AC-Space commons V3 NC-asteroid mining DA space based solar power disad 1ar-all NR-space based solar power case 2ar-space based solar power case
Berkeley
3
Opponent: Mission San Jose SS | Judge: Vishan Chaudhary
AC- space commons v3 NC-negative action T Xi DA space elevator PIC JCPOA DA 1ar-1st advantage all offs NR-Xi DA case 2ar-case Xi DA
Berkeley
5
Opponent: Northland Christian LB | Judge: Forrest Fulgenzi
AC-space commons v3 NC-extra t UNOOSA CP Russia DA Asteroid mining DA precision ag DA 1ar-all NR-UNOOSA CP precision ag DA 2ar-case UNOOSA CP precision ag DA
Glenbrooks
1
Opponent: Ardsley ZS | Judge: Derek Hilligoss
AC-incarcerated workers NC-Marx K Nebel T 1ar-all NR-all 2ar-all
Glenbrooks
4
Opponent: Westwood AY | Judge: Peyton Reeves
ac-incarcerated workers v3 nc-t workers minimum wage CP reconciliation DA 1ar-all NR-T 2ar-case T
AC-incarcerated workers v4 NC-T workersNebel (combo) psychoanalysis 1ar-all NR-k case 2ar-k case
Golden Desert
2
Opponent: Peninsula AL | Judge: Jackson Hanna
AC-space commons V2 NC-negative action T Xi DA case 1ar-all NR-negative action T 2ar-negative action T
Golden Desert
3
Opponent: Mountain View EN | Judge: Yoyo Lei
AC-space commons v2 NC-orbital use cp solar flares DA US heg DA 1ar-advantage 1 all offs nr-US heg DA orbital use CP 2ar-case US heg DA orbital use CP
Golden Desert
5
Opponent: Brentwood AR | Judge: Claudia Ribera
AC-space commons v2 NC-T post fiat action T public actors asteroid mining DA advantage cp 1ar-all NR-asteroid mining DA advantage cp 2ar-advantage 1 asteroid mining DA advantage cp
AC-Covid aff v2 NC- T medicines Innovation DA Manufacturing CP Util NC independent voter on case 1ar-all NR- Innovation DA Manufacturing CP independent voter on case 2ar- case Innovation DA Manufacturing CP independent voter on case
Harvard Westlake
5
Opponent: Harvard Westlake AW | Judge: Truman Le
AC-Space commons NC-COPUOS CP laser cannon PIC innovation DA space militarization DA restaurants DA 1ar-all NR-laser cannon PIC 2ar-case PIC
AC-Space Commons V4 - space debris adv conflict adv NC-T global commons spark 1ar-all NR-T 2ar-case T
Peninsula
1
Opponent: Monta Vista RD | Judge: Scott Brown
AC-Space Commons V2 NC-PPWT DA CIL CP asteroid mining PIC 1ar-all NR- PPWT DA CIL CP 2ar-PPWT DA CIL CP case
Peninsula
3
Opponent: Millard North AR | Judge: Saketh Kotapati
AC-Space commons v2 NC-SpaceX DA Starlink PIC 1AR-advantage 1 PICs bad SpaceX DA Starlink PIC NR- AT PICs bad AT condo bad SpaceX DA Starlink PIC 2ar-advantage 1 SpaceX DA Starlink PIC
Peninsula
6
Opponent: Immaculate Heart BC | Judge: Anish Ramireddy
AC-space commons v2 NC-Xi da PPWT DA CIL CP 1ar-all condo bad NR-Xi DA 2ar-Xi DA case
AC-Covid V3 NC-T vaccines innovation DA China CP 1ar-all case NR- China CP innovation DA 2ar- case cp DA
St Marks
4
Opponent: Strake Jesuit JW | Judge: Ari Davidson
AC-Covid V3 NC-innovation DA China DA Fishing disad advantage CP util NC scientists CP 1ar-all NR- advantage CP China DA case 2ar-advantage CP China DA case
St Marks
5
Opponent: Harker AA | Judge: Eric He
AC-covid V3 NC-climate change DA counterfeits DA advantage CP 1ar-all NR-climate disad 2ar- disad case
USC
1
Opponent: Park City NL | Judge: Samantha McLoughlin
AC-Incarcerated workers v4 NC-Weheliye K abolition K Nebel 1ar-all NR- Weheliye K 2ar-case Weheliye K cross application from abolition K
USC
4
Opponent: Harvard Westlake AW | Judge: Julian Kuffor
AC-incarcerated workers v4 NC-cap k nebel t 1ar-all NR-nebel 2ar-nebel
USC
5
Opponent: Mission San Jose AA | Judge: Jacob Nails
AC-incarcerated workers V4 NC-T States Strike Spec courts CP BOP CP Build Back Better DA Fishing DA 1ar-all NR-T states Build Back better DA 2ar- case T states Build Back better DA
To modify or delete round reports, edit the associated round.
Cites
Entry
Date
0-Contact Information and important disclosure info
Tournament: NA | Round: 1 | Opponent: NA | Judge: NA Hi, I am Macy (she/her). You can contact me through email. Email: Macylerner22@marlborough.org
M wiki is not loading cites, so the affs will not show up in the cite box but I have included round reports and open sources. Sorry!
9/4/21
JF-Space Commons
Tournament: Havard Westlake | Round: 1 | Opponent: McNeil AG | Judge: David Kilpatrick Advantage 1: Space Debris Private companies are cramming satellites into the Earth’s orbit, which are quickly becoming defunct pieces of “space junk.” Wood 20 Therese Wood Writer, Visual Capitalist, 20 - ("Who owns our orbit: Just how many satellites are there in space?," World Economic Forum, 10-23-2020, 12-8-2021, https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2020/10/visualizing-easrth-satellites-sapce-spacex)//AW There are nearly … to September 2020
Collisions make orbit unusable, causing nuclear war, mass starvation, and economic destruction. Jonson 13 Les Johnson 13, Deputy Manager for NASA's Advanced Concepts Office at the Marshall Space Flight Center, Co-Investigator for the JAXA T-Rex Space Tether Experiment and PI of NASA's ProSEDS Experiment, Master's Degree in Physics from Vanderbilt University, Popular Science Writer, and NASA Technologist, Frequent Contributor to the Journal of the British Interplanetary Sodety and Member of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, National Space Society, the World Future Society, and MENSA, Sky Alert!: When Satellites Fail, p. 9-12 Whatever the initial … reduced or eliminated.
Advantage 2: Corporate Colonialism Tech-billionaires advance a vision of private space colonization as a source of infinite resources to cure society’s ills. This rationalizes unrestrained consumption and replicates the logic of imperialism. Mccormick 21 Ted McCormick writes about the history of science, empire, and economic thought. He has a Ph.D. in history from Columbia University and teaches at Concordia University in Montreal. “The billionaire space race reflects a colonial mindset that fails to imagine a different world”. 8-15-2021. The Conversation. https://theconversation.com/the-billionaire-space-race-reflects-a-colonial-mindset-that-fails-to-imagine-a-different-world-165235. Accessed 12-15-2021; marlborough JH It was a … these consequences today.
This private expansion into space results in corporate colonization of planets that undermines the interests of the rest of humanity. Spencer ’17 Spencer, Keith A. senior editor at Salon“Against Mars-a-Lago: Why SpaceX's Mars Colonization Plan Should Terrify You.” Salon, Salon.com, Oct. 8 2017, https://www.salon.com/2017/10/08/against-mars-a-lago-why-spacexs-mars-colonization-plan-should-terrify-you/. When CEO Elon … in the sky.”
Neoliberalism destroys ethics, locks in poverty and exploitation, decimates the environment, and causes war. Werlhof 15 – Claudia, Professor of Political Science/Women's Studies, University Innsbruck (Austria), 2015 (“Neoliberal Globalization: Is There an Alternative to Plundering the Earth?” Global Research, May 25th, Available Online at http://www.globalresearch.ca/neoliberal-globalization-is-there-an-alternative-to-plundering-the-earth/24403) At the center … to the new militarism.
Plan The appropriation of outer space by private entities is unjust. Thus, the plan. Plan text: Outer space ought to be recognized as a global commons as per the Goehring card. Goehring describes but does not advocate treating space in this way. Goehring 6/3 - John S. Goehring B.A., University of California, Berkeley; J.D., Tulane Law School; LL.M., McGill University, Institute of Air and Space Law) is a space and international law attorney for the Department of Defense and a judge advocate in the United States Air Force Reserve, “Why Isn’t Outer Space a Global Commons?” Journal of National Security Law and Policy. Vol. 11:573. (June 3, 2021).https://jnslp.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/Why_Isnt_Outer_Space_a_Global_Commons_2.pdf AT B. Global Commons as… or geopolitical sense.53
Solvency Treating space as a commons solves orbital debris. States already agree to a limited regime of this type. Silverstein and Panda ‘3/9 - Benjamin Silverstein research analyst for the Space Project at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. MA, International Relations, Syracuse University Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs BA, International Affairs, George Washington University and Ankit Panda Stanton Senior Fellow in the Nuclear Policy Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. AB, Princeton University, “Space Is a Great Commons. It’s Time to Treat It as Such.” Carnegie Endowment for International Peace (Web). March 9, 2021. Accessed Dec. 13, 2021. https://carnegieendowment.org/2021/03/09/space-is-great-commons.-it-s-time-to-treat-it-as-such-pub-84018 AT The failure to … issues like debris.
Space resources must be distributed democratically—this requires challenging private control of outer space. Levine 15 Nick Levine, MPhil candidate in history of science at the University of Cambridge, 3-21-2015, "Democratize the Universe," Jacobin, https://jacobinmag.com/2015/03/space-industry-extraction-levine The privatization of… a democratic futurism.
States can extend existing models to govern space, but recognition of space as a commons is key. Silverstein and Panda ‘3/9 - Benjamin Silverstein research analyst for the Space Project at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. MA, International Relations, Syracuse University Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs BA, International Affairs, George Washington University and Ankit Panda Stanton Senior Fellow in the Nuclear Policy Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. AB, Princeton University, “Space Is a Great Commons. It’s Time to Treat It as Such.” Carnegie Endowment for International Peace (Web). March 9, 2021. Accessed Dec. 13, 2021. https://carnegieendowment.org/2021/03/09/space-is-great-commons.-it-s-time-to-treat-it-as-such-pub-84018 AT BUILDING ON PRIOR … a great commons.
Underview Scholarly discourse and engagement with politics is key to effective structural reform - critique is insufficient. Purdy ’20 - Jedediah S. Britton-Purdy et al, 20 - ("Building a Law-and-Political-Economy Framework: Beyond the Twentieth-Century Synthesis by Jedediah S. Britton-Purdy, David Singh Grewal, Amy Kapczynski, K. Sabeel Rahman :: SSRN," 3-2-2020, https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3547312)//ey/ To embrace … deeply democratic ways.
Reform makes revolution more likely. Rejecting it condescendingly asserts the possibility of radical change is better than the certainty of real improvement. Delgado ’87 - Delgado, Richard teaches civil rights and critical race theory at University of Alabama School of Law. He has written and co-authored numerous articles and books, “The Ethereal Scholar: Does Critical Legal Studies Have What Minorities Want?”, Harvard Civil Rights - Civil Liberties Law Review, 1987 Critical scholars reject … what we want.
1/15/22
JF-Space Commons V2
Tournament: Peninsula | Round: 1 | Opponent: Monta Vista RD | Judge: Scott Brown AC Ambiguities in the OST that allow private appropriation have kicked off a race to develop space, setting the stage for a debris crisis and the domination of space by unaccountable billionaires. Current laws fail due to lax rules and forum shopping. Dovey 21 Ceridwen Dovey, “Space Exploration At What Price?,” Readers Digest Asia Pacific, 5/1/21. https://www.pressreader.com/australia/readers-digest-asia-pacific/20210501/281487869174485 CT One environmental risk …community before launch.
Advantage 1: Space Debris Increasing space debris levels inevitably set off a chain of collisions. Chelsea Muñoz-Patchen, 19 - (J.D. Candidate at The University of Chicago Law School., "Regulating the Space Commons: Treating Space Debris as Abandoned Property in Violation of the Outer Space Treaty," University of Chicago, 2019, 12-6-2021, https://cjil.uchicago.edu/publication/regulating-space-commons-treating-space-debris-abandoned-property-violation-outer-space)//AW Debris poses a threat … to develop a solution.52
Collisions make orbit unusable, causing nuclear war, mass starvation, and economic destruction. Jonson 13 Les Johnson 13, Deputy Manager for NASA's Advanced Concepts Office at the Marshall Space Flight Center, Co-Investigator for the JAXA T-Rex Space Tether Experiment and PI of NASA's ProSEDS Experiment, Master's Degree in Physics from Vanderbilt University, Popular Science Writer, and NASA Technologist, Frequent Contributor to the Journal of the British Interplanetary Sodety and Member of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, National Space Society, the World Future Society, and MENSA, Sky Alert!: When Satellites Fail, p. 9-12 Whatever the initial … reduced or eliminated.
Advantage 2: Corporate Colonialism Tech-billionaires advance a vision of private space colonization as a source of infinite resources to cure society’s ills. This rationalizes unrestrained consumption and replicates the logic of imperialism. Mccormick 21 Ted McCormick writes about the history of science, empire, and economic thought. He has a Ph.D. in history from Columbia University and teaches at Concordia University in Montreal. “The billionaire space race reflects a colonial mindset that fails to imagine a different world”. 8-15-2021. The Conversation. https://theconversation.com/the-billionaire-space-race-reflects-a-colonial-mindset-that-fails-to-imagine-a-different-world-165235. Accessed 12-15-2021; marlborough JH It was a … these consequences today.
If only wealthy elites can tap the vast resources of outer space, we lock in a permanent and unconscionable inequality. Private space colonization amounts to authoritarian corporate control of future settlements. Spencer ‘17 When CEO Elon … in the sky.”
Neoliberalism destroys ethics, locks in poverty and exploitation, decimates the environment, and causes war. Werlhof 15 – Claudia, Professor of Political Science/Women's Studies, University Innsbruck (Austria), 2015 (“Neoliberal Globalization: Is There an Alternative to Plundering the Earth?” Global Research, May 25th, Available Online at http://www.globalresearch.ca/neoliberal-globalization-is-there-an-alternative-to-plundering-the-earth/24403) At the center … to the new militarism.
Plan/Solvency Since, in a just world, outer space would be treated as a global commons, and a global commons model precludes appropriation by private entries, then the appropriation of outer space by private entries is unjust. Thus, the plan: States ought to adopt a binding international agreement that bans the appropriation of outer space by private entities by establishing outer space as a global commons subject to regulatory delimiting and global liability. The aff: - solves debris and space colonialism by ensuring the sustainable and equitable use of outer space resources. - prevents circumvention by aligning the interests of state parties - is normal means since it models numerous successful agreements governing all other global commons. Vollmer 20 Sarah Louise Vollmer (St. Mary's University School of Law), “The Right Stuff in Geospace: Using Mutual Coercion to Avoid an Inevitable Prison for Humanity,” 51 ST. MARY'S L.J. 777 (2020). https://commons.stmarytx.edu/thestmaryslawjournal/vol51/iss3/6?utm_source=commons.stmarytx.edu2Fthestmaryslawjournal2Fvol512Fiss32F6andutm_medium=PDFandutm_campaign=PDFCoverPages CT IV. NECESSITY FOR REGULATION … also produces evils.”183
Treating space as a commons solves orbital debris. States already agree to a limited regime of this type. Silverstein and Panda ‘3/9 - Benjamin Silverstein research analyst for the Space Project at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. MA, International Relations, Syracuse University Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs BA, International Affairs, George Washington University and Ankit Panda Stanton Senior Fellow in the Nuclear Policy Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. AB, Princeton University, “Space Is a Great Commons. It’s Time to Treat It as Such.” Carnegie Endowment for International Peace (Web). March 9, 2021. Accessed Dec. 13, 2021. https://carnegieendowment.org/2021/03/09/space-is-great-commons.-it-s-time-to-treat-it-as-such-pub-84018 AT The failure to … issues like debris.
Development of space resources is still possible with a commons model. Property rights are not necessary. Existing models governing commons encourage responsible development, numerous examples prove. Sterling and Orrman-Rossiter 18 Sterling Saletta, Morgan; Orrman-Rossiter, Kevin (2018). Can space mining benefit all of humanity?: The resource fund and citizen's dividend model of Alaska, the ‘last frontier’. Space Policy, (), S0265964616300704–. doi:10.1016/j.spacepol.2018.02.002 CT The Outer Space … all of humanity.
1/22/22
JF-Space Commons V3
Tournament: Berkeley | Round: 2 | Opponent: Honor DL | Judge: Cale McCrary AC Ambiguities in the OST that allow private appropriation have kicked off a race to develop space, setting the stage for a debris crisis and the domination of space by unaccountable billionaires. Current laws fail due to lax rules and forum shopping. Dovey 21 Ceridwen Dovey, “Space Exploration At What Price?,” Readers Digest Asia Pacific, 5/1/21. https://www.pressreader.com/australia/readers-digest-asia-pacific/20210501/281487869174485 CT One environmental risk …community before launch.
Advantage 1: Space Debris Increasing space debris levels inevitably set off a chain of collisions. Chelsea Muñoz-Patchen, 19 - (J.D. Candidate at The University of Chicago Law School., "Regulating the Space Commons: Treating Space Debris as Abandoned Property in Violation of the Outer Space Treaty," University of Chicago, 2019, 12-6-2021, https://cjil.uchicago.edu/publication/regulating-space-commons-treating-space-debris-abandoned-property-violation-outer-space)//AW Debris poses a threat … to develop a solution.52
Collisions make orbit unusable, causing nuclear war, mass starvation, and economic destruction. Jonson 13 Les Johnson 13, Deputy Manager for NASA's Advanced Concepts Office at the Marshall Space Flight Center, Co-Investigator for the JAXA T-Rex Space Tether Experiment and PI of NASA's ProSEDS Experiment, Master's Degree in Physics from Vanderbilt University, Popular Science Writer, and NASA Technologist, Frequent Contributor to the Journal of the British Interplanetary Sodety and Member of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, National Space Society, the World Future Society, and MENSA, Sky Alert!: When Satellites Fail, p. 9-12 Whatever the initial … reduced or eliminated.
Advantage 2: Corporate Colonialism Tech-billionaires advance a vision of private space colonization as a source of infinite resources to cure society’s ills. This rationalizes unrestrained consumption and replicates the logic of imperialism. Mccormick 21 Ted McCormick writes about the history of science, empire, and economic thought. He has a Ph.D. in history from Columbia University and teaches at Concordia University in Montreal. “The billionaire space race reflects a colonial mindset that fails to imagine a different world”. 8-15-2021. The Conversation. https://theconversation.com/the-billionaire-space-race-reflects-a-colonial-mindset-that-fails-to-imagine-a-different-world-165235. Accessed 12-15-2021; marlborough JH It was a … these consequences today.
If only wealthy elites can tap the vast resources of outer space, we lock in a permanent and unconscionable inequality. Private space colonization amounts to authoritarian corporate control of future settlements. Spencer ‘17 When CEO Elon … in the sky.”
Neoliberalism destroys ethics, locks in poverty and exploitation, decimates the environment, and causes war. Werlhof 15 – Claudia, Professor of Political Science/Women's Studies, University Innsbruck (Austria), 2015 (“Neoliberal Globalization: Is There an Alternative to Plundering the Earth?” Global Research, May 25th, Available Online at http://www.globalresearch.ca/neoliberal-globalization-is-there-an-alternative-to-plundering-the-earth/24403) At the center … to the new militarism.
Plan/Solvency Since, in a just world, outer space would be treated as a global commons, and a global commons model precludes appropriation by private entries, then the appropriation of outer space by private entries is unjust. Thus, the plan: States ought to adopt a binding international agreement that bans the appropriation of outer space by private entities by establishing outer space as a global commons subject to regulatory delimiting and global liability. The aff: - solves debris and space colonialism by ensuring the sustainable and equitable use of outer space resources. - prevents circumvention by aligning the interests of state parties - is normal means since it models numerous successful agreements governing all other global commons. Vollmer 20 Sarah Louise Vollmer (St. Mary's University School of Law), “The Right Stuff in Geospace: Using Mutual Coercion to Avoid an Inevitable Prison for Humanity,” 51 ST. MARY'S L.J. 777 (2020). https://commons.stmarytx.edu/thestmaryslawjournal/vol51/iss3/6?utm_source=commons.stmarytx.edu2Fthestmaryslawjournal2Fvol512Fiss32F6andutm_medium=PDFandutm_campaign=PDFCoverPages CT IV. NECESSITY FOR REGULATION … also produces evils.”183
Treating space as a commons solves orbital debris. Current non-binding agreements are not enough. Silverstein and Panda ‘3/9 - Benjamin Silverstein research analyst for the Space Project at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. MA, International Relations, Syracuse University Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs BA, International Affairs, George Washington University and Ankit Panda Stanton Senior Fellow in the Nuclear Policy Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. AB, Princeton University, “Space Is a Great Commons. It’s Time to Treat It as Such.” Carnegie Endowment for International Peace (Web). March 9, 2021. Accessed Dec. 13, 2021. https://carnegieendowment.org/2021/03/09/space-is-great-commons.-it-s-time-to-treat-it-as-such-pub-84018 AT The failure to … issues like debris.
