1AC - China 1NC - Econ DA - Innovation DA - ICJ CP - Case 1AR - All 2NR - Innovation - Case 2AR - Same
Apple Valley
4
Opponent: Lincoln East BH | Judge: Chetan Hertzig
1AC - Lay 1NC - Reconcilitation DA - Inflation DA - Case 1AR - All 2NR - Inflation - Case 2AR - Same
Apple Valley
6
Opponent: Lexington BF | Judge: Sam Anderson
1AC - Heg 1NC - Reconciliation DA - Case 1AR - All 2NR - ALl 2AR - All
Apple Valley
Doubles
Opponent: Park City NL | Judge: Jenn Melin, Grant Brown, Joseph Georges
1AC - Cap 1NC - Police PIC - Case 1AR - All 2NR - PIC - Case 2AR - Same
Churchill
1
Opponent: Strake JW | Judge: Breigh Plat
1AC - Space Debris 1NC - T unjust - Settlerism K - Case 1AR - All 2NR - T 2AR - Same
Churchill
4
Opponent: Strake DA | Judge: River Cook
1AC - Kant 1NC - Set Col - Case 1AR - All 2NR - Set Col - Case 2AR - Same
Contact Info
1
Opponent: Contact | Judge: Info
email anooprac03@gmailcom contact you can use my email or contact me on messenger (Anoop Rachakonda Send a friend request first so I can see your message)
Glenbrooks
1
Opponent: Peninsula KD | Judge: Colton Gilbert
1AC - Healthcare Workers 1NC - T Unconditional Set Col Case 1AR - All 2NR - Set Col Case 2AR - Same
Glenbrooks
4
Opponent: Isidore Newman PJ | Judge: Kassie Coln
1AC - Antiblackness 1NC - Police Union PIC - Inflation DA - Reconciliation DA - Case 1AR - All 2NR - Inflation DA - Case 2AR - Same
Glenbrooks
5
Opponent: Marlborough WR | Judge: Lauren Woodall
1AC - Incarcerated Workers 1NC - T worker - T unconditional - Kant NC - Reconciliation DA - Case 1AR - All 2NR - NC - Case 2AR - Same
Grapevine
1
Opponent: McNeil YM | Judge: JP Stuckert
1AC - Rawls 1NC - Brackets Theory Util NC FDI DA Case 1AR - All 2NR - Util NC DA Case 2AR - Same
Grapevine
3
Opponent: Coppell ER | Judge: Nicky Smith
1AC - Cap 1NC - DA - Infrastructure DA - Counterfeit Case 1AR - All 2NR - DA - Infrastructure Case 2AR - Same
St Marks
2
Opponent: Marlborough MJ | Judge: Derek Hilligoss
1AC - MSC 1NC - Ev Ethics Theory - T Vaccine - Infrastructure DA - Case 1AR - All 2NR - ev ethics - DA - Case 2AR - Same
1AC - CRISPR 1NC - T Medicine vs CRIPSR Kant NC Dedev 1AR - All 2NR - Dedev 2AR - Same
St Marks
5
Opponent: Southlake Carroll AS | Judge: Vishan Chaudary
1AC - Evergreening 1NC - Patent Pools CP FDI Infrastructure Case 1AR - All 2NR - Infrastructure Case 2AR - Same
UT
2
Opponent: Stratford LV | Judge: Joseph Woddorf
1AC - US 1NC - Reconciliation DA - Police PIC - Case 1AR - All 2NR - PIC - Case 2AR - Same
UT
4
Opponent: Dulles NJ | Judge: Aaron Barcio
1AC - Kant 1NC - T unconditional - offense external to framework bad - Util NC - Reconciliation - Case 1AR - all - Niemi K 2NR - offense external to framework bad 2AR - Niemi K - the shell
UT
6
Opponent: Strake VC | Judge: Brett Cryan
1AC - Petit 1NC - T unconditional - Util NC - Reconciliation DA - Police PIC - Case 1AR - All - Bidirectinal Paradigm Issues Bad 2NR - T - Bidirectional Paradigm Issues Bad 2AR - Case - Bidirectional Paradigm Issues Bad
UT
6
Opponent: Strake VC | Judge: Brett Cryan
1AC - Petit 1NC - T unconditional - Util NC - Reconciliation DA - Police PIC - Case 1AR - All - Bidirectinal Paradigm Issues Bad 2NR - T - Bidirectional Paradigm Issues Bad 2AR - Case - Bidirectional Paradigm Issues Bad
1AC - Asian Melancholy 1NC - Fwk - Case 1AR - AFC - denying 1ar theory and no rvi bad - Case - Fwk 2NR - The shells - Perf Con - Fwk - Case 2AR - Case - Fwk
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Cites
Entry
Date
0 - Contact Info
Tournament: Contact Info | Round: 1 | Opponent: Contact | Judge: Info email: anooprac.03@gmail.com contact: you can use my email or contact me on messenger (Anoop Rachakonda. Send a friend request first so I can see your message).
9/10/21
1 - K - Set Col v Kant
Tournament: Churchill | Round: 4 | Opponent: Strake DA | Judge: River Cook Indigeneity connotates a state of non-ontology allowing for the construction of the human that legitimizes its self into a history of elimination, jettisoned from or assimilated into the national body to cohere settler temporality Belcourt 16. Billy-Ray Belcourt is from the Driftpile Cree Nation. He is a 2016 Rhodes Scholar and is reading for an M.St. in Women’s Studies at the University of Oxford. He was named by CBC Books as one of six Indigenous writers to watch, and his poetry has been published or is forthcoming in Assaracus: A Journal of Gay Poetry, Red Rising Magazine, SAD Mag, mâmawi-âcimowak, PRISM International, and The Malahat Review. ("A POLTERGEIST MANIFESTO," 2016, Feral Feminism) vikas recut aaditg Admittedly, the feral is a precarious space from which to theorize, sullied with an injurability bound up in the work of liberal humanism as such, an enterprise that weaponizes a set of moral barometers to distribute ferality unevenly to differently citizened and raced bodies—ones that are too close for comfort and must be pushed outside arm’s reach. Perhaps ferality traverses a semantic line of flight commensurate¬ with that of savagery, barbarism, and lawlessness, concreting into one history of elimination: that is, a history of eliminating recalcitrant indigeneities incompatible within a supposedly hygienic social. The word savage comes from the Latin salvaticus, an alteration of silvaticus, meaning “wild,” literally “of the woods.” Of persons, it means “reckless, ungovernable” (“Savage”). In the space-time of settler states, savagery temporarily stands in for those subjectivities tethered to a supposedly waning form of indigeneity, one that came from the woods and, because of this, had to be jettisoned from or assimilated into the national body. Here is Audra Simpson on the history of Indian “lawlessness”: Its genealogy extends back to the earliest moments of recorded encounter, when Indians appeared to have no law, to be without order, and thus, to be in the colonizer’s most generous articulation of differentiation, in need of the trappings of civilization. “Law” may be one instrument of civilization, as a regulating technique of power that develops through the work upon a political body and a territory. (2014, 144) According to Simpson, the recognition of Indigenous peoples as lawless rendered them governable, motivating the settler state (here, Canada) to curate and thus contain atrophied indigeneities—and, consequently, their sovereignties, lands, and politics—within the borders of federal law (2014, 144-45). Similarly, in The Transit of Empire Jodi Byrd traces the epistemological gimmicks through which the concept of “Indianness” came to align with “the savage other” (2011, 27). For her, this alignment provided the “rationale for imperial domination” and continues to stalk philosophy’s patterns of thinking (ibid.). Simpson, writing about the Mohawks of Kahnawake, argues that “a fear of lawlessness” continues to haunt the colonial imaginary, thereby diminishing “Indigenous rights to trade and to act as sovereigns in their own territories” (2014, 145). We might take the following lyrics from the popular Disney film Pocahontas as an example of the ways indigeneity circulates as a feral signifier in colonial economies of meaning-making: Ratcliffe What can you expect From filthy little heathens? Their whole disgusting race is like a curse Their skin’s a hellish red They’re only good when dead They’re vermin, as I said And worse English settlers They’re savages! Savages! Barely even human. (Gabriel and Goldberg 1995) Savagery connotes a state of non-ontology: Indigenous peoples are forced to cling to a barely extant humanity and coterminously collapse into a putatively wretched form of animality. Savagery is lethal, and its Indian becomes the prehistoric alibi through which the human is constituted as such. Indigenous peoples have therefore labored to explain away this savagery, reifying whitened rubrics for proper citizenship and crafting a genre of life tangible within the scenes of living through that are constitutive of settler colonialism as such. These scenes, however, are dead set on destroying the remnants of that savagery, converting their casualties into morally compatible subjects deserving of rights and life in a multicultural state that stokes the liberal fantasy of life after racial trauma at the expense of decolonial flourishing itself. This paper is therefore interested in the subjectivities and forms of sociality that savagery destroys when applied from without, and the political work of appropriating that savagery in the name of decolonization. Ours is a form of indigeneity that hints at a fundamental pollutability that both confirms and threatens forms of ontology tethered to a taxonomized humanity built in that foundational episode of subjection of which Simpson speaks. I am suggesting that savagery always-already references an otherworld of sorts: there are forms of life abandoned outside modernity’s episteme whose expressivities surge with affects anomalous within the topography of