of directors; mandating a national requirement that employees may only be fired for just cause rather than arbitrarily; and enabling workers to engage in sector-wide negotiations rather than single-employer bargaining. These proposals would help create shared prosperity by starting to restore balance and effective democratic standards in federal labor law.
Striketober is temporary and predicated on a onetime labor shortage that’s leaving employers desperate for labor, not the power of strikes – making union organizing easier is the only long-term way to ensure worker protection Greenhouse, 21 - ("‘Striketober’ is showing workers’ rising power – but will it lead to lasting change?," 10-23-2021, https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/oct/23/striketober-unions-strikes-workers-lasting-change)//va Despite the recent turbulence, Ruth Milkman, a sociologist of labor at City University of New York, foresees a return to the status quo. “I think things will go back to where they were once things settle down,” she said. “The labor shortage is not necessarily going to last.” She sees the number of strikes declining once the labor shortage ends. ¶ In her view, union membership isn’t likely to increase markedly because “they’re not doing that much organizing. ¶ “There’s a little” – like the unionization efforts at Starbucks in Buffalo and at Amazon – “but it’s not as if there’s some big push.” ¶ A big question, Milkman said, was how can today’s labor momentum be sustained? She said it would help if Congress passed the Protecting the Right to Organize Act, which would make it easier to unionize workers. That law would spur unions to do more organizing and increase their chances of winning union drives. ¶
Organizing DA Strikes lead to backlash bills which weaken unions – empirically proven. Partelow ‘19 Lisette Partelow Lisette Partelow is the director of K-12 Strategic Initiatives at American Progress. Her previous experience includes teaching first grade in Washington, D.C., working as a senior legislative assistant for Rep. Dave Loebsack (D-IA), and working as a legislative associate at the Alliance for Excellent Education. She has also worked at the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Education and Labor and the American Institutes for Research. “Analysis: A Looming Legislative Backlash Against Teacher Strikes? Why Walkouts Could Become Illegal in Some States, With Strikers Facing Fines, Jail, or Loss of Their License”. 02-18-2019. The 74. https://www.the74million.org/article/analysis-a-looming-legislative-backlash-against-teacher-strikes-why-walkouts-could-become-illegal-in-some-states-with-strikers-facing-fines-jail-or-loss-of-their-license/. Accessed 11-3-2021; MJen In 2018 and 2019, after a decade of disinvestment in education that led to stagnant teacher salaries, policymakers have introduced proposals in states across the country to begin reinvesting, spurred in part by teacher walkouts and activism nationwide. While it is wonderful to finally see broad support for raising teacher salaries and investing in public schools, a predictable backlash has also emerged. Legislators in some states that were hotbeds of teacher activism are introducing bills to explicitly prohibit walkouts or punish teachers who participate, often with a sprinkling of additional anti-union provisions. Weakening unions and refusing to invest in education are long-standing conservative tenets, and these bills are evidence that we should expect conservative policymakers to return to them as soon as they believe them to be politically viable. The consequences of a decade of education funding cuts came into sharp relief last spring, after teachers staged walkouts in half a dozen states. The decade of disinvestment in education had its roots in the Great Recession, when many states were forced to drastically cut their K-12 education funding. But as the recovery got underway, many governors — particularly in red states — made intentional policy choices to cut taxes for wealthy residents and corporations rather than allow education funding to rebound to pre-recession levels as revenue increased. As a result, teacher wages stagnated, school budgets were strapped, and expenses such as building repairs and learning materials were deferred year after year. By 2018, reports of crumbling schools, students learning from decades-old textbooks, high teacher turnover, and staff shortages in these states became common. Teachers had reached their boiling point. The teacher walkouts have been very effective. Though they were a last resort, they finally got lawmakers’ attention in states that had seen the most chronic and severe cuts to education. In the states where teachers walked out, governors who hadn’t historically supported education funding agreed to enact significant pay raises and increases in education funding. For example, in Arizona, Republican Gov. Doug Ducey was forced to sign off on a teacher pay bill he had previously opposed that provided a 20 percent raise to the state’s teachers — some of the lowest-paid in the nation — and invested an additional $100 million in schools in the state. And now, in several states with low teacher pay that have so far avoided major protests, some governors have proposed salary increases. Remarkably, much of this movement is happening in deep-red states with historically low education spending. In South Carolina, Gov. Henry McMaster wants to give teachers a 5 percent pay raise; in Texas, Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick has proposed a $5,000 increase; and in Georgia, Gov. Brian Kemp has proposed a $3,000 increase. In all three of these states, teachers are paid less than the national average. It’s likely that last year’s walkouts nudged these governors to consider teacher pay in a way that they wouldn’t have otherwise. Though it goes against traditional conservative principles, supporting these raises is smart politics for these governors. There is widespread public support for increasing teacher pay, particularly in the states where walkouts occurred. But even as some conservative policymakers agree to raise teacher salaries, as the 2019 legislative sessions have begun, others in Arizona, Oklahoma, and West Virginia have introduced bills that would make walkouts illegal and penalize teachers with fines, loss of their teaching licenses, or even jail time. Some of the bills also contain provisions designed specifically to weaken teachers unions, such as a requirement that teachers must opt in to dues each year, which sponsors hope will reduce membership by adding an extra step to the process. Legislators in walkout states have also introduced stand-alone proposals designed to make union membership more difficult and, therefore, less likely, such as a prohibition on districts withholding union dues from teachers’ paychecks. These backlash bills hint at a much more familiar conservative education agenda of slashing funding and working to weaken teachers unions. After all, it is this agenda that led to stagnant teacher salaries, deplorable conditions in many school buildings, and consequences for students whose schools were chronically underfunded in the first place. Supporting increases to teacher pay and greater investment in schools is the right thing to do for America’s students. Unfortunately, this wave of backlash makes clear that for some policymakers, it’s all about politics — and as soon as they have the chance, they’ll once again slash education funding and attack hardworking teachers.