Since the national appropriation is banned by the OST, banning private appropriation would ipso facto result in space being a global commons, so the plan is not extra T and is normal means. Neto 21 Bittencourt Neto, Olava de O. “Chapter 1: Outer Space as a Global Commons and the Role of Space Law,” A Research Agenda for Space Policy, Edward Elgar Publishing, Cheltenham, UK, 2021. https://www.elgaronline.com/view/edcoll/9781800374737/9781800374737.00009.xml CT Over the past ...to its uses (Soroos, 2001, p. 45).
2/19/22
ND-Incarcerated Workers
Tournament: Hollywood Invitational | Round: 2 | Opponent: Harvard Westlake EJ | Judge: Lindsay Williams Aff AC Incarcerated workers do not have a right to strike in the US. Harvard Law Review, 19 - ("Striking the Right Balance: Toward a Better Understanding of Prison Strikes," Harvard Law Review 03/8/2019, accessed 10-28-2021, https://harvardlawreview.org/2019/03/striking-the-right-balance-toward-a-better-understanding-of-prison-strikes/)//ML II. LEGAL FRAMEWORK GOVERNING … protecting prison strikes.
Prison working conditions are terrible—prisoners work in unsafe conditions and accrue thousands of dollars in debt. Eisen 20 Lauren-Brooke Eisen director of the Brennan Center’s Justice Program where she leads the organization’s work to end mass incarceration, 20 - ("Covid-19 Highlights the Need for Prison Labor Reform," Brennan Center for Justice, 4-17-2020, accessed 11-4-2021, https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/covid-19-highlights-need-prison-labor-reform)//ML For decades, prisoners … and a half ago.
Prisoners make almost no money for their labor. Fulcher 15 Patrice A. Fulcher Associate Professor at The John Marshall Law School, 15 - ("," Journal of Civil Rights and Economic Development, Winter 2015, accessed 10-28-2021, https://scholarship.law.stjohns.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1759andcontext=jcred)//ML B.87 In 2011, FPI's … and living conditions. 140
Low wages for prisoners create cycles of recidivism. Fulcher 15 Patrice A. Fulcher Associate Professor at The John Marshall Law School, 15 - ("," Journal of Civil Rights and Economic Development, Winter 2015, accessed 10-28-2021, https://scholarship.law.stjohns.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1759andcontext=jcred)//ML B. Reallocate Greater Wealth … in free society. ¶
Plan Plan: The United States ought to recognize the unconditional right of incarcerated workers to strike.
Solvency The right to strike is key for prisoners hoping to reform the criminal justice system, allows prison laborers to publicize their conditions and assert their right to dignity Harvard Law Review, 19 - ("Striking the Right Balance: Toward a Better Understanding of Prison Strikes," Harvard Law Review 03/8/2019, accessed 10-28-2021, https://harvardlawreview.org/2019/03/striking-the-right-balance-toward-a-better-understanding-of-prison-strikes/)//ML But in order … avenue to consider.
Incarcerated workers are uniquely vulnerable to exploitation the right to strike is a key weapon in fighting for better conditions Kelly 18 Kim Kelly is a freelance journalist and organizer based in Philadelphia. Her work on labor, class, politics, and culture has appeared in the New Republic, the Washington Post, the Baffler, and Esquire, among other publications, and she is the author of FIGHT LIKE HELL, a forthcoming book of intersectional labor history. “How the Ongoing Prison Strike is Connected to the Labor Movement”. 9-4-2018. Teen Vogue. https://www.teenvogue.com/story/labor-day-2018-how-the-ongoing-prison-strike-is-connected-to-the-labor-movement. Accessed 11-1-2021; MJen It’s a tough … are bleeding out.
Prisoners currently face massive barriers to striking – they get punished and aren’t allowed to unionize Kozlowska 16 Hanna is a reporter on Quartz's investigations team. She previously worked for The New York Times as a writer for NYT Opinion and was a fellow at Foreign Policy magazine. She was also a stringer for the Times in Poland. “US prisoners are going on strike to protest a massive forced labor system”. 9-06-2016. Quartz. https://qz.com/777415/an-unprecedented-prison-strike-hopes-to-change-the-fate-of-the-900000-americans-trapped-in-an-exploitative-labor-system/. Accessed 11-1-2021; MJen On Friday (Sept. 9) …America’s prison slaves.”
Framework The impact of structural violence cumulatively outweighs – challenging the structures that facilitate inequality is necessary Ansell 17 - David A. Ansell, Senior Vice President, Associate Provost for Community Health Equity, and Michael E. Kelly Professor of Medicine at Rush University Medical Center (The Death Gap: How Inequality Kills, p. 7-10) There are many ... to fix it.
Underview 1 Scholarly discourse and engagement with politics is key to effective structural reform - critique is insufficient. Purdy ’20 - Jedediah S. Britton-Purdy et al, 20 - ("Building a Law-and-Political-Economy Framework: Beyond the Twentieth-Century Synthesis by Jedediah S. Britton-Purdy, David Singh Grewal, Amy Kapczynski, K. Sabeel Rahman :: SSRN," 3-2-2020, https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3547312)//ey/ To embrace the … deeply democratic ways.
Reform makes revolution more likely. Rejecting it condescendingly asserts the possibility of radical change is better than the certainty of real improvement. Delgado ’87 - Delgado, Richard teaches civil rights and critical race theory at University of Alabama School of Law. He has written and co-authored numerous articles and books, “The Ethereal Scholar: Does Critical Legal Studies Have What Minorities Want?”, Harvard Civil Rights - Civil Liberties Law Review, 1987 Critical scholars reject … what we want.
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 … deflect their claims.
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. Zannoti ’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 …- and pessimistic activism.
Underview 2 Their disads will surely be ridiculous. (A) Ethics – The state is complicit in perpetuating inequalities that are terrible for incarcerated workers. Apply a VERY high standard of proof to any rationalization of that policy. (B) Compound Probability - Multiplied probabilities of long link chains have negligible net probabilities. This is the slippery slope fallacy. (C) Causal Direction - They will say the fractional probability of a huge impact still has a large expected value, but it’s impossible to determine the direction of low-probability links. Does the butterfly flapping its wings cause the hurricane or prevent it? Disregard tiny-probability links because they don’t guide decision-making. (D) Complexity – the DA presents a simplistic and deterministic narrative that fails to account for the myriad confounding factors that can disrupt or reverse the link chain of the DA. The most important of these is the probability that people will recognize the dangerous path they’re on and change course, e.g. leaders backing down during the Cuban Missile Crisis. (E) Decision Gridlock – Every course of action or inaction has a negligible possibility of causing extinction. This makes it impossible to prioritize averting existential risk over all else because such risk is unavoidable. We have no choice but to prioritize REALISTIC probabilities.
11/7/21
ND-Incarcerated Workers AC V2
Tournament: Hollywood Invitational | Round: 5 | Opponent: Vestavia Hills DS | Judge: George Zhang Aff AC Incarcerated workers do not have a right to strike in the US. Harvard Law Review, 19 - ("Striking the Right Balance: Toward a Better Understanding of Prison Strikes," Harvard Law Review 03/8/2019, accessed 10-28-2021, https://harvardlawreview.org/2019/03/striking-the-right-balance-toward-a-better-understanding-of-prison-strikes/)//ML II. LEGAL FRAMEWORK GOVERNING … protecting prison strikes.
Prison working conditions are terrible—prisoners work in unsafe conditions and accrue thousands of dollars in debt. Eisen 20 Lauren-Brooke Eisen director of the Brennan Center’s Justice Program where she leads the organization’s work to end mass incarceration, 20 - ("Covid-19 Highlights the Need for Prison Labor Reform," Brennan Center for Justice, 4-17-2020, accessed 11-4-2021, https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/covid-19-highlights-need-prison-labor-reform)//ML For decades, prisoners … and a half ago.
Prisoners make almost no money for their labor. Fulcher 15 Patrice A. Fulcher Associate Professor at The John Marshall Law School, 15 - ("," Journal of Civil Rights and Economic Development, Winter 2015, accessed 10-28-2021, https://scholarship.law.stjohns.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1759andcontext=jcred)//ML B.87 In 2011, FPI's … and living conditions. 140
Low wages for prisoners create cycles of recidivism. Fulcher 15 Patrice A. Fulcher Associate Professor at The John Marshall Law School, 15 - ("," Journal of Civil Rights and Economic Development, Winter 2015, accessed 10-28-2021, https://scholarship.law.stjohns.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1759andcontext=jcred)//ML B. Reallocate Greater Wealth … in free society. ¶
Plan Plan: The United States ought to recognize the unconditional right of incarcerated workers to strike.
Solvency The right to strike is key for prisoners hoping to reform the criminal justice system, allows prison laborers to publicize their conditions and assert their right to dignity Harvard Law Review, 19 - ("Striking the Right Balance: Toward a Better Understanding of Prison Strikes," Harvard Law Review 03/8/2019, accessed 10-28-2021, https://harvardlawreview.org/2019/03/striking-the-right-balance-toward-a-better-understanding-of-prison-strikes/)//ML But in order … avenue to consider.
Incarcerated workers are uniquely vulnerable to exploitation the right to strike is a key weapon in fighting for better conditions Kelly 18 Kim Kelly is a freelance journalist and organizer based in Philadelphia. Her work on labor, class, politics, and culture has appeared in the New Republic, the Washington Post, the Baffler, and Esquire, among other publications, and she is the author of FIGHT LIKE HELL, a forthcoming book of intersectional labor history. “How the Ongoing Prison Strike is Connected to the Labor Movement”. 9-4-2018. Teen Vogue. https://www.teenvogue.com/story/labor-day-2018-how-the-ongoing-prison-strike-is-connected-to-the-labor-movement. Accessed 11-1-2021; MJen It’s a tough … are bleeding out.
Prisoners currently face massive barriers to striking – they get punished and aren’t allowed to unionize Kozlowska 16 Hanna is a reporter on Quartz's investigations team. She previously worked for The New York Times as a writer for NYT Opinion and was a fellow at Foreign Policy magazine. She was also a stringer for the Times in Poland. “US prisoners are going on strike to protest a massive forced labor system”. 9-06-2016. Quartz. https://qz.com/777415/an-unprecedented-prison-strike-hopes-to-change-the-fate-of-the-900000-americans-trapped-in-an-exploitative-labor-system/. Accessed 11-1-2021; MJen On Friday (Sept. 9) …America’s prison slaves.”
Framework The impact of structural violence cumulatively outweighs – challenging the structures that facilitate inequality is necessary Ansell 17 - David A. Ansell, Senior Vice President, Associate Provost for Community Health Equity, and Michael E. Kelly Professor of Medicine at Rush University Medical Center (The Death Gap: How Inequality Kills, p. 7-10) There are many ... to fix it.
Underview 1 The Aff challenges dehumanizing cultural frames that allow us to ignore human suffering. Recognition of common vulnerability is key to a politics that rejects violence, oppression, and indifference. Butler ’04 - Judith Butler Prof. of Rhetoric and Comparative Literature, University of California at Berkeley, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence. New York: Verso (2006; First Published 2004). pp. 30-35 AT Is there something ... unmarkable and ungrievable.
Scholarly discourse and engagement with politics is key to effective structural reform - critique is insufficient. Purdy ’20 - Jedediah S. Britton-Purdy et al, 20 - ("Building a Law-and-Political-Economy Framework: Beyond the Twentieth-Century Synthesis by Jedediah S. Britton-Purdy, David Singh Grewal, Amy Kapczynski, K. Sabeel Rahman :: SSRN," 3-2-2020, https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3547312)//ey/ To embrace the … deeply democratic ways.
Reform makes revolution more likely. Rejecting it condescendingly asserts the possibility of radical change is better than the certainty of real improvement. Delgado ’87 - Delgado, Richard teaches civil rights and critical race theory at University of Alabama School of Law. He has written and co-authored numerous articles and books, “The Ethereal Scholar: Does Critical Legal Studies Have What Minorities Want?”, Harvard Civil Rights - Civil Liberties Law Review, 1987 Critical scholars reject … what we want.
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 … deflect their claims.
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. Zannoti ’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 …- and pessimistic activism.
Underview 2 Their disads will surely be ridiculous. (A) Ethics – The state is complicit in perpetuating inequalities that are terrible for incarcerated workers. Apply a VERY high standard of proof to any rationalization of that policy. (B) Compound Probability - Multiplied probabilities of long link chains have negligible net probabilities. This is the slippery slope fallacy. (C) Causal Direction - They will say the fractional probability of a huge impact still has a large expected value, but it’s impossible to determine the direction of low-probability links. Does the butterfly flapping its wings cause the hurricane or prevent it? Disregard tiny-probability links because they don’t guide decision-making. (D) Complexity – the DA presents a simplistic and deterministic narrative that fails to account for the myriad confounding factors that can disrupt or reverse the link chain of the DA. The most important of these is the probability that people will recognize the dangerous path they’re on and change course, e.g. leaders backing down during the Cuban Missile Crisis. (E) Decision Gridlock – Every course of action or inaction has a negligible possibility of causing extinction. This makes it impossible to prioritize averting existential risk over all else because such risk is unavoidable. We have no choice but to prioritize REALISTIC probabilities.
11/7/21
ND-Incarcerated Workers AC V3
Tournament: Glenbrooks | Round: 1 | Opponent: Ardsley ZS | Judge: Derek Hilligoss Aff AC Incarcerated workers do not currently have a right to strike in the US. Harvard Law Review, 19 - ("Striking the Right Balance: Toward a Better Understanding of Prison Strikes," Harvard Law Review 03/8/2019, accessed 10-28-2021, https://harvardlawreview.org/2019/03/striking-the-right-balance-toward-a-better-understanding-of-prison-strikes/)//ML II. LEGAL FRAMEWORK GOVERNING … protecting prison strikes.
Prison working conditions are terrible—prisoners work in unsafe environments and accrue thousands of dollars in debt. Eisen 20 Lauren-Brooke Eisen director of the Brennan Center’s Justice Program where she leads the organization’s work to end mass incarceration, 20 - ("Covid-19 Highlights the Need for Prison Labor Reform," Brennan Center for Justice, 4-17-2020, accessed 11-4-2021, https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/covid-19-highlights-need-prison-labor-reform)//ML For decades, prisoners … and a half ago.
Prisoners get virtually zero pay for their labor. Fulcher 15 Patrice A. Fulcher Associate Professor at The John Marshall Law School, 15 - ("," Journal of Civil Rights and Economic Development, Winter 2015, accessed 10-28-2021, https://scholarship.law.stjohns.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1759andcontext=jcred)//ML B.87 In 2011, FPI's … and living conditions. 140
Low wages for prisoners create cycles of recidivism. Fulcher 15 Patrice A. Fulcher Associate Professor at The John Marshall Law School, 15 - ("," Journal of Civil Rights and Economic Development, Winter 2015, accessed 10-28-2021, https://scholarship.law.stjohns.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1759andcontext=jcred)//ML B. Reallocate Greater Wealth … in free society. ¶
Plan Plan: The United States ought to recognize the unconditional right of incarcerated workers to strike.
Solvency The right to strike is key for prisoners hoping to reform the criminal justice system, allows prison laborers to publicize their conditions and assert their right to dignity Harvard Law Review, 19 - ("Striking the Right Balance: Toward a Better Understanding of Prison Strikes," Harvard Law Review 03/8/2019, accessed 10-28-2021, https://harvardlawreview.org/2019/03/striking-the-right-balance-toward-a-better-understanding-of-prison-strikes/)//ML But in order … avenue to consider.
Incarcerated workers are uniquely vulnerable to exploitation the right to strike is a key weapon in fighting for better conditions Kelly 18 Kim Kelly is a freelance journalist and organizer based in Philadelphia. Her work on labor, class, politics, and culture has appeared in the New Republic, the Washington Post, the Baffler, and Esquire, among other publications, and she is the author of FIGHT LIKE HELL, a forthcoming book of intersectional labor history. “How the Ongoing Prison Strike is Connected to the Labor Movement”. 9-4-2018. Teen Vogue. https://www.teenvogue.com/story/labor-day-2018-how-the-ongoing-prison-strike-is-connected-to-the-labor-movement. Accessed 11-1-2021; MJen It’s a tough … are bleeding out.
Prisoners currently face massive barriers to striking – they get punished and aren’t allowed to unionize Kozlowska 16 Hanna is a reporter on Quartz's investigations team. She previously worked for The New York Times as a writer for NYT Opinion and was a fellow at Foreign Policy magazine. She was also a stringer for the Times in Poland. “US prisoners are going on strike to protest a massive forced labor system”. 9-06-2016. Quartz. https://qz.com/777415/an-unprecedented-prison-strike-hopes-to-change-the-fate-of-the-900000-americans-trapped-in-an-exploitative-labor-system/. Accessed 11-1-2021; MJen On Friday (Sept. 9) …America’s prison slaves.”
Framework The impact of structural violence cumulatively outweighs – challenging the structures that facilitate inequality is necessary Ansell 17 - David A. Ansell, Senior Vice President, Associate Provost for Community Health Equity, and Michael E. Kelly Professor of Medicine at Rush University Medical Center (The Death Gap: How Inequality Kills, p. 7-10) There are many ... to fix it.
Underview 1 Scholarly discourse and engagement with politics is key to effective structural reform - critique is insufficient. Purdy ’20 - Jedediah S. Britton-Purdy et al, 20 - ("Building a Law-and-Political-Economy Framework: Beyond the Twentieth-Century Synthesis by Jedediah S. Britton-Purdy, David Singh Grewal, Amy Kapczynski, K. Sabeel Rahman :: SSRN," 3-2-2020, https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3547312)//ey/ To embrace the … deeply democratic ways.
Reform makes revolution more likely. Rejecting it condescendingly asserts the possibility of radical change is better than the certainty of real improvement. Delgado ’87 - Delgado, Richard teaches civil rights and critical race theory at University of Alabama School of Law. He has written and co-authored numerous articles and books, “The Ethereal Scholar: Does Critical Legal Studies Have What Minorities Want?”, Harvard Civil Rights - Civil Liberties Law Review, 1987 Critical scholars reject … what we want.
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 … deflect their claims.
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. Zannoti ’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 …- and pessimistic activism.
Underview 2 Their disads will surely be ridiculous. (A) Ethics – The state is complicit in perpetuating inequalities that are terrible for incarcerated workers. Apply a VERY high standard of proof to any rationalization of that policy. (B) Compound Probability - Multiplied probabilities of long link chains have negligible net probabilities. This is the slippery slope fallacy. (C) Causal Direction - They will say the fractional probability of a huge impact still has a large expected value, but it’s impossible to determine the direction of low-probability links. Does the butterfly flapping its wings cause the hurricane or prevent it? Disregard tiny-probability links because they don’t guide decision-making. (D) Complexity – the DA presents a simplistic and deterministic narrative that fails to account for the myriad confounding factors that can disrupt or reverse the link chain of the DA. The most important of these is the probability that people will recognize the dangerous path they’re on and change course, e.g. leaders backing down during the Cuban Missile Crisis. (E) Decision Gridlock – Every course of action or inaction has a negligible possibility of causing extinction. This makes it impossible to prioritize averting existential risk over all else because such risk is unavoidable. We have no choice but to prioritize REALISTIC probabilities.
11/21/21
ND-Incarcerated Workers AC V4
Tournament: USC | Round: 1 | Opponent: Park City NL | Judge: Samantha McLoughlin Aff AC Incarcerated workers do not have a right to strike in the US. Harvard Law Review, 19 - ("Striking the Right Balance: Toward a Better Understanding of Prison Strikes," Harvard Law Review 03/8/2019, accessed 10-28-2021, https://harvardlawreview.org/2019/03/striking-the-right-balance-toward-a-better-understanding-of-prison-strikes/)//ML II. LEGAL FRAMEWORK GOVERNING … protecting prison strikes.
Prison working conditions are terrible—incarcerated people work in unsafe environments and accrue thousands of dollars in debt. Eisen 20 Lauren-Brooke Eisen director of the Brennan Center’s Justice Program where she leads the organization’s work to end mass incarceration, 20 - ("Covid-19 Highlights the Need for Prison Labor Reform," Brennan Center for Justice, 4-17-2020, accessed 11-4-2021, https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/covid-19-highlights-need-prison-labor-reform)//ML For decades, prisoners … and a half ago.
Incarcerated workers get virtually zero pay for their labor. Fulcher 15Patrice A. Fulcher Associate Professor at The John Marshall Law School, 15 - ("," Journal of Civil Rights and Economic Development, Winter 2015, accessed 10-28-2021, https://scholarship.law.stjohns.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1759andcontext=jcred)//ML B.87 In 2011, FPI's … and living conditions. 140
Incarcerated workers get virtually zero pay for their labor. Fulcher 15Patrice A. Fulcher Associate Professor at The John Marshall Law School, 15 - ("," Journal of Civil Rights and Economic Development, Winter 2015, accessed 10-28-2021, https://scholarship.law.stjohns.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1759andcontext=jcred)//ML B. Reallocate Greater Wealth … in free society. ¶
Plan Plan: The United States ought to recognize the unconditional right of incarcerated workers to strike.