settler colonialism. This paper is not a historicist or nostalgic attachment to a pre-savage indigeneity resurrected from a past somehow unscathed by the violence that left us in the thick of things in the first place. Instead, I emphasize the potentiality of ferality as a politics in a world bent on our destruction—a world that eliminates indigeneities too radical to collapse into a collective sensorium, training us to a live in an ordinary that the settler state needs to persist as such, one that only some will survive. This world incentivizes our collusion with a multicultural state instantiated through a myth of belonging that actively disavows difference in the name of that very difference. We are repeatedly hurried into a kind of waning sociality, the content and form of which appear both too familiar and not familiar enough. In short, we are habitually left scavenging for ways to go on without knowing what it is we want. Let’s consider Jack Halberstam’s thoughts on “the wild”: It is a tricky word to use but it is a concept that we cannot live without if we are to combat the conventional modes of rule that have synced social norms to economic practices and have created a world order where every form of disturbance is quickly folded back into quiet, where every ripple is quickly smoothed over, where every instance of eruption has been tamped down and turned into new evidence of the rightness of the status quo. (2013, 126) Where Halberstam finds disturbance, I find indigeneity-cum-disturbance par excellence. Halberstam’s “wild” evokes a potentiality laboured in the here and now and “an alternative to how we want to think about being” in and outside an authoritarian state (2013, 126-27). Perhaps the wild risks the decolonial, a geography of life-building that dreams up tomorrows whose referents are the fractured indigeneities struggling to survive a historical present built on our suffering. Ferality is a stepping stone to a future grounded in Indigenous peoples’ legal and political orders. This paper does not traffic in teleologies of the anarchic or lawless as they emerge in Western thought; instead, it refuses settler sovereignty and calls for forms of collective Indigenous life that are attuned to queerness’s wretched histories and future-making potentialities. Indigeneity is an ante-ontology of sorts: it is prior to and therefore disruptive of ontology. Indigeneity makes manifest residues or pockets of times, worlds, and subjectivities that warp both common sense and philosophy into falsities that fall short of completely explaining what is going on. Indigenous life is truncated in the biopolitical category of Savage in order to make our attachments to ourselves assimilable inside settler colonialism’s national sensorium. Settler colonialism purges excessive forms of indigeneity that trouble its rubrics for sensing out the human and the nonhuman. In other words, settler colonialism works up modes of being-in-the-world that narrate themselves as the only options we have. What would it mean, then, to persist in the space of savagery, exhausting the present and holding out for futures that are not obsessed with the proper boundary between human and nonhuman life? This paper now turns to the present, asking: what happens when indigeneity collides with queerness inside the reserve, and how might a feral theory make sense of that collision? Deadly Presents “I went through a really hard time… I was beaten; more than once. I was choked” (Klassen 2014). These were the words of Tyler-Alan Jacobs, a two-spirit man from the Squamish Nation, capturing at once the terror of queer life on the reserve and the hardening of time into a thing that slows down bodies and pushes them outside its securitized geographies. Jacobs had grown up with his attackers, attackers who were energized by the pronouncement of queerness—how it insisted on being noticed, how it insisted on being. When the dust settled, “his right eye had dislodged and the side of his faced had caved in” (ibid.). Settler colonialism is fundamentally affective: it takes hold of the body, makes it perspire, and wears it out. It converts flesh into pliable automations and people into grim reapers who must choose which lives are worth keeping in the world. It can turn a person into a murderer in a matter of seconds; it is an epistemic rupturing of our attachments to life, to each other, and to ourselves. It is as if settler colonialism were simultaneously a rescue and military operation, a holy war of sorts tasked with exorcising the spectre of queer indigeneity and its putative infectivity. I rehearse this case because it allows me to risk qualifying the reserve as a geography saturated with heteronormativity’s socialities. This is a strategic interdiction that destroys supposedly degenerative queer affect worlds, untangling some bodies and not others from the future. I don’t have the statistics to substantiate these claims, but there is an archive of heartbreak and loss that is easy to come by if you ask the right people. Indeed, what would such statistics tell us that we don’t already know? What would the biopolitical work of data collection do to a knowledge-making project that thinks outside the big worlds of Statistics and Demography and, instead, inside the smaller, more precarious worlds created in the wake of gossip? I worry about ethnographic projects that seek to account for things and theory in the material in order to map the coordinates of an aberration to anchor it and its voyeurs in the theatres of the academy. The desire to attach to a body is too easily energized by a biological reading of gender that repudiates the very subjects it seeks so desperately to know and to study. What about the body? I have been asked this question, again and again. A feral theory is something of a call to arms: abolish this sort of ethnography and turn to those emergent methodologies that might better make sense of the affects and life-forms that are just now coming into focus and have been destroyed or made invisible in the name of research itself. Queer indigeneity, to borrow Fred Moten’s description of blackness, might “come most clearly into relief, by way of its negation” (2014). Perhaps decolonization needs to be a sort of séance: an attempt to communicate with the dead, a collective rising-up from the reserve’s necropolis, a feral becoming-undead. Boyd and Thrush’s Phantom Past, Indigenous Presence thinks indigeneity and its shaky histories vis-à-vis the language of haunting, where haunting is an endurant facet of “the experience of colonialism” (Bodinger de Uriarte 2012, 303). But, for me, ghostliness is differentially distributed: some more than others will be wrenched into the domain of the dead and forced to will their own ontologies into the now. Perhaps the universalist notion that haunting is a metonym for indigeneity repudiates the very life-forms that it claims to include: those who are differently queered and gendered, and, because of this, haunt waywardly and in ways that cannot be easily predicted (Ahmed 2015). This paper thus takes an imaginative turn and proceeds with something of an incantation to summon the figure of the queer Indigenous poltergeist—the feral monster in the horror story of decolonization. Queer Indigenous poltergeists do not linger inaudibly in the background; we are beside ourselves with anger, we make loud noises and throw objects around because we are demanding retribution for homicide, unloved love, and cold shoulders. We do not reconcile; we escape the reserve, pillage and mangle the settler-colonial episteme. Our arrival is both uneventful and apocalyptic, a point of departure and an entry point for an ontology that corresponds with a future that has yet to come. Sometimes all we have is the promise of the future. For the queer Indigenous poltergeist, resurrection is its own form of decolonial love. The poltergeist is an ontological anomaly: a fusion of human, object, and ghost, a “creature of social reality” and a “creature of fiction” (Haraway 1991, 149). From the German poltern meaning “to make noise, to rattle” and Geist or “ghost,” it literally means “noisy ghost,” speaking into existence an anti-subjectivity that emerges in the aftermath of death or murder (“Poltergeist”). It is the subject of Tobe Hooper’s 1982 film Poltergeist, which tells a story of “a haunting based on revenge” (Tuck and Ree 2013, 652). The film’s haunting is a wronging premised on an initial wrong: the eponymous poltergeist materializes when a mansion is constructed on a cemetery—a disturbing of spirits, if you will. José Esteban Muñoz argues that “The double ontology of ghosts and ghostliness, the manner in which ghosts exist inside and out and traverse categorical distinctions, seems especially useful for… queer criticism” (2009, 46). In this paper, the poltergeist names the form which indigeneity takes when