The right to strike means nothing so long as employees are convinced by the people directly responsible for their day-to-day working conditions that unionization and strike will hurt them – the first step has to be protecting workers from management’s lies Gordon Lafer, 20 - ("Fear at work: An inside account of how employers threaten, intimidate, and harass workers to stop them from exercising their right to collective bargaining," Economic Policy Institute, 7-23-2020, https://www.epi.org/publication/fear-at-work-how-employers-scare-workers-out-of-unionizing/)//va NLRB elections are fundamentally framed by one-sided control over communication, with no free-speech rights for workers. Under current law, employers may require workers to attend mass anti-union meetings as often as once a day (mandatory meetings at which the employer delivers anti-union messaging are dubbed “captive audience meetings” in labor law). Not only is the union not granted equal time, but pro-union employees may be required to attend on condition that they not ask questions; those who speak up despite this condition can be legally fired on the spot.19 The most recent data show that nearly 90 of employers force employees to attend such anti-union campaign rallies, with the average employer holding 10 such mandatory meetings during the course of an election campaign.20 ¶ In addition to group meetings, employers typically have supervisors talk one-on-one with each of their direct subordinates.21 In these conversations, the same person who controls one’s schedule, assigns job duties, approves vacation requests, grants raises, and has the power to terminate employees “at will” conveys how important it is that their underlings oppose unionization. As one longtime consultant explained, a supervisor’s message is especially powerful because “the warnings…come from…the people counted on for that good review and that weekly paycheck.”22 ¶ Within this lopsided campaign environment, the employer’s message typically focuses on a few key themes: unions will drive employers out of business, unions only care about extorting dues payments from workers, and unionization is futile because employees can’t make management do something it doesn’t want to do.23 Many of these arguments are highly deceptive or even mutually contradictory. For instance, the dues message stands in direct contradiction to management’s warnings that unions inevitably lead to strikes and unemployment. If a union were primarily interested in extracting dues money from workers, it would never risk a strike or bankruptcy, because no one pays dues when they are on strike or out of work. But in an atmosphere in which pro-union employees have little effective right of reply, these messages may prove extremely powerful. ¶ It is common for unionization drives to start with two-thirds of employees supporting unionization and still end in a “no” vote. This reversal points to the anti-democratic dynamics of NLRB elections: voters are not being convinced of the merits of remaining without representation—they are being intimidated into the belief that unionization is at best futile and at worst dangerous. When a large national survey asked workers who had been through an election to name “the most important reason people voted against union representation,” the single most common response was management pressure, including fear of job loss.24 Those who vote on this basis are not expressing a preference to remain unrepresented. Indeed, many might still prefer unionization if they believed it could work. Where fear is the motivator, what is captured in the snapshot of the ballot is not preference but despair. ¶To understand what union elections look like in reality, we have profiled two cases in which workers sought to create a union and met with a harsh (and typical) employer backlash. In both cases—a tire plant in Georgia and a satellite TV company in Texas—the employer response ranges from illegally firing union activists to engaging in acts of coercion and intimidation that are illegal in any normal election to public office but are allowed under the NLRA. ¶
11/5/21
SO Neg - HIF CP and Innovation DA
Tournament: Damien | Round: 2 | Opponent: Modern Brain UH | Judge: Wyatt Hattfield NC Health Impact Fund CP Counterplan text: (the member nations of the World Trade Organization) should implement and fund a Health Impact Fund as per the Hollis and Pogge 08 card The Health Impact Fund would guarantee patent rights and increase profits, while also equalizing the cost of medicines 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 We propose the Health Impact Fund as the most sensible solution that comprehensively addresses the problems. Financed by governments, the HIF would offer patentees the option to forgo monopoly pricing in exchange for a reward based on the global health impact of their new medicine. By registering a patented medicine with the HIF, a company would agree to sell it globally at cost. In exchange, the company would receive, for a fixed time, payments based on the product’s assessed global health impact. The arrangement would be optional and it wouldn’t diminish patent rights.¶ The HIF has the potential to be an institution that benefits everyone: patients, rich and poor alike, along with their caregivers; pharmaceutical companies and their shareholders; and taxpayers.¶ HOW THE HEALTH IMPACT FUND WORKS FOR PATIENTS¶ The HIF increases the incentives to invest in developing medicines that have high health impact. It directs research toward the medicines that can do the most good. It can also reward the development of new products, and the discovery of new uses for existing products, which the patent system alone can’t stimulate because of inadequate protection from imitation. All patients, rich and poor, would benefit from refocusing the innovation and marketing priorities of pharmaceutical companies toward health impact.¶ Any new medicines and new uses of existing medicines registered for health impact rewards would be available everywhere at marginal cost from the start. Many patients – especially in poor countries, but increasingly in wealthy ones too – are unable to afford the best treatment because it is too expensive. Even if fully insured, patients oft en lack access to medicines because their insurer deems them too expensive to reimburse. The HIF simply and directly solves this problem for registered drugs by setting their prices at marginal cost.¶ HOW THE HEALTH IMPACT FUND WORKS FOR PHARMACEUTICAL COMPANIES¶ Most proposals for increasing access to medicines would reduce the profits of pharmaceutical companies and hence their ability to fund research. The HIF, however, leaves the existing options of pharmaceutical firms untouched. It merely gives them the opportunity to make additional profits by developing new high-impact medicines that would be unprofitable or less profitable under monopoly pricing. Selling such registered medicines at cost, firms won’t be forced to defend a policy of charging high prices to poor people and they won’t be pressured to make charitable donations. With HIF-registered medicines they can instead “do well by doing good”: bring real benefit to patients in a profitable way. Research scientists of these firms will be encouraged to focus on addressing the most important diseases, not merely those that can support high prices.¶ HOW THE HEALTH IMPACT FUND WORKS FOR TAXPAYERS¶ The HIF will be supported mainly by governments, which are supported by the taxes they collect. Taxpayers want value for their money, and the HIF provides exactly that. Because the HIF is a more efficient way of incentivizing the pharmaceutical RandD we all want, total expenditures on medicines need not increase. However, if they do, the reason is that new medicines that would not have existed without the HIF are being developed. The HIF mechanism is designed to ensure that taxpayers always obtain value for money in the sense that any product regis-tered with the HIF will have a lower cost for a given amount of health impact than products outside the HIF. Taxpayers may also benefit from a reduction in risks of pandemics and other health problems that easily cross national borders Innovation DA The pharma industry is strong now but patents are key for continued economic growth. Batell and PhRMA 14: Batell and PhRMA {Battelle is the world’s largest nonprofit independent research and development organization, providing innovative solutions to the world’s most pressing needs through its four global businesses: Laboratory Management, National Security, Energy, Environment and Material Sciences, and Health and Life Sciences. The Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA) represents the country’s leading pharmaceutical research and biotechnology companies, which are devoted to inventing medicines that allow patients to live longer, healthier, and more productive lives.}, 14 – “The U.S. Biopharmaceutical Industry: Perspectives on Future Growth and The Factors That Will Drive It,” http://phrma-docs.phrma.org/sites/default/files/pdf/2014-economic-futures-report.pdf//marlborough-wr// Compared to other capital-intensive, advanced manufacturing industries in the U.S., the biopharmaceutical industry is a leader in RandD investment, IP generation, venture capital investment, and RandD employment. Policies and infrastructure that helped foster these innovative activities have allowed the U.S. to seize global leadership in biopharmaceutical RandD over the past 30 years. However, as this report details, other countries are seeking to compete with the U.S. by borrowing and building upon some of these pro-innovation policies to improve their own operating environment and become more favorable to biopharmaceutical companies making decisions about where to locate their RandD and manufacturing activities. A unique contribution of this report was the inclusion of the perspective of senior-level strategic planning executives of biopharmaceutical companies regarding what policy areas they see as most likely to impact the favorability of the U.S. business operating environment. The executives cited the following factors as having the most impact on the favorability of the operating environment and hence, potential growth of the innovative biopharmaceutical industry in the U.S.: • Coverage and payment policies that support and encourage medical innovation • A well-functioning, science-based regulatory system • Strong IP protection and enforcement in the U.S. and abroad The top sub-attribute identified as driving future biopharmaceutical industry growth in the U.S. cited by executives was a domestic IP system that provides adequate patent rights and data protection. Collectively, these factors underscore the need to reduce uncertainties and ensure adequate incentives for the lengthy, costly, and risky RandD investments necessary to develop new treatments needed by patients and society