Ac - Workers AC NC - Healthcare Workers PIC Wokers K Went for PIC
Alta Silver and Black
2
Opponent: Peninsula SM | Judge: Justin Fang
AC Healthcare workers NC - Pandmemic PIC and Econ DA Went for the PIC
Harvard Westlake
1
Opponent: Portola AS | Judge: Andrew Gong
AC Space Debris NC Legal Counter Plan Mining DA
Harvard Westlake
1
Opponent: Portola AS | Judge: Andrew Gong
AC Asteroid Mining NC Asteroid Mining Legal CP
Heart of Texas
3
Opponent: Little Rock XJ | Judge: Devin Hernandez
AC- Affropesimism NC - Topicality
USC
4
Opponent: Able2Shine MC | Judge: Ribera, Claudia
1ar Earth Conscious Aff Nr Automation and backlash turn and PIC
USC
2
Opponent: Harvard Westlaks EJ | Judge: Dosch, David
ac - climate change nr - t-shell police pic econ DA
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0-Contact Info
Tournament: not applicable | Round: Finals | Opponent: all | Judge: all Hi here is my contact info Please email me at sydneykarlan26@marlborough.org Thanks!
Considering the worsening climate change, in the future outer space might be our last Noah’s Ark. Now, humans must look to space as an opportunity to support growing resource requirements. Asteroids are rich in metals, which could be transported back to Earth. Unfortunately, the existing international legal framework discourages investments in the space economy. Once an enterprise invests billions of dollars in discovering and developing a mining site, it cannot claim any ownership because of the non-appropriation principle stipulated in Article 2 of the Outer Space Treaty (OST). Thus, other entities could legally access and exploit the same resource without any participation in the initial financial investment, increasing the risk of potential conflict. Bearing this in mind, the question arises, which legal regime could ensure effective allocation of resources, avoiding a chaotic space race to acquire valuable assets? The aim of this research is to argue that the first two articles of OST should be amended, to set up an international legal trust system which would guarantee different kinds of rights, dependently on the nature of the celestial body. E.g., property rights could be preferable to a lease over asteroids, as they could be exploited to their disappearance. This proposed system would be led by the United Nations Office for Outer Space Affairs (UNOOSA), as the main trustee. The co-trustees would be the nations of the world. Prior to initiating any space activity, every entity would send a request to their national government. If all the legal parameters are respected, the nation would forward the operational request to the UNOOSA. In the case of acceptance, UNOOSA would record the permit on an international public registry. The country in which the company has been registered would investigate whether the activities of its national company are consistent with the permit. This would be the ordinary model. The extraordinary model would be when the applicant for the space activity is a state, then the trustee would be the UN. All lucrative activities would be subject to benefit-sharing. Finally, this research will demonstrate the valuable outcome of the International Legal Trust System and its advantages for all humankind. Private companies would rely on property rights, while the benefit-sharing could be used to finance the 17 Sustainable Development Goals adopted by the UN in 2015, which address peace, climate change, inequalities and poverty.
1/15/22
JF - Mining DA
Tournament: Harvard Westlake | Round: 1 | Opponent: Portola AS | Judge: Andrew Gong Asteroid Mining DA New V The private sector is essential for asteroid mining – competition is key and government development is not effective, efficient, or cheap enough. Thiessen 21: Marc Thiessen, 6-1, 21, Washington Post, Opinion: SpaceX’s success is one small step for man, one giant leap for capitalism, https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/06/01/spacexs-success-is-one-small-step-man-one-giant-leap-capitalism/ It was one small step for man, one giant leap for capitalism. Only three countries have ever launched human beings into orbit. This past weekend, SpaceX became the first private company ever to do so, when it sent its Crew Dragon capsule into space aboard its Falcon 9 rocket and docked with the International Space Station. This was accomplished by a company Elon Musk started in 2002 in a California strip mall warehouse with just a dozen employees and a mariachi band. At a time when our nation is debating the merits of socialism, SpaceX has given us an incredible testament to the power of American free enterprise. While the left is advocating unprecedented government intervention in almost every sector of the U.S. economy, from health care to energy, today Americans are celebrating the successful privatization of space travel. If you want to see the difference between what government and private enterprise can do, consider: It took a private company to give us the first space vehicle with touch-screen controls instead of antiquated knobs and buttons. It took a private company to give us a capsule that can fly entirely autonomously from launch to landing — including docking — without any participation by its human crew. It also took a private company to invent a reusable rocket that can not only take off but land as well. When the Apollo 11 crew reached the moon on July 20, 1969, Neil Armstrong declared “the Eagle has landed.” On Saturday, SpaceX was able to declare that the Falcon had landed when its rocket settled down on a barge in the Atlantic Ocean — ready to be used again. That last development will save the taxpayers incredible amounts of money. The cost to NASA for launching a man into space on the space shuttle orbiter was $170 million per seat, compared with just $60 million to $67 million on the Dragon capsule. The cost for the space shuttle to send a kilogram of cargo into to space was $54,500; with the Falcon rocket, the cost is just $2,720 — a decrease of 95 percent. And while the space shuttle cost $27.4 billion to develop, the Crew Dragon was designed and built for just $1.7 billion — making it the lowest-cost spacecraft developed in six decades. SpaceX did it in six years — far faster than the time it took to develop the space shuttle. The private sector does it better, cheaper, faster and more efficiently than government. Why? Competition. Today, SpaceX has to compete with a constellation of private companies — including legacy aerospace firms such as Orbital ATK and United Launch Alliance and innovative start-ups such as Blue Origin (which is designing a Mars lander and whose owner, Jeff Bezos, also owns The Post) and Virgin Orbit (which is developing rockets than can launch satellites into space from the underside of a 747, avoiding the kinds of weather that delayed the Dragon launch). In the race to put the first privately launched man into orbit, upstart SpaceX had to beat aerospace behemoth Boeing and its Starliner capsule to the punch. It did so — for more than $1 billion less than its competitor. That spirit of competition and innovation will revolutionize space travel in the years ahead. Indeed, Musk has his sights set far beyond Earth orbit. Already, SpaceX is working on a much larger version of the Falcon 9 reusable rocket called Super Heavy that will carry a deep-space capsule named Starship capable of carrying up to 100 people to the moon and eventually to Mars. Musk’s goal — the reason he founded SpaceX — is to colonize Mars and make humanity a multiplanetary species. He has set a goal of founding a million-person city on Mars by 2050 complete with iron foundries and pizza joints. Can it be done? Who knows. But this much is certain: Private-sector innovation is opening the door to a new era of space exploration. Wouldn’t it be ironic if, just as capitalism is allowing us to explore the farthest reaches of our solar system, Americans decided to embrace socialism back here on Earth?
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 FOR CELESTIAL PROPERTY RIGHTS? ¶ The fundamental principle of "non-appropriation" upon which the international law of outer space is based stems from the desire of the international community to ensure that outer space remains an area beyond the jurisdiction of any state(s). Similar ideals emerge from UNCLOS (in relation to the High Seas) as well as the Antarctic Treaty, 42 although in the case of the latter treaty, it was finalised after a number of claims of sovereignty had already been made by various States and therefore was structured to "postpone" rather than prejudice or renounce those previously asserted claims.43 In the case of outer space, its exploitation and use is expressed in Article I of the Outer Space Treaty to be "the province of all mankind," a term whose meaning is not entirely clear but has been interpreted by most commentators as evincing the desire to ensure that any State is free to engage in space activities without reference to any sovereign claims of other States. This freedom is reinforced by other parts of the same Article and is repeated in the Moon Agreement (which also applies to "other celestial bodies within the solar system, other than the earth")." Even though both the scope for space activities and the number of private participants have expanded significantly since these treaties were finalised, it has still been suggested that the nonappropriation principle constitutes "an absolute barrier in the realization of every kind of space activity., 4 ' The amount of capital expenditure required to research, scope, trial, and implement a new space activity is significant. To bring this activity to the point where it can represent a viable "stand alone" commercial venture takes many years and almost limitless funding. From the perspective of a private enterprise contemplating such an activity, it would quite obviously be an important element in its decision to devote resources to this activity that it is able to secure the highest degree of legal rights in order to protect its investment. Security of patent and other intellectual property rights, for example, are vital prerequisites for private enterprise research activity on the ISS, and these rights are specifically addressed by the ISS Agreement between the partners to the project and were applicable to the experiments undertaken by Mark Shuttleworth when he was 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? We’re only just beginning to guess. Asterank, a service that keeps track of some 6,000 asteroids in NASA’s database, prices out the estimated mineral content in each one in the current world market. More than 500 are listed as “$100 trillion.” The estimated profit on just the top 10 asteroids judged “most cost effective” — that is, the easiest to reach and to mine, subtracting rocket fuel and other operating costs, is around $1.5 trillion.¶ Is it ours for the taking? Well, here’s the thing — we’re taking it already, and have been doing so since we started mining metals thousands of years ago. Asteroid strikes are the only reason rare metals exist in the Earth’s crust; the native ones were all sucked into our planet’s merciless iron core millions of years ago. Why not go to the source?¶ As a side project, space mining can grab water from the rocks and comets — water which, with a little processing makes rocket fuel. Which in turn makes even more currently unimaginable space operations possible, including ones that could give the planet all the energy it needs to avert climate catastrophe. Cislunar space — the bit around us and the moon, the local neighborhood, basically — is about to get very interesting.¶ It’s hard, even for the most asteroid-minded visionaries, to truly believe the full scope of this future space economy right now. Just as hard as it would have been in 1945, when an engineer named Vannevar Bush first proposed a vast library of shared knowledge that people the world over would access via personal computers, to see that mushroom into a global network of streaming movies and grandmas posting photos and trolls and spies who move the needle on presidential elections. ¶ No technology’s pioneer can predict its second-order effects.¶ The space vision thing is particularly difficult in 2019. Not only do we have plenty of urgent problems with democracy and justice to keep us occupied, but the only two companies on the planet to have gone public with asteroid-mining business plans, startups that seemed to be going strong and had launched satellites already, were just bought by larger companies that are, shall we say, less comfortable executing on long-term visions.¶ Planetary Resources was founded in 2012 in a blaze of publicity. Its funding came from, among others, Larry Page, Eric Schmidt, Ross Perot, and the country of Luxembourg. It had inked an orbital launch deal with Virgin Galactic. And it was sold last October to a blockchain software company. (To 21st century readers, this paragraph would look like I’m playing tech world mad libs.)¶ In January, the other company, Deep Space Industries, also partly funded by Luxembourg (way to get in the space race, Luxembourg!), was sold to Bradford Space, owned by a U.S. investment group called the American Industrial Acquisition Corporation. Maybe these new overlords plan on continuing their acquisitions' asteroid mining endeavors rather than stripping the companies for parts. Both companies have been notably silent on the subject. “The asteroid mining bubble has burst,” declared The Space Review, one of the few online publications to even pay attention.¶ That’s also to be expected. After all, anyone trying to build Google in 1945 would go bankrupt. Just as the internet needed a half-dozen major leaps forward in computing before it could even exist, space industry needs its launch infrastructure.¶ Currently, the world’s richest person and its most well-known entrepreneur, Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk, respectively, are working on the relatively cheap reusable rockets asteroid pioneers will need. (As I was writing this, Bezos announced in an email blast that one of his New Shepherd rockets had flown to space and back five times like it was nothing, delivering 38 payloads for various customers while remaining entirely intact.) ¶ Meanwhile, quietly, Earth’s scientists are laying the groundwork of research the space economy needs. Japan’s Hayabusa 2 spacecraft has been in orbit around asteroid Ryugu for the last year and a half, learning everything it can. (Ryugu, worth $30 billion according to Asterank, is the website's #1 most cost-effective target.) The craft dropped tiny hopping robot rovers and a small bomb on its target; pictures of the small crater that resulted were released afterwards.¶ Officially, the mission is to help us figure out how the solar system formed. Unofficially, it will help us understand whether all those useful metals clump together at the heart of an asteroid, as some theorize. If so, it’s game on for asteroid prospectors. If not, we can still get at the metals with other techniques, such as optical mining (which basically involves sticking an asteroid in a bag and drilling with sunlight; sounds nuts to us, but NASA has proved it in the lab). It’ll just take more time.¶ Effectively, we’ve just made our first mark at the base of the first space mineshaft. And there’s more to come in 2020 when Hayabusa 2 returns to Earth bearing samples. If its buckets of sand contain a modicum of gold dust, tiny chunks of platinum or pebbles of compressed carbon — aka diamonds — then the Duchy of Luxembourg won’t be the only deep-pocketed investor to sit up and take notice.¶ The possibility of private missions to asteroids, with or without a human crew, is almost here. The next step in the process that takes us from here to where you are? Tell us an inspiring story about it, one that makes people believe, and start to imagine themselves mining in space. How would you explain the world-changing nature of the internet to 1945? How would you persuade them that there was gold to be mined in Vannevar Bush’s idea? You’d let the new economy and its benefits play out in the form of a novel.¶ As Hayabusa dropped a bomb on Ryugu, Daniel Suarez was making the exact same asteroid the target of his fiction. Suarez is a tech consultant and developer turned New York Times bestselling author. His novels thus far have been techno-thrillers: his debut, Daemon, a novel of Silicon Valley’s worst nightmare, AI run rampant, made more than a million dollars.¶ So it was a telling shift in cultural mood that Suarez’s latest thriller is also a very in-depth description of — and thinly-disguised advocacy for — asteroid mining. In Delta-v, published in April, a billionaire in the 2030s named Nathan Joyce recruits a team of adventurers who know nothing about space — a world-renowned cave-diver, a world-renowned mountaineer — for the first crewed asteroid mission.¶ Elon Musk fans might expect this to be Joyce’s tale, but he soon fades into the background. The asteroid-nauts are the true heroes of Delta-v. Not only are they offered a massive payday — $6 million each for four years’ work — they also have agency in key decisions in the distant enterprise. Suarez deliberately based them on present-day heroes. The mission is essential, Joyce declares, to save Earth from its major problems. First of all, the fictional billionaire wheels in a fictional Nobel economist to demonstrate the actual truth that the entire global economy is sitting on a mountain of debt. It has to keep growing or it will implode, so we might as well take the majority of the industrial growth off-world where it can’t do any more harm to the biosphere.¶ Secondly, there’s the climate change fix. Suarez sees asteroid mining as the only way we’re going to build solar power satellites. Which, as you probably know, is a form of uninterrupted solar power collection that is theoretically more effective, inch for inch, than any solar panels on Earth at high noon, but operating 24/7. (In space, basically, it’s always double high noon). ¶ The power collected is beamed back to large receptors on Earth with large, low-power microwaves, which researchers think will be harmless enough to let humans and animals pass through the beam. A space solar power array like the one China is said to be working on could reliably supply 2,000 gigawatts — or over 1,000 times more power than the largest solar farm currently in existence. ¶ “We're looking at a 20-year window to completely replace human civilization's power infrastructure,” Suarez told me, citing the report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change on the coming catastrophe. Solar satellite technology “has existed since the 1970s. What we were missing is millions of tons of construction materials in orbit. Asteroid mining can place it there.”¶ The Earth-centric early 21st century can’t really wrap its brain around this, but the idea is not to bring all that building material and precious metals down into our gravity well. Far better to create a whole new commodities exchange in space. You mine the useful stuff of asteroids both near to Earth and far, thousands of them taking less energy to reach than the moon. That’s something else we’re still grasping, how relatively easy it is to ship stuff in zero-G environments. ¶ Robot craft can move 10-meter boulders like they’re nothing. You bring it all back to sell to companies that will refine and synthesize it in orbit for a myriad of purposes. Big pharma, to take one controversial industry, would benefit by taking its manufacturing off-world. The molecular structure of many chemicals grows better in microgravity.