it brings queer matter into its folds. In other words, this essay evokes haunting as a metaphor to hint at the ways in which queerness was murderously absorbed into the past and prematurely expected to stay there as an effect of colonialism’s drive to eliminate all traces of sexualities and genders that wandered astray. The poltergeist conceptualizes the work of queer indigeneity in the present insofar as it does not presuppose the mysterious intentions of the ghost—an otherworldly force that is bad, good, and undetectable all at once. Instead, the poltergeist is melancholic in its grief, but also pissed off. It refuses to remain in the spiritual, a space cheapened in relation to the staunch materiality of the real, and one that, though housing our conditions of possibility, cannot contain all of us. We protest forms of cruel nostalgia that tether ghosts to a discarded past within which queer Indigenous life once flourished because we know that we will never get it back and that most of us likely never experienced it in the first place. We long for that kind of love, but we know it is hard to come by. I turn to the poltergeist because I don’t have anywhere else to go. Help me, I could say. But I won’t. Queer indigeneity, then, is neither here nor there, neither dead nor alive but, to use Judith Butler’s language, interminably spectral (2006, 33). We are ghosts that haunt the reserve in the event of resurrection. According to Indigenous and Northern Affairs Canada, a reserve is a “tract of land, the legal title to which is held by the Crown, set apart for the use and benefit of an Indian band” (“Terminology”). The “reserve system” is part of the dispossessory ethos through which the settler state reifies land as the sign of sovereignty itself, and thus effects the political death of indigeneity, decomposing it into nothingness, into contaminated dirt. Reserves are the products of imaginations gone wild; they are ruins that bear “the physical imprint of the supernatural” on arid land, on decaying trailers arranged like weathered tombstones (Tuck and Ree 2013, 653). They are borderlands that connote simultaneous possession and dispossession: they represent the collision between settler sovereignty (insofar as the Crown holds the legal title to the land) and indigeneity (pointing to a genre of life that is distinctly Indigenous). Reserves were—some might say they still are—zones of death that regulated and regulate the movements of Indigenous bodies, quarantining their putatively contaminated flesh outside modern life in order to preserve settler-colonial futurities. It is as if the reserve were a site of complete atrophy, where indigeneity is supposed to waste away or degenerate, where queerness has already bled out. Look at the blood on your hands! The queer Indigenous poltergeist, however, foregrounds what I call a “reserve consciousness” —an awareness of the deathliness of the reserve. A reserve consciousness might be a kind of critical phenomenology that, to use Lisa Guenther’s description of this sort of insurgent knowledge project, pulls up “traces of what is not quite or no longer there—that which has been rubbed out or consigned to invisibility” (2015): here, the so-called on-reserve Indian. It might be about becoming a frictive surface; by rubbing up against things and resisting motion between objects, we might become unstuck. Queer Indigenous poltergeists are what Sara Ahmed calls “blockage points”: where communication stops because we cannot get through (2011, 68). That is, queer indigeneity connotes an ethical impasse, a dead end that presents us with two options: exorcism or resurrection. If settler colonialism is topological, if it persists despite elastic deformations such as stretching and twisting, wear and tear, we might have to make friction to survive. I turn to the reserve because it is a geography of affect, one in which the heaviness of atmospheres crushes some bodies to death and in which some must bear the weight of settler colonialism more than others. The violence done to us has wrenched us outside the physical world and into the supernatural. Some of us are spirits—open wounds that refuse to heal because our blood might be the one thing that cannot be stolen. Does resistance always feel like resistance, or does it sometimes feel like bleeding out (Berlant 2011)? Feral Socialities I must leave the beaten path and go where we are not. Queerness, according to Muñoz, is not yet here; it is an ideality that “we may never touch,” that propels us onward (2009, 1). Likewise, Halberstam suggests that the presentness of queerness signals a kind of emerging ontology. He argues that failure “is something that queers do and have always done exceptionally well in contrast to the grim scenarios of success” that structure “a heteronormative, capitalist society” (2011, 2-3). For Muñoz, queer failure is about “doing something that is missing in straight time’s always already flawed temporal mapping practice” (2009, 174). We know, however, that this isn’t the entire story. Whereas Muñoz’s queer past morphs into the here and now of homonormativity’s carceral tempos, indigeneity’s queernesses are saturated with the trauma of colonialism’s becoming-structure. Queer death doubles as the settler state’s condition of possibility. Pre-contact queer indigeneities had been absorbed into colonialism’s death grip; however, this making-dead was also a making-undead in the enduring of ghosts (Derrida 1994, 310). If haunting, according to Tuck and Ree, “lies precisely in its refusal to stop,” then the queer Indigenous poltergeist fails to have died by way of time travel (2013, 642). Queer indigeneity might be a kind of “feral sociality”: we are in a wild state after escaping colonial captivity and domestication. When the state evicts you, you might have to become feral to endure. To be feral is to linger in the back alleys of the settler state. It is a refusal of settler statecraft, a strategic failing to approximate the metrics of colonial citizenship, a giving up on the ethical future that reconciliation supposedly promises. As an aside, I suspect that the settler state’s reconciliatory ethos is always-already a domesticating project: it contains Indigenous suffering within the spectacularized theatre of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, building a post-Residential School temporality in which Indigenous peoples have been repaired through monetary reparations and storytelling. In the melodrama of reconciliation, the settler state wins its centuries-long war against Indian lawlessness by healing Indigenous peoples of the trauma that blocked them from becoming properly emotive citizens. Queer indigeneity, however, escapes discursive and affective concealment and therefore the category of the human itself, disturbing the binary clash between the living and nonliving by way of its un-humanity, a kind of “dead living” whereby flesh is animated through death. Perhaps we must become feral to imagine other space-times, to imagine other kinds of queerness. If settler colonialism incentivizes our collusion with the humanist enterprise of multiculturalism (and it does), what would it mean to refuse humanity and actualize other subject formations? In other words, how do the un-living live? Here, I want to propose the concept of “Indian time” to theorize the temporality and liminality of queer indigeneity as it festers in the slippage between near-death and the refusal to die. Indian time colloquially describes the regularity with which Indigenous peoples arrive late or are behind schedule. I appropriate this idiom to argue that the presentness of queer indigeneity is prefigured by an escape from and bringing forward of the past as well as a taking residence in the future. To be queer and Indigenous might mean to live outside time, to fall out of that form of affective life. Indian time thus nullifies the normative temporality of settler colonialism in which death is the telos of the human and being-in-death is an ontological fallacy. It connotes the conversion of queer indigeneity into non-living matter, into ephemera lurking in the shadows of the present, waiting, watching, and conspiring. Where Jasbir Puar argues that all things under the rubric of queer are always-already calculated into the state’s biopolitical mathematic, queer indigeneity cannot be held captive because it cannot be seen—we are still emerging in the social while simultaneously altering its substance (2012). If decolonization is, according to Tuck and K. Wayne Yang’s reading of Frantz Fanon, an “unclean break from a colonial condition,” perhaps the queer Indigenous poltergeist is feral enough to will a decolonial world into a future that hails rather than expels its ghosts (2012, 20). The queer Indigenous poltergeist might have nothing else to lose. Settler colonialism is deeply engrained in Western culture and is reflected through universalist theory—their universalist Enlightenment philosophy is a justification for assimilation and extermination of Indigenous peoples John Hinkinson 12 – Editor at Arena, an Australian maganzine. “Why Settler Colonialism?” Arena. 