to address our most costly and challenging diseases. With more than 300,000 jobs at stake between the two scenarios, the continued growth and leadership of the U.S. innovative biopharmaceutical industry cannot be taken for granted. Continued innovation is fundamental to U.S. economic well-being and the nation’s ability to compete effectively in a globalized economy and to take advantage of the expected growth in demand for new medicines around the world. Just as other countries have drawn lessons from the growth of the U.S. biopharmaceutical sector, the U.S. needs to assess how it can improve the environment for innovation and continue to boost job creation by increasing RandD investment, fostering a robust talent pool, enhancing economic growth and sustainability, and continuing to bring new medicines to patients. COVID has kept patents and innovation strong, but continued protection is key to innovation by incentivizing biomedical research – it’s also crucial to preventing counterfeit medicines, economic collapse, and fatal diseases, which independently turns case. Macdole and Ezell 4-29: Jaci Mcdole and Stephen Ezell {Jaci McDole is a senior policy analyst covering intellectual property (IP) and innovation policy at the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation (ITIF). She focuses on IP and its correlations to global innovation and trade. McDole holds a double BA in Music Business and Radio-Television with a minor in Marketing, an MS in Education, and a JD with a specialization in intellectual property (Southern Illinois University Carbondale). McDole comes to ITIF from the Institute for Intellectual Property Research, an organization she co-founded to study and further robust global IP policies. Stephen Ezell is vice president, global innovation policy, at the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation (ITIF). He comes to ITIF from Peer Insight, an innovation research and consulting firm he cofounded in 2003 to study the practice of innovation in service industries. At Peer Insight, Ezell led the Global Service Innovation Consortium, published multiple research papers on service innovation, and researched national service innovation policies being implemented by governments worldwide. Prior to forming Peer Insight, Ezell worked in the New Service Development group at the NASDAQ Stock Market, where he spearheaded the creation of the NASDAQ Market Intelligence Desk and the NASDAQ Corporate Services Network, services for NASDAQ-listed corporations. Previously, Ezell cofounded two successful innovation ventures, the high-tech services firm Brivo Systems and Lynx Capital, a boutique investment bank. Ezell holds a B.S. from the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University, with an honors certificate from Georgetown’s Landegger International Business Diplomacy program.}, 21 - ("Ten Ways Ip Has Enabled Innovations That Have Helped Sustain The World Through The Pandemic," Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, 4-29-2021, https://itif.org/publications/2021/04/29/ten-ways-ip-has-enabled-innovations-have-helped-sustain-world-through)//marlborough-wr/ To better understand the role of IP in enabling solutions related to COVID-19 challenges, this report relies on 10 case studies drawn from a variety of nations, technical fields, and firm sizes. This is but a handful of the thousands of IP-enabled innovations that have sprung forth over the past year in an effort to meet the tremendous challenges brought on by COVID-19 globally. From a paramedic in Mexico to a veteran vaccine manufacturing company in India and a tech start-up in Estonia to a U.S.-based company offering workplace Internet of Things (IoT) services, small and large organizations alike are working to combat the pandemic. Some have adapted existing innovations, while others have developed novel solutions. All are working to take the world out of the pandemic and into the future. The case studies are: Bharat Biotech: Covaxin Gilead: Remdesivir LumiraDX: SARS-COV-2 Antigen POC Test Teal Bio: Teal Bio Respirator XE Ingeniería Médica: CápsulaXE Surgical Theater: Precision VR Tombot: Jennie Starship Technologies: Autonomous Delivery Robots Triax Technologies: Proximity Trace Zoom: Video Conferencing As the case studies show, IP is critical to enabling innovation. Policymakers around the world need to ensure robust IP protections are—and remain—in place if they wish their citizens to have safe and innovative solutions to health care, workplace, and societal challenges in the future. THE ROLE OF INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY IN RandD-INTENSIVE INDUSTRIES Intangible assets, such as IP rights, comprised approximately 84 percent of the corporate value of SandP 500 companies in 2018.4 For start-ups, this means much of the capital needed to operate is directly related to IP (see Teal Bio case study for more on this). IP also plays an especially important role for RandD-intensive industries.5 To take the example of the biopharmaceutical industry, it is characterized by high-risk, time-consuming, and expensive processes including basic research, drug discovery, pre-clinical trials, three stages of human clinical trials, regulatory review, and post-approval research and safety monitoring. The drug development process spans an average of 11.5 to 15 years.6 For every 5,000 to 10,000 compounds screened on average during the basic research and drug discovery phases, approximately 250 molecular compounds, or 2.5 to 5 percent, make it to preclinical testing. Out of those 250 molecular compounds, approximately 5 make it to clinical testing. That is, 0.05 to 0.1 percent of drugs make it from basic research into clinical trials. Of those rare few which make it to clinical testing, less than 12 percent are ultimately approved for use by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA).7 In addition to high risks, drug development is costly, and the expenses associated with it are increasing. A 2019 report by the Deloitte Center for Health Solutions concluded that since 2010 the average cost of bringing a new drug to market increased by 67 percent.8 Numerous studies have examined the substantial cost of biopharmaceutical RandD, and most confirm investing in new drug development requires $1.7 billion to $3.2 billion up front on average.9 A 2018 study by the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness found similar risks and figures for vaccines, stating, “In general, vaccine development from discovery to licensure can cost billions of dollars, can take over 10 years to complete, and has an average 94 percent chance of failure.”10 Yet, a 2010 study found that 80 percent of new drugs—that is, the less than 12 percent ultimately approved by the FDA—made less than their capitalized RandD costs.11 Another study found that only 1 percent (maybe three new drugs each year) of the most successful 10 percent of FDA approved drugs generate half of the profits of the entire drug industry.12 To say the least, biopharmaceutical RandD represents a high-stakes, long-term endeavor with precarious returns. Without IP protection, biopharmaceutical manufacturers have little incentive to take the risks necessary to engage in the RandD process because they would be unable to recoup even a fraction of the costs incurred. Diminished revenues also result in reduced investments in RandD which means less research into cancer drugs, Alzheimer cures, vaccines, and more. IP rights give life-sciences enterprises the confidence needed to undertake the difficult, risky, and expensive process of life-sciences innovation secure in the knowledge they can capture a share of the gains from their innovations, which is indispensable not only to recouping the up-front RandD costs of a given drug, but which can generate sufficient profits to enable investment in future generations of biomedical innovation and thus perpetuate the enterprises into the future.13 THE IMPORTANCE OF INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY TO INNOVATION Although anti-IP proponents have attacked biopharmaceutical manufacturers particularly hard, the reality is all IP-protected innovations are at risk if these rights are ignored, or vitiated. Certain arguments have shown a desire for the term “COVID-19 innovations” to include everything from vaccines, therapeutics, diagnostics, and PPE to biotechnology, AI-related data, and educational materials.14 This could potentially open the floodgates to invalidate IP protection on many of the innovations highlighted in this report. However, much of the current discussion concerning IP focuses almost entirely on litigation fears or RandD incentives. Although RandD is an important aspect of IP, as previously mentioned, these discussions ignore the fact that IP protection can be—and often is—used for other purposes, including generating initial capital to create a company and begin manufacturing and, more importantly, using licensing agreements and IP to track the supply chain and ensure quality control of products. This report highlights but a handful of the thousands of IP-enabled innovations that have sprung forth over the past year in an effort to meet the tremendous challenges brought on by COVID-19 globally. In 2018, Forbes identified counterfeiting as the largest criminal enterprise in the world.15 The global struggle against counterfeit and non-regulated products, which has hit Latin America particularly hard during the pandemic, proves the need for safety and quality assurance in supply chains.16 Some communities already ravaged by COVID-19 are seeing higher mortality rates related to counterfeit vaccines, therapeutics, PPE, and cleaning and sanitizing products.17 Polish authorities discovered vials of antiwrinkle treatment labeled as COVID-19 vaccines. 