¶ The expectation is that a lot of these space businesses — and all the orbital infrastructure designed to support them — will be automated, controlled remotely via telepresence, and monitored by AI. But Suarez is adamant that thousands if not millions of actual human workers will thrive in the space economy, even as robots take their jobs in old industries back on Earth.¶ “Our initial expansion into space will most likely be unsettled and experimental. Human beings excel in such environments,” he says. “Humans can improvise and figure things out as we go. Robots must be purpose-built, and it's going to take time and experience for us to design and build them.”¶ Which is another way startups back on Earth will get rich in the new economy: designing and building those robots, the nearest thing to selling picks and shovels to prospectors in the space gold rush. Thousands of humans in space at any one time will also require the design and construction of stations that spin to create artificial gravity. Again, this isn’t a great stretch: Using centrifugal force to simulate gravity in space was first proposed by scientists in the 19th century. NASA has had workable designs for spinning cislunar habitats called O’Neill cylinders since the 1970s. We just haven’t funded them. ¶ But the trillionaires clearly will.¶ In short, Suarez has carefully laid out a vision of the orbital economy that offers something for everyone in our divided society. For Green New Deal Millennials, there’s the prospect of removing our reliance on fossil fuels at a stroke and literally lifting dirty industries off the face of the planet. For libertarians and other rugged individualists, there’s a whole new frontier to be developed, largely beyond the reach of government. ¶ For those who worry about asteroids that could wipe out civilization — though luckily, this isn't likely to happen any time soon — here is a way for humanity to get proficient in moving them out of the way, fast. Indeed, the National Space Society has offered a proposal to capture the asteroid Aphosis (which is set to miss Earth in the year 2029, but not by a very comfortable margin), keep it in orbit, and turn it into 150 small solar-power satellites, as a proof of concept. ¶ For the woke folks who care about the bloody history of diamond production, there’s the likelihood that space mining would wipe out Earth’s entire diamond industry. “They will be found in quantities unattainable on Earth,” claims Suarez, with good reason. We are starting to discover that there is more crystalized carbon in the cosmos than we ever suspected. Astronomers have identified one distant planet made entirely of diamond; there may be more, but they are, ironically, hard to see. ¶ We don’t have diamond planets in our solar system (and we can’t do interstellar missions), but we do have diamond-studded asteroids. Mine them for long enough and you will wear diamonds on the soles of your shoes.¶ For investors and entrepreneurs, there is the thrill of racing to be the first member of the four-comma club. (Neil deGrasse Tyson believes that the first trillionaire will be an asteroid mining mogul; Suarez isn’t sure whether they’ll be the first, but he suspects that asteroid mining “will mint more trillionaires than any industry in history.”) ¶ For the regular guy or gal with a 401K, there’ll be a fast-rising stock market — inflated not by financial shenanigans this time, but an actual increase in what the world counts as wealth.¶ For workers, there is the promise of sharing in the untold riches, both legally and otherwise. It would be hard to stop miners attaining mineral wealth beyond their paycheck, under the table, when your bosses are millions of miles away. Then there’s the likelihood of rapid advancement in this new economy, where the miners fast gain the knowledge necessary to become moguls.¶ “After several tours in space working for others, perhaps on six-month or year-long contracts, it's likely that some workers will partner to set up their own businesses there,” says Suarez. “Either serving the needs of increasing numbers of workers and businesses in space, marketing services to Earth, or launching asteroid mining startups themselves.” All in all, it’s starting to sound a damn sight more beneficial to the human race than the internet economy is. Not a moment too soon. I’ve written encouragingly about asteroid mining several times before, each time touting the massive potential wealth that seems likely to be made. And each time there’s been a sense of disquiet among my readers, a sense that we’re taking our rapacious capitalist ways and exploiting space.¶ Whereas the truth is, this is exactly the version of capitalism humanity has needed all along: the kind where there is no ecosystem to destroy, no marginalized group to make miserable. A safe, dead space where capitalism’s most enthusiastic pioneers can go nuts to their hearts’ content, so long as they clean up their space junk. ¶ (Space junk is a real problem in orbital space because it has thousands of vulnerable satellites clustered closely together around our little blue rock. The vast emptiness of cislunar space, not so much.)¶ And because they’re up there making all the wealth on their commodities market, we down here on Earth can certainly afford to focus less on growing our stock market. Maybe even, whisper it low, we can afford a fully functioning social safety net, plus free healthcare and free education for everyone on the planet.¶ It’s also clearly the area where we should have focused space exploration all along. If we settle on Mars, we may disturb as-yet-undiscovered native bacteria — and as the character Nathan Joyce shouts at a group of “Mars-obsessed” entrepreneurs in Delta-V, Mars is basically filled with toxic sand and is thus looking increasingly impossible to colonize. (Sorry, Mark Watney from The Martian, those potatoes would 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 get very bad. In 2015, a study in the Journal of Mathematical Biology pointed out that if the world’s oceans kept warming, by 2100 they might become hot enough to “stop oxygen production by phyto-plankton by disrupting the process of photosynthesis.” Given that two-thirds of the Earth’s oxygen comes from phytoplankton, that would “likely result in the mass mortality of animals and humans.” A year later, above the Arctic Circle, in Siberia, a heat wave thawed a reindeer carcass that had been trapped in the permafrost. The exposed body released anthrax into nearby water and soil, infecting two thousand reindeer grazing nearby, and they in turn infected some humans; a twelve-year-old boy died. As it turns out, permafrost is a “very good preserver of microbes and viruses, because it is cold, there is no oxygen, and it is dark” — scientists have managed to revive an eight-million-year-old bacterium they found beneath the surface of a glacier. Researchers believe there are fragments of the Spanish flu virus, smallpox, and bubonic plague buried in Siberia and Alaska. Or consider this: as ice sheets melt, they take weight off land, and that can trigger earthquakes — seismic activity is already increasing in Greenland and Alaska. Meanwhile, the added weight of the new seawater starts to bend the Earth’s crust. “That will give you a massive increase in volcanic activity. It’ll activate faults to create earthquakes, submarine landslides, tsunamis, the whole lot,” explained the director of University College London’s Hazard Centre. Such a landslide happened in Scandinavia about eight thousand years ago, as the last Ice Age retreated and a Kentucky-size section of Norway’s continental shelf gave way, “plummeting down to the abyssal plain and creating a series of titanic waves that roared forth with a vengeance,” wiping all signs of life from coastal Norway to Greenland and “drowning the Wales-sized landmass that once connected Britain to the Netherlands, Denmark, and Germany.” When the waves hit the Shetlands, they were sixty-five feet high. There’s even this: if we keep raising carbon dioxide levels, we may not be able to think straight anymore. At a thousand parts per million (which is within the realm of possibility for 2100), human cognitive ability falls 21 percent. “The largest effects were seen for Crisis Response, Information Usage, and Strategy,” a Harvard study reported, which is too bad, as those skills are what we seem to need most. I could, in other words, do my best to scare you silly. I’m not opposed on principle — changing something as fundamental as the composition of the atmosphere, and hence the heat balance of the planet, is certain to trigger all manner of horror, and we shouldn’t shy away from it. The dramatic uncertainty that lies ahead may be the most frightening development of all; the physical world is going from backdrop to foreground. (It’s like the contrast between politics in the old days, when you could forget about Washington for weeks at a time, and politics in the Trump era, when the president is always jumping out from behind a tree to yell at you.) But let’s try to occupy ourselves with the most likely scenarios, because they are more than disturbing enough. Long before we get to tidal waves or smallpox, long before we choke to death or stop thinking clearly, we will need to concentrate on the most mundane and basic facts: everyone needs to eat every day, and an awful lot of us live near the ocean. FOOD SUPPLY first. We’ve had an amazing run since the end of World War II, with crop yields growing fast enough to keep ahead of a fast-rising population. It’s come at great human cost — displaced peasant farmers fill many of the planet’s vast slums — but in terms of sheer volume, the Green Revolution’s fertilizers, pesticides, and machinery managed to push output sharply upward. That climb, however, now seems to be running into the brute facts of heat and drought. There are studies to demonstrate the dire effects of warming on coffee, cacao, chickpeas, and champagne, but it is cereals that we really need to worry about, given that they supply most of the planet’s calories: corn, wheat, and rice all evolved as crops in the climate of the last ten thousand years, and though plant breeders can change them, there are limits to those changes. You can move a person from Hanoi to Edmonton, and she might decide to open a Vietnamese restaurant. But if you move a rice plant, it will die. A 2017 study in Australia, home to some of the world’s highest-tech farming, found that “wheat productivity has flatlined as a direct result of climate change.” After tripling between 1900 and 1990, wheat yields had stagnated since, as temperatures increased a degree and rainfall declined by nearly a third. “The chance of that just being variable climate without the underlying factor of climate change is less than one in a hundred billion,” the researchers said, and it meant that despite all the expensive new technology farmers kept introducing, “they have succeeded only in standing still, not in moving forward.” Assuming the same trends continued, yields would actually start to decline inside of two decades, they reported. In June 2018, researchers found that a two-degree Celsius rise in temperature — which, recall, is what the Paris accords are now aiming for — could cut U.S. corn yields by 18 percent. A four-degree increase — which is where our current trajectory will take us — would cut the crop almost in half. The United States is the world’s largest producer of corn, which in turn is the planet’s most widely grown crop. Corn is vulnerable because even a week of high temperatures at the key moment can keep it from fertilizing. (“You only get one chance to pollinate a quadrillion kernels of corn,” the head of a commodity consulting firm explained.) But even the hardiest crops are susceptible. Sorghum, for instance, which is a staple for half a billion humans, is particularly hardy in dry conditions because it has big, fibrous roots that reach far down into the earth. Even it has limits, though, and they are being reached. Thirty years of data from the American Midwest show that heat waves affect the “vapor pressure deficit,” the difference between the water vapor in the sorghum leaf’s interior and that in the surrounding air. Hotter weather means the sorghum releases more moisture into the atmosphere. Warm the planet’s temperature by two degrees Celsius — which is, again, now the world’s goal — and sorghum yields drop 17 percent. Warm it five degrees Celsius (nine degrees Fahrenheit), and yields drop almost 60 percent. It’s hard to imagine a topic duller than sorghum yields. It’s the precise opposite of clickbait. But people have to eat; in the human game, the single most important question is probably “What’s for dinner?” And when the answer is “Not much,” things deteriorate fast. In 2010 a severe heat wave hit Russia, and it wrecked the grain harvest, which led the Kremlin to ban exports. The global price of wheat spiked, and that helped trigger the Arab Spring — Egypt at the time was the largest wheat importer on the planet. That experience set academics and insurers to work gaming out what the next food shock might look like. In 2017 one team imagined a vigorous El Niño, with the attendant floods and droughts — for a season, in their scenario, corn and soy yields declined by 10 percent, and wheat and rice by 7 percent. The result was chaos: “quadrupled commodity prices, civil unrest, significant negative humanitarian consequences . . . Food riots break out in urban areas across the Middle East, North Africa, and Latin America. The euro weakens and the main European stock markets lose ten percent.” At about the same time, a team of British researchers released a study demonstrating that even if you can grow plenty of food, the transportation system that distributes it runs through just fourteen major choke-points, and those are vulnerable to — you guessed it — massive disruption from climate change. For instance, U.S. rivers and canals carry a third of the world’s corn and soy, and they’ve been frequently shut down or crimped by flooding and drought in recent years. Brazil accounts for 17 percent of the world’s grain exports, but heavy rainfall in 2017 stranded three thousand trucks. “It’s the glide path to a perfect storm,” said one of the report’s authors. Five weeks after that, another report raised an even deeper question. What if you can figure out how to grow plenty of food, and you can figure out how to guarantee its distribution, but the food itself has lost much of its value? The paper, in the journal Environmental Research, said that rising carbon dioxide levels, by speeding plant growth, seem to have reduced the amount of protein in basic staple crops, a finding so startling that, for many years, agronomists had overlooked hints that it was happening. But it seems to be true: when researchers grow grain at the carbon dioxide levels we expect for later this century, they find that minerals such as calcium and iron drop by 8 percent, and protein by about the same amount. In the developing world, where people rely on plants for their protein, that means huge reductions in nutrition: India alone could lose 5 percent of the protein in its total diet, putting 53 million people at new risk for protein deficiency. The loss of zinc, essential for maternal and infant health, could endanger 138 million people around the world. In 2018, rice researchers found “significantly less protein” when they grew eighteen varieties of rice in high–carbon dioxide test plots. “The idea that food became less nutritious was a surprise,” said one researcher. “It’s not intuitive. But I think we should continue to expect surprises. We are completely altering the biophysical conditions that underpin our food system.” And not just ours. People don’t depend on goldenrod, for instance, but bees do. When scientists looked at samples of goldenrod in the Smithsonian that dated back to 1842, they found that the protein content of its pollen had “declined by a third since the industrial revolution — and the change closely tracks with the rise in carbon dioxide.” Bees help crops, obviously, so that’s scary news. But in August 2018, a massive new study found something just as frightening: crop pests were thriving in the new heat. “It gets better and better for them,” said one University of Colorado researcher. Even if we hit the UN target of limiting temperature rise to two degrees Celsius, pests should cut wheat yields by 46 percent, corn by 31 percent, and rice by 19 percent. “Warmer temperatures accelerate the metabolism of insect pests like aphids and corn borers at a predictable rate,” the researchers found. “That makes them hungrier, and warmer temperatures also speed up their reproduction.” Even fossilized plants from fifty million years ago make the point: “Plant damage from insects correlated with rising and falling temperatures, reaching a maximum during the warmest periods.” An asteroid collision would ensure extinction – would fundamentally alter the biosphere, don’t underestimate its risk. Hudson 19 Wesley Hudson ’19, news reporter for Express, “Asteroid alert: NASA warning as kilometre long space rock set to skim Earth at 25,000mph”, 8/28/19, Express, https://www.express.co.uk/news/science/1170826/asteroid-news-NASA-latest-space-rock-asteroid-1998-HL1-earth-danger-apocalypse AN ASTEROID almost a kilometre wide is currently barreling through space at more than 25,000mph and is due to skim the earth towards the end of October. NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) claim the space rock will shoot past the earth within a “close” proximity of the planet in the early hours of October 26. The asteroid, dubbed 1998 HL1, is a so-called Near-Earth Object (NEO) flying on a Close Approach Trajectory. NASA expects the 1998 HL1 to come flying by dangerously close around 1.21am BST (17.21pm PDT). The daunting moment will mark anther journey around the sun for the asteroid since it was discovered in 1998. The asteroid will be travelling at a staggering speed of over 25,000mph as it barrels past the Earth. The JPL predict the asteroid could be between 440m and 990m wide. At its largest an asteroid of this size is bigger than the tallest building in the world, the Burj Khalifa in Dubai. Even at it’s smallest, 1998 HL1 is still bigger than The Shard. Since it was discovered, 1998 HL1 has been seen up to 408 times. An NEO is an asteroid or comet which is on an orbital path intersecting that of the Earth's. This asteroid will miss the Earth by almost four million miles. If it were to strike the Earth, an asteroid of this size would cause catastrophic damage. The extinction of the dinosaurs in the Cretaceous-Tertiary event 65million years ago is famously believed to have been caused by a massive asteroid impact. The Chicxulub Crater in Mexico is the most commonly accepted point of impact, with the responsible body thought to be around 10km in diameter. A car-sized asteroid is estimated to hit the Earth roughly once a year. The majority of asteroids on track for the planet are usually burnt up as they enter the Earth's atmosphere. NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine has previously warned a potential asteroid collision is more likely then people realise. He said: "We have to make sure that people understand that this is not about Hollywood, it's not about the movies. "This is about ultimately protecting the only planet we know, right now, to host life - and that is the planet Earth.” NASA is currently in the process of developing the Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART). DART will test if it is possible to redirect asteroids that are threatening to impact with Earth. SpaceX chief Elon Musk had previously tweeted fears of a deadly collision that Earth was not prepared for. Mr Musk tweeted: “A big rock will hit Earth eventually and we currently have no defence.”