Solvency The right to strike is key for incarcerated workers hoping to reform the criminal justice system, allows prison laborers to publicize their conditions and assert their right to dignity Harvard Law Review, 19 - ("Striking the Right Balance: Toward a Better Understanding of Prison Strikes," Harvard Law Review 03/8/2019, accessed 10-28-2021, https://harvardlawreview.org/2019/03/striking-the-right-balance-toward-a-better-understanding-of-prison-strikes/)//ML But in order … avenue to consider.
Incarcerated workers are uniquely vulnerable to exploitation -- the right to strike is a key weapon in fighting for better conditions Kelly 18 Kim Kelly is a freelance journalist and organizer based in Philadelphia. Her work on labor, class, politics, and culture has appeared in the New Republic, the Washington Post, the Baffler, and Esquire, among other publications, and she is the author of FIGHT LIKE HELL, a forthcoming book of intersectional labor history. “How the Ongoing Prison Strike is Connected to the Labor Movement”. 9-4-2018. Teen Vogue. https://www.teenvogue.com/story/labor-day-2018-how-the-ongoing-prison-strike-is-connected-to-the-labor-movement. Accessed 11-1-2021; MJen It’s a tough … are bleeding out.
Incarcerated workers currently face massive barriers to striking – they get punished and aren’t allowed to unionize Kozlowska 16 Hanna is a reporter on Quartz's investigations team. She previously worked for The New York Times as a writer for NYT Opinion and was a fellow at Foreign Policy magazine. She was also a stringer for the Times in Poland. “US prisoners are going on strike to protest a massive forced labor system”. 9-06-2016. Quartz. https://qz.com/777415/an-unprecedented-prison-strike-hopes-to-change-the-fate-of-the-900000-americans-trapped-in-an-exploitative-labor-system/. Accessed 11-1-2021; MJen On Friday (Sept. 9) …America’s prison slaves.”
Framework The impact of structural violence cumulatively outweighs – challenging the structures that facilitate inequality is necessary Ansell 17 - David A. Ansell, Senior Vice President, Associate Provost for Community Health Equity, and Michael E. Kelly Professor of Medicine at Rush University Medical Center (The Death Gap: How Inequality Kills, p. 7-10) There are many ... to fix it.
Underview 1 The Aff challenges dehumanizing cultural frames that allow us to ignore human suffering. Recognition of common vulnerability is key to a politics that rejects violence, oppression, and indifference. Butler ’04 - Judith Butler Prof. of Rhetoric and Comparative Literature, University of California at Berkeley, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence. New York: Verso (2006; First Published 2004). pp. 30-35 AT Is there something ... unmarkable and ungrievable.
Scholarly discourse and engagement with politics is key to effective structural reform - critique is insufficient. Purdy ’20 - Jedediah S. Britton-Purdy et al, 20 - ("Building a Law-and-Political-Economy Framework: Beyond the Twentieth-Century Synthesis by Jedediah S. Britton-Purdy, David Singh Grewal, Amy Kapczynski, K. Sabeel Rahman :: SSRN," 3-2-2020, https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3547312)//ey/ To embrace the … deeply democratic ways.
Reform makes revolution more likely. Rejecting it condescendingly asserts the possibility of radical change is better than the certainty of real improvement. Delgado ’87 - Delgado, Richard teaches civil rights and critical race theory at University of Alabama School of Law. He has written and co-authored numerous articles and books, “The Ethereal Scholar: Does Critical Legal Studies Have What Minorities Want?”, Harvard Civil Rights - Civil Liberties Law Review, 1987 Critical scholars reject … what we want.
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 … deflect their claims.
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. Zannoti ’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 …- and pessimistic activism.
Underview 2 Their disads will surely be ridiculous. (A) Ethics – The state is complicit in perpetuating inequalities that are terrible for incarcerated workers. Apply a VERY high standard of proof to any rationalization of that policy. (B) Compound Probability - Multiplied probabilities of long link chains have negligible net probabilities. This is the slippery slope fallacy. (C) Causal Direction - They will say the fractional probability of a huge impact still has a large expected value, but it’s impossible to determine the direction of low-probability links. Does the butterfly flapping its wings cause the hurricane or prevent it? Disregard tiny-probability links because they don’t guide decision-making. (D) Complexity – the DA presents a simplistic and deterministic narrative that fails to account for the myriad confounding factors that can disrupt or reverse the link chain of the DA. The most important of these is the probability that people will recognize the dangerous path they’re on and change course, e.g. leaders backing down during the Cuban Missile Crisis. (E) Decision Gridlock – Every course of action or inaction has a negligible possibility of causing extinction. This makes it impossible to prioritize averting existential risk over all else because such risk is unavoidable. We have no choice but to prioritize REALISTIC probabilities.
12/11/21
SO-Covid Aff V2
Tournament: Greenhill | Round: 1 | Opponent: Lexington BF | Judge: Samantha McLoughlin I. Vaccine Apartheid A TRIPS waiver for covid vaccines will not pass in the squo. Baschuk 7/26 Bryce Baschuk Reporter, Bloomberg Economics, 21 - ("WTO Holiday From Vaccine Equity Talks Draws Calls for Action," Bloomberg, 7-26-2021, accessed 8-18-2021, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-07-26/wto-s-holiday-from-vaccine-equity-talks-draws-calls-for-action)//ML An urgent global effort to rebalance the inequity between rich, vaccinated nations and poor nations sliding further into pandemic misery is colliding with an immovable calendar conflict: the European summer holiday. Next week World Trade Organization delegates are planning to depart Geneva for their August break and, in doing so, pause their fractious debate over a proposal to waive intellectual-property protections for Covid-19 shots until the second week of September.¶ Before they leave, members will adopt a report that acknowledges they’ve made scant headway on the proposal aimed at making doses more widely available, which the world’s top health expert says is critical to ending a “moral failure.”¶ “With so many lives on the line, profits and patents must come second,” World Health Organization Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said during a virtual summit last week.¶ WTO Director-General Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala previously urged ambassadors to shorten their usual six-week summer holiday to focus on pressing issues like the waiver. Nevertheless, members aren’t planning to reconsider the matter until the week of Sept. 6, according to officials familiar with the planning.¶ “August doesn’t matter in Geneva; it doesn’t matter if people are dying around the world,” said Shailly Gupta, a spokesperson at Médecins Sans Frontières. “We hope members will move at a faster pace.”¶ Disagreement persists on the fundamental question of whether a waiver is the “appropriate and most effective way” to address the shortage of vaccines, according to a draft status report produced by Dagfinn Sørli, the chairman of WTO council on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights, or TRIPS.¶ That split could sink prospects for an ambitious vaccine waiver because WTO decisions must be taken on the basis of consensus -- which means any of the 164 members can veto a final agreement for any reason.¶ ”The WTO’s response to Covid is the most critical issue before our organization right now,” WTO spokesman Keith Rockwell said a phone interview. “Millions have died and lives are at stake. Finding a pragmatic outcome by December is essential.”¶ Proponents of the waiver had hoped to conclude their negotiations by the end of July and are now criticizing the European Union and other developed nations for sandbagging the talks.¶ EU ‘Not Interested’¶ The European Commission, which opposes a WTO TRIPS waiver, has proposed a series of measures that it argues will create greater legal certainty for nations to leverage existing trade tools in order to expand their production capacities.¶ “The EU is not interested,” Gupta said. “Switzerland, Norway and the United Kingdom are not engaging. They’re saying: ‘This or that won’t work; the waiver won’t work.’ There is no intention of engaging.”¶ A spokesman for the EU mission in Geneva declined to comment.§ Critics counter that the proposal from Brussels is a distraction to redirect focus from India and South Africa’s earlier waiver proposal and to prevent members from engaging in more detailed negotiations.¶ “The EU’s actions are incredibly cynical and dangerous,” said Lori Wallach, the founder of Public Citizen’s Global Trade Watch. “They have submitted a paper that basically conflicts with the text-based negotiations by saying ‘We don’t want a waiver.’”¶ The U.S., meanwhile, has taken a back seat in the process and enthusiasm about Washington’s engagement on the issue has begun to wane in the three months since Trade Representative Katherine Tai announced American support for a waiver.¶ Though Tai’s surprise announcement briefly knocked shares of Moderna Inc., Pfizer Inc., and BioNTech SE, the stocks quickly rebounded and all are now trading at or near their highest levels of the year.¶ “People feel that message from Ambassador Tai is not playing out on the ground or being implemented in a meaningful way,” said Thiru Balasubramaniam a managing director at Knowledge Ecology International in Europe. The only way to solve the pandemic is global vaccination, but current production is woefully short. Public Citizen 3/29 - Public Citizen “Public Citizen is a nonprofit consumer advocacy organization that champions the public interest in the halls of power. We defend democracy, resist corporate power and work to ensure that government works for the people – not for big corporations. Founded in 1971, we now have 500,000 members and supporters throughout the country. We don’t participate in partisan political activities or endorse any candidates for elected office. We take no government or corporate money, which enables us to remain fiercely independent and call out bad actors – no matter who they are or how much power and money they have.”, “Waiver of the WTO’s Intellectual Property Rules: Facts vs. Common Myths,” Public Citizen Global Trade Watch Series. March 29, 2021. Accessed Aug. 10, 2021. https://www.citizen.org/article/waiver-of-the-wtos-intellectual-property-rules-myths-vs-facts/ AT The COVID-19 public health disaster and resulting economic crises won’t end anywhere unless people everywhere are vaccinated. Despite this obvious truth, rich countries with only 14 of the global population have secured preferential access to over 50 of projected global vaccine supplies. Ongoing outbreaks anywhere allow the virus to mutate, threatening the whole world with vaccine-resistant variants or more deadly or easily spread variants. Governments invested billions to create the vaccines. But, there is a dire shortage, with no end in sight. As we enter the second quarter, about one billion doses have been produced in 2021. We need 10 to 12 billion to reach global herd immunity. And we will need far more if, like flu vaccines, they must be repeated or require booster shots. In every region, there are existing firms that could gear up production and governments willing to invest in expanding supply. But WTO rules require countries to guarantee pharmaceutical corporations monopoly control. More than 100 countries support a temporary, emergency suspension of these WTO rules, so more vaccines, treatments and diagnostic tests can be manufactured in as many places as possible. The United States and a handful of other WTO members are blocking the waiver: They won’t even agree to negotiate about waiver language to address whatever concerns that they may have with the current text. Donald Trump started this self-defeating blockade. President Joe Biden must reverse it to speed the end of the COVID-19 pandemic. Changing IP laws is key to combatting global health inequality and vaccine apartheid. Rich countries hoard vaccine supply, which means donor models never solve and reinforce colonialism. Harman et al 6/21 Sophie Harman professor of Politics and International Relations, Queen Mary University of London, Parsa Erfani Fogarty Global Health Fellow at the University of Global Health Equity and a medical student at Harvard Medical School, Tinashe Goronga Community Organiser Equal Health Global Campaign Against Racism at EqualHealth, Jason Hickel, Michelle Morse, Eugene T Richardson 6/21 - ("Global vaccine equity demands reparative justice — not charity," BMJ Global Health, 6/21/2021, https://gh.bmj.com/content/6/6/e006504)//ML By late April, more than 80 of the world’s COVID-19 vaccines had gone to people in wealthy countries, with just 0.3 to people in low-income countries.1 This reprehensible imbalance is no accident. High-income countries have used neocolonial negotiating power, global policy leverage and capital to procure enough doses to cover 245 of their citizens while leaving few doses for poorer countries.2 As a result, lower-income countries may not be able to vaccinate their populations until 2023.3¶ Such inequity is yet another example of how the interests of racial capitalism run roughshod over the golden rule of global solidarity—attend to the highest risk first.4 Currently, older and medically vulnerable individuals are dying from COVID-19 disproportionately in poor countries, while young, healthy individuals are getting vaccinated in wealthy ones.5 Vaccine apartheid is a not novel phenomenon. The notion that only certain corners of the world get to benefit from life-saving treatments is an everyday reality of a global health system driven by a capitalist, philanthropic model.6 7 But in times of crises—and as new variants threaten the vaccination plans of wealthy countries—these inequities and their solutions come to the forefront of global debate.8¶ Policy-makers in rich nations are aware of these issues. But the solutions they have proposed so far do nothing to address the underlying structural problems. They offer charitable donations and partial, temporary fixes that are designed to deflect the substantive demands for reform that global South countries are fighting for, including challenges to unethical intellectual property (IP) regimes.9 This approach will not work, because it is not designed to ‘work.’ If we want to end vaccine apartheid, we need to target the root causes of global health inequities. We need reparative justice.¶ Three limited ‘solutions’ to vaccine inequity¶ There are currently three approaches to reduce inequity in COVID-19 vaccine distribution: bilateral charity, multilateral charity and temporary waivers or suspensions of IP.¶ The first is the most straightforward. States that stockpile COVID-19 vaccines have committed to sharing their leftovers with low-income and middle-income countries. Norway was one of the first nations to accede to donating doses to poorer countries in parallel with its vaccine programme.10 This is the weakest form of equity as it is unclear if this will be done for free, at a lower cost, tied to diplomacy or conditionality, or crucially, when these vaccines will be made available, where they will go, or how many will be delivered. The bilateral charity approach has little to do with equity and more to do with geopolitics, wealth and aid dependency.11 12¶ The second is multilateral charity, best exemplified by COVAX. In 2020, COVAX emerged as an international collaboration by the World Health Organisation (WHO), United Nations Children’s Fund, Gavi and the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations to ensure equitable global access to COVID-19 vaccines.13 Rich countries can access doses for 10–50 of their populations, depending on how much they have paid in, and poor countries can access doses for 20 through the scheme. It is the 20 for poor countries that has come to be COVAX’s unique selling point: here is a mechanism that ensures every country in the world can get the vaccine regardless of ability to pay. This is the first time such an initiative has been trialled.¶ The shortcomings of COVAX are numerous. If vaccines are delivered as planned, COVAX may reach 27 of the population in lower-income countries by the end of 2021—a depressing goal compared with the estimated 70 coverage needed for herd immunity and the open vaccine access currently granted to Americans.14 15 Furthermore, COVAX is still significantly underfunded and there are concerns regarding supply chains. While capital and resource transfer from wealthy countries to poorer ones is surely needed in the current pandemic response, any system that solely relies on aid will ultimately fail to achieve equity. In the setting of vaccine scarcity, in which suppliers are unable to deliver doses as scheduled and countries are banning exports to keep vaccines at home, there is a risk that COVAX aid-recipient states will fall further down the priority list, awaiting the leftover vaccines from the rich country stockpiles.16–18¶ What may be most pernicious about the COVAX scheme, however, is that rich countries and their pharmaceutical companies have repeatedly used it as a shield to deflect demands for IP waivers. This is an enduring problem with aid: it papers over and distracts our attention away from the underlying structural violence. And in so doing, it maintains and perpetuates inequalities. Over 50 years ago, Kwame Nkrumah observed how aid is a ‘revolving credit’ which returns to countries of the global North in the form of increased profits.19 To the extent that COVAX is being leveraged to protect corporate patents and profits, Nkrumah’s words continue to be germane¶. The third approach is focused on pooling, temporary waivers, or suspension of IP. In May 2020, the WHO created the COVID-19 Technology Access Pool for companies to share IP and transfer technologies in a coordinated manner. But to date, not a single company has utilised the transfer process—likely because such forms of global IP sharing would quell profits, even if royalties are included.20 Pharmaceutical companies and universities prefer one-off transfer deals because it enables them to set their own terms with non-disclosure agreements. Given that they are accountable to shareholders and boards—not patients—financial incentives will drive transfer decisions, not public health demand.¶ Following the blockages at the WHO around IP, attention shifted towards the World Trade Organisation (WTO). In October 2020, India and South Africa proposed a temporary waiver of IP rights to COVID-19 technologies for the duration of the pandemic, so that all manufacturers with sufficient capacity and shared know-how could start production.21 Although backed by over 100 countries within the WTO and a global campaign for the ‘People’s Vaccine,’ the proposal has been repeatedly blocked at every committee meeting since then by select wealthy countries with large pharmaceutical industries, including the UK, Japan and EU states.22 23¶ Those who oppose the IP waiver argue that it will not do anything to solve the problem: even if you were to liberate the recipe for the vaccines, low-income and middle-income countries do not have the capacity to produce it.24 But this argument is specious. For one, several middle-income countries—including India, Brazil, Senegal and South Africa—do have the ability to ramp up production by repurposing existing manufacturing capacity.25 In addition, an IP waiver can and should be supplemented with technology transfers, logistical support and financial investment to facilitate this repurposing process. And the most important point is that such a waiver could drastically reduce costs across the board, making vaccine imports more affordable for poor countries.¶ Opponents of the waiver also claim that IP-related obstacles can be addressed through existing arrangements for ‘compulsory licensing’ under the WTO’s Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS).26 But the past evidence suggests that this process is slow, cumbersome and subject to various shaming practices by the international community.27 28 Some point instead to the possibility of voluntary licensing. But voluntary licenses are often executed secretly and are limited to companies or governments that can afford them. The University of Pennsylvania, which owns IP rights relating to the mRNA vaccines, is helping Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok develop a vaccine production facility. This partnership was possible because Thailand—unlike other middle-income countries—was able to put up the money.29 Poorer countries are left out. Sharing of IP and technology transfers can and will accelerate global vaccine production. The question is on whose terms. Organisations such as the WHO and African Union are currently mobilising support and resources to accelerate production in low-income and middle-income countries.30 31 But these efforts will be to waste unless IP for COVID-19 technologies is shared broadly and quickly.¶ Vaccine coloniality¶ Donor-based approaches to vaccine equity are grounded in old, even colonial ideas of aid and dependency, which have failed to serve the health needs of the Majority World or deliver on health equity. This failed model has not promoted health equity in the past and is clearly inadequate in the present, on account of dependency on donor whims (the bilateral ‘leftovers’ approach), persistent funding gaps and shortfalls (COVAX), and time-consuming diplomacy and filibustering over what is or is it not within current trade rules (WTO).¶ Once again in the political economy of global health, the charitable model of COVAX becomes the smokescreen for inequitable systems. When states are asked about their stockpiling, they point to COVAX. When pharmaceutical companies are asked about IP, they point to COVAX or their low-cost commitment. The focus on a donor-based model of aid in achieving vaccine equity has distracted leaders from the ideologies, economic systems and trade regulations that leave access to medicine to the forces of the marketplace rather than global health priorities.32 Achieving global vaccine justice requires a rapid shift in trade regulations and contract transparency that streamlines IP sharing and technology transfers. The resultant collaborations across economies will not only accelerate vaccine production but will also increase competition and push vaccine prices down.¶ Finally, old models of vaccine equity have not kept pace with changes in discourse and thinking around global health governance, equity and justice. 2021 is not the early 2000s, where new public–private partnerships or funding models were de rigueur. Donor countries are increasingly wary of aid dependency as they pay the cost of continuing high profile health programmes with diminishing strategic returns. Aid-recipient countries are similarly exasperated by funding gaps that lead to delays and materiel shortfalls, the NGO-industrial complex and attendant consultants that rationalise them, and fundamentally, by the notion that their populations only seem to matter when another state can capitalise on them.¶ Conclusion¶ Vaccine apartheid is only one symptom of broader global health inequalities that have their roots in colonialism and persist today because of neocolonial forms of power. As Grosfoguel writes, ‘The heterogeneous and multiple global structures put in place over a period of 450 years did not evaporate with the juridical–political decolonisation of the periphery over the past 50 years. We continue to live under the same ‘colonial power matrix.’ With juridical–political decolonisation we moved from a period of ‘global colonialism’ to the current period of ‘global coloniality.’33 Vaccine justice starts with moving beyond aid models of vaccine donation, in which poorer countries are gifted vaccine leftovers. It demands rapidly achieving global consensus for the IP waiver, democratising vaccine IP and know-how and supporting low-income and middle-income countries to build manufacturing capacity for this pandemic and the next. These steps can mark the start of a reparative justice movement in global health that demands we confront and overturn colonial legacies that continue to devastate the health of low- and middle-income countries.34 A commitment to funding vaccine justice in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic can be a first step in this direction. Compulsory licensing is not sufficient – drug company resistance, IP thickets, and devolved decision-making. Stiglitz and Wallach 4/26 - Joseph E. Stiglitz and Lori Wallach Joseph E. Stiglitz, co-recipient of the 2001 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics Sciences, teaches at Columbia University. Lori Wallach is the director of Public Citizen’s Global Trade Watch., “Opinion: Preserving intellectual property barriers to covid-19 vaccines is morally wrong and foolish,” Washington Post (Web). April 26, 2021. Accessed Aug. 10, 2021. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/04/26/preserving-intellectual-property-barriers-covid-19-vaccines-is-morally-wrong-foolish/ AT Unfortunately, the drug companies have consistently done whatever they can to preserve their monopoly control. Even today, as they battle the waiver and argue that existing compulsory licensing rights are sufficient, they lobby the U.S. government to sanction countries that use that tool.¶ These corporations have also undermined this option by building “thickets” of intellectual property barriers. They fortify their monopolies by registering exclusive rights to industrial designs and undisclosed data, such as trade secrets and test data, in addition to numerous patents and copyrights for each medicine. Each element would require a license, and the WTO’s flexibilities might not even encompass all of them.¶ Making matters more difficult, “product-by-product” and “country-by-country” compulsory licensing is nigh impossible to coordinate across countries for medicines with complex global supply chains, such as covid-19 vaccines. Vaccine shortfall causes widespread death and poverty. Public Citizen 3/1 - Public Citizen “Public Citizen is a nonprofit consumer advocacy organization that champions the public interest in the halls of power. We defend democracy, resist corporate power and work to ensure that government works for the people – not for big corporations. Founded in 1971, we now have 500,000 members and supporters throughout the country. We don’t participate in partisan political activities or endorse any candidates for elected office. We take no government or corporate money, which enables us to remain fiercely independent and call out bad actors – no matter who they are or how much power and money they have.”, “Backgrounder: WTO-Required Monopolies for Pharmaceutical Corporations Obstruct Global Production of COVID-19 Vaccines and Treatment,” Public Citizen Global Trade Watch Series. March 1, 2021. Accessed Aug. 12, 2021. https://www.citizen.org/article/wto-required-monopolies-for-pharmaceutical-corporations-obstruct-global-production-of-covid-19-vaccines-and-treatments/ AT It is obvious that current production capacity cannot supply enough vaccines for the entire world. Many people in low- and middle-income countries around the globe will not get vaccinated until at least 2022 unless the world manufactures many more doses, according to the British Medical Journal. The world’s poorest countries may wait until 2024 for mass immunization, if it happens at all, reports the Economist Intelligence Unit. The global vaccine apartheid unfolding right now could cost millions of lives and push tens of millions more into poverty. The devastation will be felt for a generation. A new International Chamber of Commerce report concluded that the world could face economic losses of more than $9 trillion under the scenario of wealthy nations being fully vaccinated by mid-2021, but poor countries largely shut out. Wealthy countries like the United States would bear nearly half of that hit. Vaccinating just half of low- and middle-income countries’ populations could reduce global losses by $5.5 trillion. Poverty and disease are mutually reinforcing, causing staggering suffering and injustice. Hollis and Pogge ’08 - Aidan Hollis Associate Professor of Economics, the University of Calgary and Thomas Pogge Leitner Professor of Philosophy and International Affairs, Yale University, “The Health Impact Fund Making New Medicines Accessible for All,” Incentives for Global Health (2008) AT In 2004, some 970 million people, around 15 percent of the world’s population, were living below the extreme poverty line of $1 a day (more strictly defi ned, $392.88 annually) in 1993 Purchasing Power Parity (PPP) terms (Chen and Ravallion 2007, 16579).3 Furthermore, those living below this very low poverty line fell on average around 28 percent below it. Th eir average annual purchasing power therefore corresponded to approximately $420 in the US in 2008 dollars.4¶ Th ese are the poorest of the poor. Th e World Bank also uses a somewhat less miserly poverty line, namely $2 dollar a day, or an annual amount of $785.76 PPP 1993. Th e Bank’s data show that around 40 percent of the world’s population, or over 2.5 billion people, lived in income poverty so defi ned in 2004,5 with this population falling on average 41 percent below this higher line.6 Individuals in this much larger group could buy, on average, about as much in 2004 as could be bought in the US in 2008 for $690.¶ The Effects of Global Income Poverty on Health¶ The effects of such extreme income poverty are foreseeable and extensively documented. It is estimated that around 13 percent of all human beings (830 million) are chronically undernourished, 17 percent (1.1 billion) lack access to safe water, and 41 percent (2.6 billion) lack access to basic sanitation (UNDP 2006, 174, 33). About 31 percent (2 billion) lack access to crucial drugs and 25 percent (1.6 billion) lack electricity (Fogarty n.d., IEA 2002). Some 780 million adults are illiterate (UNESCO 2006), and 14 percent of children aged between fi ve and 17 (218 million) are child laborers, more than half in hazardous work (ILO 2006, 6).¶ Worldwide, diseases related to poverty, including communicable, maternal, perinatal, and nutritionrelated diseases, comprise over 50 percent of the burden of disease in low-income countries, nearly ten times their relative burden in developed countries (WHO 2006b, 3). If the developed world had its proportional share of poverty-related deaths (onethird of all deaths), severe poverty would kill some 16,000 Americans and 26,000 citizens of the European Union each week.¶ The cycle of mutually reinforcing poverty and disease besetting low income countries, and particularly the poorer communities in these countries, could be broken by signifi cantly reducing severe poverty. But it is also possible to make substantial progress against the global burden of disease more directly by improving health care in developing countries.¶ Poverty does not merely render poor people more vulnerable to disease, but also makes it less likely that they can obtain medical treatment for the diseases they contract. This is because in poor countries medical care is rarely available for free, and poor people are typically unable to buy either the care needed by themselves or their families or the insurance policies that would guarantee them such care. The price of health care in poor countries therefore also plays a crucial role in explaining the catastrophic health situation among the global poor.