2012. https://arena.org.au/why-settler-colonialism/ JJNrecut anop Settler colonialism as a practice is a subset of colonial history, one where the colonial relationship converts into a very specific cultural practice. It is where the ‘settler culture’ seeks a permanent place in the colonial setting and, as such, enters an unrelenting cultural logic of misrecognition and blindness towards the cultural other, issuing in acts of objective cruelty and cultural destruction. Because this relationship is based in cultures, which are prior to the individual (while simultaneously forming the individual), it is a relationship that is especially difficult to put aside. Empirically speaking, there are many such examples in history, many arising in the period of Western Empire associated with modernity and expansionism in the New World. Settler colonialism as a field illuminates the history of these myriad examples while bridging into accounts of contemporary expressions of the settler phenomenon, from the continued cultural suppression arising out of nineteenth-century Empire (in Africa, the Americas, Australia and New Zealand, for example) to twentieth-century expressions in Palestine. If settler colonialism is to develop as a field of critical study it needs to include but go far beyond empirical accounts simply framed by an ethic of cultural justice. To do this it is necessary to develop a theory and account of how settler colonialism as a practice is based culturally. And this will require a broader frame of reference than the specific localities of settler-colonial practice, a broader frame that shows how this phenomenon is an effect of power based in attitudes to other cultures more generally. For it is arguable that the settler-colonial attitude derives from a widespread cultural politics set within a larger frame, one which the world today assumes, rather than reflexively knows or seeks to reform. This is to speak of a continuing imperialist attitude expressed in a view of other cultures that has little respect for those cultures’ core assumptions. There are crude expressions of this lack of cultural empathy, but there are also ‘high’ expressions, such as those embodied in the universalist philosophy of the West. For high universalism, the emancipatory principle is argued to be beyond all specific cultures and, as such, superior to all of them. Recent US adventures in the Middle East come to mind, where the invocation of ‘freedom’ has become a sign of disrespect for the complex cultures of the region. Imposed ‘freedom’ has devastating effects. Common to these expressions is a deep cultural blindness associated with modernity that is unable to view other cultures empathically or engage them in informed, reciprocal cultural interchange. Rather, knowledge of such cultures has predominantly developed instrumentally as a means to domination. These relations of cultural power at a more general level both generate the settler colonial relationship and reflexively feed off its effects. As John Gray remarks in his Black Mass, the Enlightenment is responsible for many racist policies, especially towards colonized peoples. Enlightenment philosophers have a special responsibility, as is seen in the case of Locke: John Locke was a Christian committed to the idea that humans are created equal, but he devoted a good deal of intellectual energy to justifying the seizure of the lands of indigenous people in America.(8) Other philosophers, including Kant, are mired in much the same logic. The goal of equality within a universal civilization was the prospect, but this could only be achieved by the peoples of the colonies ‘giving up their own ways of life and adopting European ways’.(9) If they did not willingly give up their ways of life, extermination, an idea that was widespread, might be entertained. This was not merely a Nazi policy. When H. G. Wells asked himself about the fate of ‘swarms of black and yellow and brown people who do not come into the needs of efficiency’, he replied: ‘Well, the world is not a charitable institution, and I take it they will have to go’.(10) John Gray goes on: Nazi policies of extermination … drew on powerful currents in the Enlightenment and used as models policies in operation in many countries, including the world’s leading liberal democracy. Programmes aiming to sterilize the unfit were under way in the United States. Hitler admired these programmes and also admired America’s genocidal treatment of indigenous peoples: he ‘often praised to his inner circle the efficiency of America’s extermination — by starvation and uneven combat — of the “Red Savages” who could not be tamed by captivity’.(11) If there is any doubt about the crucial role of settler colonialism in the power effects of the West one should turn to the recent book by Timothy Snyder, Bloodlands.(12) Here the author confirms that the various plans constructed by Hitler and the Nazi regime for the mass starvation of the Slavs and the Final Solution of the Jews of Eastern Europe were based on settler-colonial assumptions, in particular as expressed in the example of the United States and the conquest of the Native American peoples. Hitler’s plan (the Generalplan Ost) to colonize the Ukraine breadbasket was one that sought to turn back the clock of industrialization in the Soviet Union, deliberately starve unwanted millions of people, introduce German settlers up to the Urals, enslave Slavs where they were deemed to be essential for economic production and push the Jews of Eastern Europe beyond the Urals into Asia. While the plan was quickly frustrated in its detail by the resistance of the Soviets, Hitler’s plan is nevertheless illustrative of crucial background assumptions and elaborations of notions of ‘development’. For Hitler, Colonization would make of Germany a continental empire fit to rival the United States, another hardy frontier state based upon exterminatory colonialism and slave labor. The East was the Nazi Manifest Destiny. In Hitler’s view, ‘in the East a similar process will repeat itself for a second time as in the conquest of America’. As Hitler imagined the future, Germany would deal with the Slavs much as the North Americans had dealt with the Indians. The Volga River in Russia, he once proclaimed, will be Germany’s Mississippi.(13) As suggestive as this material may be, the point is not that of equating the United States with the Nazis. Rather it is to make the more important ethical point about Western powers and Western culture: they are interwoven with practices that take settler colonialism for granted, practices that arguably define the underside of modernity. The 1AC’s representations of space exploration are underscored by Western tropes of “knowledge” and “human”, ignoring Indigenous methodologies of space exploration – the K comes before the 1AC’s scholarship. Deondre Smiles 20 Deondre Smiles, Ph.D. is a postdoctoral scholar at The Ohio State University. A citizen of the Leech Lake Band of Ojibwe, his ongoing research agenda is situated at the intersection of critical Indigenous geographies and political ecology, centered in the argument that tribal protection of remains, burial grounds, and more-than-human environments represents an effective form of ‘quotidian’ resistance against the settler colonial state. "The Settler Logics of (Outer) Space," Society and Space (October 26, 2020), https://www.societyandspace.org/articles/the-settler-logics-of-outer-space, accessed 1-6-2022anop One scientist told me that astronomy is a “benign science” because it is based on observation, and that it is universally beneficial because it offers “basic human knowledge” that everyone should know “like human anatomy.” Such a statement underscores the cultural bias within conventional notions of what constitutes the “human” and “knowledge.” In the absence of a critical self-reflection on this inherent ethnocentrism, the tacit claim to universal truth reproduces the cultural supremacy of Western science as self-evident. Here, the needs of astronomers for tall peaks in remote locations supplant the needs of Indigenous communities on whose ancestral territories these observatories are built (2017: 8). As Casumbal-Salazar and other scholars who have written about the TMT and the violence that has been done to Native Hawai’ians (such as police actions designed to dislodge blockades that prevented construction) as well as the potential violence to come such as the construction of the telescope have skillfully said, when it comes to the infringement upon Indigenous space by settler scientific endeavors tied to space exploration, there is no