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 are a source of elevated impact risks of some NEOs with the Earth. The impact probability of an asteroid with Earth is a complex problem. First, the orbits of Earth and the asteroid should be close enough or even intersect; second, the Earth and asteroid should meet at the intersection at the same time. If these conditions are met, then one can assess how close the asteroid flies around the Earth at a given time, or whether it will hit the Earth. One must remember that each asteroid orbit comes with uncertainties and therefore, instead of a single accurate solution where the asteroid will hit the Earth or miss it, there is always a realm of possible solutions within the orbit uncertainties. The tangent plane to the asteroid’s trajectory at the time of impact, or close approach, is called a b-plane. At a given time of a predicted impact, all possible closest distances to the Earth of possible orbits create an area on the tangent plane. If the area contains the Earth, then the impact probability for that epoch is non-zero and in a simple approximation can be denoted as a ratio of an area of Earth cross section and the entire area with possible orbits going through the b-plane. It happens that a newly discovered NEO with a short arc that is coming very close to the Earth has a non-zero impact probability, because its orbit is highly uncertain and the area on the b-plane is very large. Typically, further observations improve the orbit, and the impact risk for a given epoch falls to zero. Some objects, however, have orbits with low orbital uncertainty, but still have non-zero impact probability, such as Bennu. The non-zero impact probability is computed for a given time in the future, but even if the orbit is known very well today, small perturbations from planets and non-gravitational forces increase the uncertainty for future impacts. That is why NASA’s Sentry is providing predictions only for the next 100 years. A close flyby of a spacecraft around an asteroid may improve the asteroid’s orbit significantly, however, it does not fully mitigate its impact in the future, due to the presence of keyholes (Chodas 1999)—small areas in space near Earth. Keyholes are specific for asteroids flying very close to the Earth and are rather small, from a few to hundreds of kilometers across. If the keyhole is hit during the NEO flyby, the orbit of the NEO becomes resonant with Earth and the NEO will return to Earth regularly, increasing its impact probability. Thus, in case of a very near Earth flyby, the orbit needs to be known with such precision (km) that keyhole avoidance is confirmed. NASA has even created the NEO Deflection App,1 where the public can try to change the orbit of a hypothesized NEO on direct impact trajectory. For Earth impact monitoring, the accuracy of orbits and orbital uncertainties is crucial and deserves more attention. The future of orbit determination and uncertainty mitigation will depend more and more on sophisticated software that will be able to handle orbital computation in detail; assess uncertainties and errors of measurements; coordinate a list of objects that are crucial for follow-up or orbit improvement, or even automatically point the telescopes in a network to observe those asteroids; measure their positions; and submit the data to MPC. This automated process is more or less implanted by several surveys (CSS, LCOGT) and agencies (ESA, MPC).
1/15/22
ND - Auto backlash and pic
Tournament: USC | Round: 4 | Opponent: Able2Shine MC | Judge: Ribera, Claudia Automation, Outsourcing, and Offshoring Turn 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 silver bullet solution exists that can solve our skills and earnings problems. Why? Because no single or dominant cause explains stagnating earnings or rising inequality in the US. Thus, simplistic “silver bullet” policies would likely be ineffective or even do more harm than good.¶ Some “silver bullets” are too scattershot. For instance, free college for all would shunt billions of dollars of tax revenue into subsidizing higher education for the wealthy at a time when federal budgets are already deeply in the red. A Universal Basic Income would be even more expensive, and could induce workers to stop seeking many new jobs that will be created over time.¶ Other proposals could harm those they aim to help or be ineffective. Imposing a uniform $15 federal minimum wage, even by 2025 (as many now propose), could induce employers to eliminate jobs for low-wage workers in already distressed communities. Proposals to expand unionism alone might generate only small increases, in light of employers’ ability of to resist collective bargaining by automating, relocating their facilities, or outsourcing work to other firms.¶ To sensibly raise wages and reduce inequality among American workers, we must recognize that a confluence of causes are at work, which requires a combination of evidence-based policy responses. The causes include labor market forces like technical change, globalization, and too few well-educated workers; they also include changes in labor institutions beyond weakened unions and a lack of worker “voice.” Indeed, a growing set of employer practices, such as outsourcing some activities to other firms (which is often called employment “fissuring”) likely contribute to weak outcomes as well. Such practices break the time-honored links between a firm’s profitability and its workers’ earnings, and diminish employer interest in training workers to make them more productive.¶ Without important, systematic policy changes, the earnings and employment of US workers – especially those without college degrees – will likely continue to deteriorate. More trade and automation in the form of robotics and artificial intelligence (AI) will almost certainly lead millions of workers to be displaced, while our failure to adequately fund public institutions of higher education and workforce services will limit workers’ readiness for new jobs that will be created. In other areas – including federal wage and hour laws, worker rights to representation on the job, and employer staffing arrangements – we are surely still moving in 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 accelerates, there are questions about who is most likely to lose jobs due to automation and what the overall future of the US economy looks like. These questions are worth asking—particularly after a pandemic that appears to have hastened the automation of many tasks in American industries. Yet research on automation has so far centered almost entirely on the presence of digitalization, automation-potential estimates, the relationship between technological change and macroeconomic conditions, and tech’s impact on inequality and wage divergence. Since technological change often is quite disruptive and spurs economic and political shocks, it is vital for researchers to study the attitudes of the individuals most vulnerable to new technological shifts. In doing so, researchers can gain a humanizing window into how these shifts—so crucial to capitalism’s advancement—are borne out in the beliefs, characteristics, and fears of the individuals most likely to experience disruption due to automation The results of my work offer an ominous window into how technological change may correspond with despair, radicalization, and democratic erosion. This study shows that the Americans whose occupations have the highest automation potential tend to have a dark and cynical view of politics, the economy, the media, and humanity. They comprise a traditional working class that is politically left-leaning on economic issues and slightly right-leaning on socio-cultural ones. Although they are moderately more likely to support Democrats, they are increasingly likely to support Republicans since 2000. These often-economically-vulnerable Americans are deeply pessimistic about the state of the world and politics; they also have a tendency to vote against their economic interests and become more authoritarian in their outlook. TECHNOLOGICAL CHANGE OFTEN CAUSES MORE INEQUALITY My work examines studies on the relationship between economic upheaval and radicalization, polarization, and revolution. In addition, I look at how technological change impacts inequality, wage divergence, and job polarization. Works from David Autor, Robert Allen, and Daron Acemoglu, in particular, have been able to illustrate the ways that digitalization can catalyze labor substitution, the erosion of the middle class, and greater income inequality. It seems clear that technological advancement can both stifle real wage growth for many workers while simultaneously increasing returns to capital by making labor more productive. This tends to benefit the owners of productive capital and some workers whose skills are complemented by the new technology. Moreover, when productivity tends to rise faster than wages, inequality increases almost by definition since new GDP gains accrue primarily amongst capital owners, rather than workers. Technological change can additionally lead to a hollowing out of middle-wage work, in turn producing a smaller middle class. Digitalization appears to be inducing dis-equalizing shifts through all of these mechanisms.
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 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. Pic Adopt earth based conscientization but do not affirm the resolution A just government ought to recognize an unconditional right of workers to strike
The aff provided no evidence/reasons why workers striking is good 2. Cannot bring up new contentions in the 1AR
12/12/21
ND - Econ DA
Tournament: Alta Silver and Black | Round: 2 | Opponent: Peninsula SM | Judge: Justin Fang NC Shell Repurposed Novice 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 their hiring last month, adding a solid 531,000 jobs, the most since July and a sign that the recovery from the pandemic recession is overcoming a virus-induced slowdown.¶ Friday’s report from the labor department also showed that the unemployment rate fell to 4.6 last month from 4.8 in September.¶ That is a comparatively low level though, still well above the pre-pandemic jobless rate of 3.5. And the job gains in August and September weren’t as weak as initially reported: The government increased its estimate of hiring for those two months by a hefty combined 235,000 jobs.¶ All told, the figures point to an economy that is steadily recovering from the pandemic recession, with healthy consumer spending prompting companies in nearly every industry to add workers. Though the effects of COVID-19 are still causing severe supply shortages, heightening inflation, and keeping many people out of the workforce, employers are finding gradually more success in filling near record-high job postings.¶ “This is the kind of recovery we can get when we are not sidelined by a surge in COVID cases,” said Nick Bunker, director of economic research at the employment website Indeed. “The speed of employment gains has faltered at times this year, but the underlying momentum of the U.S. labor market is quite clear.”¶ The better-than-expected jobs report was welcomed on Wall Street, where investors sent stocks further into record territory. The Dow Jones Industrial Average rose more than 200 points, or roughly 0.6, in Friday trading. Short-term Treasury yields rose as some investors moved up their expectations for when the Federal Reserve will begin raising interest rates. But longer-term yields dipped amid muted expectations for inflation over the long term.¶ By most barometers, the economic recovery appears solidly on track. Service companies in such areas as retail, banking, and warehousing have reported a sharp jump in sales. Sales of new and existing homes surged last month. And consumer confidence rose in October after three straight declines.¶ At the same time, though, the nation remains 4.2 million jobs short of the number it had before the pandemic flattened the economy in March 2020. The effects of the virus are still discouraging some people from traveling, shopping, eating out, and attending entertainment venues.¶ In October, the pickup in hiring was spread across nearly every major industry, with only government employers reporting a job loss, mostly in education. Shipping and warehousing companies added 54,000 jobs. The battered leisure and hospitality sector, which includes restaurants, bars, hotels, and entertainment venues, gained 164,000. Manufacturers, despite their struggles with supply shortages, added 60,000, the most since June 2020.¶ And employers, who have been competing to fill jobs from a diminished pool of applicants, raised wages at a solid clip: Average hourly pay jumped 4.9 in October compared with a year earlier, up from 4.6 the previous month. Even a gain that strong, though, is barely keeping pace with recent surges in consumer inflation.¶ Those price increases pose a headwind for the economy. Higher costs for food, heating oil, rents, and furniture have burdened millions of families. Prices rose 4.4 in September compared with 12 months earlier, the sharpest such jump in three decades.¶ Among people who are receiving pay raises, some of the biggest beneficiaries are the record-high number of people who have been quitting jobs to take new ones. One of them is Christian Frink, who has begun work as a business analyst at a digital consulting firm. In his new job, Mr. Frink of Ferndale, Michigan, helps business clients determine the technologies they need.¶ Earlier this year, Mr. Frink held a marketing job but left it because, like many people during COVID, he felt burnt out. He then worked for Door Dash during the spring and summer to earn money and searched for new work. Although employers were complaining about a labor shortage, several told him they wouldn’t hire anyone without a college degree. (Mr. Frink attended college but didn’t graduate.)¶ This past summer, Mr. Frink took coding classes at Tech Elevator, a boot camp, and then landed his new position. Now, he’s earning 35 more than in his previous job and says he’s “blown away” that he already has health care coverage and doesn’t have to wait months to become eligible.¶ Yet it isn’t only job-switchers who are receiving pay raises. Chad Leibundguth, a regional director in Tampa for the Robert Half staffing agency, said the job market is the strongest for workers he has seen in his 22-year career. Before the pandemic, he said, you could fill a customer service job in Florida for $14 an hour.¶ “Nowadays,” he said, “you’ve got to be closer to $20 an hour, because people have options.”¶ Job prospects are brightening even for people who have been out of work for prolonged periods. The number of long-term unemployed – people who have been jobless for six months or more – has fallen sharply in recent months, to 2.3 million in October from 4.2 million in April. That’s still double the pre-recession total. But it’s an encouraging sign because employers are typically wary of hiring people who haven’t held jobs for an extended time.¶ At the same time, disparities in the job market have persisted. The Black unemployment rate was unchanged in October at 7.9, for example, while for white workers, it fell to 4 from 4.2. The Latino jobless rate dropped to 5.9 from 6.3.¶ And though white-collar jobs in professional services like information technology, engineering, and architecture are nearly back to their pre-pandemic employment levels, leisure and hospitality still has 1.4 million fewer jobs.¶ Hari Ravichandran, CEO of digital security provider Aura in Boston, says his 800-person company has 140 positions open, mostly in software development.¶ Mr. Ravichandran is willing to hire remote workers; 170 of his staffers have never regularly worked in any of the company’s buildings. Still, hiring remains as tough as he’s ever experienced.¶ One disappointing note in Friday’s report is that the workforce – the number of people either working or looking for a job – was unchanged in October. That suggested that the reopening of schools in September, the waning of the virus, and the expiration of a $300-a-week federal unemployment supplement have yet to coax many people off the sidelines of the job market in large numbers.¶ Drawing many people back into the workforce after recessions is typically a prolonged process. There are now 7.4 million people officially out of work – just 1.7 million more than in February 2020, before the pandemic struck the economy. Yet millions more who lost jobs during the recession have given up their job hunts, and employers might have to raise pay and benefits to draw them back in, said Aaron Sojourner, a labor economist at the University of Minnesota.¶ Even so, some companies still can’t find enough workers. Many parents, particularly mothers, haven’t returned to the workforce after having left jobs during the pandemic to care for children or other relatives. Yet there was evidence of a small rebound last month: The proportion of women who were either working or looking for work rose after two 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 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. 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. 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 faces a different dynamic from candidate Biden, because strikes risk adding to labor shortages and supply chain disruptions that are already driving up prices as the global economy reels from pandemic strains. While the strikes could benefit workers by driving up wages in the long term, the near-term impact of persistent or growing work stoppages could include worst-case scenarios like food shortages or lack of access to hospitals. "This will come at an economic cost to employers and therefore the economy, and I think that may be why Biden has gone a little silent," said Ariel Avgar, an associate professor of labor relations, law and history at Cornell University. "It is tricky for him. On the one hand, he is on the record supporting unions and their ability to use collective action. On the other hand, the point of strikes is to extract an economic price for employers unwilling to negotiate in a way the union 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 often portrayed as short-term events. However, as a substantial body of economic literature shows, the consequences of high unemployment, falling incomes, and reduced economic activity can have lasting consequences. For example, job loss and falling incomes can force families to delay or forgo a college education for their children. Frozen credit markets and depressed consumer spending can stop the creation of otherwise vibrant small businesses. Larger companies may delay or reduce spending on RandD.