18 In Mexico, fake vaccines sold for approximately $1,000 per dose.19 Chinese and South African police seized thousands of counterfeit vaccine doses from warehouses and manufacturing plants.20 Meanwhile, dozens of websites worldwide claiming to sell vaccines or be affiliated with vaccine manufacturers have been taken down.21 But the problem is not limited to biopharmaceuticals. The National Intellectual Property Rights Coordination Center has recovered $48 million worth of counterfeit PPE and other products.22 Collaborative efforts between law enforcement and manufacturers have kept numerous counterfeits from reaching the population. In countries with strong IP protection, the chances of counterfeit products reaching the market are significantly lower. This is largely because counterfeiting tends to be an IP-related issue, and these countries generally provide superior means of tracking the supply chain through trademarks, trade secrets, and licensing agreements. This enables greater quality control and helps manufacturers maintain a level of public confidence in their products. By controlling the flow of knowledge associated with IP, voluntary licensing agreements provide innovators with opportunities to collaborate, while ensuring their partners are properly equipped and capable of producing quality products. Throughout this difficult time, the world has seen unexpected collaborations, especially between biopharmaceutical companies worldwide such as Gilead and Eva Pharma or Bharat Biotech and Ocugen, Inc. Throughout history, and most significantly in the nineteenth century through the widespread development of patent systems and the ensuing Industrial Revolution, IP has contributed toward greater economic growth.23 This is promising news as the world struggles for economic recovery. A 2021 joint study by the EU Intellectual Property Office (EUIPO) and European Patent Office (EPO) shows a strong, positive correlation between IP rights and economic performance.24 It states that “IP-owning firms represent a significantly larger proportion of economic activity and employment across Europe,” with IP-intensive industries contributing to 45 percent of gross domestic product (GDP) (€6.6 trillion; US$7.9 trillion).25 The study also shows 38.9 percent of employment is directly or indirectly attributed to IP-intensive industries, and IP generates higher wages and greater revenue per employee, especially for small-to-medium-sized enterprises.26 That concords with the United States, where the Department of Commerce estimated that IP-intensive industries support at least 45 million jobs and contribute more than $6 trillion dollars to, or 38.2 percent of, GDP.27 In 2020, global patent filings through the World Intellectual Property Organization’s (WIPO) Patent Cooperation Treaty (PCT) system reached a record 275,900 filings amidst the pandemic, growing 4 percent from 2019.28 The top-four nations, which accounted for 180,530 of the patent applications, were China, the United States, Japan, and Korea, respectively.29 While several countries saw an increase in patent filings, Saudi Arabia and Malaysia both saw significant increases in the number of annual applications, with the top two filing growths of 73 percent and 26 percent, respectively.30 The COVID-19 pandemic slowed a lot of things, but it certainly couldn’t stop innovation. There are at least five principal benefits strong IP rights can generate, for both developing and developed countries alike.31 First, stronger IP protection spurs the virtuous cycle of innovation by increasing the appropriability of returns, enabling economic gain and catalyzing economic growth. Second, through patents—which require innovators to disclose certain knowledge as a condition of protection—knowledge spillovers build a platform of knowledge that enables other innovators. For instance, studies have found that the rate of return to society from corporate RandD and innovation activities is at least twice the estimated returns that each company itself receives.32 Third, countries with robust IP can operate more efficiently and productively by using IP to determine product quality and reduce transaction costs. Fourth, trade and foreign direct investment enabled and encouraged by strong IP protection offered to enterprises from foreign countries facilitates an accumulation of knowledge capital within the destination economy. That matters when foreign sources of technology account for over 90 percent of productivity growth in most countries.33 There’s also evidence suggesting that developing nations with stronger IP protections enjoy the earlier introduction of innovative new medicines.34 And fifth, strong IP boosts exports, including in developing countries.35 Research shows a positive correlation between stronger IP protection and exports from developing countries as well as faster growth rates of certain industries.36 The following case studies illustrate these benefits of IP and how they’ve enabled innovative solutions to help global society navigate the COVID-19 pandemic. This sets a precedent that spills over to all future diseases – Hopkins 21: Jared S. Hopkins {Jared S. Hopkins is a New York-based reporter for The Wall Street Journal covering the pharmaceutical industry, including companies such as Pfizer Inc. and Merck and Co. He previously was a health-care reporter at Bloomberg News and an investigative reporter at the Chicago Tribune. Jared started his career at The Times-News in Twin Falls, Idaho covering politics. In 2014, he was a finalist for the Livingston Award For Young Journalists for an investigation into charities founded by professional athletes. In 2011, he was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Investigative Reporting for a series about neglect at a residential facility for disabled kids. Jared graduated from the Merrill College of Journalism at the University of Maryland-College Park with a bachelor's degree in journalism}, 21 - ("U.S. Support for Patent Waiver Unlikely to Cost Covid-19 Vaccine Makers in Short Term ," WSJ, 5-7-2021, https://www.wsj.com/articles/u-s-support-for-patent-waiver-unlikely-to-cost-covid-19-vaccine-makers-in-short-term-11620414260)//marlborough-wr/ The Biden administration’s unexpected support for temporarily waiving Covid-19 vaccine patents won’t have an immediate financial impact on the companies making the shots, industry officials and analysts said. Yet the decision could mark a shift in Washington’s longstanding support of the industry’s valuable intellectual property, patent-law experts said. A waiver, if it does go into effect, may pose long-term risks to the vaccine makers, analysts said. Moderna Inc., MRNA -4.12 Pfizer Inc. PFE -3.10 and other vaccine makers weren’t counting on sales from the developing countries that would gain access to the vaccine technology, analysts said. If patents and other crucial product information behind the technology is made available, it would take at least several months before shots were produced, industry officials said. Yet long-term Covid-19 sales could take a hit if other companies and countries gained access to the technologies and figured out how to use it. Western drugmakers could also confront competition sooner for other medicines they are hoping to make using the technologies. A World Trade Organization waiver could also set a precedent for waiving patents for other medicines, a long-sought goal of some developing countries, patient groups and others to try to reduce the costs of prescription drugs. “It sets a tremendous precedent of waiving IP rights that’s likely going to come up in future pandemics or in other serious diseases,” said David Silverstein, a patent lawyer at Axinn, Veltrop and Harkrider LLP who advises drugmakers. “Other than that, this is largely symbolic.” Pharmaceutical innovation is key to protecting against future pandemics, bioterrorism, and antibiotic resistance. Marjanovic and Fejiao ‘20 Marjanovic, Sonja, and Carolina Feijao. Sonja Marjanovic, Ph.D., Judge Business School, University of Cambridge. Carolina Feijao, Ph.D. in biochemistry, University of Cambridge; M.Sc. in quantitive biology, Imperial College London; B.Sc. in biology, University of Lisbon. "Pharmaceutical Innovation for Infectious Disease Management: From Troubleshooting to Sustainable Models of Engagement." (2020). Quality Control As key actors in the healthcare innovation landscape, pharmaceutical and life sci-ences companies have been called on to develop medicines, vaccines and diagnostics for pressing public health challenges. The COVID-19 crisis is one such challenge, but there are many others. For example, MERS, SARS, Ebola, Zika and avian and swine flu are also infectious diseases that represent public health threats. Infectious agents such as anthrax, smallpox and tularemia could present threats in a bioterrorism con-text.1 The general threat to public health that is posed by antimicrobial resistance is also well-recognised as an area in need of pharmaceutical innovation. Innovating in response to these challenges does not always align well with pharmaceutical industry commercial models, shareholder expectations and compe-tition within the industry. However, the expertise, networks and infrastructure that industry has within its reach, as well as public expectations and the moral imperative, make pharmaceutical companies and the wider life sciences sector an indispensable partner in the search for solutions that save lives. This perspective argues for the need to establish more sustainable and scalable ways of incentivising pharmaceu-tical innovation in response to infectious disease threats to public health. It considers both past and current examples of efforts to mobilise pharmaceutical innovation in high commercial risk areas, including in the context of current efforts to respond to the COVID-19 pandemic. In global pandemic crises like COVID-19, the urgency and scale of the crisis – as well as the spotlight placed on pharmaceutical companies – mean that contributing to the search for effective medicines, vaccines or diagnostics is essential for socially responsible companies in the sec-tor.2 It is therefore unsurprising that we are seeing indus-try-wide efforts unfold at unprecedented scale and pace. Whereas there is always scope for more activity, industry is currently contributing in a variety of ways. Examples include pharmaceutical companies donating existing com-pounds to assess their utility in the fight against COVID-19; screening existing compound libraries in-house or with partners to see if they can be repurposed; accelerating tri-als for potentially effective medicine or vaccine candidates; and in some cases rapidly accelerating in-house research and development to discover new treatments or vaccine agents and develop diagnostics tests.3,4 Pharmaceutical companies are collaborating with each other in some of these efforts and participating in global RandD partnerships (such as the Innovative Medicines Initiative effort to accel-erate the development of potential therapies for COVID-19) and supporting national efforts to expand diagnosis and testing capacity and ensure affordable and ready access to potential solutions.3,5,6 The primary purpose of such innovation is to benefit patients and wider population health. Although there are also reputational benefits from involvement that can be realised across the industry, there are likely to be rela-tively few companies that are ‘commercial’ winners. Those who might gain substantial revenues will be under pres-sure not to be seen as profiting from the pandemic. In the United Kingdom for example, GSK has stated that it does not expect to profit from its COVID-19 related activities and that any gains will be invested in supporting research and long-term pandemic preparedness, as well as in developing products that would be affordable in the world’s poorest countries.7 Similarly, in the United States AbbVie has waived intellectual property rights for an existing com-bination product that is being tested for therapeutic poten-tial