neutrality to be had—dispossession and violence are dispossession and violence, no matter the potential ‘good for humanity’ that might come about through these things. Such contestations over outer space and ethical engagement with previously unknown spaces will continue to happen. Outer space is not the first ‘final frontier’ (apologies to Gene Roddenberry) that has been discussed in settler logics and academic spaces. In terms of settler colonialism, scholars have written about how Antarctica was initially thought of as the ‘perfect’ settler colony—land that could be had without the messy business of pushing Indigenous people off of it (see Howkins 2010). Of course, we know now that engagement with Antarctica should be constrained by ecological concern—who is to say that these concerns will be heeded in ‘unpopulated’ space? What can be done to push back against these settler logics? Indigenous Engagement with ‘Space’ "River of Souls" by Carl Gawboy (as published in Indian Country Today, 4/2/16) I want to now turn our attention towards the possibilities that exist regarding Indigenous engagement with outer space. After all, the timing could not be more urgent to do so—we are now at a point where after generations and generations of building the myth that America was built out of nothing, we are now ready to resume the project of extending the reach of American military and economic might in space. To be fair, there are plenty of advances that can be made scientifically with a renewed focus on space exploration. However, history shows us that space exploration has been historically tied to military hegemony, and there is nothing in Mr. Trump’s temperament or attitude towards a re-engagement with space that suggest that his push toward the stars will be anything different. A sustained conversation needs to be had—will this exploration be ethical and beneficial to all Americans? One potential avenue of Indigenous involvement comes through the active involvement of Indigenous peoples and Indigenous perspectives in space exploration, of course. This involvement can be possible through viewing outer space through a ‘decolonial’ lens, for instance. Astronomers such as Prescod-Weinstein and Walkowicz have spoken about the need to avoid replicating colonial frameworks of occupation and use of space when exploring places such as Mars, for example (Mandelbaum, 2018). The rise of logics of resource extraction in outer-space bodies have led to engagements by other academics such as Alice Gorman on the agency and personhood of the Moon. Collaborations between Indigenous people and space agencies such as NASA help provide the Indigenous perspective inside space exploration and the information that is gleaned from it, with implications both in space and on a Earth that is dealing with climate crisis (Bean, 2018; Bartels, 2019). Another potential avenue of engagement with Indigenous methodologies and epistemologies related to space comes with engaging with Indigenous thinkers who are already deeply immersed into explorations of Indigenous ‘space’ here on Earth—the recent works of Indigenous thinkers such as Waziyatawin (2008) Leanne Betasamosake Simpson (2017), Natchee Blu Barnd (2018) and others provide a unique viewpoint into the ways that Indigenous peoples make and remake space—perhaps this can provide another blueprint for how we might engage with space beyond Earth. And that is just the work that exists within the academic canon. Indigenous people have always been engaged with the worlds beyond the Earth, in ways that often stood counter to accepted ‘settler’ conventions of space exploration (Young, 1987). In one example, when asked about the Moon landings, several Inuit said, "We didn't know this was the first time you white people had been to the moon. Our shamans have been going for years. They go all the time...We do go to visit the moon and moon people all the time. The issue is not whether we go to visit our relatives, but how we treat them and their homeland when we go (Young, 1987: 272).” In another example, turning to my own people, the Ojibwe, we have long standing cultural connections to the stars that influence storytelling, governance, and religious tenets (CHIN, 2003). This engagement continues through to the present day, and points to a promising future. A new generation of Indigenous artists, filmmakers, and writers are beginning to create works that place the Indigenous individual themselves into narratives of space travel and futurity, unsettling existing settler notions of what our future in space might look like. As Leo Cornum (2015) writes, “Outer space, perhaps because of its appeal to our sense of endless possibility, has become the imaginative site for re-envisioning how black, indigenous and other oppressed people can relate to each other outside of and despite the colonial gaze.” (Photo Credit: Indigenous Education Institute) These previous examples should serve as a reminder that the historical underpinnings of our great national myth are built upon shaky intellectual ground—we need to be honest about this. America did not just spring forth out of nothing; it came from the brutal occupation and control of Native lands. Despite the best efforts of the settler state, Native people are still here, we still exist and make vital contributions to both our tribal communities and science. We cannot expect Donald Trump to turn his back on the national myth of what made the United States the United States—in his mind, this is the glorious history of what made America great in the past. And it should serve as no surprise that Trump and others wish to extend this history into outer space. Even when Trump’s days in the White House are over, the settler colonial logics that underpin our engagement with land on Earth will still loom large over the ways that we may potentially engage with outer space. But for those of us who do work in Indigenous geographies and Indigenous studies, it becomes even more vital that we heed the calls of Indigenous thinkers inside and outside formal academic structures, validate Indigenous histories, and push to deconstruct the American settler myth and to provide a new way of looking at the stars, especially at a crucial moment where the settler state turns its gaze towards the same. Western colonial frameworks render Nativeness as the raw material for settler vitality — refuse the re-scripting of Native life and death onto settler landscapes and colonial cartographies Urbanski 16. Claire Urbanski is a doctoral candidate in Feminist Studies with a designated emphasis in Critical Race and Ethnic Studies. As a scholar and social justice activist invested in collective liberation, her work considers how settler colonial ideologies of Indigenous dispossession and gendered violence structure and inform relationships between place, identity, and land. Her doctoral research examines how knowledges of spiritual afterlife have shaped ongoing material structures of United States settler colonial empire ("Genocidal Intimacies: Settler Desire and Carceral Geographies," 2016, American Studies Association) vikas Connecting Kim TallBear and Philip Deloria’s work, we can understand how Western colonial scientific frameworks render ‘Nativeness’ into a material resource, already belonging to settler society, which can be mined for value; its imaginary, raw, authentic qualities are desired to make settler identity meaningful and to construct intimate belongings with landscape. Thinking about desires to consume and own flesh (or bone), and rendering bone into personal property, Alexander Weheliye’s concept of ‘pornotroping’ gets at the ways that the captive body is a “source of an irresistible, destructive sensuality” and at the same time is “reduced to a thing, to being for the captor” (90). Orlando Patterson also discusses the imagined intimacy between enslavers and captive bodies, as well as a fear of danger waiting in the spiritual realm for the enslaver because of his actions; which is assuaged through imagining a ‘benevolent enslavement,’ thus assuring a salvation for the enslaver. I do not mean to collapse the very differing racializing projects of antiBlackness and Indigenous dispossession into being the same thing, while also recognizing their inseparable entanglements in the mutual constitution of settler colonialism, and also acknowledging that perhaps my easy comparison here is very problematic; I do want to think about the space of settler sexualized desire for captive bodies, and connect it to a sexualized and intimate desire for captured dead bodies. How do settlers form (imagined) belongings through imagined intimacies with Indigenous dead? How does anti-Black consumption facilitate white settler intimacies with landscapes? What kinds of sexualized and intimate fantasies are being enacted through the dissection and hoarding of corpses, or the extraction