¶ In each of these cases, an economic recession can lead to “scarring”—that is, long-lasting damage to individuals’ economic situations and the economy more broadly. This report examines some of the evidence demonstrating the long-run consequences of recessions. Findings include:¶ Educational achievement: Unemployment and income losses can reduce educational achievement by threatening early childhood nutrition; reducing families’ abilities to provide a supportive learning environment (including adequate health care, summer activities, and stable housing); and by forcing a delay or abandonment of college plans.¶ Opportunity: Recession-induced job and income losses can have lasting consequences on individuals and families. The increase in poverty that will occur as a result of the recession, for example, will have lasting consequences for kids, and will impose long-lasting costs on the economy.¶ Private investment: Total non-residential investment is down by 20 from peak levels through the second quarter of 2009. The reduction in investment will lead to reduced production capacity for years to come. Furthermore, since technology is often embedded in new capital equipment, the investment slowdown can also be expected to reduce the adoption of new innovations.¶ Entrepreneurial activity and business formation: New and small businesses are often at the forefront of technological advancement. With the credit crunch and the reduction in consumer demand, small businesses are seeing a double squeeze. For example, in 2008, 43,500 businesses filed for bankruptcy, up from 28,300 businesses in 2007 and more than double the 19,700 filings in 2006. Only 21 active firms had an initial public offering in 2008, down from an average of 163 in the four years prior.¶ There is also substantial evidence that economic outcomes are passed across generations. As such, economic hardships for parents will mean more economic hurdles for their children. While it is often said that deficits can cause transfers of wealth from future generations of taxpayers to the present, this cost must also be compared with the economic consequences of recessions that are also passed to future generations.¶ This analysis also suggests that efforts to stimulate the economy can be very effective over both the short- and long-run. Using a simple illustrative accounting framework, it is shown that an economic stimulus can lead to a short-run boost in output that outweighs the additional interest costs of the associated debt increase. This is especially true over a short horizon.¶ A recession, therefore, should not be thought of as a one-time event that stresses individuals and families for a couple of years. Rather, economic downturns will impact the future prospects of all family members, including children, and will have consequences for years to come. 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. Big One 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. Economic decline drastically increases poverty – turns case. Pettinger ‘20 Tejvan Pettinger studied PPE at LMH, Oxford University and works as an economics teacher and writer, 3-13-2020, "Impact of economic recession," Economics Help, https://www.economicshelp.org/blog/5618/economics/negative-impact-of-economic-recession/marlborough jh A recession (fall in national income) will typically be characterised by high unemployment, falling average incomes, increased inequality and higher government borrowing. The impact of a recession depends on how long it lasts and the depth of the fall in output. ¶The main costs of a recession will be: ¶Unemployment ¶Fall in income – shorter working week. ¶Rise in poverty ¶Fall in asset prices (e.g. fall in house prices/stock market) ¶Increased inequality and an increase in relative poverty ¶Higher government borrowing (less tax revenue) ¶Permanently lost output. ¶Firms go out of business. ¶Who is most affected by a recession? ¶The worst affected will be those who lose their job or see their hours/self-employed income dramatically fall. ¶It also depends on the type of recession. The 2009 recession hit the financial sector the hardest. Many highly-paid ‘white-collar’ workers lost their jobs. Banks saw large-scale losses and falls in profit. It hit the housing sector very hard. The 2020 recession will be different. It will particularly affect low-income workers in the leisure and tourism sector – which will be devastated by the Coronavirus. It will also depend on whether the worker can work from home (writer) or has a job in the physical economy which will suffer more. (e.g. selling coffee). The effect will also depend on the extent of government support and whether people are entitled to benefits/rent relief. ¶Unemployment ¶A fall in economic output will cause a rise in unemployment. This is because: ¶Some firms will go bankrupt meaning workers will lose their jobs. ¶Firms will lay off workers to try and reduce costs. ¶Firms will cut back on hiring new workers. ¶In the 2009 recession, unemployment in the UK rose to over 2.6 million, though given the depth of the recession, you might have expected it to be even more (e.g. in the 1980s, unemployment rose to over 3 million). However, in Europe, many countries saw a catastrophic rise in unemployment. With rates of over 20 in countries such as Greece, Spain and Portugal. ¶The unemployment figures may under-estimate the true level of unemployment. For example, in a recession the self-employed may see a dramatic fall in income, but still not be classed as unemployed. ¶UK unemployment showing very clearly the recession of 1981, 1992 and 2009. ¶In the great depression, where there was a rapid fall in GDP, unemployment rose from 0 to 25 within three years. ¶Lower wages ¶In a recession, firms will also try to reduce costs by keeping wages low. Some workers (especially temporary workers without contracts may see wage cuts) This was a key feature of the 2008-12 recession, also aggravated by rising costs of living (e.g. higher taxes/oil prices) In 2020, at least cost-push inflation will be low – helped by falling oil prices and commodities. ¶Negative real wage growth 2008-14 ¶Another cause of lower wages is under-employment. Some workers may keep their job, but see their hours cut. Rather than working full time, they become part-time workers (e.g. 20 hours a week). This means that the rise in unemployment may be muted, but many workers see substantial falls in effective income. ¶The self-employed are particularly vulnerable to recession. In an economic downturn, the self-employed may see a cash-flow shortage very quickly and struggle to make ends meet. ¶Higher government borrowing ¶Governments will see a fall in tax revenue as a result of a recession. ¶Firms make less profit, therefore the government receive lower corporation tax ¶Workers receive lower-income, therefore government receive lower income tax ¶Lower house prices and fewer housing transaction lead to lower stamp duty revenue. ¶Lower expenditure, leading to lower VAT payments. ¶Government spending ¶Rising government spending on welfare payments, such as unemployment benefits, housing benefit and income support. ¶Because of falling tax revenues and rising welfare payments (automatic fiscal stabilisers), a recession tends to cause an increase in the budget deficit and total government debt. ¶US budget deficit rose sharply after the recession of 2008/09. Note, the forecast for 2021 is wrong. Borrowing in 2021 in the US will surge because of the impact of Coronavirus and impending recession. ¶Many countries saw a sharp rise in the budget deficit post-2008 credit crunch because they relied on tax revenues from property and the finance sector. The fall in the property market hit tax revenues harder. VAT receipts tend to be less cyclical. ¶A budget deficit may also increase because the government decide to pursue expansionary fiscal policy and attempt to stimulate economic activity. FOr example, in 2010, the UK government cut VAT. ¶Falling asset prices ¶Oil prices dropped sharply in 2008/09 and 2020. ¶In a global recession, we tend to get a fall in oil prices because demand falls. The 2020 Coronavirus caused a sharp drop in oil prices and also a dramatic fall in share prices. It is an indication of the extent to which analysts expect the recession to hurt. Falling asset prices contribute to the downward spiral in the economy. Falling house prices create a negative wealth effect, reducing confidence and causing further falls in spending. We are likely to see a drop in house prices in 2020. ¶Bond Yields ¶Usually, in a recession, government bond yields fall. This is because in a recession, saving tends to rise and people demand the security of bonds rather than stock market. In 2020, US bond yields have fallen to near-record levels. US 2 year bond yield is at 0.46. ¶It is possible bond yields may rise if markets fear the recession will cause very serious problems for the government and liquidity shortage. For example, Italian bond yields have started to rise in 2020 because of real concerns about the collapse in the Italian economy. A lot will depend on the reaction of the ECB and whether they will create money to provide liquidity. ¶Lost Output ¶A recession leads to lower investment and therefore can damage the long-term productive capacity of the economy. If the recession is short, this lost output may be quite limited – economies can bounce back. But, in a prolonged recession, this lost output becomes greater. The 2009 recession caused a permanent loss of output because the recession was very deep and fundamental weaknesses. ¶See Impact of recession on trend rate of economic growth ¶Impact on Workers ¶Unemployment can leave lasting negative impacts. Firstly, unemployment is very stressful and can damage the person’s morale, and even health. Areas of high unemployment tend to experience more social problems. High unemployment can be a factor in creating social instability, leading to problems such as riots and vandalism. Mass unemployment can threaten the social fabric of the countries. ¶The unemployed lose the opportunity to gain skills and on-the-job training. Long-term unemployment can make it harder for the worker to gain a job in the future; it can even cause people to give up and drop out of the labour market completely.¶Unemployment and recession can also cause a rise in social/health problems such as depression and suicide. ¶Impact on firms ¶Firms will see a fall in demand and lower profits. Some firms may start to make a loss and go bankrupt. This may be due to fundamental inefficiency but also firms may go out of business purely because of the cyclical factors and an inability to borrow sufficient firms to see the end of the recession. A recession will hit some firms more than others. In a recession, there is a large fall in demand for luxury goods (foreign holidays) top-end sports cars and so these firms will be more vulnerable. ¶If a company has large reserves then it will be able to ride out the recession even if it makes a temporary loss. A recession may cause a firm to pursue price wars and cost-cutting. ¶Price Wars – Firms often seek to hang onto market share. This leads to aggressive price cuts, which further reduce the profitability of business. ¶Cost Cutting – The impact of declining profitability means companies will be forced to look closely at reducing costs and maybe closing unprofitable areas of the business. Companies may be forced to lay off staff in an effort to reduce costs ¶Inequality In a recession, inequality and relative poverty tend to worsen. This is because unemployment is a big cause of relative poverty (unemployed see fall in incomes) Are there any potential positive effects of a recession? ¶The collapse in Chinese manufacturing in early 2020 led to a sharp fall in air pollution and will have some effect in reducing deaths related to air pollution. ¶Rather ironically, some recessions have shown to increase life expectancy. During the Great Depression, mortality rates in the US fell amongst areas of high unemployment. The reasoning was people spent
12/10/21
ND - Econ DA
Tournament: USC | Round: 2 | Opponent: Harvard Westlaks EJ | Judge: Dosch, David NC – 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 their hiring last month, adding a solid 531,000 jobs, the most since July and a sign that the recovery from the pandemic recession is overcoming a virus-induced slowdown.¶ Friday’s report from the labor department also showed that the unemployment rate fell to 4.6 last month from 4.8 in September.¶ That is a comparatively low level though, still well above the pre-pandemic jobless rate of 3.5. And the job gains in August and September weren’t as weak as initially reported: The government increased its estimate of hiring for those two months by a hefty combined 235,000 jobs.¶ All told, the figures point to an economy that is steadily recovering from the pandemic recession, with healthy consumer spending prompting companies in nearly every industry to add workers. Though the effects of COVID-19 are still causing severe supply shortages, heightening inflation, and keeping many people out of the workforce, employers are finding gradually more success in filling near record-high job postings.¶ “This is the kind of recovery we can get when we are not sidelined by a surge in COVID cases,” said Nick Bunker, director of economic research at the employment website Indeed. “The speed of employment gains has faltered at times this year, but the underlying momentum of the U.S. labor market is quite clear.”¶ The better-than-expected jobs report was welcomed on Wall Street, where investors sent stocks further into record territory. The Dow Jones Industrial Average rose more than 200 points, or roughly 0.6, in Friday trading. Short-term Treasury yields rose as some investors moved up their expectations for when the Federal Reserve will begin raising interest rates. But longer-term yields dipped amid muted expectations for inflation over the long term.¶ By most barometers, the economic recovery appears solidly on track. Service companies in such areas as retail, banking, and warehousing have reported a sharp jump in sales. Sales of new and existing homes surged last month. And consumer confidence rose in October after three straight declines.¶ At the same time, though, the nation remains 4.2 million jobs short of the number it had before the pandemic flattened the economy in March 2020. The effects of the virus are still discouraging some people from traveling, shopping, eating out, and attending entertainment venues.¶ In October, the pickup in hiring was spread across nearly every major industry, with only government employers reporting a job loss, mostly in education. Shipping and warehousing companies added 54,000 jobs. The battered leisure and hospitality sector, which includes restaurants, bars, hotels, and entertainment venues, gained 164,000. Manufacturers, despite their struggles with supply shortages, added 60,000, the most since June 2020.¶ And employers, who have been competing to fill jobs from a diminished pool of applicants, raised wages at a solid clip: Average hourly pay jumped 4.9 in October compared with a year earlier, up from 4.6 the previous month. Even a gain that strong, though, is barely keeping pace with recent surges in consumer inflation.¶ Those price increases pose a headwind for the economy. Higher costs for food, heating oil, rents, and furniture have burdened millions of families. Prices rose 4.4 in September compared with 12 months earlier, the sharpest such jump in three decades.¶ Among people who are receiving pay raises, some of the biggest beneficiaries are the record-high number of people who have been quitting jobs to take new ones. One of them is Christian Frink, who has begun work as a business analyst at a digital consulting firm. In his new job, Mr. Frink of Ferndale, Michigan, helps business clients determine the technologies they need.¶ Earlier this year, Mr. Frink held a marketing job but left it because, like many people during COVID, he felt burnt out. He then worked for Door Dash during the spring and summer to earn money and searched for new work. Although employers were complaining about a labor shortage, several told him they wouldn’t hire anyone without a college degree. (Mr. Frink attended college but didn’t graduate.)¶ This past summer, Mr. Frink took coding classes at Tech Elevator, a boot camp, and then landed his new position. Now, he’s earning 35 more than in his previous job and says he’s “blown away” that he already has health care coverage and doesn’t have to wait months to become eligible.¶ Yet it isn’t only job-switchers who are receiving pay raises. Chad Leibundguth, a regional director in Tampa for the Robert Half staffing agency, said the job market is the strongest for workers he has seen in his 22-year career. Before the pandemic, he said, you could fill a customer service job in Florida for $14 an hour.¶ “Nowadays,” he said, “you’ve got to be closer to $20 an hour, because people have options.”¶ Job prospects are brightening even for people who have been out of work for prolonged periods. The number of long-term unemployed – people who have been jobless for six months or more – has fallen sharply in recent months, to 2.3 million in October from 4.2 million in April. That’s still double the pre-recession total. But it’s an encouraging sign because employers are typically wary of hiring people who haven’t held jobs for an extended time.