II. Solvency Plan text: The member nations of the World Trade Organization ought to waive intellectual property protections for Covid-19 related medicines. Public Citizen 6/22 - Public Citizen et. al, “Please Speedily Secure Implementation of a COVID-19 Emergency Waiver of WTO TRIPS Rules for Vaccines, Tests and Treatments,” Open Letter to President Joe Biden. June 22, 2021. https://www.citizenstrade.org/ctc/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/COVIDTRIPSWaiver_SignOnLtr2_062221.pdf#new_tab AT We the undersigned organizations respectfully urge you to speedily secure a waiver that is:¶ • Comprehensive: The U.S. government must secure swift adoption of a temporary waiver of the patent, copyright, industrial design and undisclosed data rules of the WTO’s TRIPS Agreement with respect to COVID-19-related medical products. The scope of the waiver must extend beyond vaccines to also cover the diagnostic tests needed to detect outbreaks and variants; the treatments, ventilators and other medical devices necessary to shorten lockdowns and save the lives of the millions who will contract COVID-19 before sufficient vaccine doses can be made and the materials, components, means and methods of manufacturing such goods.¶ • Swift: The WTO Director General’s December 2021 deadline for a final waiver text is far too late to meet the urgency of the pandemic, which requires agreement on a waiver in a matter of weeks, not months.¶ • Long-lasting: A waiver must be of sufficient duration to incentivize and sustain increases in manufacturing capacity for and output of medical goods to prevent, contain or treat COVID19, taking into consideration that the pandemic may yet escape current vaccines. We support the waiver sponsors’ proposal that the initial waiver last three years and be regularly reviewed thereafter, particularly given uncertainties around variants, the need for boosters, and what levels of immunization may be needed.¶ Current global production capacity of COVID-19 vaccines, medicines, and diagnostic tests cannot come close to meeting global needs to detect, treat, prevent, or contain COVID-19. Absent significant increases in vaccine production, many in developing nations will not have access to vaccines until 2024. This lag would mean more deaths and the greater chances for development of new variants that can undermine vaccines' achievements to date.¶ Every country should have the right to develop and make their own vaccines free from the worry that they and their suppliers would be sued by IP holders. To date, vaccine intellectual property rightsholders have refused to issue open licenses under transparent and accountable terms and conditions, and transfer technology fully to and negotiate payment terms with qualified manufacturers in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, creating supply shortages and production bottlenecks and prohibiting urgently needed production of doses worldwide. The worst global health crisis in a century has resulted in at least 3.5 million deaths worldwide and is conservatively estimated to cost the U.S. alone $16 trillion in economic losses, accompanied by yet greater global losses that have impoverished hundreds of millions of people worldwide. We are in a race against time to save lives and prevent new variants. Absent a major increase in vaccines, treatments, diagnostic tests, ventilators, and other COVID-19-related medical supplies, the pandemic will rage largely unmitigated among a significant share of the world’s population. COVID-19 infections will increase, resulting in increased deaths and long-term damage to the health of millions of people, a dragging blow to the global economy and a risk that vaccine-resistant variants will put the world back on lockdown and evade immunity for those previously infected and/or vaccinated. The long-term impact on people’s health and the world’s health system would be unprecedented. A waiver would increase leverage over pharma and provide legal certainty needed to spur critical production. Stiglitz and Wallach 4/26 - Joseph E. Stiglitz and Lori Wallach Joseph E. Stiglitz, co-recipient of the 2001 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics Sciences, teaches at Columbia University. Lori Wallach is the director of Public Citizen’s Global Trade Watch., “Opinion: Preserving intellectual property barriers to covid-19 vaccines is morally wrong and foolish,” Washington Post (Web). April 26, 2021. Accessed Aug. 10, 2021. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/04/26/preserving-intellectual-property-barriers-covid-19-vaccines-is-morally-wrong-foolish/ AT A waiver would immediately increase government leverage over vaccine makers that refuse to license the technology. Firms could choose to either expand production by negotiating with governments, alternative suppliers and global initiatives, or risk governments circumventing them and forcing the transfer of technology.¶ A waiver would also provide legal certainty for governments and investors that are inclined to repurpose existing pharmaceutical manufacturing or build new facilities but are fearful of intellectual property liability. And it could boost production of covid-19 treatments unavailable in much of the world, as well as diagnostic tests and vaccine supply chain products. Legal certainty unlocks global production. Public Citizen 3/29 - Public Citizen “Public Citizen is a nonprofit consumer advocacy organization that champions the public interest in the halls of power. We defend democracy, resist corporate power and work to ensure that government works for the people – not for big corporations. Founded in 1971, we now have 500,000 members and supporters throughout the country. We don’t participate in partisan political activities or endorse any candidates for elected office. We take no government or corporate money, which enables us to remain fiercely independent and call out bad actors – no matter who they are or how much power and money they have.”, “Waiver of the WTO’s Intellectual Property Rules: Facts vs. Common Myths,” Public Citizen Global Trade Watch Series. March 29, 2021. Accessed Aug. 10, 2021. https://www.citizen.org/article/waiver-of-the-wtos-intellectual-property-rules-myths-vs-facts/ AT Most critically, there simply is not enough supply to go around now or for every year in the future during which the whole world will need regular COVID vaccination to keep the virus under control. Thankfully, scores of countries are ready to invest in building new or repurposing existing production capacity. That is why more than 100 countries support a waiver of the WTO’s Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property (TRIPS). These countries seek certainty that if they adjust their domestic laws and practices to support that investment by providing access to the necessary technology, they will not get dragged into expansive WTO litigation or face retaliatory sanctions from countries claiming WTO violations. The waiver will also serve as a worldwide buffer against the political pressure and legal harassment to which Big Pharma subjects countries that seek to promote affordable access to medicines.¶ In many countries, the regulatory authorities that had to approve domestic use of various vaccines and other COVID-related medical products have significant information from the firms that they could share with skilled teams from local universities, government agencies and pharmaceutical manufacturers — if they were not obliged by WTO rules to guarantee monopoly control of it. And world-class pharmaceutical firms already are making generic versions of new cutting-edge HIV-AIDS medicines and pumping out vaccines based on the platform that, for instance, the Johnson and Johnson vaccine uses. Manufacturing capacity is widespread around the world. Public Citizen 3/29 - Public Citizen “Public Citizen is a nonprofit consumer advocacy organization that champions the public interest in the halls of power. We defend democracy, resist corporate power and work to ensure that government works for the people – not for big corporations. Founded in 1971, we now have 500,000 members and supporters throughout the country. We don’t participate in partisan political activities or endorse any candidates for elected office. We take no government or corporate money, which enables us to remain fiercely independent and call out bad actors – no matter who they are or how much power and money they have.”, “Waiver of the WTO’s Intellectual Property Rules: Facts vs. Common Myths,” Public Citizen Global Trade Watch Series. March 29, 2021. Accessed Aug. 10, 2021. https://www.citizen.org/article/waiver-of-the-wtos-intellectual-property-rules-myths-vs-facts/ AT In the press and on Capitol Hill, Big Pharma is pushing a Big Lie. The claim is that a lack of manufacturing capacity, not pharmaceutical corporation’s monopoly intellectual property (IP) protections, are thwarting greater production of COVID-19 vaccines. A related argument, with decidedly racist overtones, is that COVID-19 vaccines are too complicated for producers in developing countries to make successfully. The reality is that in every region of the world, there are multiple producers that could be greatly increasing global vaccine supplies if the technology and know-how were shared.¶ Just in Africa, “Biovac and Aspen in South Africa, Institute Pasteur in Senegal, and Vacsera in Egypt could rapidly retool factories to make mRNA vaccines,” notes a group of medicine-production experts in a recent Foreign Policy article. Indeed, a former Moderna director of chemistry revealed that with enough technology transfer and know- how-sharing, a modern factory should be able to get mRNA vaccine production online in, at most, three to four months. The Serum Institute in India already is slated to produce the AstraZeneca and Novavax vaccines, while Moderna declined to partner with a qualified Bangladeshi vaccine maker, claiming its engineers were too busy to focus beyond U.S. and EU production. In Latin America, existing facilities in Brazil, Argentina and Mexico under contract to monopoly holders are already pumping out vials, and in countries like Chile and Colombia, the pharmaceutical industry has expressed willingness to kickstart vaccine production.¶ Existing and planned contract manufacturing arrangements prove facilities in developing countries certainly can produce COVID-19 vaccines. But unless technology and know-how are shared more openly, the monopoly holders maintain absolute control over how much can be produced, what the price is and where it will be sold. So, 91 of the Johnson and Johnson vaccine that South African firm Aspen will manufacture must be shipped for sale outside South Africa, according to South Africa’s WTO Counselor. And the Serum Institute is barred from supplying upper- middle-income and high-income countries with the AstraZeneca vaccines it makes, meaning AstraZeneca can artificially segment the global market and ensure that it is the only supplier of the Oxford vaccine in the most profitable national markets, according to Doctors Without Borders.¶ Most critically, there simply is not enough supply to go around now or for every year in the future during which the whole world will need regular COVID vaccination to keep the virus under control. Thankfully, scores of countries are ready to invest in building new or repurposing existing production capacity. That is why more than 100 countries support a waiver of the WTO’s Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property (TRIPS). These countries seek certainty that if they adjust their domestic laws and practices to support that investment by providing access to the necessary technology, they will not get dragged into expansive WTO litigation or face retaliatory sanctions from countries claiming WTO violations. The waiver will also serve as a worldwide buffer against the political pressure and legal harassment to which Big Pharma subjects countries that seek to promote affordable access to medicines.¶ In many countries, the regulatory authorities that had to approve domestic use of various vaccines and other COVID-related medical products have significant information from the firms that they could share with skilled teams from local universities, government agencies and pharmaceutical manufacturers — if they were not obliged by WTO rules to guarantee monopoly control of it. And world-class pharmaceutical firms already are making generic versions of new cutting-edge HIV-AIDS medicines and pumping out vaccines based on the platform that, for instance, the Johnson and Johnson vaccine uses. III. Framing The Aff challenges dehumanizing cultural frames that allow us to ignore human suffering. Recognition of common vulnerability is key to a politics that rejects violence, oppression, and indifference. Butler ’04 - Judith Butler Prof. of Rhetoric and Comparative Literature, University of California at Berkeley, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence. New York: Verso (2006; First Published 2004). pp. 30-35 AT Is there something to be gained from grieving, from tarrying with grief, from remaining exposed to its unbearability and not endeavoring to seek a resolution for grief through violence? Is there something to be gained in the political domain by maintaining grief as part of the framework within which we think our international ties? If we stay with the sense of loss, are we left feeling only passive and powerless, as some might fear? Or are we, rather, returned to a sense of human vulnerability, to our collective responsibility for the physical lives of one another? Could the experience of a dislocation of First World safety not condition the insight into the radically inequitable ways that corporeal vulnerability is distributed globally? To foreclose that vulnerability, to banish it, to make ourselves secure at the expense of every other human consideration is to eradicate one of the most important resources from which we must take our bearings and find our way.¶ To grieve, and to make grief itself into a resource for politics, is not to be resigned to inaction, but it may be understood as the slow process by which we develop a point of identification with suffering itself. The disorientation of grief- “Who have I become?” or, indeed, “What is left of me?” “What is it in the Other that I have lost?” – posits the “I” in the mode of unknowingness.¶ But this can be a point of departure for a new understanding if the narcissistic preoccupation of melancholia can be moved into a consideration of the vulnerability of others. Then we might critically evaluate and oppose the conditions under which certain human lives are more vulnerable than others, and thus certain human lives are more grievable than others. From where might a principle emerge by which we vow to protect others from the kinds of violence we have suffered, if not from an apprehension of a common human vulnerability? I do not mean to deny that vulnerability is differentiated, that it is allocated differentially across the globe. I do not even mean to presume upon a common notion of the human, although to speak in its “name” is already (or perhaps only) to fathom its possibility.¶ I am referring to violence, vulnerability, and mourning, but there is a more general conception of the human with which I am trying to work here, one in which we are, from the start, given over to the other, one in which we are, from the start, even prior to individuation itself and, by virtue of bodily requirements, given over to some set of primary others: this conception means that we are vulnerable to those we are too young to know and to judge and, hence, vulnerable to violence; but also vulnerable to another range of touch, a range that includes the eradication of our being at the one end, and the physical support for our lives at the other.¶ Although I am insisting on referring to a common human vulnerability, one that emerges with life itself, I also insist that we cannot recover the source of this vulnerability: it precedes the formation of the “I.” This is a condition, a condition of being laid bare from the start and with which we cannot argue. I mean, that we can argue with it, but we are perhaps foolish, if not dangerous, when we do. I do not mean to suggest that the necessary support for a newborn is always there. Clearly, it is not, and for some this primary scene is a scene of abandonment or violence or starvation, that theirs are bodies given over to nothing, or to brutality, or to no sustenance.¶ We cannot understand vulnerability as a deprivation, however, unless we understand the need that is thwarted. Such infants still must be apprehended as given over, as given over to no one or to some insufficient support, or to an abandonment. It would be difficult, it not impossible, to understand how humans suffer from oppression without seeing how this primary condition is exploited and exploitable, thwarted and denied. The condition of primary vulnerability, of being given over to the touch of the other, even if there is no other there, and no support for our lives, signifies a primary helplessness and need, one to which any society must attend. Lives are supported and maintained differently, and there are radically different ways in which human physical vulnerability is distributed across the globe. Certain lives will be highly protected, and the abrogation of their claims to sanctity will be sufficient to mobilize the forces of war. Other lives will not find such fast and furious support and will not even qualify as “grievable.”¶ A hierarchy of grief could no doubt be enumerated. We have seen it already, in the genre of the obituary, where lives are quickly tidied up and summarized, humanized, usually married, or on the way to be, heterosexual, happy, monogamous. But this is just a sign of another differential relation to life, since we seldom, if ever, hear the names of the thousands of Palestinians who have died by the Israeli military with United States support, or any number of Afghan people, children and adults. Do they have names, faces, personal histories, family, favorite hobbies, slogans by which they life? What defense against the apprehension of loss is at work in the blithe way in which we accept deaths caused by military means with a shrug or with self-righteousness or with clear vindictiveness? To what extent have Arab peoples, predominantly practitioners of Islam, fallen outside the “human” as it has been naturalized in its “Western” mold by the contemporary workings of humanism? What are the cultural contours of the human at work here? How do our cultural frames for thinking the human set limits on the kinds of losses we can avow as loss? After all, if someone is lost, and that person is not someone, then what and where is the loss, and how does mourning take place?¶ This last is surely a question that lesbian, gay, and hi-studies have asked in relation to violence against sexual minorities; that transgendered people have asked as they are singled out for harassment and sometimes murder; that intersexed people have asked, whose formative years are so often marked by unwanted violence against their bodies in the name of a normative notion of the human, a normative notion of what the body of a human must be. This question is no doubt, as well, the basis of a profound affinity between movements centering on gender and sexuality and efforts to counter the normative human morphologies and capacities that condemn or efface those who are physically challenged. It must also be part of the affinity with anti-racist struggles, given the racial differential that undergirds the culturally viable notions of the human, ones that we see acted out in dramatic and terrifying ways in the global arena at the present time.¶ I am referring not only to humans not regarded as humans, and thus to a restrictive conception of the human that is based upon their exclusion. It is not a matter of a simple entry of the excluded into an established ontology, but an insurrection at the level of ontology, a critical opening up of the questions, What is real? Whose lives are real? How might reality be remade? Those who are unreal have, in a sense, already suffered the violence of derealization. What, then, is the relation between violence and those lives considered as "unreal"? Does violence effect that unreality? Does violence take place on the condition of that unreality?¶ If violence is done against those who are unreal, then, from the perspective of violence, it fails to injure or negate those lives since those lives are already negated. But they have a strange way of remaining animated and so must be negated again (and again). They cannot be mourned because they are always already lost or, rather, never "were," and they must be killed, since they seem to live on, stubbornly, in this state of deadness. Violence renews itself in the face of the apparent inexhaustibility of its object. The derealization of the "Other" means that it is neither alive nor dead, but interminably spectral. The infinite paranoia that imagines the war against terrorism as a war without end will be one that justifies itself endlessly in relation to the spectral infinity of its enemy, regardless of whether or not there are established grounds to suspect the continuing operation of terror cells with violent aims.¶ How do we understand this derealization? It is one thing to argue that first, on the level of discourse, certain lives are not considered lives at all, they cannot be humanized, that they fit no dominant frame for the human, and that their dehumanization occurs first, at this level, and that this level then gives rise to a physical violence that in some sense delivers the message of dehumanization that is already at work in the culture. It is another thing to say that discourse itself effects violence through omission. If 2oo,ooo Iraqi children were killed during the Gulf War and its aftermath/ do we have an image, a frame for any of those lives, singly or collectively? Is there a story we might find about those deaths in the media? Are there names attached to those children?¶ There are no obituaries for the war casualties that the United States inflicts, and there cannot be. If there were to be an obituary, there would have had to have been a life, a life worth noting, a life worth valuing and preserving, a life that qualifies for recognition. Although we might argue that it would be impractical to write obituaries for all those people, or for all people, I think we have to ask, again and again, how the obituary functions as the instrument by which grievability is publicly distributed. It is the means by which a life becomes, or fails to become, a publicly grievable life, an icon for national self-recognition, the means by which a life becomes noteworthy. As a result, we have to consider the obituary as an act of nation-building. The matter is not a simple one, for, if a life is not grievable, it is not quite a life; it does not qualify as a life and is not worth a note. It is already the unburied, if not the unburiable.¶ It is not simply, then, that there is a "discourse" of dehumanization that produces these effects, but rather that there is a limit to discourse that establishes the limits of human intelligibility. It is not just that a death is poorly marked, but that it is unmarkable. Such a death vanishes, not into explicit discourse, but in the ellipses by which public discourse proceeds. The queer lives that vanished on September I I were not publicly welcomed into the idea of national identity built in the obituary pages, and their closest relations were only belatedly and selectively (the marital norm holding sway once again) made eligible for benefits. But this should come as no surprise, when we think about how few deaths from AIDS were publicly grievable losses, and how, for instance, the extensive deaths now taking place in Africa are also, in the media, for the most part unmarkable and ungrievable.