of energy from human bones? When does the researcher, or witch, imagine and perform a fabricated emotional intimacy with the dead, and when is the dead body simply an object from which to extract, or dismember? I’m reflecting on Audra Simpson’s comments on yesterday’s panel “Colonial Unknowing and Biopolitics,” which speaking on the ruse of consent that settler society depicts in its relations with Indigenous peoples, I call attention to the coercive intimacy researchers, and perhaps witches, enforce onto the dead. I do acknowledge and hesitate at my oversimplification of histories and meanings of witchcraft, and at the same time, I do take seriously the settler colonial fantasies that very much inform the increasing popularity of witchcraft particularly amongst white queer identified settlers. To conclude, I have begun to consider the historical and ongoing extractive projects that seek to render Indigenous bones into material resources - to be excavated, consumed, dismembered, and the particular logics of containment projected onto the dead through settler imaginaries. I ask how are the bones of the dead consumed in order to enact queer settler belongings imagined to be subversive to the state, yet ultimately naturalizing of, and thus reinforcing to, a settler colonial project? Thinking with the work of Sylvia Wynter and Jodi Byrd, projects of settler colonial grave excavation reveal an important process in how meanings of ‘symbolic life and death’ are mapped onto landscape through their centrality in establishing the normative standards of ‘Western Man’ as ‘human’ and as foundational to the parameters of US legal personhood, furthermore, genocidal intimacies draws attention to the sexualized productions of colonial carceral geographies. Settler belonging is accessed through genocidal intimacies, which are both informed by and reproductive of the carceral grounds from which militarized settler space and racializing technologies of social death can be erected and enacted. The alternative is to refuse the affirmative’s endorsement of settler political selfhood. This isn’t “reject the aff”—it’s a micro-political process that destabilizes the settler psyche by breaking down the coherence of settler colonialism built through repetition. Debate is an ethical affirmation of a certain ideology. Voting neg forces a confrontation of the genocidal settlement, destabilizing the settler subject—that comes prior to evaluating the settler truth claims of the aff. Henderson 15 Henderson, Phil. (2015). Imagoed communities: the psychosocial space of settler colonialism. Settler Colonial Studies, 7(1), 40–56. doi:10.1080/2201473x.2015.1092194 JParkrecut anop At a distance, the duplicity here is quite strange. Lines are drowned, forests are cut, nets are stolen, because settlers know reflexively that they have a right – duty even – to shape the vacant land according to their collective and individual needs. Yet, the very things which they seek to remove should prove the falsity of terra nullius, as they evidence indigenous presence. The settler subject is able to gloss the violence of his actions so easily, however, because he is ultimately the product of, and dependent upon, a series of power relations that actively disappear indigenous peoples as active sovereign bodies. Within the psychosocial order of settler sovereignty, supported by the settler imago, these acts are understood as progressive or represent an adherence to the law, and become unreadable to the settler for what they are: the latest in a series of dispossessive acts. Destabilizing a dispossessive subject Not only does the concept of the spatial imago allow us to interrogate the formation of the settler as a subject, it also provides a powerful analytical tool to explain the extreme vitriolic reactions that indigenous peoples constantly face from settlers. Many point to racism as 10 P. HENDERSON Downloaded by New York University at 15:35 26 February 2016 the source of such reactions, and this is not without cause, as settlers have long imbibed a sense of racial and cultural superiority – particularly toward indigenous peoples. Despite these prejudices, however, Wolfe notes that the ‘primary motive’ of settler colonialism’s domination ‘is not race’ but ‘access to territory’. 63 Thus, inasmuch as the settler colonial imago validates access to territory by occluding indigenous sovereignty, the ongoing presences on and claims to the land by indigenous peoples trouble the settler imago and induce panic in settler subjects. Facing assertive indigenous presences within settler colonial spaces, settlers must answer the legitimate charge that their daily life – in all its banality – is predicated upon the privileges produced by ongoing genocide. The jarring nature of such charges offers an irreconcilable challenge to settlers qua settlers.64 Should these charges become impossible to ignore, they threaten to explode the imago of settler colonialism, which had hitherto operated within the settler psyche in a relatively smooth and benign manner. This explosion is potentiated by the revelation of even a portion of the violence that is required to make settler life possible. If, for example, settlers are forced to see ‘their’ beach as a site of murder and ongoing colonization, it becomes more difficult to sustain it within the imaginary as a site of frivolity.65 As Brown writes, in the ‘loss of horizons, order, and identity’ the subject experiences a sense of enormous vulnerability.66 Threatened with this ‘loss of containment’, the settler subject embarks down the road to psychosis.67 Thus, to parlay Brown’s thesis to the settler colonial context, the uncontrollable rage that indigenous presences induce within the settler is not evidence of the strength of settlers, but rather of a subject lashing out on the brink of its own dissolution. This panic – this rabid and insatiable anger – is always already at the core of the settler as a subject. As Lorenzo Veracini observes, the settler necessarily remains in a disposition of aggression ‘even after indigenous alterities have ceased to be threatening’. 68 This disposition results from the precarity inherent in the maintenance of settler colonialism’s imago, wherein any and all indigenous presences threaten subjective dissolution of the settler as such. Trapped in a Gordian Knot, the very thing that provides a balm to the settler subject – further development and entrenchment of the settler colonial imago – is also what panics the subject when it is inevitably contravened.69 We might think of this as a process of hardening that leaves the imago brittle and more susceptible to breakage. Their desire to produce a firm imago means that settlers are also always already in a psychically defensive position – that is, the settler’s offensive position on occupied land is sustained through a defensive posture. For while settlers desire the total erasure of indigenous populations, the attendant desire to disappear their own identity as settlers necessitates the suppression of both desires, if the subject’s reliance on settler colonial power structure is to be psychically naturalized. Settlers’ reactions to indigenous peoples fit, almost universally, with the two ego defense responses that Sigmund Freud observed. The first of these defenses is to attempt a complete conversion of the suppressed desire into a new idea. In settler colonial contexts, this requires averting attention from the violence of dispossession; as such, settlers often suggest that they aim to create a ‘city on the hill’. 70 Freud noted that the conversion defense mechanism does suppress the anxiety-inducing desire, but it also leads to ‘periodic hysterical outbursts’. Such is the case when settlers’ utopic visions are forced to confront the reality that the gentile community they imagine is founded in and perpetuates irredeemable suffering. A second type of defense is to channel the original desire’s energy into an obsession or a phobia. The effects of this defense are seen in the preoccupation that settler colonialism has with purity of blood or of community.71 As we have already seen, this obsession at once solidifies the power of the settler state, thereby naturalizing the settler and simultaneously perpetuating the processes of erasing indigenous peoples. Psychic defenses are intended to secure the subject from pain, and whether that pain originates inside or outside the psyche is inconsequential. Because of the threat that indigeneity presents to the phantasmatic wholeness of settler colonialism, settlers must always remain suspended in a state of arrested development between these defensive positions. Despite any pretensions to the contrary, the settler is necessarily a parochial subject who continuously coils, reacts, disavows, and lashes out, when confronted with his dependency on indigenous peoples and their territory. This psychic precarity exists at the core of the settler subject because of the unending fear of its own dissolution, should indigenous sovereignty be recognized.72 Goeman writes as an explicit challenge to other indigenous peoples, but this holds true to settler-allies as well, that decolonization must include an analysis of the dominant ‘self-disciplining colonial subject’. 