¶ At the same time, disparities in the job market have persisted. The Black unemployment rate was unchanged in October at 7.9, for example, while for white workers, it fell to 4 from 4.2. The Latino jobless rate dropped to 5.9 from 6.3.¶ And though white-collar jobs in professional services like information technology, engineering, and architecture are nearly back to their pre-pandemic employment levels, leisure and hospitality still has 1.4 million fewer jobs.¶ Hari Ravichandran, CEO of digital security provider Aura in Boston, says his 800-person company has 140 positions open, mostly in software development.¶ Mr. Ravichandran is willing to hire remote workers; 170 of his staffers have never regularly worked in any of the company’s buildings. Still, hiring remains as tough as he’s ever experienced.¶ One disappointing note in Friday’s report is that the workforce – the number of people either working or looking for a job – was unchanged in October. That suggested that the reopening of schools in September, the waning of the virus, and the expiration of a $300-a-week federal unemployment supplement have yet to coax many people off the sidelines of the job market in large numbers.¶ Drawing many people back into the workforce after recessions is typically a prolonged process. There are now 7.4 million people officially out of work – just 1.7 million more than in February 2020, before the pandemic struck the economy. Yet millions more who lost jobs during the recession have given up their job hunts, and employers might have to raise pay and benefits to draw them back in, said Aaron Sojourner, a labor economist at the University of Minnesota.¶ Even so, some companies still can’t find enough workers. Many parents, particularly mothers, haven’t returned to the workforce after having left jobs during the pandemic to care for children or other relatives. Yet there was evidence of a small rebound last month: The proportion of women who were either working or looking for work rose after two 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 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. 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. 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 faces a different dynamic from candidate Biden, because strikes risk adding to labor shortages and supply chain disruptions that are already driving up prices as the global economy reels from pandemic strains. While the strikes could benefit workers by driving up wages in the long term, the near-term impact of persistent or growing work stoppages could include worst-case scenarios like food shortages or lack of access to hospitals. "This will come at an economic cost to employers and therefore the economy, and I think that may be why Biden has gone a little silent," said Ariel Avgar, an associate professor of labor relations, law and history at Cornell University. "It is tricky for him. On the one hand, he is on the record supporting unions and their ability to use collective action. On the other hand, the point of strikes is to extract an economic price for employers unwilling to negotiate in a way the union 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 often portrayed as short-term events. However, as a substantial body of economic literature shows, the consequences of high unemployment, falling incomes, and reduced economic activity can have lasting consequences. For example, job loss and falling incomes can force families to delay or forgo a college education for their children. Frozen credit markets and depressed consumer spending can stop the creation of otherwise vibrant small businesses. Larger companies may delay or reduce spending on RandD.¶ In each of these cases, an economic recession can lead to “scarring”—that is, long-lasting damage to individuals’ economic situations and the economy more broadly. This report examines some of the evidence demonstrating the long-run consequences of recessions. Findings include:¶ Educational achievement: Unemployment and income losses can reduce educational achievement by threatening early childhood nutrition; reducing families’ abilities to provide a supportive learning environment (including adequate health care, summer activities, and stable housing); and by forcing a delay or abandonment of college plans.¶ Opportunity: Recession-induced job and income losses can have lasting consequences on individuals and families. The increase in poverty that will occur as a result of the recession, for example, will have lasting consequences for kids, and will impose long-lasting costs on the economy.¶ Private investment: Total non-residential investment is down by 20 from peak levels through the second quarter of 2009. The reduction in investment will lead to reduced production capacity for years to come. Furthermore, since technology is often embedded in new capital equipment, the investment slowdown can also be expected to reduce the adoption of new innovations.¶ Entrepreneurial activity and business formation: New and small businesses are often at the forefront of technological advancement. With the credit crunch and the reduction in consumer demand, small businesses are seeing a double squeeze. For example, in 2008, 43,500 businesses filed for bankruptcy, up from 28,300 businesses in 2007 and more than double the 19,700 filings in 2006. Only 21 active firms had an initial public offering in 2008, down from an average of 163 in the four years prior.¶ There is also substantial evidence that economic outcomes are passed across generations. As such, economic hardships for parents will mean more economic hurdles for their children. While it is often said that deficits can cause transfers of wealth from future generations of taxpayers to the present, this cost must also be compared with the economic consequences of recessions that are also passed to future generations.¶ This analysis also suggests that efforts to stimulate the economy can be very effective over both the short- and long-run. Using a simple illustrative accounting framework, it is shown that an economic stimulus can lead to a short-run boost in output that outweighs the additional interest costs of the associated debt increase. This is especially true over a short horizon.¶ A recession, therefore, should not be thought of as a one-time event that stresses individuals and families for a couple of years. Rather, economic downturns will impact the future prospects of all family members, including children, and will have consequences for years to come.
12/12/21
ND - Pandemic PIC
Tournament: Alta Silver and Black | Round: 2 | Opponent: Peninsula SM | Judge: Justin Fang Pandemic PIC Plan Text: A just government ought to recognize the right of workers to strike except for healthcare workers responding to pandemics. Nurse strikes devastate hospitals Wright 10 Sarah H. Wright July 2010 "Evidence on the Effects of Nurses' Strikes" https://www.nber.org/digest/jul10/evidence-effects-nurses-strikes (Researcher at National Bureau of Economic Research) U.S. hospitals were excluded from collective bargaining laws for three decades longer than other sectors because of fears that strikes by nurses might imperil patients' health. Today, while unionization has been declining in general, it is growing rapidly in hospitals, with the number of unionized workers rising from 679,000 in 1990 to nearly one million in 2008. In Do Strikes Kill? Evidence from New York State (NBER Working Paper No. 15855), co-authors Jonathan Gruber and Samuel Kleiner carefully examine the effects of nursing strikes on patient care and outcomes. The researchers match data on nurses' strikes in New York State from 1984 to 2004 to data on hospital discharges, including information on treatment intensity, patient mortality, and hospital readmission. They conclude that nurses' strikes were costly to hospital patients: in-hospital mortality increased by 19.4 percent and hospital readmissions increased by 6.5 percent for patients admitted during a strike. Among their sample of 38,228 such patients, an estimated 138 more individuals died than would have without a strike, and 344 more patients were readmitted to the hospital than if there had been no strike. "Hospitals functioning during nurses' strikes do so at a lower quality of patient care," they write. Still, at hospitals experiencing strikes, the measures of treatment intensity -- that is, the length of hospital stay and the number of procedures performed during the patient's stay -- show no significant differences between striking and non-striking periods. Patients appear to receive the same intensity of care during union work stoppages as during normal hospital operations. Thus, the poor outcomes associated with strikes suggest that they might reduce hospital productivity. These poor health outcomes increased for both emergency and non-emergency hospital patients, even as admissions of both groups decreased by about 28 percent at hospitals with strikes. The poor health outcomes were not apparent either before or after the strike in the striking hospitals, suggesting that they are attributable to the strike itself. And, the poor health outcomes do not appear to do be due to different types of patients being admitted during strike periods, because patients admitted during a strike are very similar to those admitted during other periods. Hiring replacement workers apparently does not help: hospitals that hired replacement workers performed no better during strikes than those that did not hire substitute employees. In each case, patients with conditions that required intensive nursing were more likely to fare worse in the presence of nurses' strikes. Hospitals are the critical internal link for pandemic preparedness. Al Thobaity 20, Abdullelah, and Farhan Alshammari. "Nurses on the frontline against the COVID-19 pandemic: an Integrative review." Dubai Medical Journal 3.3 (2020): 87-92. (Associate Professor of Nursing at Taif University) The majority of infected or symptomatic people seek medical treatment in medical facilities, particularly hospitals, as a high number of cases, especially those in critical condition, will have an impact on hospitals 4. The concept of hospital resilience in disaster situations is defined as the ability to recover from the damage caused by huge disturbances quickly 2. The resilience of hospitals to pandemic cases depends on the preparedness of the institutions, and not all hospitals have the same resilience. A lower resilience will affect the sustainability of the health services. This also affects healthcare providers such as doctors, nurses, and allied health professionals 5, 6. Despite the impact on healthcare providers, excellent management of a pandemic depends on the level of preparedness of healthcare providers, including nurses. This means that if it was impossible to be ready before a crisis or disaster, responsible people will do all but the impossible to save lives.
Healthcare workers are key to saving millions of lives during COVID-19 through treatment and administering vaccines Garrett Ilg, 21 - ("Celebrating Healthcare Workers and the Technology that Empowers Them," Oracle APAC, 4-7-2021, https://www.oracle.com/apac/news/announcement/blog/celebrating-healthcare-workers-technology-2021-04-05.html?source=:so:ch:or:awr::::)/AK As we observe the World Health Organization’s World Health Day on April 7, I want to celebrate the people and institutions on the front lines of healthcare worldwide—especially amid the COVID-19 pandemic. Their steely dedication and relentless innovation have produced multiple, highly effective coronavirus vaccines in record time. They’ve administered close to 460 million doses of those vaccines, according to the WHO, saving countless millions of lives. And they’ve treated a large subset of about 125 million confirmed cases, often at great personal risk and with insufficient resources. Oracle’s National Electronic Health Records Database and the Oracle Public Health Management System, built by a global team that worked round the clock, in partnership with government and non-government institutions, played a critical role in that Herculean effort. In addition to electronically screening hundreds of thousands of volunteers for COVID-19 clinical trials, the system has collected millions of daily health updates from patients and healthcare providers. It was designed from the ground up to scale to the populations of entire nations as COVID-19 vaccines become more widely available. New Pandemics are deadlier and faster are coming – COVID is just the beginning Future pandemics cause extinction Eleftherios P. Diamandis 21 (works for the Department of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine, Mount Sinai Hospital, Toronto, Canada; Lunenfeld-Tanenbaum Research Institute, Mount Sinai Hospital, Toronto, Canada; Department of Laboratory Medicine and Pathobiology, University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada. “The Mother of All Battles: Viruses vs. Humans. Can Humans Avoid Extinction in 50-100 Years? 4/13/21 https://www.preprints.org/manuscript/202104.0397/v1 The recent SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, which is causing COVID 19 disease, has taught us unexpected lessons about the dangers of human extinction through highly contagious and lethal diseases. As the COVID 19 pandemic is now being controlled by various isolation measures, therapeutics and vaccines, it became clear that our current lifestyle and societal functions may not be sustainable in the long term. We now have to start thinking and planning on how to face the next dangerous pandemic, not just overcoming the one that is upon us now. Is there any evidence that even worse pandemics could strike us in the near future and threaten the existence of the human race? The answer is unequivocally yes. It is not necessary to get infected by viruses of bats, pangolins and other exotic animals that live in remote forests in order to be in danger. Creditable scientific evidence indicates that the human gut microbiota harbor billions of viruses which are capable of affecting the function of vital human organs such as the immune system, lung, brain, liver, kidney, heart etc. It is possible that the development of pathogenic variants in the gut can lead to contagious viruses which can cause pandemics, leading to destruction of vital organs, causing death or various debilitating diseases such as blindness, respiratory, liver, heart and kidney failures. These diseases could result n the complete shutdown of our civilization and probably the extinction of human race. In this essay, I will first provide a few independent pieces of scientific facts and then combine this information to come up with some (but certainly not all) hypothetical scenarios that could cause human race misery, even extinction. I hope that these scary scenarios will trigger preventative measures that could reverse or delay the projected adverse outcomes.
Extra Cards
COVID-19 Health Care Workers around the world have been going on strike- any increase in striking would be catastrophic Hazel T 20, - (COVID-19: prioritizing healthcare workers, "PubMed Central (PMC), Dec-02-2020, accessed 11-2-2021, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7799022/ In dealing with the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic, governments have ignored the welfare of the most essential workers during this time—the healthcare workers. While health professionals and physicians are at the top of the list to be infected because of their exposures to patients, they have been deprived of fair salaries, proper training, personal protective equipment (PPE) and psychological and emotional interventions.¶ The non-prioritization of healthcare workers has led to detrimental effects. We have seen this in Italy and Spain at the onset of the pandemic.1 In the case of Peru, the lack of training and PPE has led to high infection and mortality rates among physicians.2 In one instance, a doctor even uses regular plastic bags as improvised PPE to protect himself from infection due to government budget constraints.3 Peruvian doctors have gone on strike as they demand for better working conditions and higher salaries.4 In the case of the Philippines, on the other hand, medical organizations have called for a second stricter enhanced community quarantine due to the critical level of the healthcare system and fatigue and depression of healthcare workers.5 Authorities refused to heed this call at first, prioritizing an antiterrorism bill6 and citing the economy as a motivation.7,8¶ The most recent case in point, however, is the case of the Czech Republic. In September 2020, COVID-19 cases surged, putting pressure on healthcare workers and even forcing them to put their own safeties at risk.9 Authorities have been accused of being complacent with health measures due to the prioritization of public opinion and political leanings over recommendations of medical experts.9 As of 19 October 2020, the Czech Republic ‘now tops in new cases per capita’,10 and physician infections rose 6-fold and nurse infections 7-fold in the span of a month.9 US National Guard doctors will even be sent to the Czech Republic to help combat the pandemic.11¶ There have been ethical debates as to whether healthcare workers should be prioritized with medical resources in times of COVID-19.12,13 If governments heeded healthcare workers’ needs, listened to them and took care of their welfares to begin with, there shall not be a need to have to decide between their lives or their patients’. Governments must make informed decisions14 and learn from other governments’ mistakes in ignoring their healthcare workers. Although it is easier said than done, rather than being caught up with economic concerns, political leanings and bureaucracies, governments must prioritize healthcare workers as they are our only lifeline.