against COVID-19, which would support affordability and allow for a supply of generics.8,9 Johnson and Johnson has stated that its potential vaccine – which is expected to begin trials – will be available on a not-for-profit basis during the pandemic.10 Pharma is mobilising substantial efforts to rise to the COVID-19 challenge at hand. However, we need to consider how pharmaceutical innovation for responding to emerging infectious diseases can best be enabled beyond the current crisis. Many public health threats (including those associated with other infectious diseases, bioterror-ism agents and antimicrobial resistance) are urgently in need of pharmaceutical innovation, even if their impacts are not as visible to society as COVID-19 is in the imme-diate term. The pharmaceutical industry has responded to previous public health emergencies associated with infec-tious disease in recent times – for example those associated with Ebola and Zika outbreaks.11 However, it has done so to a lesser scale than for COVID-19 and with contribu-tions from fewer companies. Similarly, levels of activity in response to the threat of antimicrobial resistance are still low.12 There are important policy questions as to whether – and how – industry could engage with such public health threats to an even greater extent under improved innova-tion conditions. Bioterror causes extinction---early response key Farmer 17 (“Bioterrorism could kill more people than nuclear war, Bill Gates to warn world leaders” http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/02/17/biological-terrorism-could-kill-people-nuclear-attacks-bill/) Bioterrorists could one day kill hundreds of millions of people in an attack more deadly than nuclear war, Bill Gates will warn world leaders. Rapid advances in genetic engineering have opened the door for small terrorism groups to tailor and easily turn biological viruses into weapons. A resulting disease pandemic is currently one of the most deadly threats faced by the world, he believes, yet governments are complacent about the scale of the risk. Speaking ahead of an address to the Munich Security Conference, the richest man in the world said that while governments are concerned with the proliferation of nuclear and chemical weapons, they are overlooking the threat of biological warfare. Mr Gates, whose charitable foundationis funding research into quickly spotting outbreaks and speeding up vaccine production, said the defence and security establishment “have not been following biology and I’m here to bring them a little bit of bad news”. Mr Gates will today (Saturday) tell an audience of international leaders and senior officers that the world’s next deadly pandemic “could originate on the computer screen of a terrorist”. He told the Telegraph: “Natural epidemics can be extremely large. Intentionally caused epidemics, bioterrorism, would be the largest of all. “With nuclear weapons, you’d think you would probably stop after killing 100million. Smallpox won’t stop. Because the population is naïve, and there are no real preparations. That, if it got out and spread, would be a larger number.” He said developments in genetic engineering were proceeding at a “mind-blowing rate”. Biological warfare ambitions once limited to a handful of nation states are now open to small groups with limited resources and skills. He said: “They make it much easier for a non-state person. It doesn’t take much biology expertise nowadays to assemble a smallpox virus. Biology is making it way easier to create these things.” The increasingly common use of gene editing technology would make it difficult to spot any potential terrorist conspiracy. Technologies which have made it easy to read DNA sequences and tinker with them to rewrite or tweak genes have many legitimate uses. He said: “It’s not like when someone says, ‘Hey I’d like some Plutonium’ and you start saying ‘Hmmm.. I wonder why he wants Plutonium?’” Mr Gates said the potential death toll from a disease outbreak could be higher than other threats such as climate change or nuclear war. He said: “This is like earthquakes, you should think in order of magnitudes. If you can kill 10 people that’s a one, 100 people that’s a two... Bioterrorism is the thing that can give you not just sixes, but sevens, eights and nines. “With nuclear war, once you have got a six, or a seven, or eight, you’d think it would probably stop. With bioterrorism it’s just unbounded if you are not there to stop the spread of it.” By tailoring the genes of a virus, it would be possible to manipulate its ability to spread and its ability to harm people. Mr Gates said one of the most potentially deadly outbreaks could involve the humble flu virus. It would be relatively easy to engineer a new flu strain combining qualities from varieties that spread like wildfire with varieties that were deadly. The last time that happened naturally was the 1918 Spanish Influenza pandemic, which went on to kill more than 50 million people – or nearly three times the death toll from the First World War. By comparison, the recent Ebola outbreak in West Africa which killed just over 11,000 was “a Richter Scale three, it’s a nothing,” he said. But despite the potential, the founder of Microsoft said that world leaders and their militaries could not see beyond the more recognised risks. He said: “Should the world be serious about this? It is somewhat serious about normal classic warfare and nuclear warfare, but today it is not very serious about bio-defence or natural epidemics.” He went on: “They do tend to say ‘How easy is it to get fissile material and how accurate are the plans out on the internet for dirty bombs, plutonium bombs and hydrogen bombs?’ “They have some people that do that. What I am suggesting is that the number of people that look at bio-defence is worth increasing.” Whether naturally occurring, or deliberately started, it is almost certain that a highly lethal global pandemic will occur within our lifetimes, he believes. But the good news for those contemplating the potential damage is that the same biotechnology can prevent epidemics spreading out of control. Mr Gates will say in his speech that most of the things needed to protect against a naturally occurring pandemic are the same things needed to prepare for an intentional biological attack. Nations must amass an arsenal of new weapons to fight such a disease outbreak, including vaccines, drugs and diagnostic techniques. Being able to develop a vaccine as soon as possible against a new outbreak is particularly important and could save huge numbers of lives, scientists working at his foundation believe.
10/2/21
SO Neg - HIF and Innovation
Tournament: WBFL 1 | Round: 1 | Opponent: Brentwood MM | Judge: Hatim Malik NC Health Impact Fund The Health Impact Fund would guarantee patent rights and increase profits, while also equalizing the cost of medicines 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 We propose the Health Impact Fund as the most sensible solution that comprehensively addresses the problems. Financed by governments, the HIF would offer patentees the option to forgo monopoly pricing in exchange for a reward based on the global health impact of their new medicine. By registering a patented medicine with the HIF, a company would agree to sell it globally at cost. In exchange, the company would receive, for a fixed time, payments based on the product’s assessed global health impact. The arrangement would be optional and it wouldn’t diminish patent rights.¶ The HIF has the potential to be an institution that benefits everyone: patients, rich and poor alike, along with their caregivers; pharmaceutical companies and their shareholders; and taxpayers.¶ HOW THE HEALTH IMPACT FUND WORKS FOR PATIENTS¶ The HIF increases the incentives to invest in developing medicines that have high health impact. It directs research toward the medicines that can do the most good. It can also reward the development of new products, and the discovery of new uses for existing products, which the patent system alone can’t stimulate because of inadequate protection from imitation. All patients, rich and poor, would benefit from refocusing the innovation and marketing priorities of pharmaceutical companies toward health impact.¶ Any new medicines and new uses of existing medicines registered for health impact rewards would be available everywhere at marginal cost from the start. Many patients – especially in poor countries, but increasingly in wealthy ones too – are unable to afford the best treatment because it is too expensive. Even if fully insured, patients oft en lack access to medicines because their insurer deems them too expensive to reimburse. The HIF simply and directly solves this problem for registered drugs by setting their prices at marginal cost.¶ HOW THE HEALTH IMPACT FUND WORKS FOR PHARMACEUTICAL COMPANIES¶ Most proposals for increasing access to medicines would reduce the profits of pharmaceutical companies and hence their ability to fund research. The HIF, however, leaves the existing options of pharmaceutical firms untouched. It merely gives them the opportunity to make additional profits by developing new high-impact medicines that would be unprofitable or less profitable under monopoly pricing. Selling such registered medicines at cost, firms won’t be forced to defend a policy of charging high prices to poor people and they won’t be pressured to make charitable donations. With HIF-registered medicines they can instead “do well by doing good”: bring real benefit to patients in a profitable way. Research scientists of these firms will be encouraged to focus on addressing the most important diseases, not merely those that can support high prices.¶ HOW THE HEALTH IMPACT FUND WORKS FOR TAXPAYERS¶ The HIF will be supported mainly by governments, which are supported by the taxes they collect. Taxpayers want value for their money, and the HIF provides exactly that. Because the HIF is a more efficient way of incentivizing the pharmaceutical RandD we all want, total expenditures on medicines need not increase. However, if they do, the reason is that new medicines that would not have existed without the HIF are being developed. The HIF mechanism is designed to ensure that taxpayers always obtain value for money in the sense that any product regis-tered with the HIF will have a lower cost for a given amount of health impact than products outside the HIF. Taxpayers may also benefit from a reduction in risks of pandemics and other health problems that easily cross national borders If we eliminate IP protections, we cannot use a health impact fund. If there is no IP, then generic companies can manufacture medicines, getting a share of the funds. This would undermine the purpose of the health impact fund, because it is no longer compensating innovation. Innovation DA The pharma industry is strong now but patents are key for continued economic growth. Batell and PhRMA 14: Batell and PhRMA {Battelle is the world’s largest nonprofit independent research and development organization, providing innovative solutions to the world’s most pressing needs through its four global businesses: Laboratory Management, National Security, Energy, Environment and Material Sciences, and Health and Life Sciences. The Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA) represents the country’s leading pharmaceutical research and biotechnology companies, which are devoted to inventing medicines that allow patients to live longer, healthier, and more productive lives.