73 However, as this discussion of subjective precarity demonstrates, the degree of to which these disciplinary or phenomenological processes are complete should not be overstated. For settler-allies must also examine and cultivate the ways in which settler subjects fail to be totally disciplined. Evidence of this incompletion is apparent in the subject’s arrested state of development. Discovering the instability at the core of the settler subject, indeed of all subjects, is the central conceit of psychoanalysis. This exception of at least partial failure to fully subjectivize the settler is also what sets my account apart from Rifkin’s. His phenomenology falls into the trap that Jacqueline Rose observes within many sociological accounts of the subject: that of assuming a successful internalization of norms. From the psychoanalytical perspective, the ‘unconscious constantly reveals the “failure”’ of internalization.74 As we have seen, within settler subjects this can be expressed as an irrational anxiety that expresses itself whenever a settler is confronted with the facts regarding their colonizing status. Under conditions of total subjectification, such charges ought to be unintelligible to the settler. Thus, the process of subject formation is always in slippage and never totalized as others might suggest.75 Because of this precarity, the settler subject is prone to violence and lashing out; but the subject in slippage also provides an avenue by which the process of settler colonialism can be subverted – creating cracks in a phantasmatic wholeness which can be opened wider. Breakages of this sort offer an opportunity to pursue what Paulette Regan calls a ‘restorying’ of settler colonial history and culture, to decanter settler mythologies built upon and within the dispossession of indigenous peoples.76 The cultivation of these cracks is a necessary part of decolonizing work, as it continues to panic and thus to destabilize settler subjects. Resistance to settler colonialism does not occur only in highly visible moments like the famous conflict at Kanesatake and Kahnawake,77 it also occurs in reiterative and disruptive practices, presences, and speech acts. Goeman correctly observes that the ‘repetitive practices of everyday life’ are what give settler spaces their meaning, as they provide a degree of naturalness to the settler imago and its psychic investments.78 As such, to disrupt the ease of these repetitions is at once to striate radically the otherwise smooth spaces of settler colonialism and also to disrupt the easy (re)production of the settler subject. Goeman calls these subversive acts the ‘micro-politics of resistance’, which historically 12 P. HENDERSON Downloaded by New York University at 15:35 26 February 2016 took the form of ‘moving fences, not cooperating with census enumerators, sometimes disrupting survey parties’ amongst other process.79 These acts panic the subject that is disciplined as a product of settler colonial power, by forcing encounters with the sovereign indigenous peoples that were imagined to be gone. This reveals to the settler, if only fleetingly, the violence that founds and sustains the settler colonial relationship. While such practices may not overthrow the settler colonial system, they do subvert its logics by insistently drawing attention to the ongoing presence of indigenous peoples who refuse erasure. Today, we can draw similar inspiration from the variety of tactics used in movements like Idle No More. From flash mobs in major malls, to round dances that block city streets, and even projects to rename Toronto locations, Idle No More is engaged in a series of micro-political projects across Turtle Island.80 The micro-politics of the movement strengthen indigenous subjects and their spatialities, while leaving an indelible imprint in the settler psyche. Predictably, rage and resentment were provoked in some settlers;81 however, Idle No More also drew thousands of settler-allies into the streets and renewed conversations about the necessity of nation-to-nation relationships. With settler colonial spaces disrupted and a relationship of domination made impossible to ignore, in the tradition of centuries of indigenous resistance, Idle No More put the settler subject into serious flux once more. The counterinterpretation is that you should evaluate the 1AC as an object of study a Sociogeny – debate may not spill over to political change but it has the potential to reproduce affirmations and negations that trigger neurohcmeical responses via reward and punishment mechanisms privilege certain research methods as valuable in the way debaters view the world. b Objectivity – consequence based plan focus shifts the focus of debate from our investments in settler colonialism to a plan text, which is incoherent because debate is a communicative activity and their inter sidesteps discussions of genocide.
1/14/22
1 - Theory - Brackets
Tournament: Grapevine | Round: 1 | Opponent: McNeil YM | Judge: JP Stuckert Interpretation – Debaters may not modify their evidence. To clarify, debaters may not strikethrough or delete words or characters, replace words with bracketed synonyms, bracket in words for grammatical reasons, or edit their evidence for any other reason.
9/11/21
1 - Theory - Dont modify ev
Tournament: St Marks | Round: 2 | Opponent: Marlborough MJ | Judge: Derek Hilligoss Interpretation: Debaters may not modify evidence.
Violation highlighted in green In 2004, some 970 million people, around 15 percent of the world’s population, were living below the extreme poverty line of $1 a day (more strictly defi ned, $392.88 annually) in 1993 Purchasing Power Parity (PPP) terms (Chen and Ravallion 2007, 16579).3 Furthermore, those living below this very low poverty line fell on average around 28 percent below it. Th eir average annual purchasing power therefore corresponded to approximately $420 in the US in 2008 dollars.4¶ Th ese are the poorest of the poor. Th e World Bank also uses a somewhat less miserly poverty line, namely $2 dollar a day, or an annual amount of $785.76 PPP 1993. Th e Bank’s data show that around 40 percent of the world’s population, or over 2.5 billion people, lived in income poverty so defi ned in 2004,5 with this population falling on average 41 percent below this higher line.6 Individuals I;\pp
\n this much larger group could buy, on average, about as much in 2004 as could be bought in the US in 2008 for $690.¶ The Effects of Global Income Poverty on Health¶ The effects of such extreme income poverty are foreseeable and extensively documented. It is estimated that around 13 percent of all human beings (830 million) are chronically undernourished, 17 percent (1.1 billion) lack access to safe water, and 41 percent (2.6 billion) lack access to basic sanitation (UNDP 2006, 174, 33). About 31 percent (2 billion) lack access to crucial drugs and 25 percent (1.6 billion) lack electricity (Fogarty n.d., IEA 2002). Some 780 million adults are illiterate (UNESCO 2006), and 14 percent of children aged between fi ve and 17 (218 million) are child laborers, more than half in hazardous work (ILO 2006, 6).¶ Worldwide, diseases related to poverty, including communicable, maternal, perinatal, and nutritionrelated diseases, comprise over 50 percent of the burden of disease in low-income countries, nearly ten times their relative burden in developed countries (WHO 2006b, 3). If the developed world had its proportional share of poverty-related deaths (onethird of all deaths), severe poverty would kill some 16,000 Americans and 26,000 citizens of the European Union each week.¶ The cycle of mutually reinforcing poverty and disease besetting low income countries, and particularly the poorer communities in these countries, could be broken by signifi cantly reducing severe poverty. But it is also possible to make substantial progress against the global burden of disease more directly by improving health care in developing countries.¶ Poverty does not merely render poor people more vulnerable to disease, but also makes it less likely that they can obtain medical treatment for the diseases they contract. This is because in poor countries medical care is rarely available for free, and poor people are typically unable to buy either the care needed by themselves or their families or the insurance policies that would guarantee them such care. The price of health care in poor countries therefore also plays a crucial role in explaining the catastrophic health situation among the global poor.