The only way to solve the pandemic is global vaccination Public Citizen 3/29 - Public Citizen “Public Citizen is a nonprofit consumer advocacy organization that champions the public interest in the halls of power. We defend democracy, resist corporate power and work to ensure that government works for the people – not for big corporations. Founded in 1971, we now have 500,000 members and supporters throughout the country. We don’t participate in partisan political activities or endorse any candidates for elected office. We take no government or corporate money, which enables us to remain fiercely independent and call out bad actors – no matter who they are or how much power and money they have.”, “Waiver of the WTO’s Intellectual Property Rules: Facts vs. Common Myths,” Public Citizen Global Trade Watch Series. March 29, 2021. Accessed Aug. 10, 2021. https://www.citizen.org/article/waiver-of-the-wtos-intellectual-property-rules-myths-vs-facts/ AT The COVID-19 public health disaster and resulting economic crises won’t end anywhere unless people everywhere are vaccinated. Despite this obvious truth, rich countries with only 14 of the global population have secured preferential access to over 50 of projected global vaccine supplies. Ongoing outbreaks anywhere allow the virus to mutate, threatening the whole world with vaccine-resistant variants or more deadly or easily spread variants. Governments invested billions to create the vaccines. But, there is a dire shortage, with no end in sight. As we enter the second quarter, about one billion doses have been produced in 2021. We need 10 to 12 billion to reach global herd immunity. And we will need far more if, like flu vaccines, they must be repeated or require booster shots. In every region, there are existing firms that could gear up production and governments willing to invest in expanding supply. But WTO rules require countries to guarantee pharmaceutical corporations monopoly control. More than 100 countries support a temporary, emergency suspension of these WTO rules, so more vaccines, treatments and diagnostic tests can be manufactured in as many places as possible. The United States and a handful of other WTO members are blocking the waiver: They won’t even agree to negotiate about waiver language to address whatever concerns that they may have with the current text. Donald Trump started this self-defeating blockade. President Joe Biden must reverse it to speed the end of the COVID-19 pandemic.
12/10/21
SO - T-Framework
Tournament: Heart of Texas | Round: 3 | Opponent: Little Rock XJ | Judge: Devin Hernandez NC – T v K Affs (2:00) Interpretation: the affirmative must defend the hypothetical implementation of the resolution or a subset thereof – The World Trade Organization is an international body that oversees global trade. Tarver 6/15 Evan Tarver bachelor's in finance and economics from San Diego State University-California, 21 - ("How Best to Define the World Trade Organization (WTO)," Investopedia, 6-15-2021, accessed 7-5-2021, https://www.investopedia.com/terms/w/wto.asp)//ML
Created in 1995, the World Trade Organization (WTO) is an international institution that oversees the global trade rules among nations. It superseded the 1947 General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) created in the wake of World War II.¶ The WTO is based on agreements signed by the majority of the world’s trading nations. The main function of the organization is to help producers of goods and services, as well as exporters and importers, protect and manage their businesses. As of 2021, the WTO has 164 member countries, with Liberia and Afghanistan the most recent members, having joined in July 2016, and 25 “observer” countries and governments.1 Intellectual property includes patents, trademarks, and copyrights Yang 19 James Yang (patent attorney). “Four types of intellectual property to protect your idea and how to use them.” OC Patent Lawyer. 2019. JDN. https://ocpatentlawyer.com/four-types-intellectual-property-protect-idea/¶ To protect your idea so that someone else cannot steal your idea, you need to secure one or more of the four different types of intellectual property (IP). Intellectual property rights are exclusionary rights given to authors, inventors, and businesses for their literary and artistic works of authorship, useful and ornamental inventions, and valuable information.¶ Every invention generally starts as an inventor’s trade secret. Before inventors market their inventions, they need to secure one or more of the other forms of intellectual property protection – patents, trademarks, and copyrights.¶ FOUR TYPES OF INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY RIGHTS¶ The four types of intellectual property include:¶ Trade Secrets¶ Trademarks¶ Copyrights, and¶ Patents.¶ The first type of intellectual property right is a trade secret. All inventions generally start as a trade secret of the inventor. Inventors have an instinctual desire to keep their ideas secret. To market your invention, you should protect your idea with one or more of the other types of intellectual property rights: patents, trademarks, and copyrights.
Reduce is to decrease in size or amount Merriam Webster no date - ("Definition of REDUCE," Merriam Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/reduce)//ML to draw together or cause to converge : CONSOLIDATE ¶reduce all the questions to one b(1): to diminish in size, amount, extent, or number ¶reduce taxes ¶reduce the likelihood of war
Vote negative – the ballot only signifies a win or loss within debate as a game, and their aff is outside the constraints of that game
Not reading a topical aff creates incredible structural advantages for the aff – they get first and last speech and perms which means without a stable advocacy they get to morph their aff into whatever minimizes direct clash, and allows for a retreat to moral high ground
There’s two Impacts –
Clash – it’s a pre-requisite to debate which is an intrinsic good since we are all here for the purpose of debating – yes this may seem tautological, but so is every impact – you should use your ballot to assert that since we all took our weekend and spent it here, that clash does have meaning 2. Iterative argumentative testing – the ability to subject controversial ideas to rigorous testing allows debaters to better engage in the research process, discern what arguments are most accurate, and learn how to refine our own beliefs to become more compelling advocates – not reading a plan allows a constant spew of new content that never reaches those high levels of contestation without the constraints of the topic – Even if this topic isn’t the perfect topic, the predictability of debates under it are worth potential substantive tradeoff. Without a bridge for subjecting beliefs to a rigorous test, we are left with might-makes-right. Cheryl MISAK Philosophy @ Toronto ‘8 “A Culture of Justification: The Pragmatist's Epistemic Argument for Democracy” Episteme 5 (1) p. 100-104 The charge that Rorty has had to face again and again is that he really is a relativist, holding that one belief is no better than another, and that one must “treat the epistemic standards of any and every epistemic community as on a par” (Haack 1995, 136). Rorty, that is, leaves us with no way of adjudicating claims that arise in different communities. It is argued that this is not only an unsatisfactory view, but it is incompatible with his commitment to his own set of beliefs and with his practice of arguing or giving reasons for them. Peirce would join in this charge, arguing that it is the community of inquirers or reasoners that matter, not this or that local community. One of Rorty’s responses to this clutch of objections is to say that he doesn’t have to treat the epistemic standards of every community as on a par: “I prize communities which share more background beliefs with me above those which share fewer” (Rorty 1995b, 153). There is nothing incoherent about asserting that your community has it right, for all “right” amounts to is what your community agrees upon. I have argued (2000, 12ff) that this kind of comeback puts Rorty in a very difficult position, giving him nothing to say against the likes of Carl Schmitt, the fascist legal philosopher who found it natural to join the Nazi bandwagon. Schmitt, like Rorty, argued that there is no truth and rationality in politics. Rather, politics is the arena in which groups assert themselves, with the strongest coming out on top and the weaker groups disappearing. One makes an existential choice – opts for a conception of the good – and then tries to attain “substantive homogeneity” in the population. Might ends up being right and the elimination of those who disagree with us ends up being a fine method of reaching our political decisions. A democrat or liberal like Rorty has an impossible time in giving us – and himself – reasons for opting for his view rather than his fascist opponent’s view. Once you give up aiming at truth, once you give up aiming at something that goes beyond the standards of your own community, then you give up the wherewithal to argue against the might-is-right view. The charge I am trying to answer here, on behalf of the non-Rortian pragmatist, is that mixing truth and politics is dangerous. One of the points I want to make is that, whatever the dangers are in saying morals and politics aim at the truth, the dangers of denying it are even more alarming. If we were to get rid of the notion of truth, nothing would protect us from the idea that there is nothing to get right, no better or worse action, and no better or worse way of treating others. Nothing would protect us from the Schmittian worldview. Another point is that the pragmatist view encourages something which is downright salutary, not dangerous at all. It encourages a culture of justification, a culture the importance of which grows as we face the challenges of living in a global society with worldviews struggling against each other. This thought was prominent in the debate about how the new democratic order in South Africa should be conceived. Here is how Etienne Murienik put it: If the new constitution is a bridge away from a culture of authority, it is clear what it must be a bridge to. It must lead to a culture of justification – a culture in which every exercise of power is expected to be justified; in which the leadership given by government rests on the cogency of the case offered in defense of its decisions, not the fear inspired by the force of its command. The new order must be a community built on persuasion, not on coercion.4 A final point rests on the nature of the kinds of answers the pragmatist envisions. Rorty and Rawls seem to think that any view of truth carries with it the idea that there is one and only one true answer to every question. It is important to see that, whatever the case might be for other views of truth, the pragmatist’s view of truth does not entail anything about the precise nature of right answers. On the Peircean view of truth, it might be true that the best solution to a problem is to compromise in a certain way. Or a question might have a number of equally right answers: it might be true that either A or B or C is an acceptable solution to a problem. That is, bringing truth into politics need not result in a view on which one theory of the good triumphs over the others. Indeed, the pragmatist account of truth does not require agreement at the end of the day (whatever that might mean) and it does not require the consent of all who are affected by a particular decision here and now. The right answer to a question might be one that only a few see is right. A right answer is the one that would be best – would stand up to the evidence and arguments – were we to inquire into the matter as far as we fruitfully could. That is, we are not primarily aiming at agreement in deliberation – we are aiming at getting a view that will stand up to reasons and evidence. That said, there may be cases in moral and especially political deliberation in which we do aim for agreement because we think that what will best stand up to reasons in that case is a solution that is agreed upon by all or by all who are affected. But this will be just one kind of case amongst many. Right answers aren’t necessarily answers that are acceptable by all. Nor are right answers necessarily those that resolve a conflict with a compromise, although sometimes a compromise or cooperative solution may indeed be what is required. Nor is bargaining always not conducive to truth – in some cases, that may be exactly what is required. This view of truth does not lead to zeal, oppression, closing off of discussion, or a squashing of pluralism, even if it might happen to be the case that there is only one reasonable conception of the good out there. The idea is that we are always aiming at getting the best answer – whatever that may be – and to do that we need to take into account the views of all. 6 . WHO DECIDES? One of the first questions put to those who would like to think of politics as a species of truth-oriented deliberation is this: why deliberate with the ignorant multitude? Would it not be better to expose our moral and political beliefs only to the reasons and experience of experts? Science, after all, doesn’t work by asking the person in the street what he or she thinks about quantum mechanics. The reason that the pragmatist’s epistemic justification is a justification of democratic politics, rather than of a hierarchical politics, in which an elite makes decisions, is that we do not and will not ever have an identifiable pool of moral and political experts. Dewey saw this clearly. As experts become specialized, “they are shut off from knowledge of the needs which they are supposed to serve” (Dewey 1926/1984, 364). Everyone engages in moral and political deliberation and it is not obvious that having special education makes you better at it – just look at priests, politicians, and moral philosophers/political theorists and ask yourself if they seem especially decent or especially wise when it comes to practical matters. Some people are good at examining moral and politi\cal issues, but it’s not clear that they are the ones trained to do so. Even if we could identify genuinely wise people, this kind of expertise is liable to be corrupted merely by being identified – merely by the wise person starting to think of herself as a moral expert.5 And it is far from clear that the rule of the wise would really take the views and experiences of all into account better than the democratic rule of the people. So how do we distinguish deliberating well and deliberating badly if we cannot appeal to education and training? No account of deliberative democracy can ignore the call to make the distinction. The trouble is that, in saying what good, as opposed to poor, deliberation amounts to, one finds oneself facing a justificatory problem: how can we specify what good deliberation is without simply assuming that our current standards of deliberation and inquiry are the gold standards? (This is the deep and central question of pragmatism: how do genuine norms arise out of contingent practices?) It will be unsurprising that I agree with Robert Talisse that the way forward is to focus on an epistemic justification of the whole range of deliberative virtues. Some of the virtues we think important in inquiry are open-mindedness, courage, honesty, integrity, rigor, willingness to listen to the views of others and to seriously entertain challenges to one’s own views, willingness to put oneself in another’s shoes, and the like. These virtues may well have a number of kinds of justifications – justifications, for instance, with their origins in the canons of etiquette or in this or that substantive moral or religious view. Politeness and Christianity (do unto others . . . ), for instance,may both dictate that we should listen to the views of others. But this kind of justification doesn’t break out of the circle of local practices. Talisse argues that the virtues are justified because they lead to true belief. Listening to others is not merely the polite thing to do, but it is also good because we might learn something. The epistemic argument I have presented on Peirce’s behalf gets us this far: we need to expose our beliefs to the views of others if we are to follow a method that will get us good or better or true beliefs. Talisse takes us the next step – there are other characteristics that make one an inquirer who aims at the truth. Honesty is the trait of following reasons and evidence, rather than self-interest. Modesty is the trait of taking your views to be fallible. Charity is willingness to listen to the views of others. Integrity is willingness to uphold the deliberative process, no matter the difficulties encountered. The distinction between deliberating well (having deliberative virtues) and deliberating badly (having deliberative vices), that is, is drawn in terms of whether a method promotes beliefs which are responsive to and fit with the reasons and evidence. 7 . THE SOURCE OF AUTHORITY The pragmatist has offered us a compelling reason to take the views of others seriously and encourage the values associated with deliberative democratic politics. For inquirers must engage in the ongoing project of continually subjecting their beliefs to the tests of further experience and argument. The virtues inherent in a deliberative model of democratic citizenship must be cultivated if we are to come to good beliefs about how to treat others, how to resolve conflicts, and how to arrange society. The model of democratic citizenship which results is one that makes democratic citizenship part of a culture of justification. Citizens search for how best to structure our institutions and how best to live our lives. Democratic citizenship is a quest to get things right, with a genuine engagement in looking for right answers to pressing questions.We are not after mere agreement and we are not after the transformation of initial preferences into something that others can accept. We aim at getting things right – at getting beliefs that would forever stand up to scrutiny. In so aiming, citizens commit themselves to abiding by the decisions produced by the democratic procedure. For those decisions are the best we can do here and now. Here we find the justification of the coercive power of democracies. Eventually there has to be a decision in politics. The question that faces all societies is who decides and who wields the power to coerce once the decision is made? My argument is that as more people deliberate and more reasons and experience go into the mix, it will become more likely that the decisions made will account for the reasons and experience of all. The more likely, that is, that the answer will be right. Decisions produced by a democratic deliberative process are made by a rational method and so they are enforceable. Frame procedural impacts through a lens of optimization – we don’t need to win they make the game impossible, just relatively less effective. In the same way you would vote aff to reject a bad process CP even if there are theoretically solvency deficits based on certainty and immediacy – the fact that we still have some neg ground doesn’t mean that reading the cap k for the 87th time against a survival strategy aff is a good debate to have for anyone involved
They have no offense