}, 14 – “The U.S. Biopharmaceutical Industry: Perspectives on Future Growth and The Factors That Will Drive It,” http://phrma-docs.phrma.org/sites/default/files/pdf/2014-economic-futures-report.pdf//marlborough-wr// Compared to other capital-intensive, advanced manufacturing industries in the U.S., the biopharmaceutical industry is a leader in RandD investment, IP generation, venture capital investment, and RandD employment. Policies and infrastructure that helped foster these innovative activities have allowed the U.S. to seize global leadership in biopharmaceutical RandD over the past 30 years. However, as this report details, other countries are seeking to compete with the U.S. by borrowing and building upon some of these pro-innovation policies to improve their own operating environment and become more favorable to biopharmaceutical companies making decisions about where to locate their RandD and manufacturing activities. A unique contribution of this report was the inclusion of the perspective of senior-level strategic planning executives of biopharmaceutical companies regarding what policy areas they see as most likely to impact the favorability of the U.S. business operating environment. The executives cited the following factors as having the most impact on the favorability of the operating environment and hence, potential growth of the innovative biopharmaceutical industry in the U.S.: • Coverage and payment policies that support and encourage medical innovation • A well-functioning, science-based regulatory system • Strong IP protection and enforcement in the U.S. and abroad The top sub-attribute identified as driving future biopharmaceutical industry growth in the U.S. cited by executives was a domestic IP system that provides adequate patent rights and data protection. Collectively, these factors underscore the need to reduce uncertainties and ensure adequate incentives for the lengthy, costly, and risky RandD investments necessary to develop new treatments needed by patients and society to address our most costly and challenging diseases. With more than 300,000 jobs at stake between the two scenarios, the continued growth and leadership of the U.S. innovative biopharmaceutical industry cannot be taken for granted. Continued innovation is fundamental to U.S. economic well-being and the nation’s ability to compete effectively in a globalized economy and to take advantage of the expected growth in demand for new medicines around the world. Just as other countries have drawn lessons from the growth of the U.S. biopharmaceutical sector, the U.S. needs to assess how it can improve the environment for innovation and continue to boost job creation by increasing RandD investment, fostering a robust talent pool, enhancing economic growth and sustainability, and continuing to bring new medicines to patients. COVID has kept patents and innovation strong, but continued protection is key to innovation by incentivizing biomedical research – it’s also crucial to preventing counterfeit medicines, economic collapse, and fatal diseases, which independently turns case. Macdole and Ezell 4-29: Jaci Mcdole and Stephen Ezell {Jaci McDole is a senior policy analyst covering intellectual property (IP) and innovation policy at the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation (ITIF). She focuses on IP and its correlations to global innovation and trade. McDole holds a double BA in Music Business and Radio-Television with a minor in Marketing, an MS in Education, and a JD with a specialization in intellectual property (Southern Illinois University Carbondale). McDole comes to ITIF from the Institute for Intellectual Property Research, an organization she co-founded to study and further robust global IP policies. Stephen Ezell is vice president, global innovation policy, at the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation (ITIF). He comes to ITIF from Peer Insight, an innovation research and consulting firm he cofounded in 2003 to study the practice of innovation in service industries. At Peer Insight, Ezell led the Global Service Innovation Consortium, published multiple research papers on service innovation, and researched national service innovation policies being implemented by governments worldwide. Prior to forming Peer Insight, Ezell worked in the New Service Development group at the NASDAQ Stock Market, where he spearheaded the creation of the NASDAQ Market Intelligence Desk and the NASDAQ Corporate Services Network, services for NASDAQ-listed corporations. Previously, Ezell cofounded two successful innovation ventures, the high-tech services firm Brivo Systems and Lynx Capital, a boutique investment bank. Ezell holds a B.S. from the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University, with an honors certificate from Georgetown’s Landegger International Business Diplomacy program.}, 21 - ("Ten Ways Ip Has Enabled Innovations That Have Helped Sustain The World Through The Pandemic," Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, 4-29-2021, https://itif.org/publications/2021/04/29/ten-ways-ip-has-enabled-innovations-have-helped-sustain-world-through)//marlborough-wr/ To better understand the role of IP in enabling solutions related to COVID-19 challenges, this report relies on 10 case studies drawn from a variety of nations, technical fields, and firm sizes. This is but a handful of the thousands of IP-enabled innovations that have sprung forth over the past year in an effort to meet the tremendous challenges brought on by COVID-19 globally. From a paramedic in Mexico to a veteran vaccine manufacturing company in India and a tech start-up in Estonia to a U.S.-based company offering workplace Internet of Things (IoT) services, small and large organizations alike are working to combat the pandemic. Some have adapted existing innovations, while others have developed novel solutions. All are working to take the world out of the pandemic and into the future. The case studies are: Bharat Biotech: Covaxin Gilead: Remdesivir LumiraDX: SARS-COV-2 Antigen POC Test Teal Bio: Teal Bio Respirator XE Ingeniería Médica: CápsulaXE Surgical Theater: Precision VR Tombot: Jennie Starship Technologies: Autonomous Delivery Robots Triax Technologies: Proximity Trace Zoom: Video Conferencing As the case studies show, IP is critical to enabling innovation. Policymakers around the world need to ensure robust IP protections are—and remain—in place if they wish their citizens to have safe and innovative solutions to health care, workplace, and societal challenges in the future. THE ROLE OF INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY IN RandD-INTENSIVE INDUSTRIES Intangible assets, such as IP rights, comprised approximately 84 percent of the corporate value of SandP 500 companies in 2018.4 For start-ups, this means much of the capital needed to operate is directly related to IP (see Teal Bio case study for more on this). IP also plays an especially important role for RandD-intensive industries.5 To take the example of the biopharmaceutical industry, it is characterized by high-risk, time-consuming, and expensive processes including basic research, drug discovery, pre-clinical trials, three stages of human clinical trials, regulatory review, and post-approval research and safety monitoring. The drug development process spans an average of 11.5 to 15 years.6 For every 5,000 to 10,000 compounds screened on average during the basic research and drug discovery phases, approximately 250 molecular compounds, or 2.5 to 5 percent, make it to preclinical testing. Out of those 250 molecular compounds, approximately 5 make it to clinical testing. That is, 0.05 to 0.1 percent of drugs make it from basic research into clinical trials. Of those rare few which make it to clinical testing, less than 12 percent are ultimately approved for use by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA).7 In addition to high risks, drug development is costly, and the expenses associated with it are increasing. A 2019 report by the Deloitte Center for Health Solutions concluded that since 2010 the average cost of bringing a new drug to market increased by 67 percent.8 Numerous studies have examined the substantial cost of biopharmaceutical RandD, and most confirm investing in new drug development requires $1.7 billion to $3.2 billion up front on average.9 A 2018 study by the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness found similar risks and figures for vaccines, stating, “In general, vaccine development from discovery to licensure can cost billions of dollars, can take over 10 years to complete, and has an average 94 percent chance of failure.”10 Yet, a 2010 study found that 80 percent of new drugs—that is, the less than 12 percent ultimately approved by the FDA—made less than their capitalized RandD costs.11 Another study found that only 1 percent (maybe three new drugs each year) of the most successful 10 percent of FDA approved drugs generate half of the profits of the entire drug industry.12 To say the least, biopharmaceutical RandD represents a high-stakes, long-term endeavor with precarious returns. Without IP protection, biopharmaceutical manufacturers have little incentive to take the risks necessary to engage in the RandD process because they would be unable to recoup even a fraction of the costs incurred. Diminished revenues also result in reduced investments in RandD which means less research into cancer drugs, Alzheimer cures, vaccines, and more. IP rights give life-sciences enterprises the confidence needed to undertake the difficult, risky, and expensive process of life-sciences innovation secure in the knowledge they can capture a share of the gains from their innovations, which is indispensable not only to recouping the up-front RandD costs of a given drug, but which can generate sufficient profits to enable investment in future generations of biomedical innovation and thus perpetuate the enterprises into the future.13 THE IMPORTANCE OF INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY TO INNOVATION Although anti-IP proponents have attacked biopharmaceutical manufacturers particularly hard, the reality is all IP-protected innovations are at risk if these rights are ignored, or vitiated. Certain arguments have shown a desire for the term “COVID-19 innovations” to include everything from vaccines, therapeutics, diagnostics, and PPE to biotechnology, AI-related data, and educational materials.14 This could potentially open the floodgates to invalidate IP protection on many of the innovations highlighted in this report. However, much of the current discussion concerning IP focuses almost entirely on litigation fears or RandD incentives. Although RandD is an important aspect of IP, as previously mentioned, these discussions ignore the fact that IP protection can be—and often is—used for other purposes, including generating initial capital to create a company and begin manufacturing and, more importantly, using licensing agreements and IP to track the supply chain and ensure quality control of products. This report highlights but a handful of the thousands of IP-enabled innovations that have sprung forth over the past year in an effort to meet the tremendous challenges brought on by COVID-19 globally. In 2018, Forbes identified counterfeiting as the largest criminal enterprise in the world.15 The global struggle against counterfeit and non-regulated products, which has hit Latin America particularly hard during the pandemic, proves the need for safety and quality assurance in supply chains.16 Some communities already ravaged by COVID-19 are seeing higher mortality rates related to counterfeit vaccines, therapeutics, PPE, and cleaning and sanitizing products.17 Polish authorities discovered vials of antiwrinkle treatment labeled as COVID-19 vaccines. 