The Aff challenges the hegemonic ideology of the status quo by rejecting sacrificial rationalizations. That logic is the basis for colonialism, slavery, genocide, war, and global poverty. Santos 3 2003, Boaventura de Souza Santos is a Professor of Sociology at the University of Coimbra, “Collective Suicide?”, Bad Subjects, Issue # 63 , http://www.ces.fe.uc.pt/opiniao/bss/072en.php According to Franz Hinkelammert, the West has repeatedly been under the illusion that it should try to save humanity by destroying part of it. This is a salvific and sacrificial destruction, committed in the name of the need to radically materialize all the possibilities opened up by a given social and political reality over which it is supposed to have total power. This is how it was in colonialism, with the genocide of indigenous peoples, and the African slaves. This is how it was in the period of imperialist struggles, which caused millions of deaths in two world wars and many other colonial wars. This is how it was in Stalinism, with the Gulag and in Nazism, with the holocaust. And now today, this is how it is in neoliberalism, with the collective sacrifice of the periphery and even the semiperiphery of the world system. With the war against Iraq, it is fitting to ask whether what is in progress is a new genocidal and sacrificial illusion, and what its scope might be. It is above all appropriate to ask if the new illusion will not herald the radicalization and the ultimate perversion of the western illusion: destroying all of humanity in the illusion of saving it. Sacrificial genocide arises from a totalitarian illusion that is manifested in the belief that there are no alternatives to the present-day reality and that the problems and difficulties confronting it arise from failing to take its logic of development to its ultimate consequences. If there is unemployment, hunger and death in the Third World, this is not the result of market failures; instead, it is the outcome of the market laws not having been fully applied. If there is terrorism, this is not due to the violence of the conditions that generate it; it is due, rather, to the fact that total violence has not been employed to physically eradicate all terrorists and potential terrorists. This political logic is based on the supposition of total power and knowledge, and on the radical rejection of alternatives; it is ultra-conservative in that it aims to infinitely reproduce the status quo. Inherent to it is the notion of the end of history. During the last hundred years, the West has experienced three versions of this logic, and, therefore, seen three versions of the end of history: Stalinism, with its logic of insuperable efficiency of the plan; Nazism, with its logic of racial superiority; and neoliberalism, with its logic of insuperable efficiency of the market. The first two periods involved the destruction of democracy. The last one trivializes democracy, disarming it in the face of social actors sufficiently powerful to be able to privatize the State and international institutions in their favour. I have described this situation as a combination of political democracy and social fascism. One current manifestation of this combination resides in the fact that intensely strong public opinion, worldwide, against the war is found to be incapable of halting the war machine set in motion by supposedly democratic rulers. At all these moments, a death drive, a catastrophic heroism, predominates, the idea of a looming collective suicide, only preventable by the massive destruction of the other. Paradoxically, the broader the definition of the other and the efficacy of its destruction, the more likely collective suicide becomes. In its sacrificial genocide version, neoliberalism is a mixture of market radicalization, neoconservatism and Christian fundamentalism. Its death drive takes a number of forms, from the idea of "discardable populations", referring to citizens of the Third World not capable of being exploited as workers and consumers, to the concept of "collateral damage" , to refer to the deaths, as a result of war, of thousands of innocent civilians. The last, catastrophic heroism, is quite clear on two facts: according to reliable calculations by the Non-Governmental Organization MEDACT, in London, between 48 and 260 thousand civilians will die during the war and in the three months after (this is without there being civil war or a nuclear attack); the war will cost 100 billion dollars, enough to pay the health costs of the world's poorest countries for four years. Is it possible to fight this death drive? We must bear in mind that, historically, sacrificial destruction has always been linked to the economic pillage of natural resources and the labor force, to the imperial design of radically changing the terms of economic, social, political and cultural exchanges in the face of falling efficiency rates postulated by the maximalist logic of the totalitarian illusion in operation. It is as though hegemonic powers, both when they are on the rise and when they are in decline, repeatedly go through times of primitive accumulation, legitimizing the most shameful violence in the name of futures where, by definition, there is no room for what must be destroyed. In today's version, the period of primitive accumulation consists of combining neoliberal economic globalization with the globalization of war. The machine of democracy and liberty turns into a machine of horror and destruction. Underview Their disads will surely be ridiculous. (A) Ethics – WTO countries are complicit in hoarding lifesaving medicines from the world’s most vulnerable people. Apply a VERY high standard of proof to any rationalization of that policy.
(B) Compound Probability - Multiplied probabilities of long link chains have negligible net probabilities. This is the slippery slope fallacy.
(C) Causal Direction - They will say the fractional probability of a huge impact still has a large expected value, but it’s impossible to determine the direction of low-probability links. Does the butterfly flapping its wings cause the hurricane or prevent it? Disregard tiny-probability links because they don’t guide decision-making.
(D) Complexity – the DA presents a simplistic and deterministic narrative that fails to account for the myriad confounding factors that can disrupt or reverse the link chain of the DA. The most important of these is the probability that people will recognize the dangerous path they’re on and change course, e.g. leaders backing down during the Cuban Missile Crisis.
(E) Decision Gridlock – Every course of action or inaction has a negligible possibility of causing extinction. This makes it impossible to prioritize averting existential risk over all else because such risk is unavoidable. We have no choice but to prioritize REALISTIC probabilities.
Scholarly discourse and engagement with politics is key to effective structural reform - critique is insufficient. Purdy ’20 - Jedediah S. Britton-Purdy et al, 20 - ("Building a Law-and-Political-Economy Framework: Beyond the Twentieth-Century Synthesis by Jedediah S. Britton-Purdy, David Singh Grewal, Amy Kapczynski, K. Sabeel Rahman :: SSRN," 3-2-2020, https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3547312)//ey/
To embrace the possibility of democratic renewal requires rejecting the terms of the Twentieth-Century Synthesis. We believe that the legal realists—and thinkers in a much longer history of political thought—were right in believing that "the economy" is neither self-defining nor self-justifying. The emphasis in these traditions has been the right one: on power, distribution, and the need for legitimacy as the central themes in the organization of economic life. Moreover, precisely because economic ordering is a political and legal artifact, the idea of an "autonomous" economic domain has always been obscurantist and ideological, even when accepted in good faith.' Law does not and never could simply defer to such a realm. Rather, law is perennially involved in creating and enforcing the terms of economic ordering, most particularly through the creation and maintenance of markets. One of its most important roles, indeed, is determining who is subject to market ordering and on what terms, and who is exempted in favor of other kinds of protection or provision.' Thus the program of law, politics, and institution building often called "neoliberalism" is, and can only be, a specific theory of how to use state power, to what ends, and for whose benefit.' The ideological work of the Twentieth-Century Synthesis has been to naturalize and embed in legal institutions from the Supreme Court to the Antitrust Office and World Trade Organization a specific disposition of power. This power represents a deployment of market ordering that produces intense and cross-cutting forms of inequality and democratic erosion. However, Twentieth-Century Synthesis theorists tend not to see this, precisely because the Synthesis makes it so hard to see (or at least so easy to overlook). If it is to succeed, law and political economy will also require something beyond mere critique. It will require a positive agenda. Many new and energized voices, from the legal academy to political candidates to movement activists, are already building in this direction,' calling for and giving shape to programs for more genuine democracy that also takes seriously questions of economic power and racial subordination;171 more equal distribution of resources and life chances;172 more public and shared resources and infrastructues;173 the displacement of concentrated corporate power and rooting of new forms of worker power;174 the end of mass incarceration and broader contestation of the long history of the criminalization and control of poor people and people of color in building capitalism;175 the recognition of finance and money as public infrastructures;176 the challenges posed by emerging forms of power and control arising from new technologies;177 and the need for a radical new emphasis on ecology.178 These are the materials from which a positive agenda, over time, will be built. Political fights interact generatively with scholarly and policy debates in pointing the way toward a more democratic political economy. The emergence of new grassroots movements, campaigns, and proposals seeking to deepen our democracy is no guarantee of success. But their prevalence and influence make clear the dangers and opportunities of this moment of upheaval—and highlight the stakes of building a new legal imaginary. 179 Neoliberal political economy, with its underlying commitments to efficiency, neutrality, and anti-politics, helped animate, shape, and legitimate a twentieth-century consensus that erased power, encased the market, and reinscribed racialized, economic, and gendered inequities. By contrast, a legal imaginary of democratic political economy, that takes seriously underlying concepts of power, equality, and democracy, can inform a wave of legal thought whose critique and policy imagination can amplify and accelerate these movements for structural reform and, if we are lucky, help remake our polity in more deeply democratic ways. 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. 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. 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. Zannoti ’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. Reform makes revolution more likely. Rejecting it condescendingly asserts the possibility of radical change is better than the certainty of real improvement. Delgado ’87 - Delgado, Richard teaches civil rights and critical race theory at University of Alabama School of Law. He has written and co-authored numerous articles and books, “The Ethereal Scholar: Does Critical Legal Studies Have What Minorities Want?”, Harvard Civil Rights - Civil Liberties Law Review, 1987 Critical scholars reject the idea of piecemeal reform. Incremental change, they argue, merely postpones the wholesale reformation that must occur to create a decent society.38 Even worse, an unfair social system survives by using piecemeal reform to disguise and legitimize oppression. 39 Those who control the system weaken resistance by pointing to the occasional concession to, or periodic court victory of, a black plaintiff or worker as evidence that the system is fair and just.40 In fact, Crits believe that teaching the common law or using the case method in law school is a disguised means of preaching incrementalism and thereby maintaining the current power structure.41 To avoid this, CLS scholars urge law professors to abandon the case method, give up the effort to find rationality and order in the case law, and teach in an unabashedly political fashion. 42 The CLS critique of piecemeal reform is familiar, imperialistic and wrong. Minorities know from bitter experience that occasional court victories do not mean the Promised Land is at hand.43 The critique is imperialistic in that it tells minorities and other oppressed peoples how they should interpret events affecting them.44 A court order directing a housing authority to disburse funds for heating in subsidized housing may postpone the revolution, or it may not. In the meantime, the order keeps a number of poor families warm. This may mean more to them than it does to a comfortable academic working in a warm office. It smacks of paternalism to assert that the possibility of revolution later outweighs the certainty of heat now, unless there is evidence for that possibility. The Crits do not offer such evidence. Indeed, some incremental changes may bring revolutionary changes closer, not push them further away. Not all small reforms induce complacency; some may whet the appetite for further combat. The welfare family may hold a tenants' union meeting in their heated living room. CLS scholars' critique of piecemeal reform often misses these possibilities, and neglects the question of whether total change, when it comes, will be what we want.
9/18/21
SO-Covid Aff V3
Tournament: St Marks | Round: 1 | Opponent: Harvard Westlake SW | Judge: Mohul Aggarwal AC I. Vaccine Apartheid A TRIPS waiver for covid vaccines will not pass in the squo. Baschuk 7/26 Bryce Baschuk Reporter, Bloomberg Economics, 21 - ("WTO Holiday From Vaccine Equity Talks Draws Calls for Action," Bloomberg, 7-26-2021, accessed 8-18-2021, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-07-26/wto-s-holiday-from-vaccine-equity-talks-draws-calls-for-action)//ML An urgent global … International in Europe. The only way to solve the pandemic is global vaccination, but current production is woefully short. Public Citizen 3/29 - Public Citizen “Public Citizen is a nonprofit consumer advocacy organization that champions the public interest in the halls of power. We defend democracy, resist corporate power and work to ensure that government works for the people – not for big corporations. Founded in 1971, we now have 500,000 members and supporters throughout the country. We don’t participate in partisan political activities or endorse any candidates for elected office. We take no government or corporate money, which enables us to remain fiercely independent and call out bad actors – no matter who they are or how much power and money they have.”, “Waiver of the WTO’s Intellectual Property Rules: Facts vs. Common Myths,” Public Citizen Global Trade Watch Series. March 29, 2021. Accessed Aug. 10, 2021. https://www.citizen.org/article/waiver-of-the-wtos-intellectual-property-rules-myths-vs-facts/ AT The COVID-19 public … the COVID-19 pandemic. Changing IP laws is key to combatting global health inequality and vaccine apartheid. Rich countries hoard vaccine supply, which means donor models never solve and reinforce colonialism. Harman et al 6/21 Sophie Harman professor of Politics and International Relations, Queen Mary University of London, Parsa Erfani Fogarty Global Health Fellow at the University of Global Health Equity and a medical student at Harvard Medical School, Tinashe Goronga Community Organiser Equal Health Global Campaign Against Racism at EqualHealth, Jason Hickel, Michelle Morse, Eugene T Richardson 6/21 - ("Global vaccine equity demands reparative justice — not charity," BMJ Global Health, 6/21/2021, https://gh.bmj.com/content/6/6/e006504)//ML By late April, … in this direction. Compulsory licensing is not sufficient – drug company resistance, IP thickets, and devolved decision-making. Stiglitz and Wallach 4/26 - Joseph E. Stiglitz and Lori Wallach Joseph E. Stiglitz, co-recipient of the 2001 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics Sciences, teaches at Columbia University. Lori Wallach is the director of Public Citizen’s Global Trade Watch., “Opinion: Preserving intellectual property barriers to covid-19 vaccines is morally wrong and foolish,” Washington Post (Web). April 26, 2021. Accessed Aug. 10, 2021. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/04/26/preserving-intellectual-property-barriers-covid-19-vaccines-is-morally-wrong-foolish/ AT Unfortunately, the drug … as covid-19 vaccines. Vaccine shortfall causes widespread death and poverty. Public Citizen 3/1 - Public Citizen “Public Citizen is a nonprofit consumer advocacy organization that champions the public interest in the halls of power. We defend democracy, resist corporate power and work to ensure that government works for the people – not for big corporations. Founded in 1971, we now have 500,000 members and supporters throughout the country. We don’t participate in partisan political activities or endorse any candidates for elected office. We take no government or corporate money, which enables us to remain fiercely independent and call out bad actors – no matter who they are or how much power and money they have.”, “Backgrounder: WTO-Required Monopolies for Pharmaceutical Corporations Obstruct Global Production of COVID-19 Vaccines and Treatment,” Public Citizen Global Trade Watch Series. March 1, 2021. Accessed Aug. 12, 2021. https://www.citizen.org/article/wto-required-monopolies-for-pharmaceutical-corporations-obstruct-global-production-of-covid-19-vaccines-and-treatments/ AT It is obvious …by $5.5 trillion. Poverty and disease are mutually reinforcing, causing staggering suffering and injustice. Hollis and Pogge ’08 - Aidan Hollis Associate Professor of Economics, the University of Calgary and Thomas Pogge Leitner Professor of Philosophy and International Affairs, Yale University, “The Health Impact Fund Making New Medicines Accessible for All,” Incentives for Global Health (2008) AT In 2004, some … the global poor.
II. Solvency Plan text: The member nations of the World Trade Organization ought to waive intellectual property protections for Covid-19 related medicines. Public Citizen 6/22 - Public Citizen et. al, “Please Speedily Secure Implementation of a COVID-19 Emergency Waiver of WTO TRIPS Rules for Vaccines, Tests and Treatments,” Open Letter to President Joe Biden. June 22, 2021. https://www.citizenstrade.org/ctc/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/COVIDTRIPSWaiver_SignOnLtr2_062221.pdf#new_tab AT We the … would be unprecedented. A waiver would increase leverage over pharma and provide legal certainty needed to spur critical production. Stiglitz and Wallach 4/26 - Joseph E. Stiglitz and Lori Wallach Joseph E. Stiglitz, co-recipient of the 2001 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics Sciences, teaches at Columbia University. Lori Wallach is the director of Public Citizen’s Global Trade Watch., “Opinion: Preserving intellectual property barriers to covid-19 vaccines is morally wrong and foolish,” Washington Post (Web). April 26, 2021. Accessed Aug. 10, 2021. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/04/26/preserving-intellectual-property-barriers-covid-19-vaccines-is-morally-wrong-foolish/ AT A waiver … supply chain products. Legal certainty unlocks global production. Public Citizen 3/29 - Public Citizen “Public Citizen is a nonprofit consumer advocacy organization that champions the public interest in the halls of power. We defend democracy, resist corporate power and work to ensure that government works for the people – not for big corporations. Founded in 1971, we now have 500,000 members and supporters throughout the country. We don’t participate in partisan political activities or endorse any candidates for elected office. We take no government or corporate money, which enables us to remain fiercely independent and call out bad actors – no matter who they are or how much power and money they have.”, “Waiver of the WTO’s Intellectual Property Rules: Facts vs. Common Myths,” Public Citizen Global Trade Watch Series. March 29, 2021. Accessed Aug. 10, 2021. https://www.citizen.org/article/waiver-of-the-wtos-intellectual-property-rules-myths-vs-facts/ AT Most critically, … Johnson and Johnson vaccine uses. Manufacturing capacity is widespread around the world. Public Citizen 3/29 - Public Citizen “Public Citizen is a nonprofit consumer advocacy organization that champions the public interest in the halls of power. We defend democracy, resist corporate power and work to ensure that government works for the people – not for big corporations. Founded in 1971, we now have 500,000 members and supporters throughout the country. We don’t participate in partisan political activities or endorse any candidates for elected office. We take no government or corporate money, which enables us to remain fiercely independent and call out bad actors – no matter who they are or how much power and money they have.”, “Waiver of the WTO’s Intellectual Property Rules: Facts vs. Common Myths,” Public Citizen Global Trade Watch Series. March 29, 2021. Accessed Aug. 10, 2021. https://www.citizen.org/article/waiver-of-the-wtos-intellectual-property-rules-myths-vs-facts/ AT In the press … Johnson and Johnson vaccine uses. III. Framing The Aff challenges dehumanizing cultural frames that allow us to ignore human suffering. Recognition of common vulnerability is key to a politics that rejects violence, oppression, and indifference. Butler ’04 - Judith Butler Prof. of Rhetoric and Comparative Literature, University of California at Berkeley, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence. New York: Verso (2006; First Published 2004). pp. 30-35 AT Is there … unmarkable and ungrievable.
The Aff challenges the hegemonic ideology of the status quo by rejecting sacrificial rationalizations. That logic is the basis for colonialism, enslavement, genocide, war, and global poverty. Santos 3 2003, Boaventura de Souza Santos is a Professor of Sociology at the University of Coimbra, “Collective Suicide?”, Bad Subjects, Issue # 63 , http://www.ces.fe.uc.pt/opiniao/bss/072en.php According to Franz … horror and destruction. Underview Prioritize probability. Kessler 08 (Oliver; April 2008; PhD in IR, professor of sociology at the University of Bielefeld, and professor of history and theory of IR at the Faculty of Arts; Alternatives, Vol. 33, “From Insecurity to Uncertainty: Risk and the Paradox of Security Politics” p. 211-232) The problem of the … with relative certainty. Reject extinction-first framing:
Apocalyptic rhetoric is an independent voter – justifies violence, trades off with addressing real risks, and causes nihilism. Pinker ’18 - Steven Pinker Johnston Professor of Psychology, Harvard U., Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress. New York: Viking. (2018). pp. 291-292 At first glance … do about it.
Their disads will surely be ridiculous. (A) Ethics – WTO countries are complicit in hoarding lifesaving medicines from the world’s most vulnerable people. Apply a VERY high standard of proof to any rationalization of that policy.