View T impacts as a process, not a product – any education impact about their content being important are solved by reading a book – filter impacts through what is unique to the process of debating itself 2. They get to read it on the neg – if their k of being topical is true then reading the aff as a K on the neg means they get auto-wins, we still access their education, and if forces affs to shift to better arguments 3. The TVA solves – they could have read an aff that - this would allow a discussion of the aff in a forum that allows us to have nuanced responses – yes, it isn’t perfect, but those imperfections are neg ground – if they aren’t forced to defend a controversy, then the meaning of any wins the gets become hollow anyway which takes out solvency Even if the state is irredeemable, use it as a heuristic – role playing as the state is a powerful learning tool. Zanotti ’14, Zanotti 14 (Dr. Laura Zanotti is an Associate Professor of Political Science at Virginia Tech. Her research and teaching include critical political theory as well as international organizations, UN peacekeeping, democratization and the role of NGOs in post-conflict governance.“Governmentality, Ontology, Methodology: Re-thinking Political Agency in the Global World” – Alternatives: Global, Local, Political – vol 38(4):p. 288-304, obtained via school library being awesome.) While there are important variations in the way international relations scholars use governmentality theory, for the purpose of my argument I identify two broad trajectories. 2 One body of scholarship uses governmentality as a heuristic tool to explore modalities of local and international government and to assess their effects in the contexts where they are deployed; the other adopts this notion as a descriptive tool to theorize the globally oppressive features of international liberalism. Scholars who use governmentality as a heuristic tool tend to conduct inquiries based upon analyses of practices of government and resistance. These scholars rely on ethnographic inquiries, emphasizes the multifarious ways government works in practice (to include its oppressive trajectories) and the ways uneven interactions of governmental strategies and resistance are contingently enacted. As examples, Didier Bigo, building upon Pierre Bourdieu, has encouraged a research methodology that privileges a relational approach and focuses on practice; 3 William Walters has advocated considering governmentality as a research program rather than as a ‘‘depiction of discrete systems of power;’’ 4 and Michael Merlingen has criticized the downplaying of resistance and the use of ‘‘governmentality’’ as interchangeable with liberalism. 5 Many other scholars have engaged in contextualized analyses of governmental tactics and resistance. Oded Lowenheim has shown how ‘‘responsibilization’’ has become an instrument for governing individual travelers through ‘‘travel warnings’’ as well as for ‘‘developing states’’ through performance indicators; 6 Wendy Larner and William Walters have questioned accounts of globalization as an ontological dimension of the present and advocated less substantialized accounts that focus on studying the discourses, processes and practices through which globalization is made as a space and a political economy; 7 Ronnie D. Lipschutz and James K. Rowe have looked at how localized practices of resistance may engage and transform power relations; 8 and in my own work, I have studied the deployment of disciplinary and governmental tools for reforming governments in peacekeeping operations and how these practices were hijacked and resisted and by their targets. 9 Scholars who use governmentality as a descriptive tool focus instead on one particular trajectory of global liberalism, that is on the convergence of knowledge and scrutiny of life processes (or biopolitics) and violence and theorize global liberalism as an extremely effective formation, a coherent and powerful Leviathan, where biopolitical tools and violence come together to serve dominant classes or states’ political agendas. As I will show, Giorgio Agamben, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, and Sergei Prozorov tend to embrace this position. 10 The distinction between governmentality as a heuristic and governmentality as a descriptive tool is central for debating political agency. I argue that, notwithstanding their critique of liberalism, scholars who use governmentality as a descriptive tool rely on the same ontological assumptions as the liberal order they criticize and do move away from Foucault’s focus on historical practices in order to privilege abstract theorizations. By using governmentality as a description of ‘‘liberalism’’ or ‘‘capitalism’’ instead of as a methodology of inquiry on power’s contingent modalities and technologies, these scholars tend to reify a substantialist ontology that ultimately reinforces a liberal conceptualization of subjects and power as standing in a relation of externality and stifles the possibility of reimagining political agency on different grounds. ‘‘Descriptive governmentality’’ constructs a critique of the liberal international order based upon an ontological framework that presupposes that power and subjects are entities possessing qualities that preexist relations. Power is imagined as a ‘‘mighty totality,’’ and subjects as monads endowed with potentia. As a result, the problematique of political agency is portrayed as a quest for the ‘‘liberation’’ of a subject ontologically gifted with a freedom that power inevitably oppresses. In this way, the conceptualization of political agency remains confined within the liberal struggle of ‘‘freedom’’ and ‘‘oppression.’’ Even researchers who adopt a Foucauldian vocabulary end up falling into what Bigo has identified as ‘‘traps’’ of political science and international relations theorizing, specifically essentialization and ahistoricism. 11 I argue here that in order to reimagine political agency an ontological and epistemological turn is necessary, one that relies upon a relational ontology. Relational ontological positions question adopting abstract stable entities, such as ‘‘structures,’’ ‘‘power,’’ or ‘‘subjects,’’ as explanations for what happens. Instead, they explore how these pillar concepts of the Western political thought came to being, what kind of practices they facilitate, consolidate and result from, what ambiguities and aporias they contain, and how they are transformed. 12 Relational ontologies nurture ‘‘modest’’ conceptualizations of political agency and also question the overwhelming stability of ‘‘mighty totalities,’’ such as for instance the international liberal order or the state. In this framework, political action has more to do with playing with the cards that are dealt to us to produce practical effects in specific contexts than with building idealized ‘‘new totalities’’ where perfect conditions might exist. The political ethics that results from non-substantialist ontological positions is one that privileges ‘‘modest’’ engagements and weights political choices with regard to the consequences and distributive effects they may produce in the context where they are made rather than based upon their universal normative aspirations. 13 Using the government as a heuristic is better pragmatically and forces us to truly investigate political structures in search of ways to improve instead of using abstract solutions for concrete impacts. Zanotti ‘13 Zannoti, Laura, associate professor of Political Science at Virginia Tech., Ph.D. from the University of Washington in 2008 and joined the Purdue University faculty in 2009. “Governmentality, Ontology, Methodology: Re-thinking Political Agency in the Global World”, originally published online 30 December 2013, DOI: 10.1177/0304375413512098, P. Sage Publications MC By questioning substantialist representations of power and subjects, inquiries on the possibilities of political agency are reframed in a way that focuses on power and subjects’ relational character and the contingent processes of their (trans)formation in the context of agonic relations. Options for resistance to governmental scripts are not limited to ‘‘rejection,’’ ‘‘revolution,’’ or ‘‘dispossession’’ to regain a pristine ‘‘freedom from all constraints’’ or an immanent ideal social order. It is found instead in multifarious and contingent struggles that are constituted within the scripts of governmental rationalities and at the same time exceed and transform them. This approach questions oversimplifications of the complexities of liberal political rationalities and of their interactions with non-liberal political players and nurtures a radical skepticism about identifying universally good or bad actors or abstract solutions to political problems. International power interacts in complex ways with diverse political spaces and within these spaces it is appropriated, hybridized, redescribed, hijacked, and tinkered with. Governmentality as a heuristic focuses on performing complex diagnostics of events. It invites historically situated explorations and careful differentiations rather than overarching demonizations of ‘‘power,’’ romanticizations of the ‘‘rebel’’ or the ‘‘the local.’’ More broadly, theoretical formulations that conceive the subject in non-substantialist terms and focus on processes of subjectification, on the ambiguity of power discourses, and on hybridization as the terrain for political transformation, open ways for reconsidering political agency beyond the dichotomy of oppression/rebellion. These alternative formulations also foster an ethics of political engagement, to be continuously taken up through plural and uncertain practices, that demand continuous attention to ‘‘what happens’’ instead of fixations on ‘‘what ought to be.’’83 Such ethics of engagement would not await the revolution to come or hope for a pristine ‘‘freedom’’ to be regained. Instead, it would constantly attempt to twist the working of power by playing with whatever cards are available and would require intense processes of reflexivity on the consequences of political choices. To conclude with a famous phrase by Michel Foucault ‘‘my point is not that everything is bad, but that everything is dangerous, which is not exactly the same as bad. If everything is dangerous, then we always have something to do. So my position leads not to apathy but to hyper- and pessimistic activism.
. The use of non-violent tactics may be crucial in this regard: state repression is easily justified against violent adversaries, but it is vulnerable to public criticism when used against non-violence. Thus, the fact that Chipko and the NBA deployed civil disobedience — pioneered, it must be pointed out, by the ‘father of the nation’ (i.e. Gandhi) — made it difficult for the state to quash them or deflect their claims.
2. the opposite of pessimism is apathy – their answers are purity politics that demonizes pessimist BLM protestors – our obligation is solidarity, not conformity Syedullah 17 - (citing James Baldwin, Jasmine, Professor @ Vassar College, “Afro pessimism,” Critical Exchange, Contemporary Political Theory, pp 1–33, Springer) Prophetic despair, such as that which Baldwin expresses in an often quoted interview between James Baldwin Dr. Kenneth Clark in May of 1963, presses on the material cohesion of our moral infrastructure. In the interview Baldwin professes to remaining pessimistic with regard to his own life when he says, ‘‘It doesn’t matter any longer what you do to me; you can put me in jail, you can kill me. By the time I was 17, you’d done everything that you could do to me. The problem now is, how are you going to save yourselves?’’ He goes on a bit later to refuse, in no uncertain term, pessimism as a politics of the future. When Clark asks, ‘‘Jim, what do you see deep in the recesses of your own mind as the future of our nation, … I think that the future of the Negro and the future of the nation are linked … What do you see?,’’ Baldwin replies, ‘‘I can’t be a pessimist because I’m alive. To be a pessimist means that you have agreed that human life is an academic matter, so I’m forced to be an optimist. I’m forced to believe that we can survive whatever we must survive. But the future of the Negro in this country is precisely as bright or as dark as the future of the country (Clark et al., 1963). I want to savor the tensions of Baldwin’s response. I want to hold them, not resolve them, and observe how they situate pedestrian personal pessimism outside the movement for black life, while calling out the limits of a political process propelled and legitimated by white supremacy. Even insofar as pessimism is a social expression of the affective limits of social death, a feeling that brings us back to life, out of isolation, and into conversation with each other the promise of pessimism is clearly far more than an academic matter. The antithesis of pessimism in this instance is not optimism but apathy, willful passive acceptance of the untenable conditions of a people systemically and forcibly made to understand that there are some whose existence is at best immaterial and at worst a clear and present danger, and then there are those lives that do matter. What we have been witnessing in the activist and academic movements for black life is the implosion of identity politics and the failure of its possessive claims to liberal demands for rights and protection. The abolition of whiteness demands a kind of justice the state may not yet know how to sanction. As Patrisse Cullors (2015), one of three original founders of #BLM, argues, ‘‘I believe we can’t wait on the State to take care of our Black lives. We have to show up now to build the world we want to see.’’ Thinking the purchase of the pessimistic prophetically then, as a residual, inevitable, yet generative practice of the black prophetic tradition with reparative properties that precede and exceed Afro-pessimism’s formal incorporation into scholarly journals and conferences, I find myself constantly reminding my students that while we can take the analysis of power Afro-pessimism offers and run with it, academic enunciations of pessimism run the risk of remaining loyal to the limits of legibility and respectability of politics as usual. As Nick Mitchell (forthcoming, p. 10) writes: ‘‘When the intellectual becomes interchangeable with the slave, it is perhaps too easy … to smooth over the fact that black intellectuals have interests as intellectuals that can and do diverge from those of the people for whom they might want justice. Without an acknowledgement (not a confession) of this divergence … the project of race theorization risks deploying the generalizing force of theory and the moralizing tendency of critique to generalize a class perspective.’’ What we are dealing with here is more than occidental anxiety of ontological uncertainty. It is an ethical imperative to engage in a struggle to change the meaning of rights and protection from the ground up (or suffer senselessly at the altar of the state’s right to defend itself by any means necessary). As Baldwin (in Clark et al., 1963) suggested in the interview with Kenneth Clark, the pessimism of antiblack racism is not just a black problem, it presses on the condition of whites and upon the country as a whole: ‘‘These people have deluded themselves for so long, that they really don’t think I’m human. I base this on their conduct, not on what they say, and this means that they have become, in themselves, moral monsters.’’ The predicament of the pessimist is not a personal problem that is easily self contained. It presses upon the body, moving it to unrest, unleashing a rage that cannot stand to be at home in moral monstrosity. It just wants to burn it all down. ‘‘Now, we are talking about human beings, there’s not such a thing as a monolithic wall or some abstraction called the Negro problem, these are Negro boys and girls, who at 16 and 17 don’t believe the country means anything that it says and don’t feel they have any place here, on the basis of the performance of the entire country.’’ The question Afro-pessimism poses as a practice of prophetic desire then, turns away from a politics of recognition and respectability toward an abolitionist praxis of fugitive reparation to ask, ‘‘Will you run with me?’’ Does my pessimism press on your sense of superiority, exception, perfection enough for you to forfeit your status and help us move the country, force the nation to believe there is freedom beyond this world, a more prophetic imagination of difference, identity, and inclusion? ‘‘What white people have to do,’’ Baldwin (in Clark et al., 1963) reminds us, ‘‘is try and find out in their own hearts why it was necessary to have a nigger in the first place, because I’m not a nigger, I’m a man, but if you think I’m a nigger, it means you need it.’’ In the present moment Black Lives Matter (BLM) is advancing the cause for the abolition of white supremacy in local ways in chapters throughout the world. They call us to account for the material consequences of the unfinished work of antislavery abolition and reconstruction. They are part of an underground lineage of fugitive communities that emerged from the marshes, swamps, and hiding spaces of the plantation South. Their message is decentralized. It is not uniform. It does not reproduce old antagonisms. It does not pit moral suasion against direct confrontation. It does not ask that we choose to remain either optimistic or pessimistic. It exercises a practice of the political that harnesses both. In this last section then I turn to a speech against apathy by Patrisse Cullors, a beacon in a leader-full movement who has been animating pessimism as a protocol of self-care and prophetic political organizing powerful enough to propel activist and intellectual movements from isolated places of loss into collective liberation, out of abstractions into objections, subjecting the logics of antiblack racism to the collective force of intersecting fugitive communities of abolitionist movement against nihilism and toward an affirmation of life. At age 25 on 19 April 2015 Freddie Gray died from injuries sustained while shackled by his feet in a Baltimore Police Department van where he was being held in custody following his arrest. Baltimore stood up, rose up, died in, and rolled out. We all bore witness. His death was deemed a murder by the medical examiner a few weeks later. That Sunday morning, May 3, 2015, I, a Buddhist, found my way to church, to All Saints in Pasadena, CA, into the strikingly upper-class congregation of post-service attendees who piled in along with an unlikely mix of young greater Los Angeles activists-of-color and their white hipster allies. It would be my first time hearing our speaker in person. The whole room stood and cheered as she entered – the woman who helped coin the hashtag, the longtime activist organizer, Patrisse Cullors greeted us like family, all knowing eyes, bright smiles, and then began a talk she called ‘‘Abolition Theology.’’ Her voice was clear and certain, free of the cross-bearing affect of black suffering that often accompanies talk of state-sponsored antiblack violence in predominately white spaces. Cullors gave us a speech that touched us, that moved us – mourning, rage and all – into a mood for collective action. She impressed upon us the fact that the movement for black lives was a call to action for all black life, not just the names we could recite, not just cisgendered young men, not just ‘‘innocent’’ ‘‘children,’’ not just Americans. She let us know there had been recent formations of #Black Lives Matter chapters beyond U.S. borders. There were Afro-Latino chapters, chapters forming in Haiti, and in Ghana. She reminded us that the concept of blackness that resonates across the globe called on us to broaden the scope of our movements and to build alliances, to build with Latino communities in particular. It was a call for #BLM without borders. We were being enlisted in a movement that began, she reminded us, with the movement to abolish the institution of slavery. We were being reeducated as she drew connection between the hard-won efforts of formerly fugitive abolitionists to build resilient communities out of the so-called contraband during and following the Civil War through to the present-day ‘‘leader-full’’ movement of #BLM. ‘‘Isn’t this a great time to be alive?’’ Cullors asked in closing. Is she joking I wondered? I found not one drop of cynicism in her question. Without missing a beat, she proceeded to relay the names, the facts, the numbers, the bodies felled by police, by gun, by force. As she listed the lives taken a wave of loss flooded the room and we were still, breathless. ‘‘Protest is about disrupting apathy,’’ she continued. She left us eager to join her in this twenty-first century revival of reconstruction, in a fight for food, for access to housing, for access to education, and for a kind of justice for black lives that will not come without our willingness to show up, stand up, and throw down. In the streets, in solidarity, we will find the power to change people, she said, to change policy. She echoed the words of civil rights organizer Ella Baker, ‘‘the system under which we now exist has to be radically changed… It means facing a system that does not lend itself to your needs and devising means by which you change that system.’’ For Cullors that ‘‘means’’ came by way of waves grief, rage, despair, the loss of family, the loss of hope, bearing witness, heartbreak, and the will to return to face it all again. She closed us out with the rallying chant of the movement for black lives, the recitation of a prayer by Twentieth century fugitive slave Assata Shakur, ‘‘It is our duty to fight for our freedom. It is our duty to win. We must love each other and protect each other. We have nothing to lose but our chains.’’ The congregation’s joy burst through the siren of her words and bound us toward another way of sitting with the litany of loss. What Baldwin and Cullors make clear is that pessimism is most powerful as an unrelenting political process of coming back to life, beginning to feel one another’s humanity. What my students who are taking up the work of Afro-pessimism are in most need of are new ways to put their pessimism to work, to come together and collectively counteract the mind-numbing soul-crushing isolation centuries of antiblack racism have waged on our humanity. We need not fear falling short. The more we ‘‘fail,’’ the stronger we rise to try again armed with the alchemy of despair. What we need are stories and speeches, and spaces that moves us from abjection toward that fertile ground of self-transformation one can only find in the witness of another. What might we give up in a move from critique to healing and reparation, generative of the choice to be fearless in the face of the impossibilities of freedom? What might the audacity to ‘‘lean on each other,’’ as Jasmine Abdullah Richards says in the epigraph, and imagine a future for black life otherwise, add to the pursuits of the pessimist? Countermethod: Adopt a hybridizing strategy - exploiting contradictions in hegemonic discourse maintains critical distance while effectively challenging the state. Kapoor ‘08 Kapoor, 2008 (Ilan, Associate Professor at the Faculty of Environmental Studies, York University, “The Postcolonial Politics of Development,” p. 138-139) There are perhaps several other social movement campaigns that could be cited as examples of a ‘hybridizing strategy’.5 But what emerges as important from the Chipko and NBA campaigns is the way in which they treat laws and policies, institutional practices, and ideological apparatuses as deconstructible. That is, they refuse to take dominant authority at face value, and proceed to reveal its contingencies. Sometimes, they expose what the hegemon is trying to disavow or hide (exclusion of affected communities in project design and implementation, faulty information gathering and dissemination). Sometimes, they problematize dominant or naturalized truths (‘development = unlimited economic growth = capitalism’, ‘big is better’, ‘technology can save the environment’). In either case, by contesting, publicizing, and politicizing accepted or hidden truths, they hybridize power, challenging its smugness and triumphalism, revealing its impurities. They show power to be, literally and figuratively, a bastard. While speaking truth to power, a hybridizing strategy also exploits the instabilities of power. In part, this involves showing up and taking advantage of the equivocations of power — conflicting laws, contradictory policies, unfulfilled promises. A lot has to do here with publicly shaming the hegemon, forcing it to remedy injustices and live up to stated commitments in a more accountable and transparent manner. And, in part, this involves nurturing or manipulating the splits and strains within institutions. Such maneuvering can take the form of cultivating allies, forging alliances, or throwing doubt on prevailing orthodoxy. Note, lastly, the way in which a hybridizing strategy works with the dominant discourse. This reflects the negotiative aspect of Bhabha’s performativity. The strategy may outwit the hegemon, but it does so from the interstices of the hegemony. The master may be paralyzed, but his paralysis is induced using his own poison/medicine. It is for this reason that cultivating allies in the adversarial camp is possible: when you speak their language and appeal to their own ethical horizons, you are building a modicum of common ground. It is for this reason also that the master cannot easily dismiss or crush you. Observing his rules and playing his game makes it difficult for him not to take you seriously or grant you a certain legitimacy A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds -- we can both view the legal system as instrumental to addressing injustice and shift views to critique its shortcomings. The K, by demanding the legal system be perfect before providing legal remedy, demonstrates a profound lack of empathy for those facing injustice. Matsuda ’92. Matsuda, Mari American lawyer, activist, and law professor at the William S. Richardson School of Law at the University of Hawaii. Matsuda returned to Richardson in the fall of 2008, “When the First Quail Calls”, Women’s Rights Law Reporter, Spring/Fall 1992. A professor once remarked that the mediocre law students are the ones who are still trying to make it all make sense. That is, the students who are trying to understand law as necessary, logical, and co-extensive with reality. The students who excel in law schools-and the best lawyers--are the ones who are able to detach law and to see it as a system that makes sense only from a particular viewpoint. Those lawyers can operate within that view, and then shift out of it for purposes of critique, analysis, and strategy. The shifting of consciousness I have thus far ascribed to women of color is a tool used-in a more limited way by skilled lawyers of many ideological bents. A good corporate lawyer can argue within the language and policy of anti-trust law, modify that argument to suit a Reagan-era judge, and then advise a client that the outcome may well turn on some event in Geneva wholly irrelevant to the legal doctrine. Multiple consciousness as jurisprudential method, however, encompasses more than consciousness-shifting as skilled advocacy. It encompasses as well the search for the pathway to a just world. The multiple consciousness I urge lawyers to attain is not a random ability to see all points of view, but a deliberate choice to see the world from the standpoint of the oppressed. That world is accessible to all of us. We should know it in its concrete particulars. We should know of our sister carrying buckets of water up five flights of stairs in a welfare hotel, our sister trembling at 3 a.m. in a shelter for battered women, our sisters holding bloodied children in their arms in Cape Town, on the West Bank, and in Nicaragua. The jurisprudence of outsiders teaches that these details and the emotions they evoke are relevant and important as we set out on the road to justice. These details are accessible to all of us, of all genders and colors. We can choose to know the lives of others by reading, studying, listening, and venturing into different places. For lawyers, our pro bono work may be the most effective means of acquiring a broader consciousness of oppression. Turn: K’s rejection of reform misses the reforms that makes make revolution more likely and condescendingly asserts the possibility of total change is better than the certainty of real improvement without any warrant for this claim. 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. Trend lines prove the status quo form of political engagement works— this isn’t to say that everything is OK, but that falsifiable claims matter for assessing impacts AND that engagement can be effective. Beauchamp ‘13 Zach Beauchamp, Think Progress, 12/11/13, 5 Reasons Why 2013 Was The Best Year In Human History, thinkprogress.org/security/2013/12/11/3036671/2013-certainly-year-human-history/ Racism, sexism, anti-Semitism, homophobia, and other forms of discrimination remain, without a doubt, extraordinarily powerful forces. The statistical and experimental evidence is overwhelming — this irrefutable proof of widespread discrimination against African-Americans, for instance, should put the “racism is dead” fantasy to bed. Yet the need to combat discrimination denial shouldn’t blind us to the good news. Over the centuries, humanity has made extraordinary progress in taming its hate for and ill-treatment of other humans on the basis of difference alone. Indeed, it is very likely that we live in the least discriminatory era in the history of modern civilization. It’s not a huge prize given how bad the past had been, but there are still gains worth celebrating. Go back 150 years in time and the point should be obvious. Take four prominent groups in 1860: African-Americans were in chains, European Jews were routinely massacred in the ghettos and shtetls they were confined to, women around the world were denied the opportunity to work outside the home and made almost entirely subordinate to their husbands, and LGBT people were invisible. The improvements in each of these group’s statuses today, both in the United States and internationally, are incontestable. On closer look, we have reason to believe the happy trends are likely to continue. Take racial discrimination. In 2000, Harvard sociologist Lawrence Bobo penned a comprehensive assessment of the data on racial attitudes in the United States. He found a “national consensus” on the ideals of racial equality and integration. “A nation once comfortable as a deliberately segregationist and racially discriminatory society has not only abandoned that view,” Bobo writes, “but now overtly positively endorses the goals of racial integration and equal treatment. There is no sign whatsoever of retreat from this ideal, despite events that many thought would call it into question. The magnitude, steadiness, and breadth of this change should be lost on no one.” The norm against overt racism has gone global. In her book on the international anti-apartheid movement in the 1980s, Syracuse’s Audie Klotz says flatly that “the illegitimacy of white minority rule led to South Africa’s persistent diplomatic, cultural, and economic isolation.” The belief that racial discrimination could not be tolerated had become so widespread, Klotz argues, that it united the globe — including governments that had strategic interests in supporting South Africa’s whites — in opposition to apartheid. In 2011, 91 percent of respondents in a sample of 21 diverse countries said that equal treatment of people of different races or ethnicities was important to them. Racism obviously survived both American and South African apartheid, albeit in more subtle, insidious forms. “The death of Jim Crow racism has left us in an uncomfortable place,” Bobo writes, “a state of laissez-faire racism” where racial discrimination and disparities still exist, but support for the kind of aggressive government policies needed to address them is racially polarized. But there’s reason to hope that’ll change as well: two massive studies of the political views of younger Americans by my TP Ideas colleagues, John Halpin and Ruy Teixeira, found that millenials were significantly more racially tolerant and supportive of government action to address racial disparities than the generations that preceded them. Though I’m not aware of any similar research of on a global scale, it’s hard not to imagine they’d find similar results, suggesting that we should have hope that the power of racial prejudice may be waning. The story about gender discrimination is very similar: after the feminist movement’s enormous victories in the 20th century, structural sexism still shapes the world in profound ways, but the cause of gender equality is making progress. In 2011, 86 percent of people in a diverse 21 country sample said that equal treatment on the basis of gender was an important value. The U.N.’s Human Development Report’s Gender Inequality Index — a comprehensive study of reproductive health, social empowerment, and labor market equity — saw a 20 percent decline in observable gender inequalities from 1995 to 2011. IMF data show consistent global declines in wage disparities between genders, labor force participation, and educational attainment around the world. While enormous inequality remains, 2013 is looking to be the worst year for sexism in history. Finally, we’ve made astonishing progress on sexual orientation and gender identity discrimination — largely in the past 15 years. At the beginning of 2003, zero Americans lived in marriage equality states; by the end of 2013, 38 percent of Americans will. Article 13 of the European Community Treaty bans discrimination on the grounds of sexual orientation, and, in 2011, the UN Human Rights Council passed a resolution committing the council to documenting and exposing discrimination on orientation or identity grounds around the world. The public opinion trends are positive worldwide: all of the major shifts from 2007 to 2013 in Pew’s “acceptance of homosexuality” poll were towards greater tolerance, and young people everywhere are more open to equality for LGBT individuals than their older peers. best_year_graphics-04 Once again, these victories are partial and by no means inevitable. Racism, sexism, homophobia, and other forms of discrimination aren’t just “going away” on their own. They’re losing their hold on us because people are working to change other people’s minds and because governments are passing laws aimed at promoting equality. Positive trends don’t mean the problems are close to solved, and certainly aren’t excuses for sitting on our hands. That’s true of everything on this list. The fact that fewer people are dying from war and disease doesn’t lessen the moral imperative to do something about those that are; the fact that people are getting richer and safer in their homes isn’t an excuse for doing more to address poverty and crime. But too often, the worst parts about the world are treated as inevitable, the prospect of radical victory over pain and suffering dismissed as utopian fantasy. The overwhelming force of the evidence shows that to be false. As best we can tell, the reason humanity is getting better is because humans have decided to make the world a better place. We consciously chose to develop lifesaving medicine and build freer political systems; we’ve passed laws against workplace discrimination and poisoning children’s minds with lead. So far, these choices have more than paid off. It’s up to us to make sure they continue to. No solvency - Changing debate fails. Atchison and Panetta, 09 (Jarrod Atchison, Phd Rhetoric University of Georgia, Assistant Professor and Director of debate at Wake Forest University, and Edward Panetta, Phd Rhetoric Associate Professor University of Pitt and Director of Debate at Georgia, Intercollegiate Debate and Speech Communication, Historical Developments and Issues for the Future, “Intercollegiate Debate and Speech Communication: Issues for the Future,” The Sage Handbook of Rhetorical Studies, Lunsford, Andrea, ed. (Los Angeles: Sage Publications Inc., 2009) p. 317-334) This section will address the "debate as activism perspective that argues that the appropriate site for addressing community problems in individual debates. In contrast to the "debate as innovation" perspective, which assumes that the activity is an isolated game with educational benefits, proponents of the "debate as activism" perspective argue that individual debates have the potential to create change in the debate community and society at large. If the first approach assumed that debate was completely insulated, this perspective assumes that there is no substantive insulation between individual debates and the community at large. ¶ From our perspective, using individual debates to create community change is an insufficient strategy for three reasons. First, individual debates are, for the most part, insulated from the community at large. Second, individual debates limit the conversation to the immediate participants and the judge, excluding many important contributors to the debate community. Third, locating the discussion within the confines of a competition diminishes the additional potential for collaboration, consensus, and coalition building. The first problem that we isolate is the difficulty of any individual debate to generate community change. Although any debate has the potential to create problems for the community (videotapes of objectionable behavior, etc.), rarely does any one debate have the power to create communitywide change. We attribute this ineffectiveness to the structural problems inherent in individual debates and the collective forgetfulness of the debate community. The structural problems stem from the current tournament format that has remained relatively consistent for the past 30 years. Debaters engage in preliminary debates in rooms that are rarely populated by anyone other than the judge. Judges are instructed to vote for the team that does the best debating, but the ballot is rarely seen by anyone outside the tabulation room.¶ Given the limited number of debates in which a judge actually writes meaningful comments, there is little documentation of what actually transpired during the debate round. During the period when judges interact with the debaters, there are often external pressures (filing evidence, preparing for the next debate, etc.) that restrict the ability of anyone outside the debate to pay attention to the judges' justification for their decision. Elimination debates do not provide for a much better audience because debates still occur simultaneously, and travel schedules dictate that most of the participants have left by the later elimination rounds. It is difficult for anyone to substantiate the claim that asking a judge to vote to solve a community problem in an individual debate with so few participants is the best strategy for addressing important problems.