18 In Mexico, fake vaccines sold for approximately $1,000 per dose.19 Chinese and South African police seized thousands of counterfeit vaccine doses from warehouses and manufacturing plants.20 Meanwhile, dozens of websites worldwide claiming to sell vaccines or be affiliated with vaccine manufacturers have been taken down.21 But the problem is not limited to biopharmaceuticals. The National Intellectual Property Rights Coordination Center has recovered $48 million worth of counterfeit PPE and other products.22 Collaborative efforts between law enforcement and manufacturers have kept numerous counterfeits from reaching the population. In countries with strong IP protection, the chances of counterfeit products reaching the market are significantly lower. This is largely because counterfeiting tends to be an IP-related issue, and these countries generally provide superior means of tracking the supply chain through trademarks, trade secrets, and licensing agreements. This enables greater quality control and helps manufacturers maintain a level of public confidence in their products. By controlling the flow of knowledge associated with IP, voluntary licensing agreements provide innovators with opportunities to collaborate, while ensuring their partners are properly equipped and capable of producing quality products. Throughout this difficult time, the world has seen unexpected collaborations, especially between biopharmaceutical companies worldwide such as Gilead and Eva Pharma or Bharat Biotech and Ocugen, Inc. Throughout history, and most significantly in the nineteenth century through the widespread development of patent systems and the ensuing Industrial Revolution, IP has contributed toward greater economic growth.23 This is promising news as the world struggles for economic recovery. A 2021 joint study by the EU Intellectual Property Office (EUIPO) and European Patent Office (EPO) shows a strong, positive correlation between IP rights and economic performance.24 It states that “IP-owning firms represent a significantly larger proportion of economic activity and employment across Europe,” with IP-intensive industries contributing to 45 percent of gross domestic product (GDP) (€6.6 trillion; US$7.9 trillion).25 The study also shows 38.9 percent of employment is directly or indirectly attributed to IP-intensive industries, and IP generates higher wages and greater revenue per employee, especially for small-to-medium-sized enterprises.26 That concords with the United States, where the Department of Commerce estimated that IP-intensive industries support at least 45 million jobs and contribute more than $6 trillion dollars to, or 38.2 percent of, GDP.27 In 2020, global patent filings through the World Intellectual Property Organization’s (WIPO) Patent Cooperation Treaty (PCT) system reached a record 275,900 filings amidst the pandemic, growing 4 percent from 2019.28 The top-four nations, which accounted for 180,530 of the patent applications, were China, the United States, Japan, and Korea, respectively.29 While several countries saw an increase in patent filings, Saudi Arabia and Malaysia both saw significant increases in the number of annual applications, with the top two filing growths of 73 percent and 26 percent, respectively.30 The COVID-19 pandemic slowed a lot of things, but it certainly couldn’t stop innovation. There are at least five principal benefits strong IP rights can generate, for both developing and developed countries alike.31 First, stronger IP protection spurs the virtuous cycle of innovation by increasing the appropriability of returns, enabling economic gain and catalyzing economic growth. Second, through patents—which require innovators to disclose certain knowledge as a condition of protection—knowledge spillovers build a platform of knowledge that enables other innovators. For instance, studies have found that the rate of return to society from corporate RandD and innovation activities is at least twice the estimated returns that each company itself receives.32 Third, countries with robust IP can operate more efficiently and productively by using IP to determine product quality and reduce transaction costs. Fourth, trade and foreign direct investment enabled and encouraged by strong IP protection offered to enterprises from foreign countries facilitates an accumulation of knowledge capital within the destination economy. That matters when foreign sources of technology account for over 90 percent of productivity growth in most countries.33 There’s also evidence suggesting that developing nations with stronger IP protections enjoy the earlier introduction of innovative new medicines.34 And fifth, strong IP boosts exports, including in developing countries.35 Research shows a positive correlation between stronger IP protection and exports from developing countries as well as faster growth rates of certain industries.36 The following case studies illustrate these benefits of IP and how they’ve enabled innovative solutions to help global society navigate the COVID-19 pandemic. who advises drugmakers. “Other than that, this is largely symbolic.” Pharmaceutical innovation is key to protecting against future pandemics, bioterrorism, and antibiotic resistance. Marjanovic and Fejiao ‘20 Marjanovic, Sonja, and Carolina Feijao. Sonja Marjanovic, Ph.D., Judge Business School, University of Cambridge. Carolina Feijao, Ph.D. in biochemistry, University of Cambridge; M.Sc. in quantitive biology, Imperial College London; B.Sc. in biology, University of Lisbon. "Pharmaceutical Innovation for Infectious Disease Management: From Troubleshooting to Sustainable Models of Engagement." (2020). Quality Control As key actors in the healthcare innovation landscape, pharmaceutical and life sci-ences companies have been called on to develop medicines, vaccines and diagnostics for pressing public health challenges. The COVID-19 crisis is one such challenge, but there are many others. For example, MERS, SARS, Ebola, Zika and avian and swine flu are also infectious diseases that represent public health threats. Infectious agents such as anthrax, smallpox and tularemia could present threats in a bioterrorism con-text.1 The general threat to public health that is posed by antimicrobial resistance is also well-recognised as an area in need of pharmaceutical innovation. Innovating in response to these challenges does not always align well with pharmaceutical industry commercial models, shareholder expectations and compe-tition within the industry. However, the expertise, networks and infrastructure that industry has within its reach, as well as public expectations and the moral imperative, make pharmaceutical companies and the wider life sciences sector an indispensable partner in the search for solutions that save lives. This perspective argues for the need to establish more sustainable and scalable ways of incentivising pharmaceu-tical innovation in response to infectious disease threats to public health. It considers both past and current examples of efforts to mobilise pharmaceutical innovation in high commercial risk areas, including in the context of current efforts to respond to the COVID-19 pandemic. In global pandemic crises like COVID-19, the urgency and scale of the crisis – as well as the spotlight placed on pharmaceutical companies – mean that contributing to the search for effective medicines, vaccines or diagnostics is essential for socially responsible companies in the sec-tor.2 It is therefore unsurprising that we are seeing indus-try-wide efforts unfold at unprecedented scale and pace. Whereas there is always scope for more activity, industry is currently contributing in a variety of ways. Examples include pharmaceutical companies donating existing com-pounds to assess their utility in the fight against COVID-19; screening existing compound libraries in-house or with partners to see if they can be repurposed; accelerating tri-als for potentially effective medicine or vaccine candidates; and in some cases rapidly accelerating in-house research and development to discover new treatments or vaccine agents and develop diagnostics tests.3,4 Pharmaceutical companies are collaborating with each other in some of these efforts and participating in global RandD partnerships (such as the Innovative Medicines Initiative effort to accel-erate the development of potential therapies for COVID-19) and supporting national efforts to expand diagnosis and testing capacity and ensure affordable and ready access to potential solutions.3,5,6 The primary purpose of such innovation is to benefit patients and wider population health. Although there are also reputational benefits from involvement that can be realised across the industry, there are likely to be rela-tively few companies that are ‘commercial’ winners. Those who might gain substantial revenues will be under pres-sure not to be seen as profiting from the pandemic. In the United Kingdom for example, GSK has stated that it does not expect to profit from its COVID-19 related activities and that any gains will be invested in supporting research and long-term pandemic preparedness, as well as in developing products that would be affordable in the world’s poorest countries.7 Similarly, in the United States AbbVie has waived intellectual property rights for an existing com-bination product that is being tested for therapeutic poten-tial against COVID-19, which would support affordability