(B) Compound Probability - Multiplied probabilities of long link chains have negligible net probabilities. This is the slippery slope fallacy.
(C) Causal Direction - They will say the fractional probability of a huge impact still has a large expected value, but it’s impossible to determine the direction of low-probability links. Does the butterfly flapping its wings cause the hurricane or prevent it? Disregard tiny-probability links because they don’t guide decision-making.
(D) Complexity – the DA presents a simplistic and deterministic narrative that fails to account for the myriad confounding factors that can disrupt or reverse the link chain of the DA. The most important of these is the probability that people will recognize the dangerous path they’re on and change course, e.g. leaders backing down during the Cuban Missile Crisis.
(E) Decision Gridlock – Every course of action or inaction has a negligible possibility of causing extinction. This makes it impossible to prioritize averting existential risk over all else because such risk is unavoidable. We have no choice but to prioritize REALISTIC probabilities.
Scholarly discourse and engagement with politics is key to effective structural reform - critique is insufficient. Purdy ’20 - Jedediah S. Britton-Purdy et al, 20 - ("Building a Law-and-Political-Economy Framework: Beyond the Twentieth-Century Synthesis by Jedediah S. Britton-Purdy, David Singh Grewal, Amy Kapczynski, K. Sabeel Rahman :: SSRN," 3-2-2020, https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3547312)//ey/
To embrace the possibility … more deeply democratic ways. 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 … them or deflect their claims. 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. Zannoti ’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 …- and pessimistic activism. Reform makes revolution more likely. Rejecting it condescendingly asserts the possibility of radical change is better than the certainty of real improvement. Delgado ’87 - Delgado, Richard teaches civil rights and critical race theory at University of Alabama School of Law. He has written and co-authored numerous articles and books, “The Ethereal Scholar: Does Critical Legal Studies Have What Minorities Want?”, Harvard Civil Rights - Civil Liberties Law Review, 1987 Critical scholars … what we want.
10/16/21
SO-Covid Aff V4
Tournament: Meadows | Round: 2 | Opponent: Harvard Westlake MT | Judge: Delanie Ness I. Vaccine Apartheid A TRIPS waiver for covid vaccines will not pass in the squo. Baschuk 7/26 Bryce Baschuk Reporter, Bloomberg Economics, 21 - ("WTO Holiday From Vaccine Equity Talks Draws Calls for Action," Bloomberg, 7-26-2021, accessed 8-18-2021, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-07-26/wto-s-holiday-from-vaccine-equity-talks-draws-calls-for-action)//ML An urgent global effort to rebalance the inequity between rich, vaccinated nations and poor nations sliding further into pandemic misery is colliding with an immovable calendar conflict: the European summer holiday. Next week World Trade Organization delegates are planning to depart Geneva for their August break and, in doing so, pause their fractious debate over a proposal to waive intellectual-property protections for Covid-19 shots until the second week of September.¶ Before they leave, members will adopt a report that acknowledges they’ve made scant headway on the proposal aimed at making doses more widely available, which the world’s top health expert says is critical to ending a “moral failure.”¶ “With so many lives on the line, profits and patents must come second,” World Health Organization Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said during a virtual summit last week.¶ WTO Director-General Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala previously urged ambassadors to shorten their usual six-week summer holiday to focus on pressing issues like the waiver. Nevertheless, members aren’t planning to reconsider the matter until the week of Sept. 6, according to officials familiar with the planning.¶ “August doesn’t matter in Geneva; it doesn’t matter if people are dying around the world,” said Shailly Gupta, a spokesperson at Médecins Sans Frontières. “We hope members will move at a faster pace.”¶ Disagreement persists on the fundamental question of whether a waiver is the “appropriate and most effective way” to address the shortage of vaccines, according to a draft status report produced by Dagfinn Sørli, the chairman of WTO council on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights, or TRIPS.¶ That split could sink prospects for an ambitious vaccine waiver because WTO decisions must be taken on the basis of consensus -- which means any of the 164 members can veto a final agreement for any reason.¶ ”The WTO’s response to Covid is the most critical issue before our organization right now,” WTO spokesman Keith Rockwell said a phone interview. “Millions have died and lives are at stake. Finding a pragmatic outcome by December is essential.”¶ Proponents of the waiver had hoped to conclude their negotiations by the end of July and are now criticizing the European Union and other developed nations for sandbagging the talks.¶ EU ‘Not Interested’¶ The European Commission, which opposes a WTO TRIPS waiver, has proposed a series of measures that it argues will create greater legal certainty for nations to leverage existing trade tools in order to expand their production capacities.¶ “The EU is not interested,” Gupta said. “Switzerland, Norway and the United Kingdom are not engaging. They’re saying: ‘This or that won’t work; the waiver won’t work.’ There is no intention of engaging.”¶ A spokesman for the EU mission in Geneva declined to comment.§ Critics counter that the proposal from Brussels is a distraction to redirect focus from India and South Africa’s earlier waiver proposal and to prevent members from engaging in more detailed negotiations.¶ “The EU’s actions are incredibly cynical and dangerous,” said Lori Wallach, the founder of Public Citizen’s Global Trade Watch. “They have submitted a paper that basically conflicts with the text-based negotiations by saying ‘We don’t want a waiver.’”¶ The U.S., meanwhile, has taken a back seat in the process and enthusiasm about Washington’s engagement on the issue has begun to wane in the three months since Trade Representative Katherine Tai announced American support for a waiver.¶ Though Tai’s surprise announcement briefly knocked shares of Moderna Inc., Pfizer Inc., and BioNTech SE, the stocks quickly rebounded and all are now trading at or near their highest levels of the year.¶ “People feel that message from Ambassador Tai is not playing out on the ground or being implemented in a meaningful way,” said Thiru Balasubramaniam a managing director at Knowledge Ecology International in Europe. The only way to solve the pandemic is global vaccination, but current production is woefully short. Public Citizen 3/29 - Public Citizen “Public Citizen is a nonprofit consumer advocacy organization that champions the public interest in the halls of power. We defend democracy, resist corporate power and work to ensure that government works for the people – not for big corporations. Founded in 1971, we now have 500,000 members and supporters throughout the country. We don’t participate in partisan political activities or endorse any candidates for elected office. We take no government or corporate money, which enables us to remain fiercely independent and call out bad actors – no matter who they are or how much power and money they have.”, “Waiver of the WTO’s Intellectual Property Rules: Facts vs. Common Myths,” Public Citizen Global Trade Watch Series. March 29, 2021. Accessed Aug. 10, 2021. https://www.citizen.org/article/waiver-of-the-wtos-intellectual-property-rules-myths-vs-facts/ AT The COVID-19 public health disaster and resulting economic crises won’t end anywhere unless people everywhere are vaccinated. Despite this obvious truth, rich countries with only 14 of the global population have secured preferential access to over 50 of projected global vaccine supplies. Ongoing outbreaks anywhere allow the virus to mutate, threatening the whole world with vaccine-resistant variants or more deadly or easily spread variants. Governments invested billions to create the vaccines. But, there is a dire shortage, with no end in sight. As we enter the second quarter, about one billion doses have been produced in 2021. We need 10 to 12 billion to reach global herd immunity. And we will need far more if, like flu vaccines, they must be repeated or require booster shots. In every region, there are existing firms that could gear up production and governments willing to invest in expanding supply. But WTO rules require countries to guarantee pharmaceutical corporations monopoly control. More than 100 countries support a temporary, emergency suspension of these WTO rules, so more vaccines, treatments and diagnostic tests can be manufactured in as many places as possible. The United States and a handful of other WTO members are blocking the waiver: They won’t even agree to negotiate about waiver language to address whatever concerns that they may have with the current text. Donald Trump started this self-defeating blockade. President Joe Biden must reverse it to speed the end of the COVID-19 pandemic. Changing IP laws is key to combatting global health inequality and vaccine apartheid. Rich countries hoard vaccine supply, which means donor models never solve and reinforce colonialism. Harman et al 6/21 Sophie Harman professor of Politics and International Relations, Queen Mary University of London, Parsa Erfani Fogarty Global Health Fellow at the University of Global Health Equity and a medical student at Harvard Medical School, Tinashe Goronga Community Organiser Equal Health Global Campaign Against Racism at EqualHealth, Jason Hickel, Michelle Morse, Eugene T Richardson 6/21 - ("Global vaccine equity demands reparative justice — not charity," BMJ Global Health, 6/21/2021, https://gh.bmj.com/content/6/6/e006504)//ML By late April, more than 80 of the world’s COVID-19 vaccines had gone to people in wealthy countries, with just 0.3 to people in low-income countries.1 This reprehensible imbalance is no accident. High-income countries have used neocolonial negotiating power, global policy leverage and capital to procure enough doses to cover 245 of their citizens while leaving few doses for poorer countries.2 As a result, lower-income countries may not be able to vaccinate their populations until 2023.3¶ Such inequity is yet another example of how the interests of racial capitalism run roughshod over the golden rule of global solidarity—attend to the highest risk first.4 Currently, older and medically vulnerable individuals are dying from COVID-19 disproportionately in poor countries, while young, healthy individuals are getting vaccinated in wealthy ones.5 Vaccine apartheid is a not novel phenomenon. The notion that only certain corners of the world get to benefit from life-saving treatments is an everyday reality of a global health system driven by a capitalist, philanthropic model.6 7 But in times of crises—and as new variants threaten the vaccination plans of wealthy countries—these inequities and their solutions come to the forefront of global debate.8¶ Policy-makers in rich nations are aware of these issues. But the solutions they have proposed so far do nothing to address the underlying structural problems. They offer charitable donations and partial, temporary fixes that are designed to deflect the substantive demands for reform that global South countries are fighting for, including challenges to unethical intellectual property (IP) regimes.9 This approach will not work, because it is not designed to ‘work.’ If we want to end vaccine apartheid, we need to target the root causes of global health inequities. We need reparative justice.¶ Three limited ‘solutions’ to vaccine inequity¶ There are currently three approaches to reduce inequity in COVID-19 vaccine distribution: bilateral charity, multilateral charity and temporary waivers or suspensions of IP.¶ The first is the most straightforward. States that stockpile COVID-19 vaccines have committed to sharing their leftovers with low-income and middle-income countries. Norway was one of the first nations to accede to donating doses to poorer countries in parallel with its vaccine programme.10 This is the weakest form of equity as it is unclear if this will be done for free, at a lower cost, tied to diplomacy or conditionality, or crucially, when these vaccines will be made available, where they will go, or how many will be delivered. The bilateral charity approach has little to do with equity and more to do with geopolitics, wealth and aid dependency.11 12¶ The second is multilateral charity, best exemplified by COVAX. In 2020, COVAX emerged as an international collaboration by the World Health Organisation (WHO), United Nations Children’s Fund, Gavi and the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations to ensure equitable global access to COVID-19 vaccines.13 Rich countries can access doses for 10–50 of their populations, depending on how much they have paid in, and poor countries can access doses for 20 through the scheme. It is the 20 for poor countries that has come to be COVAX’s unique selling point: here is a mechanism that ensures every country in the world can get the vaccine regardless of ability to pay. This is the first time such an initiative has been trialled.¶ The shortcomings of COVAX are numerous. If vaccines are delivered as planned, COVAX may reach 27 of the population in lower-income countries by the end of 2021—a depressing goal compared with the estimated 70 coverage needed for herd immunity and the open vaccine access currently granted to Americans.14 15 Furthermore, COVAX is still significantly underfunded and there are concerns regarding supply chains. While capital and resource transfer from wealthy countries to poorer ones is surely needed in the current pandemic response, any system that solely relies on aid will ultimately fail to achieve equity. In the setting of vaccine scarcity, in which suppliers are unable to deliver doses as scheduled and countries are banning exports to keep vaccines at home, there is a risk that COVAX aid-recipient states will fall further down the priority list, awaiting the leftover vaccines from the rich country stockpiles.16–18¶ What may be most pernicious about the COVAX scheme, however, is that rich countries and their pharmaceutical companies have repeatedly used it as a shield to deflect demands for IP waivers. This is an enduring problem with aid: it papers over and distracts our attention away from the underlying structural violence. And in so doing, it maintains and perpetuates inequalities. Over 50 years ago, Kwame Nkrumah observed how aid is a ‘revolving credit’ which returns to countries of the global North in the form of increased profits.19 To the extent that COVAX is being leveraged to protect corporate patents and profits, Nkrumah’s words continue to be germane¶. The third approach is focused on pooling, temporary waivers, or suspension of IP. In May 2020, the WHO created the COVID-19 Technology Access Pool for companies to share IP and transfer technologies in a coordinated manner. But to date, not a single company has utilised the transfer process—likely because such forms of global IP sharing would quell profits, even if royalties are included.20 Pharmaceutical companies and universities prefer one-off transfer deals because it enables them to set their own terms with non-disclosure agreements. Given that they are accountable to shareholders and boards—not patients—financial incentives will drive transfer decisions, not public health demand.¶ Following the blockages at the WHO around IP, attention shifted towards the World Trade Organisation (WTO). In October 2020, India and South Africa proposed a temporary waiver of IP rights to COVID-19 technologies for the duration of the pandemic, so that all manufacturers with sufficient capacity and shared know-how could start production.21 Although backed by over 100 countries within the WTO and a global campaign for the ‘People’s Vaccine,’ the proposal has been repeatedly blocked at every committee meeting since then by select wealthy countries with large pharmaceutical industries, including the UK, Japan and EU states.22 23¶ Those who oppose the IP waiver argue that it will not do anything to solve the problem: even if you were to liberate the recipe for the vaccines, low-income and middle-income countries do not have the capacity to produce it.24 But this argument is specious. For one, several middle-income countries—including India, Brazil, Senegal and South Africa—do have the ability to ramp up production by repurposing existing manufacturing capacity.25 In addition, an IP waiver can and should be supplemented with technology transfers, logistical support and financial investment to facilitate this repurposing process. And the most important point is that such a waiver could drastically reduce costs across the board, making vaccine imports more affordable for poor countries.¶ Opponents of the waiver also claim that IP-related obstacles can be addressed through existing arrangements for ‘compulsory licensing’ under the WTO’s Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS).26 But the past evidence suggests that this process is slow, cumbersome and subject to various shaming practices by the international community.27 28 Some point instead to the possibility of voluntary licensing. But voluntary licenses are often executed secretly and are limited to companies or governments that can afford them. The University of Pennsylvania, which owns IP rights relating to the mRNA vaccines, is helping Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok develop a vaccine production facility. This partnership was possible because Thailand—unlike other middle-income countries—was able to put up the money.29 Poorer countries are left out. Sharing of IP and technology transfers can and will accelerate global vaccine production. The question is on whose terms. Organisations such as the WHO and African Union are currently mobilising support and resources to accelerate production in low-income and middle-income countries.30 31 But these efforts will be to waste unless IP for COVID-19 technologies is shared broadly and quickly.¶ Vaccine coloniality¶ Donor-based approaches to vaccine equity are grounded in old, even colonial ideas of aid and dependency, which have failed to serve the health needs of the Majority World or deliver on health equity. This failed model has not promoted health equity in the past and is clearly inadequate in the present, on account of dependency on donor whims (the bilateral ‘leftovers’ approach), persistent funding gaps and shortfalls (COVAX), and time-consuming diplomacy and filibustering over what is or is it not within current trade rules (WTO).¶ Once again in the political economy of global health, the charitable model of COVAX becomes the smokescreen for inequitable systems. When states are asked about their stockpiling, they point to COVAX. When pharmaceutical companies are asked about IP, they point to COVAX or their low-cost commitment. The focus on a donor-based model of aid in achieving vaccine equity has distracted leaders from the ideologies, economic systems and trade regulations that leave access to medicine to the forces of the marketplace rather than global health priorities.32 Achieving global vaccine justice requires a rapid shift in trade regulations and contract transparency that streamlines IP sharing and technology transfers. The resultant collaborations across economies will not only accelerate vaccine production but will also increase competition and push vaccine prices down.¶ Finally, old models of vaccine equity have not kept pace with changes in discourse and thinking around global health governance, equity and justice. 2021 is not the early 2000s, where new public–private partnerships or funding models were de rigueur. Donor countries are increasingly wary of aid dependency as they pay the cost of continuing high profile health programmes with diminishing strategic returns. Aid-recipient countries are similarly exasperated by funding gaps that lead to delays and materiel shortfalls, the NGO-industrial complex and attendant consultants that rationalise them, and fundamentally, by the notion that their populations only seem to matter when another state can capitalise on them.¶ Conclusion¶ Vaccine apartheid is only one symptom of broader global health inequalities that have their roots in colonialism and persist today because of neocolonial forms of power. As Grosfoguel writes, ‘The heterogeneous and multiple global structures put in place over a period of 450 years did not evaporate with the juridical–political decolonisation of the periphery over the past 50 years. We continue to live under the same ‘colonial power matrix.’ With juridical–political decolonisation we moved from a period of ‘global colonialism’ to the current period of ‘global coloniality.’33 Vaccine justice starts with moving beyond aid models of vaccine donation, in which poorer countries are gifted vaccine leftovers. It demands rapidly achieving global consensus for the IP waiver, democratising vaccine IP and know-how and supporting low-income and middle-income countries to build manufacturing capacity for this pandemic and the next. These steps can mark the start of a reparative justice movement in global health that demands we confront and overturn colonial legacies that continue to devastate the health of low- and middle-income countries.34 A commitment to funding vaccine justice in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic can be a first step in this direction. Compulsory licensing is not sufficient – drug company resistance, IP thickets, and devolved decision-making. Stiglitz and Wallach 4/26 - Joseph E. Stiglitz and Lori Wallach Joseph E. Stiglitz, co-recipient of the 2001 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics Sciences, teaches at Columbia University. Lori Wallach is the director of Public Citizen’s Global Trade Watch., “Opinion: Preserving intellectual property barriers to covid-19 vaccines is morally wrong and foolish,” Washington Post (Web). April 26, 2021. Accessed Aug. 10, 2021. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/04/26/preserving-intellectual-property-barriers-covid-19-vaccines-is-morally-wrong-foolish/ AT Unfortunately, the drug companies have consistently done whatever they can to preserve their monopoly control. Even today, as they battle the waiver and argue that existing compulsory licensing rights are sufficient, they lobby the U.S. government to sanction countries that use that tool.¶ These corporations have also undermined this option by building “thickets” of intellectual property barriers. They fortify their monopolies by registering exclusive rights to industrial designs and undisclosed data, such as trade secrets and test data, in addition to numerous patents and copyrights for each medicine. Each element would require a license, and the WTO’s flexibilities might not even encompass all of them.¶ Making matters more difficult, “product-by-product” and “country-by-country” compulsory licensing is nigh impossible to coordinate across countries for medicines with complex global supply chains, such as covid-19 vaccines. Vaccine shortfall causes widespread death and poverty. Public Citizen 3/1 - Public Citizen “Public Citizen is a nonprofit consumer advocacy organization that champions the public interest in the halls of power. We defend democracy, resist corporate power and work to ensure that government works for the people – not for big corporations. Founded in 1971, we now have 500,000 members and supporters throughout the country. We don’t participate in partisan political activities or endorse any candidates for elected office. We take no government or corporate money, which enables us to remain fiercely independent and call out bad actors – no matter who they are or how much power and money they have.”, “Backgrounder: WTO-Required Monopolies for Pharmaceutical Corporations Obstruct Global Production of COVID-19 Vaccines and Treatment,” Public Citizen Global Trade Watch Series. March 1, 2021. Accessed Aug. 12, 2021. https://www.citizen.org/article/wto-required-monopolies-for-pharmaceutical-corporations-obstruct-global-production-of-covid-19-vaccines-and-treatments/ AT It is obvious that current production capacity cannot supply enough vaccines for the entire world. Many people in low- and middle-income countries around the globe will not get vaccinated until at least 2022 unless the world manufactures many more doses, according to the British Medical Journal. The world’s poorest countries may wait until 2024 for mass immunization, if it happens at all, reports the Economist Intelligence Unit. The global vaccine apartheid unfolding right now could cost millions of lives and push tens of millions more into poverty. The devastation will be felt for a generation. A new International Chamber of Commerce report concluded that the world could face economic losses of more than $9 trillion under the scenario of wealthy nations being fully vaccinated by mid-2021, but poor countries largely shut out. Wealthy countries like the United States would bear nearly half of that hit. Vaccinating just half of low- and middle-income countries’ populations could reduce global losses by $5.5 trillion. Poverty and disease are mutually reinforcing, causing staggering suffering and injustice. Hollis and Pogge ’08 - Aidan Hollis Associate Professor of Economics, the University of Calgary and Thomas Pogge Leitner Professor of Philosophy and International Affairs, Yale University, “The Health Impact Fund Making New Medicines Accessible for All,” Incentives for Global Health (2008) AT In 2004, some 970 million people, around 15 percent of the world’s population, were living below the extreme poverty line of $1 a day (more strictly defi ned, $392.88 annually) in 1993 Purchasing Power Parity (PPP) terms (Chen and Ravallion 2007, 16579).3 Furthermore, those living below this very low poverty line fell on average around 28 percent below it. Th eir average annual purchasing power therefore corresponded to approximately $420 in the US in 2008 dollars.4¶ Th ese are the poorest of the poor. Th e World Bank also uses a somewhat less miserly poverty line, namely $2 dollar a day, or an annual amount of $785.76 PPP 1993. Th e Bank’s data show that around 40 percent of the world’s population, or over 2.5 billion people, lived in income poverty so defi ned in 2004,5 with this population falling on average 41 percent below this higher line.6 Individuals in this much larger group could buy, on average, about as much in 2004 as could be bought in the US in 2008 for $690.¶ The Effects of Global Income Poverty on Health¶ The effects of such extreme income poverty are foreseeable and extensively documented. It is estimated that around 13 percent of all human beings (830 million) are chronically undernourished, 17 percent (1.1 billion) lack access to safe water, and 41 percent (2.6 billion) lack access to basic sanitation (UNDP 2006, 174, 33). About 31 percent (2 billion) lack access to crucial drugs and 25 percent (1.6 billion) lack electricity (Fogarty n.d., IEA 2002). Some 780 million adults are illiterate (UNESCO 2006), and 14 percent of children aged between fi ve and 17 (218 million) are child laborers, more than half in hazardous work (ILO 2006, 6).¶ Worldwide, diseases related to poverty, including communicable, maternal, perinatal, and nutritionrelated diseases, comprise over 50 percent of the burden of disease in low-income countries, nearly ten times their relative burden in developed countries (WHO 2006b, 3). If the developed world had its proportional share of poverty-related deaths (onethird of all deaths), severe poverty would kill some 16,000 Americans and 26,000 citizens of the European Union each week.¶ The cycle of mutually reinforcing poverty and disease besetting low income countries, and particularly the poorer communities in these countries, could be broken by signifi cantly reducing severe poverty. But it is also possible to make substantial progress against the global burden of disease more directly by improving health care in developing countries.¶ Poverty does not merely render poor people more vulnerable to disease, but also makes it less likely that they can obtain medical treatment for the diseases they contract. This is because in poor countries medical care is rarely available for free, and poor people are typically unable to buy either the care needed by themselves or their families or the insurance policies that would guarantee them such care. The price of health care in poor countries therefore also plays a crucial role in explaining the catastrophic health situation among the global poor.
II. Solvency Plan text: The member nations of the World Trade Organization ought to waive intellectual property protections for Covid-19 related medicines. Public Citizen 6/22 - Public Citizen et. al, “Please Speedily Secure Implementation of a COVID-19 Emergency Waiver of WTO TRIPS Rules for Vaccines, Tests and Treatments,” Open Letter to President Joe Biden. June 22, 2021. https://www.citizenstrade.org/ctc/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/COVIDTRIPSWaiver_SignOnLtr2_062221.pdf#new_tab AT We the undersigned organizations respectfully urge you to speedily secure a waiver that is:¶ • Comprehensive: The U.S. government must secure swift adoption of a temporary waiver of the patent, copyright, industrial design and undisclosed data rules of the WTO’s TRIPS Agreement with respect to COVID-19-related medical products. The scope of the waiver must extend beyond vaccines to also cover the diagnostic tests needed to detect outbreaks and variants; the treatments, ventilators and other medical devices necessary to shorten lockdowns and save the lives of the millions who will contract COVID-19 before sufficient vaccine doses can be made and the materials, components, means and methods of manufacturing such goods.¶ • Swift: The WTO Director General’s December 2021 deadline for a final waiver text is far too late to meet the urgency of the pandemic, which requires agreement on a waiver in a matter of weeks, not months.¶ • Long-lasting: A waiver must be of sufficient duration to incentivize and sustain increases in manufacturing capacity for and output of medical goods to prevent, contain or treat COVID19, taking into consideration that the pandemic may yet escape current vaccines. We support the waiver sponsors’ proposal that the initial waiver last three years and be regularly reviewed thereafter, particularly given uncertainties around variants, the need for boosters, and what levels of immunization may be needed.¶ Current global production capacity of COVID-19 vaccines, medicines, and diagnostic tests cannot come close to meeting global needs to detect, treat, prevent, or contain COVID-19. Absent significant increases in vaccine production, many in developing nations will not have access to vaccines until 2024. This lag would mean more deaths and the greater chances for development of new variants that can undermine vaccines' achievements to date.¶ Every country should have the right to develop and make their own vaccines free from the worry that they and their suppliers would be sued by IP holders. To date, vaccine intellectual property rightsholders have refused to issue open licenses under transparent and accountable terms and conditions, and transfer technology fully to and negotiate payment terms with qualified manufacturers in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, creating supply shortages and production bottlenecks and prohibiting urgently needed production of doses worldwide. The worst global health crisis in a century has resulted in at least 3.5 million deaths worldwide and is conservatively estimated to cost the U.S. alone $16 trillion in economic losses, accompanied by yet greater global losses that have impoverished hundreds of millions of people worldwide. We are in a race against time to save lives and prevent new variants. Absent a major increase in vaccines, treatments, diagnostic tests, ventilators, and other COVID-19-related medical supplies, the pandemic will rage largely unmitigated among a significant share of the world’s population. COVID-19 infections will increase, resulting in increased deaths and long-term damage to the health of millions of people, a dragging blow to the global economy and a risk that vaccine-resistant variants will put the world back on lockdown and evade immunity for those previously infected and/or vaccinated. The long-term impact on people’s health and the world’s health system would be unprecedented. A waiver would increase leverage over pharma and provide legal certainty needed to spur critical production. Stiglitz and Wallach 4/26 - Joseph E. Stiglitz and Lori Wallach Joseph E. Stiglitz, co-recipient of the 2001 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics Sciences, teaches at Columbia University. Lori Wallach is the director of Public Citizen’s Global Trade Watch., “Opinion: Preserving intellectual property barriers to covid-19 vaccines is morally wrong and foolish,” Washington Post (Web). April 26, 2021. Accessed Aug. 10, 2021. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/04/26/preserving-intellectual-property-barriers-covid-19-vaccines-is-morally-wrong-foolish/ AT A waiver would immediately increase government leverage over vaccine makers that refuse to license the technology. Firms could choose to either expand production by negotiating with governments, alternative suppliers and global initiatives, or risk governments circumventing them and forcing the transfer of technology.¶ A waiver would also provide legal certainty for governments and investors that are inclined to repurpose existing pharmaceutical manufacturing or build new facilities but are fearful of intellectual property liability. And it could boost production of covid-19 treatments unavailable in much of the world, as well as diagnostic tests and vaccine supply chain products. Legal certainty unlocks global production. Public Citizen 3/29 - Public Citizen “Public Citizen is a nonprofit consumer advocacy organization that champions the public interest in the halls of power. We defend democracy, resist corporate power and work to ensure that government works for the people – not for big corporations. Founded in 1971, we now have 500,000 members and supporters throughout the country. We don’t participate in partisan political activities or endorse any candidates for elected office. We take no government or corporate money, which enables us to remain fiercely independent and call out bad actors – no matter who they are or how much power and money they have.”, “Waiver of the WTO’s Intellectual Property Rules: Facts vs. Common Myths,” Public Citizen Global Trade Watch Series. March 29, 2021. Accessed Aug. 10, 2021. https://www.citizen.org/article/waiver-of-the-wtos-intellectual-property-rules-myths-vs-facts/ AT Most critically, there simply is not enough supply to go around now or for every year in the future during which the whole world will need regular COVID vaccination to keep the virus under control. Thankfully, scores of countries are ready to invest in building new or repurposing existing production capacity. That is why more than 100 countries support a waiver of the WTO’s Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property (TRIPS). These countries seek certainty that if they adjust their domestic laws and practices to support that investment by providing access to the necessary technology, they will not get dragged into expansive WTO litigation or face retaliatory sanctions from countries claiming WTO violations. The waiver will also serve as a worldwide buffer against the political pressure and legal harassment to which Big Pharma subjects countries that seek to promote affordable access to medicines.¶ In many countries, the regulatory authorities that had to approve domestic use of various vaccines and other COVID-related medical products have significant information from the firms that they could share with skilled teams from local universities, government agencies and pharmaceutical manufacturers — if they were not obliged by WTO rules to guarantee monopoly control of it. And world-class pharmaceutical firms already are making generic versions of new cutting-edge HIV-AIDS medicines and pumping out vaccines based on the platform that, for instance, the Johnson and Johnson vaccine uses. Countries can rapidly ramp up covid vaccine production. Nolen 10/22 Stephanie Nolen Stephanie Nolen covers global health for The New York Times. She has reported on public health, economic development and humanitarian crises from more than 80 countries around the world., 10/22 - ("Here’s Why Developing Countries Can Make mRNA Covid Vaccines," NY Timesn, 10/22/2021, accessed 10-26-2021, https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/10/22/science/developing-country-covid-vaccines.html)//ML Across the developing world, hundreds of millions of people are unable to get a vaccine to protect themselves from the ravages of Covid-19, and millions of them have already become infected and died.¶ Depending on wealthy nations to donate billions of doses is not working, public health experts say. The solution, many now believe, is for the countries to do something that the big American mRNA vaccine makers say is not feasible: Manufacture the gold-standard mRNA shots themselves.¶ Despite mounting pressure, the chief executives of Moderna and Pfizer have declined to license their mRNA technology in developing countries, arguing it makes no sense to do so. They say that the process is too complex, that it would be too time- and labor- intensive to establish facilities that could do it, and that they cannot spare the staff because of the urgent need to maximize production at their own network of facilities.¶ “You cannot go hire people who know how to make mRNA: Those people don’t exist,” the chief executive of Moderna, Stéphane Bancel, told analysts.¶ But public health experts in both rich and poor countries argue that expanding production to the regions most in need is not only possible, it is essential for safeguarding the world against dangerous variants of the virus and ending the pandemic.¶ Setting up mRNA manufacturing operations in other countries should start immediately, said Tom Frieden, the former director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in the United States, adding: “They are our insurance policy against variants and production failure” and “absolutely can be produced in a variety of settings.”¶ The vaccine needs of poorer countries were supposed to be met through Covax, a multinational body meant to facilitate global vaccine distribution — but donations have been slow and limited. Wealthier countries have locked up supply. Just 4 percent of people in low-income countries are fully vaccinated.¶ Experts in both the development and production of vaccines say the mRNA vaccines involve fewer steps, fewer ingredients and less physical capacity than traditional vaccines. Companies in Africa, South America and parts of Asia already have much of what they would need to make them, they say; the technology specific to the mRNA production process can be delivered as a ready-to-use modular kit.¶ Ten Candidates for mRNA Production¶ The Times assessed 10 companies around the world that are strong candidates to manufacture mRNA vaccines.¶ Most estimates put the cost of setting up production at $100 million to $200 million. A few large pharmaceutical producers in developing countries have these funds at hand; others would need loans or investors. The U.S. International Development Finance Corporation and the International Finance Corporation both have billions of dollars in funding available for this kind of project, as low-interest loans or a share of equity.¶ The New York Times interviewed dozens of executives and scientists at vaccine, drug and biotechnology companies across the developing world and from those conversations, found 10 strong candidates to produce mRNA Covid vaccines in six countries on three continents. The key criteria include existing facilities, human capital, the regulatory system for medicines and the political and economic climate.¶ Which Companies Could Produce mRNA Vaccines?¶ The Times assessed leading companies based on suitable production facilities and the availability of skilled workers, the country’s history of drug regulation and certification for drug export, and other political and economic factors that affect research and trade.¶ Production Experience and Facilities¶ Regulatory Environment and Status¶ Political and Economic Context¶ Human Capital ¶ Company¶ The Serum Institute of India, the world’s largest vaccine maker, has huge capacity and extensive supply chains. It already produces Covid vaccines for Oxford-AstraZeneca and Novavax, as well as other vaccines for the W.H.O. and Unicef, and is investing in mRNA production. The Indian government barred exports of its Covid vaccines for months this year.¶ Based in Hyderabad, Biological E is a large and experienced company that has its own protein subunit Covid vaccine in Phase 3 trials. The Indian company has a contract to bottle the Johnson and Johnson Covid vaccine. It says it could make 100 million mRNA doses a month. It has W.H.O. prequalification for seven products.¶ Based in Rio de Janeiro, Bio-Manguinhos already produces more than 120 million doses of vaccine each year and has W.H.O.-prequalified products. As a public institution, it can’t access funding from bodies such as the U.S. International Development Finance Corporation, but it has solid support from Brazil’s government.¶ Instituto Butantan, a renowned scientific research institute in São Paulo, produces two-thirds of Brazil’s vaccines and has strong government support. Butantan is already producing China’s Sinovac vaccine, and is testing its own Covid vaccine.¶ Gennova Biopharmaceuticals in Pune is testing its own Phase 2/3 mRNA Covid vaccine. The CEO worked on vaccines at the U.S. National Institutes of Health. The company developed new mRNA technology with HDT Bio of Seattle. Gennova has limited manufacturing capacity of its own but its parent is a large generics maker, and it has strong Indian government support.¶ Based in Bangkok, BioNet-Asia is a growing private vaccine maker currently testing a Phase 2 Covid vaccine candidate invented at Chulalongkorn University. It uses mRNA encapsulation technology developed with the University of Pennsylvania.¶ Durban-based Aspen Pharmacare bottles the Johnson and Johnson vaccine and says it could produce a billion mRNA vaccine doses within a year with a $100 million investment and a partner for the drug substance. Aspen has strong facilities and a footprint across Africa; constraints include the country’s smaller pool of experienced biotech personnel and infrastructure challenges in South Africa.¶ Cape Town’s Biovac Institute has a contract to bottle the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine. Biovac is a partner in the W.H.O. mRNA tech transfer hub, and has solid government backing. Cape Town has a strong clinical trials infrastructure.¶ Based in Argentina, Sinergium Biotech was selected by the W.H.O. as an mRNA development center. The company bottles vaccines, but does not produce drug substance. The country is politically and economically fragile.¶ BioFarma is a large state-owned company in Indonesia which currently bottles China’s Sinovac vaccine. It has W.H.O prequalification. Its halal production process makes its vaccines suitable for use across the Muslim world.¶ The candidates include companies that are already making other Covid vaccines, such as the Serum Institute of India, the world’s largest vaccine maker; public institutions that are already testing their own mRNA vaccines for the coronavirus; and firms tapped by the World Health Organization to be regional centers for mRNA development.¶ Two companies in Asia are already making their own mRNA vaccines against Covid.¶ Gennova Biopharmaceuticals in Pune, India, has one in Phase 2 and 3 clinical trials. Gennova says that unlike the mRNA shots currently in use, its vaccine can be stored at the temperature of a standard medical refrigerator.¶ Gennova’s manufacturing site in Pune, India.Karan Deep Singh/The New York Times¶ Gennova is headed by Sanjay Singh, a biochemist who worked on malaria vaccines at the National Institutes of Health in the United States for six years before returning to India. The company is negotiating with contract manufacturers to make its vaccine while also working to expand its existing production capacity from 100 million to one billion doses a year, and it could be in production with its Covid shot within months, Dr. Singh said.¶ BioNet-Asia, a Thai drug maker, is producing test batches of a Covid mRNA vaccine developed at Chula Vaccine Research Center in Bangkok that is in Phase 2 trials.¶ If results continue to be positive, the vaccine could go to Thailand’s drug regulator by March, and BioNet would be ready for commercial production on approval, said Kiat Ruxrungtham, who heads the research team making the ChulaCov19 vaccine.¶ BioNet employees inspecting and testing a pre-filled syringe packing machine at a factory in Ayutthaya, Thailand.Adam Dean for The New York Times¶ “Having this capability and capacity of this technology platform within the country — the goal is when you have a new variant spreading or you have the next pandemic, you can start things very quickly instead of waiting to buy vaccines like we have been doing so far,” Dr. Ruxrungtham said.¶ Other drug companies would like to license one of the existing mRNA vaccines — pay a fee to receive the formulation and instructions, then share a royalty on each dose they sell — and start making it as quickly as possible. Stephen Saad, chief executive of Aspen Pharmacare in Durban, South Africa, said that with an investment he estimated at $100 million, his firm could be producing a billion doses of mRNA vaccine within a year — more than enough to supply all of Africa, across which Aspen already has a distribution network.¶ Bio-Manguinhos, the immunobiology arm of a venerated Brazilian public health research organization, will soon start clinical trials of an RNA-based Covid vaccine, said Sotiris Missailidis, deputy director of technology development for the research center. III. Framing The Aff challenges dehumanizing cultural frames that allow us to ignore human suffering. Recognition of common vulnerability is key to a politics that rejects violence, oppression, and indifference. Butler ’04 - Judith Butler Prof. of Rhetoric and Comparative Literature, University of California at Berkeley, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence. New York: Verso (2006; First Published 2004). pp. 30-35 AT Is there something to be gained from grieving, from tarrying with grief, from remaining exposed to its unbearability and not endeavoring to seek a resolution for grief through violence? Is there something to be gained in the political domain by maintaining grief as part of the framework within which we think our international ties? If we stay with the sense of loss, are we left feeling only passive and powerless, as some might fear? Or are we, rather, returned to a sense of human vulnerability, to our collective responsibility for the physical lives of one another? Could the experience of a dislocation of First World safety not condition the insight into the radically inequitable ways that corporeal vulnerability is distributed globally? To foreclose that vulnerability, to banish it, to make ourselves secure at the expense of every other human consideration is to eradicate one of the most important resources from which we must take our bearings and find our way.¶ To grieve, and to make grief itself into a resource for politics, is not to be resigned to inaction, but it may be understood as the slow process by which we develop a point of identification with suffering itself. The disorientation of grief- “Who have I become?” or, indeed, “What is left of me?” “What is it in the Other that I have lost?” – posits the “I” in the mode of unknowingness.¶ But this can be a point of departure for a new understanding if the narcissistic preoccupation of melancholia can be moved into a consideration of the vulnerability of others. Then we might critically evaluate and oppose the conditions under which certain human lives are more vulnerable than others, and thus certain human lives are more grievable than others. From where might a principle emerge by which we vow to protect others from the kinds of violence we have suffered, if not from an apprehension of a common human vulnerability? I do not mean to deny that vulnerability is differentiated, that it is allocated differentially across the globe. I do not even mean to presume upon a common notion of the human, although to speak in its “name” is already (or perhaps only) to fathom its possibility.¶ I am referring to violence, vulnerability, and mourning, but there is a more general conception of the human with which I am trying to work here, one in which we are, from the start, given over to the other, one in which we are, from the start, even prior to individuation itself and, by virtue of bodily requirements, given over to some set of primary others: this conception means that we are vulnerable to those we are too young to know and to judge and, hence, vulnerable to violence; but also vulnerable to another range of touch, a range that includes the eradication of our being at the one end, and the physical support for our lives at the other.¶ Although I am insisting on referring to a common human vulnerability, one that emerges with life itself, I also insist that we cannot recover the source of this vulnerability: it precedes the formation of the “I.” This is a condition, a condition of being laid bare from the start and with which we cannot argue. I mean, that we can argue with it, but we are perhaps foolish, if not dangerous, when we do. I do not mean to suggest that the necessary support for a newborn is always there. Clearly, it is not, and for some this primary scene is a scene of abandonment or violence or starvation, that theirs are bodies given over to nothing, or to brutality, or to no sustenance.¶ We cannot understand vulnerability as a deprivation, however, unless we understand the need that is thwarted. Such infants still must be apprehended as given over, as given over to no one or to some insufficient support, or to an abandonment. It would be difficult, it not impossible, to understand how humans suffer from oppression without seeing how this primary condition is exploited and exploitable, thwarted and denied. The condition of primary vulnerability, of being given over to the touch of the other, even if there is no other there, and no support for our lives, signifies a primary helplessness and need, one to which any society must attend. Lives are supported and maintained differently, and there are radically different ways in which human physical vulnerability is distributed across the globe. Certain lives will be highly protected, and the abrogation of their claims to sanctity will be sufficient to mobilize the forces of war. Other lives will not find such fast and furious support and will not even qualify as “grievable.”¶ A hierarchy of grief could no doubt be enumerated. We have seen it already, in the genre of the obituary, where lives are quickly tidied up and summarized, humanized, usually married, or on the way to be, heterosexual, happy, monogamous. But this is just a sign of another differential relation to life, since we seldom, if ever, hear the names of the thousands of Palestinians who have died by the Israeli military with United States support, or any number of Afghan people, children and adults. Do they have names, faces, personal histories, family, favorite hobbies, slogans by which they life? What defense against the apprehension of loss is at work in the blithe way in which we accept deaths caused by military means with a shrug or with self-righteousness or with clear vindictiveness? To what extent have Arab peoples, predominantly practitioners of Islam, fallen outside the “human” as it has been naturalized in its “Western” mold by the contemporary workings of humanism? What are the cultural contours of the human at work here? How do our cultural frames for thinking the human set limits on the kinds of losses we can avow as loss? After all, if someone is lost, and that person is not someone, then what and where is the loss, and how does mourning take place?¶ This last is surely a question that lesbian, gay, and hi-studies have asked in relation to violence against sexual minorities; that transgendered people have asked as they are singled out for harassment and sometimes murder; that intersexed people have asked, whose formative years are so often marked by unwanted violence against their bodies in the name of a normative notion of the human, a normative notion of what the body of a human must be. This question is no doubt, as well, the basis of a profound affinity between movements centering on gender and sexuality and efforts to counter the normative human morphologies and capacities that condemn or efface those who are physically challenged. It must also be part of the affinity with anti-racist struggles, given the racial differential that undergirds the culturally viable notions of the human, ones that we see acted out in dramatic and terrifying ways in the global arena at the present time.¶ I am referring not only to humans not regarded as humans, and thus to a restrictive conception of the human that is based upon their exclusion. It is not a matter of a simple entry of the excluded into an established ontology, but an insurrection at the level of ontology, a critical opening up of the questions, What is real? Whose lives are real? How might reality be remade? Those who are unreal have, in a sense, already suffered the violence of derealization. What, then, is the relation between violence and those lives considered as "unreal"? Does violence effect that unreality? Does violence take place on the condition of that unreality?¶ If violence is done against those who are unreal, then, from the perspective of violence, it fails to injure or negate those lives since those lives are already negated. But they have a strange way of remaining animated and so must be negated again (and again). They cannot be mourned because they are always already lost or, rather, never "were," and they must be killed, since they seem to live on, stubbornly, in this state of deadness. Violence renews itself in the face of the apparent inexhaustibility of its object. The derealization of the "Other" means that it is neither alive nor dead, but interminably spectral. The infinite paranoia that imagines the war against terrorism as a war without end will be one that justifies itself endlessly in relation to the spectral infinity of its enemy, regardless of whether or not there are established grounds to suspect the continuing operation of terror cells with violent aims.¶ How do we understand this derealization? It is one thing to argue that first, on the level of discourse, certain lives are not considered lives at all, they cannot be humanized, that they fit no dominant frame for the human, and that their dehumanization occurs first, at this level, and that this level then gives rise to a physical violence that in some sense delivers the message of dehumanization that is already at work in the culture. It is another thing to say that discourse itself effects violence through omission. If 2oo,ooo Iraqi children were killed during the Gulf War and its aftermath/ do we have an image, a frame for any of those lives, singly or collectively? Is there a story we might find about those deaths in the media? Are there names attached to those children?¶ There are no obituaries for the war casualties that the United States inflicts, and there cannot be. If there were to be an obituary, there would have had to have been a life, a life worth noting, a life worth valuing and preserving, a life that qualifies for recognition. Although we might argue that it would be impractical to write obituaries for all those people, or for all people, I think we have to ask, again and again, how the obituary functions as the instrument by which grievability is publicly distributed. It is the means by which a life becomes, or fails to become, a publicly grievable life, an icon for national self-recognition, the means by which a life becomes noteworthy. As a result, we have to consider the obituary as an act of nation-building. The matter is not a simple one, for, if a life is not grievable, it is not quite a life; it does not qualify as a life and is not worth a note. It is already the unburied, if not the unburiable.¶ It is not simply, then, that there is a "discourse" of dehumanization that produces these effects, but rather that there is a limit to discourse that establishes the limits of human intelligibility. It is not just that a death is poorly marked, but that it is unmarkable. Such a death vanishes, not into explicit discourse, but in the ellipses by which public discourse proceeds. The queer lives that vanished on September I I were not publicly welcomed into the idea of national identity built in the obituary pages, and their closest relations were only belatedly and selectively (the marital norm holding sway once again) made eligible for benefits. But this should come as no surprise, when we think about how few deaths from AIDS were publicly grievable losses, and how, for instance, the extensive deaths now taking place in Africa are also, in the media, for the most part unmarkable and ungrievable.