and allow for a supply of generics.8,9 Johnson and Johnson has stated that its potential vaccine – which is expected to begin trials – will be available on a not-for-profit basis during the pandemic.10 Pharma is mobilising substantial efforts to rise to the COVID-19 challenge at hand. However, we need to consider how pharmaceutical innovation for responding to emerging infectious diseases can best be enabled beyond the current crisis. Many public health threats (including those associated with other infectious diseases, bioterror-ism agents and antimicrobial resistance) are urgently in need of pharmaceutical innovation, even if their impacts are not as visible to society as COVID-19 is in the imme-diate term. The pharmaceutical industry has responded to previous public health emergencies associated with infec-tious disease in recent times – for example those associated with Ebola and Zika outbreaks.11 However, it has done so to a lesser scale than for COVID-19 and with contribu-tions from fewer companies. Similarly, levels of activity in response to the threat of antimicrobial resistance are still low.12 There are important policy questions as to whether – and how – industry could engage with such public health threats to an even greater extent under improved innova-tion conditions. Bioterror causes extinction---early response key Farmer 17 (“Bioterrorism could kill more people than nuclear war, Bill Gates to warn world leaders” http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/02/17/biological-terrorism-could-kill-people-nuclear-attacks-bill/) Bioterrorists could one day kill hundreds of millions of people in an attack more deadly than nuclear war, Bill Gates will warn world leaders. Rapid advances in genetic engineering have opened the door for small terrorism groups to tailor and easily turn biological viruses into weapons. A resulting disease pandemic is currently one of the most deadly threats faced by the world, he believes, yet governments are complacent about the scale of the risk. Speaking ahead of an address to the Munich Security Conference, the richest man in the world said that while governments are concerned with the proliferation of nuclear and chemical weapons, they are overlooking the threat of biological warfare. Mr Gates, whose charitable foundationis funding research into quickly spotting outbreaks and speeding up vaccine production, said the defence and security establishment “have not been following biology and I’m here to bring them a little bit of bad news”. Mr Gates will today (Saturday) tell an audience of international leaders and senior officers that the world’s next deadly pandemic “could originate on the computer screen of a terrorist”. He told the Telegraph: “Natural epidemics can be extremely large. Intentionally caused epidemics, bioterrorism, would be the largest of all. “With nuclear weapons, you’d think you would probably stop after killing 100million. Smallpox won’t stop. Because the population is naïve, and there are no real preparations. That, if it got out and spread, would be a larger number.” He said developments in genetic engineering were proceeding at a “mind-blowing rate”. Biological warfare ambitions once limited to a handful of nation states are now open to small groups with limited resources and skills. He said: “They make it much easier for a non-state person. It doesn’t take much biology expertise nowadays to assemble a smallpox virus. Biology is making it way easier to create these things.” The increasingly common use of gene editing technology would make it difficult to spot any potential terrorist conspiracy. Technologies which have made it easy to read DNA sequences and tinker with them to rewrite or tweak genes have many legitimate uses. He said: “It’s not like when someone says, ‘Hey I’d like some Plutonium’ and you start saying ‘Hmmm.. I wonder why he wants Plutonium?’” Mr Gates said the potential death toll from a disease outbreak could be higher than other threats such as climate change or nuclear war. He said: “This is like earthquakes, you should think in order of magnitudes. If you can kill 10 people that’s a one, 100 people that’s a two... Bioterrorism is the thing that can give you not just sixes, but sevens, eights and nines. “With nuclear war, once you have got a six, or a seven, or eight, you’d think it would probably stop. With bioterrorism it’s just unbounded if you are not there to stop the spread of it.” By tailoring the genes of a virus, it would be possible to manipulate its ability to spread and its ability to harm people. Mr Gates said one of the most potentially deadly outbreaks could involve the humble flu virus. It would be relatively easy to engineer a new flu strain combining qualities from varieties that spread like wildfire with varieties that were deadly. The last time that happened naturally was the 1918 Spanish Influenza pandemic, which went on to kill more than 50 million people – or nearly three times the death toll from the First World War. By comparison, the recent Ebola outbreak in West Africa which killed just over 11,000 was “a Richter Scale three, it’s a nothing,” he said. But despite the potential, the founder of Microsoft said that world leaders and their militaries could not see beyond the more recognised risks. He said: “Should the world be serious about this? It is somewhat serious about normal classic warfare and nuclear warfare, but today it is not very serious about bio-defence or natural epidemics.” He went on: “They do tend to say ‘How easy is it to get fissile material and how accurate are the plans out on the internet for dirty bombs, plutonium bombs and hydrogen bombs?’ “They have some people that do that. What I am suggesting is that the number of people that look at bio-defence is worth increasing.” Whether naturally occurring, or deliberately started, it is almost certain that a highly lethal global pandemic will occur within our lifetimes, he believes. But the good news for those contemplating the potential damage is that the same biotechnology can prevent epidemics spreading out of control. Mr Gates will say in his speech that most of the things needed to protect against a naturally occurring pandemic are the same things needed to prepare for an intentional biological attack. Nations must amass an arsenal of new weapons to fight such a disease outbreak, including vaccines, drugs and diagnostic techniques. Being able to develop a vaccine as soon as possible against a new outbreak is particularly important and could save huge numbers of lives, scientists working at his foundation believe.
Blocks AT Innovation Patents are good---key to innovation Laxminarayan 1, Ramanan Laxminarayan directs the Center for Disease Dynamics, Economics and Policy. He is also a Senior Research Scholar and Lecturer at Princeton University. - See more at: http://www.cddep.org/profile/ramanan_laxminarayan#sthash.YqaghohJ.dpuf Spring 2001 http://www.rff.org/files/sharepoint/WorkImages/Download/RFF-Resources-143-antibiotic.pdf The Role of Patents Firms that manufacture antibiotics face conflicting incentives with respect to resistance. On the one hand, bacterial resistance to a product can reduce the demand for that product. On the other hand, the resistance makes old drugs obsolete and can therefore encourage investment in new antibiotics. Pharmaceutical firms are driven to maximize profits during the course of the drug’s effective patent life—the period of time between obtaining regulatory approval for the antibiotic and the expiration of product and process patents to manufacture the drug. Given the paucity of tools at the policymaker’s disposal, the use of patents to influence antibiotic use may be worth considering. A longer effective patent life could increase incentives for a company to minimize resistance, since the company would enjoy a longer period of monopoly benefits from its antibiotic’s effectiveness. Patent breadth is another critical consideration. When resistance is significant, other things being equal, it may be prudent to assign broad patents that cover an entire class of antibiotics rather than a single antibiotic. In such a situation, the benefits of preserving effectiveness could outweigh the cost to society of greater monopoly power associated with broader patents. Broad patents may prevent many firms from competing inefficiently for the same pool of effectiveness embodied in a class of antibiotics, while providing an incentive to develop new antibiotics. TRIPs encourages innovation Margaret Kyle and Yi Qian 14, Kyle is Professor of Economics. Center for Industrial Economics, “INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY RIGHTS AND ACCESS TO INNOVATION: EVIDENCE FROM TRIPS,” https://www.nber.org/papers/w20799 The TRIPS Agreement, which generally strengthened and harmonized IPRs across countries, does appear to have changed market outcomes. On average, access to new pharmaceuticals has at least not decreased following TRIPS. Point estimates show an increase in the probability of new product launch and quantities sold, although differences are not always statistically significant. While patents are also associated with higher prices, there is some evidence that prices in poorer countries have fallen, though not to the level of off-patent products. However, the effect of IPRs may be confounded by other policy changes. It is certainly possible that in the absence of countervailing policies, stronger IPRs would have resulted in a larger increase in prices. It is also likely that IPRs have very different implications for countries with a large generic sector (e.g., India) than for most of the developing countries we examine. Nevertheless, we believe the results should be considered relatively good news about the relationship between IPRs and access to innovative medicines, although considerable work remains to improve the latter. Longer patents are net-good, downsides aren’t outweighed by the benefits David Abrams 9, Assistant Professor of Law, University of Pennsylvania Law School, “Did TRIPS Spur Innovation? An Empirical Analysis of Patent Duration and Incentives to Innovate,” https://scholarship.law.upenn.edu/faculty_scholarship/274/ Let us consider the increase in value of innovation due to a one– standard-deviation increase in patent-term extension. The standard deviation of the term extension (by class) is 114 days (see Figure 6 for the full distribution). Multiplying this by the coefficient above, we find that a one-standard-deviation increase in patent term extension is associated with an increase of about seven monthly patents. From a mean of approximately thirty-four, in percentage terms, this comes to a twenty-one percent increase in value of innovation—a very substantial increase. It seems unlikely that the deadweight loss due to exclusive rights would be enough to offset this considerable gain, suggesting that an increase in patent terms could lead to greater welfare.