The Aff challenges the hegemonic ideology of the status quo by rejecting sacrificial rationalizations. That logic is the basis for colonialism, enslavement, genocide, war, and global poverty. Santos 3 2003, Boaventura de Souza Santos is a Professor of Sociology at the University of Coimbra, “Collective Suicide?”, Bad Subjects, Issue # 63 , http://www.ces.fe.uc.pt/opiniao/bss/072en.php According to Franz Hinkelammert, the West has repeatedly been under the illusion that it should try to save humanity by destroying part of it. This is a salvific and sacrificial destruction, committed in the name of the need to radically materialize all the possibilities opened up by a given social and political reality over which it is supposed to have total power. This is how it was in colonialism, with the genocide of indigenous peoples, and the African slaves. This is how it was in the period of imperialist struggles, which caused millions of deaths in two world wars and many other colonial wars. This is how it was in Stalinism, with the Gulag and in Nazism, with the holocaust. And now today, this is how it is in neoliberalism, with the collective sacrifice of the periphery and even the semiperiphery of the world system. With the war against Iraq, it is fitting to ask whether what is in progress is a new genocidal and sacrificial illusion, and what its scope might be. It is above all appropriate to ask if the new illusion will not herald the radicalization and the ultimate perversion of the western illusion: destroying all of humanity in the illusion of saving it. Sacrificial genocide arises from a totalitarian illusion that is manifested in the belief that there are no alternatives to the present-day reality and that the problems and difficulties confronting it arise from failing to take its logic of development to its ultimate consequences. If there is unemployment, hunger and death in the Third World, this is not the result of market failures; instead, it is the outcome of the market laws not having been fully applied. If there is terrorism, this is not due to the violence of the conditions that generate it; it is due, rather, to the fact that total violence has not been employed to physically eradicate all terrorists and potential terrorists. This political logic is based on the supposition of total power and knowledge, and on the radical rejection of alternatives; it is ultra-conservative in that it aims to infinitely reproduce the status quo. Inherent to it is the notion of the end of history. During the last hundred years, the West has experienced three versions of this logic, and, therefore, seen three versions of the end of history: Stalinism, with its logic of insuperable efficiency of the plan; Nazism, with its logic of racial superiority; and neoliberalism, with its logic of insuperable efficiency of the market. The first two periods involved the destruction of democracy. The last one trivializes democracy, disarming it in the face of social actors sufficiently powerful to be able to privatize the State and international institutions in their favour. I have described this situation as a combination of political democracy and social fascism. One current manifestation of this combination resides in the fact that intensely strong public opinion, worldwide, against the war is found to be incapable of halting the war machine set in motion by supposedly democratic rulers. At all these moments, a death drive, a catastrophic heroism, predominates, the idea of a looming collective suicide, only preventable by the massive destruction of the other. Paradoxically, the broader the definition of the other and the efficacy of its destruction, the more likely collective suicide becomes. In its sacrificial genocide version, neoliberalism is a mixture of market radicalization, neoconservatism and Christian fundamentalism. Its death drive takes a number of forms, from the idea of "discardable populations", referring to citizens of the Third World not capable of being exploited as workers and consumers, to the concept of "collateral damage" , to refer to the deaths, as a result of war, of thousands of innocent civilians. The last, catastrophic heroism, is quite clear on two facts: according to reliable calculations by the Non-Governmental Organization MEDACT, in London, between 48 and 260 thousand civilians will die during the war and in the three months after (this is without there being civil war or a nuclear attack); the war will cost 100 billion dollars, enough to pay the health costs of the world's poorest countries for four years. Is it possible to fight this death drive? We must bear in mind that, historically, sacrificial destruction has always been linked to the economic pillage of natural resources and the labor force, to the imperial design of radically changing the terms of economic, social, political and cultural exchanges in the face of falling efficiency rates postulated by the maximalist logic of the totalitarian illusion in operation. It is as though hegemonic powers, both when they are on the rise and when they are in decline, repeatedly go through times of primitive accumulation, legitimizing the most shameful violence in the name of futures where, by definition, there is no room for what must be destroyed. In today's version, the period of primitive accumulation consists of combining neoliberal economic globalization with the globalization of war. The machine of democracy and liberty turns into a machine of horror and destruction. Underview Prioritize probability. Kessler 08 (Oliver; April 2008; PhD in IR, professor of sociology at the University of Bielefeld, and professor of history and theory of IR at the Faculty of Arts; Alternatives, Vol. 33, “From Insecurity to Uncertainty: Risk and the Paradox of Security Politics” p. 211-232) The problem of the second method is that it is very difficult to "calculate" politically unacceptable losses. If the risk of terrorism is defined in traditional terms by probability and potential loss, then the focus on dramatic terror attacks leads to the marginalization of probabilities. The reason is that even the highest degree of improbability becomes irrelevant as the measure of loss goes to infinity.^o The mathematical calculation of the risk of terrorism thus tends to overestimate and to dramatize the danger. This has consequences beyond the actual risk assessment for the formulation and execution of "risk policies": If one factor of the risk calculation approaches infinity (e.g., if a case of nuclear terrorism is envisaged), then there is no balanced measure for antiterrorist efforts, and risk management as a rational endeavor breaks down. Under the historical condition of bipolarity, the "ultimate" threat with nuclear weapons could be balanced by a similar counterthreat, and new equilibria could be achieved, albeit on higher levels of nuclear overkill. Under the new condition of uncertainty, no such rational balancing is possible since knowledge about actors, their motives and capabilities, is largely absent. The second form of security policy that emerges when the deterrence model collapses mirrors the "social probability" approach. It represents a logic of catastrophe. In contrast to risk management framed in line with logical probability theory, the logic of catastrophe does not attempt to provide means of absorbing uncertainty. Rather, it takes uncertainty as constitutive for the logic itself; uncertainty is a crucial precondition for catastrophes. In particular, catastrophes happen at once, without a warning, but with major implications for the world polity. In this category, we find the impact of meteorites. Mars attacks, the tsunami in South East Asia, and 9/11. To conceive of terrorism as catastrophe has consequences for the formulation of an adequate security policy. Since catastrophes hap-pen irrespectively of human activity or inactivity, no political action could possibly prevent them. Of course, there are precautions that can be taken, but the framing of terrorist attack as a catastrophe points to spatial and temporal characteristics that are beyond "rationality." Thus, political decision makers are exempted from the responsibility to provide security—as long as they at least try to preempt an attack. Interestingly enough, 9/11 was framed as catastrophe in various commissions dealing with the question of who was responsible and whether it could have been prevented. This makes clear that under the condition of uncertainty, there are no objective criteria that could serve as an anchor for measuring dangers and assessing the quality of political responses. For ex- ample, as much as one might object to certain measures by the US administration, it is almost impossible to "measure" the success of countermeasures. Of course, there might be a subjective assessment of specific shortcomings or failures, but there is no "common" currency to evaluate them. As a consequence, the framework of the security dilemma fails to capture the basic uncertainties. Pushing the door open for the security paradox, the main problem of security analysis then becomes the question how to integrate dangers in risk assessments and security policies about which simply nothing is known. In the mid 1990s, a Rand study entitled "New Challenges for Defense Planning" addressed this issue arguing that "most striking is the fact that we do not even know who or what will constitute the most serious future threat, "^i In order to cope with this challenge it would be essential, another Rand researcher wrote, to break free from the "tyranny" of plausible scenario planning. The decisive step would be to create "discontinuous scenarios ... in which there is no plausible audit trail or storyline from current events"52 These nonstandard scenarios were later called "wild cards" and became important in the current US strategic discourse. They justified the transformation from a threat-based toward a capability- based defense planning strategy.53 The problem with this kind of risk assessment is, however, that even the most absurd scenarios can gain plausibility. By constructing a chain of potentialities, improbable events are linked and brought into the realm of the possible, if not even the probable. "Although the likelihood of the scenario dwindles with each step, the residual impression is one of plausibility. "54 This so-called Othello effect has been effective in the dawn of the recent war in Iraq. The connection between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda that the US government tried to prove was disputed from the very beginning. False evidence was again and again presented and refuted, but this did not prevent the administration from presenting as the main rationale for war the improbable yet possible connection between Iraq and the terrorist network and the improbable yet possible proliferation of an improbable yet possible nuclear weapon into the hands of Bin Laden. As Donald Rumsfeld famously said: "Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence." This sentence indicates that under the condition of genuine uncertainty, different evidence criteria prevail than in situations where security problems can be assessed with relative certainty. Reject extinction-first framing:
Apocalyptic rhetoric is an independent voter – justifies violence, trades off with addressing real risks, and causes nihilism. Pinker ’18 - Steven Pinker Johnston Professor of Psychology, Harvard U., Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress. New York: Viking. (2018). pp. 291-292 At first glance one might think that the more thought we give to existential risks, the better. The stakes, quite literally, could not be higher. What harm could there be in getting people to think about these terrible risks? The worst that could happen is that we would take some precautions that turn out in retrospect to have been unnecessary.¶ But apocalyptic thinking has serious downsides. One is that false alarms to catastrophic risks can themselves be catastrophic. The nuclear arms race of the 1960s, for example, was set off by fears of a mythical “missile gap” with the Soviet Union.1 The 2003 invasion of Iraq was justified by the uncertain but catastrophic possibility that Saddam Hussein was developing nuclear weapons and planning to use them against the United States. (As George W. Bush put it, “We cannot wait for the final proof—the smoking gun—that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud.”) And as we shall see, one of the reasons the great powers refuse to take the common-sense pledge that they won’t be the first to use nuclear weapons is that they want to reserve the right to use them against other supposed existential threats such as bioterror and cyberattacks.2 Sowing fear about hypothetical disasters, far from safeguarding the future of humanity, can endanger it.¶ A second hazard of enumerating doomsday scenarios is that humanity has a finite budget of resources, brainpower, and anxiety. You can’t worry about everything. Some of the threats facing us, like climate change and nuclear war, are unmistakable, and will require immense effort and ingenuity to mitigate. Folding them into a list of exotic scenarios with minuscule or unknown probabilities can only dilute the sense of urgency. Recall that people are poor at assessing probabilities, especially small ones, and instead play out scenarios in their mind’s eye. If two scenarios are equally imaginable, they may be considered equally probable, and people will worry about the genuine hazard no more than about the science-fiction plotline. And the more ways people can imagine bad things happening, the higher their estimate that something bad will happen.¶ And that leads to the greatest danger of all: that people will think, as a recent New York Times article put it, “These grim facts should lead any reasonable person to conclude that humanity is screwed.”3 If humanity is screwed, why sacrifice anything to reduce potential risks? Why forgo the convenience of fossil fuels, or exhort governments to rethink their nuclear weapons policies? Eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we die! A 2013 survey in four English-speaking countries showed that among the respondents who believe that our way of life will probably end in a century, a majority endorsed the statement “The world’s future looks grim so we have to focus on looking after ourselves and those we love.”4¶ Few writers on technological risk give much thought to the cumulative psychological effects of the drumbeat of doom. As Elin Kelsey, an environmental communicator, points out, “We have media ratings to protect children from sex or violence in movies, but we think nothing of inviting a scientist into a second grade classroom and telling the kids the planet is ruined. A quarter of (Australian) children are so troubled about the state of the world that they honestly believe it will come to an end before they get older.”5 According to recent polls, so do 15 percent of people worldwide, and between a quarter and a third of Americans.6 In The Progress Paradox, the journalist Gregg Easterbrook suggests that a major reason that Americans are not happier, despite their rising objective fortunes, is “collapse anxiety”: the fear that civilization may implode and there’s nothing anyone can do about it.
Their disads will surely be ridiculous. (A) Ethics – WTO countries are complicit in hoarding lifesaving medicines from the world’s most vulnerable people. Apply a VERY high standard of proof to any rationalization of that policy.
(B) Compound Probability - Multiplied probabilities of long link chains have negligible net probabilities. This is the slippery slope fallacy.
(C) Causal Direction - They will say the fractional probability of a huge impact still has a large expected value, but it’s impossible to determine the direction of low-probability links. Does the butterfly flapping its wings cause the hurricane or prevent it? Disregard tiny-probability links because they don’t guide decision-making.
(D) Complexity – the DA presents a simplistic and deterministic narrative that fails to account for the myriad confounding factors that can disrupt or reverse the link chain of the DA. The most important of these is the probability that people will recognize the dangerous path they’re on and change course, e.g. leaders backing down during the Cuban Missile Crisis.
(E) Decision Gridlock – Every course of action or inaction has a negligible possibility of causing extinction. This makes it impossible to prioritize averting existential risk over all else because such risk is unavoidable. We have no choice but to prioritize REALISTIC probabilities.
Scholarly discourse and engagement with politics is key to effective structural reform - critique is insufficient. Purdy ’20 - Jedediah S. Britton-Purdy et al, 20 - ("Building a Law-and-Political-Economy Framework: Beyond the Twentieth-Century Synthesis by Jedediah S. Britton-Purdy, David Singh Grewal, Amy Kapczynski, K. Sabeel Rahman :: SSRN," 3-2-2020, https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3547312)//ey/
To embrace the possibility of democratic renewal requires rejecting the terms of the Twentieth-Century Synthesis. We believe that the legal realists—and thinkers in a much longer history of political thought—were right in believing that "the economy" is neither self-defining nor self-justifying. The emphasis in these traditions has been the right one: on power, distribution, and the need for legitimacy as the central themes in the organization of economic life. Moreover, precisely because economic ordering is a political and legal artifact, the idea of an "autonomous" economic domain has always been obscurantist and ideological, even when accepted in good faith.' Law does not and never could simply defer to such a realm. Rather, law is perennially involved in creating and enforcing the terms of economic ordering, most particularly through the creation and maintenance of markets. One of its most important roles, indeed, is determining who is subject to market ordering and on what terms, and who is exempted in favor of other kinds of protection or provision.' Thus the program of law, politics, and institution building often called "neoliberalism" is, and can only be, a specific theory of how to use state power, to what ends, and for whose benefit.' The ideological work of the Twentieth-Century Synthesis has been to naturalize and embed in legal institutions from the Supreme Court to the Antitrust Office and World Trade Organization a specific disposition of power. This power represents a deployment of market ordering that produces intense and cross-cutting forms of inequality and democratic erosion. However, Twentieth-Century Synthesis theorists tend not to see this, precisely because the Synthesis makes it so hard to see (or at least so easy to overlook). If it is to succeed, law and political economy will also require something beyond mere critique. It will require a positive agenda. Many new and energized voices, from the legal academy to political candidates to movement activists, are already building in this direction,' calling for and giving shape to programs for more genuine democracy that also takes seriously questions of economic power and racial subordination;171 more equal distribution of resources and life chances;172 more public and shared resources and infrastructues;173 the displacement of concentrated corporate power and rooting of new forms of worker power;174 the end of mass incarceration and broader contestation of the long history of the criminalization and control of poor people and people of color in building capitalism;175 the recognition of finance and money as public infrastructures;176 the challenges posed by emerging forms of power and control arising from new technologies;177 and the need for a radical new emphasis on ecology.178 These are the materials from which a positive agenda, over time, will be built. Political fights interact generatively with scholarly and policy debates in pointing the way toward a more democratic political economy. The emergence of new grassroots movements, campaigns, and proposals seeking to deepen our democracy is no guarantee of success. But their prevalence and influence make clear the dangers and opportunities of this moment of upheaval—and highlight the stakes of building a new legal imaginary. 179 Neoliberal political economy, with its underlying commitments to efficiency, neutrality, and anti-politics, helped animate, shape, and legitimate a twentieth-century consensus that erased power, encased the market, and reinscribed racialized, economic, and gendered inequities. By contrast, a legal imaginary of democratic political economy, that takes seriously underlying concepts of power, equality, and democracy, can inform a wave of legal thought whose critique and policy imagination
can amplify and accelerate these movements for structural reform and, if we are lucky, help remake our polity in more deeply democratic ways. 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. 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. 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. Zannoti ’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. Reform makes revolution more likely. Rejecting it condescendingly asserts the possibility of radical change is better than the certainty of real improvement. Delgado ’87 - Delgado, Richard teaches civil rights and critical race theory at University of Alabama School of Law. He has written and co-authored numerous articles and books, “The Ethereal Scholar: Does Critical Legal Studies Have What Minorities Want?”, Harvard Civil Rights - Civil Liberties Law Review, 1987 Critical scholars reject the idea of piecemeal reform. Incremental change, they argue, merely postpones the wholesale reformation that must occur to create a decent society.38 Even worse, an unfair social system survives by using piecemeal reform to disguise and legitimize oppression. 39 Those who control the system weaken resistance by pointing to the occasional concession to, or periodic court victory of, a black plaintiff or worker as evidence that the system is fair and just.40 In fact, Crits believe that teaching the common law or using the case method in law school is a disguised means of preaching incrementalism and thereby maintaining the current power structure.41 To avoid this, CLS scholars urge law professors to abandon the case method, give up the effort to find rationality and order in the case law, and teach in an unabashedly political fashion. 42 The CLS critique of piecemeal reform is familiar, imperialistic and wrong. Minorities know from bitter experience that occasional court victories do not mean the Promised Land is at hand.43 The critique is imperialistic in that it tells minorities and other oppressed peoples how they should interpret events affecting them.44 A court order directing a housing authority to disburse funds for heating in subsidized housing may postpone the revolution, or it may not. In the meantime, the order keeps a number of poor families warm. This may mean more to them than it does to a comfortable academic working in a warm office. It smacks of paternalism to assert that the possibility of revolution later outweighs the certainty of heat now, unless there is evidence for that possibility. The Crits do not offer such evidence. Indeed, some incremental changes may bring revolutionary changes closer, not push them further away. Not all small reforms induce complacency; some may whet the appetite for further combat. The welfare family may hold a tenants' union meeting in their heated living room. CLS scholars' critique of piecemeal reform often misses these possibilities, and neglects the question of whether total change, when it comes, will be what we want.