Original article: 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. Standards: Academic integrity – modifying authors changes argument perception because it forecloses the possibility of authors to represent their own words, killing validity. That outweighs - Your role as an educator mandates that you enforce academic rules – just as a teacher would fail a paper that plagiarized, you should not vote for someone who used altered evidence. Outweighs any other voter bc only ours defines what the role of a judge is, which controls the internal link to viewing fairness and education Academic rules are A. Key to enforcing a norm of honesty instead of lying – this fosters a respectful and fair academic community B. Debate is an academic activity – academic honesty is a rule in every other academic area so the same standards apply
10/16/21
JF - K - Settlerism
Tournament: Churchill | Round: 1 | Opponent: Strake JW | Judge: Breigh Plat Indigeneity connotates a state of non-ontology allowing for the construction of the human that legitimizes its self into a history of elimination, jettisoned from or assimilated into the national body to cohere settler temporality Belcourt 16. Billy-Ray Belcourt is from the Driftpile Cree Nation. He is a 2016 Rhodes Scholar and is reading for an M.St. in Women’s Studies at the University of Oxford. He was named by CBC Books as one of six Indigenous writers to watch, and his poetry has been published or is forthcoming in Assaracus: A Journal of Gay Poetry, Red Rising Magazine, SAD Mag, mâmawi-âcimowak, PRISM International, and The Malahat Review. ("A POLTERGEIST MANIFESTO," 2016, Feral Feminism) vikas recut aaditg Admittedly, the feral is a precarious space from which to theorize, sullied with an injurability bound up in the work of liberal humanism as such, an enterprise that weaponizes a set of moral barometers to distribute ferality unevenly to differently citizened and raced bodies—ones that are too close for comfort and must be pushed outside arm’s reach. Perhaps ferality traverses a semantic line of flight commensurate¬ with that of savagery, barbarism, and lawlessness, concreting into one history of elimination: that is, a history of eliminating recalcitrant indigeneities incompatible within a supposedly hygienic social. The word savage comes from the Latin salvaticus, an alteration of silvaticus, meaning “wild,” literally “of the woods.” Of persons, it means “reckless, ungovernable” (“Savage”). In the space-time of settler states, savagery temporarily stands in for those subjectivities tethered to a supposedly waning form of indigeneity, one that came from the woods and, because of this, had to be jettisoned from or assimilated into the national body. Here is Audra Simpson on the history of Indian “lawlessness”: Its genealogy extends back to the earliest moments of recorded encounter, when Indians appeared to have no law, to be without order, and thus, to be in the colonizer’s most generous articulation of differentiation, in need of the trappings of civilization. “Law” may be one instrument of civilization, as a regulating technique of power that develops through the work upon a political body and a territory. (2014, 144) According to Simpson, the recognition of Indigenous peoples as lawless rendered them governable, motivating the settler state (here, Canada) to curate and thus contain atrophied indigeneities—and, consequently, their sovereignties, lands, and politics—within the borders of federal law (2014, 144-45). Similarly, in The Transit of Empire Jodi Byrd traces the epistemological gimmicks through which the concept of “Indianness” came to align with “the savage other” (2011, 27). For her, this alignment provided the “rationale for imperial domination” and continues to stalk philosophy’s patterns of thinking (ibid.). Simpson, writing about the Mohawks of Kahnawake, argues that “a fear of lawlessness” continues to haunt the colonial imaginary, thereby diminishing “Indigenous rights to trade and to act as sovereigns in their own territories” (2014, 145). We might take the following lyrics from the popular Disney film Pocahontas as an example of the ways indigeneity circulates as a feral signifier in colonial economies of meaning-making: Ratcliffe What can you expect From filthy little heathens? Their whole disgusting race is like a curse Their skin’s a hellish red They’re only good when dead They’re vermin, as I said And worse English settlers They’re savages! Savages! Barely even human. (Gabriel and Goldberg 1995) Savagery connotes a state of non-ontology: Indigenous peoples are forced to cling to a barely extant humanity and coterminously collapse into a putatively wretched form of animality. Savagery is lethal, and its Indian becomes the prehistoric alibi through which the human is constituted as such. Indigenous peoples have therefore labored to explain away this savagery, reifying whitened rubrics for proper citizenship and crafting a genre of life tangible within the scenes of living through that are constitutive of settler colonialism as such. These scenes, however, are dead set on destroying the remnants of that savagery, converting their casualties into morally compatible subjects deserving of rights and life in a multicultural state that stokes the liberal fantasy of life after racial trauma at the expense of decolonial flourishing itself. This paper is therefore interested in the subjectivities and forms of sociality that savagery destroys when applied from without, and the political work of appropriating that savagery in the name of decolonization. Ours is a form of indigeneity that hints at a fundamental pollutability that both confirms and threatens forms of ontology tethered to a taxonomized humanity built in that foundational episode of subjection of which Simpson speaks. I am suggesting that savagery always-already references an otherworld of sorts: there are forms of life abandoned outside modernity’s episteme whose expressivities surge with affects anomalous within the topography of settler colonialism. This paper is not a historicist or nostalgic attachment to a pre-savage indigeneity resurrected from a past somehow unscathed by the violence that left us in the thick of things in the first place. Instead, I emphasize the potentiality of ferality as a politics in a world bent on our destruction—a world that eliminates indigeneities too radical to collapse into a collective sensorium, training us to a live in an ordinary that the settler state needs to persist as such, one that only some will survive. This world incentivizes our collusion with a multicultural state instantiated through a myth of belonging that actively disavows difference in the name of that very difference. We are repeatedly hurried into a kind of waning sociality, the content and form of which appear both too familiar and not familiar enough. In short, we are habitually left scavenging for ways to go on without knowing what it is we want. Let’s consider Jack Halberstam’s thoughts on “the wild”: It is a tricky word to use but it is a concept that we cannot live without if we are to combat the conventional modes of rule that have synced social norms to economic practices and have created a world order where every form of disturbance is quickly folded back into quiet, where every ripple is quickly smoothed over, where every instance of eruption has been tamped down and turned into new evidence of the rightness of the status quo. (2013, 126) Where Halberstam finds disturbance, I find indigeneity-cum-disturbance par excellence. Halberstam’s “wild” evokes a potentiality laboured in the here and now and “an alternative to how we want to think about being” in and outside an authoritarian state (2013, 126-27). Perhaps the wild risks the decolonial, a geography of life-building that dreams up tomorrows whose referents are the fractured indigeneities struggling to survive a historical present built on our suffering. Ferality is a stepping stone to a future grounded in Indigenous peoples’ legal and political orders. This paper does not traffic in teleologies of the anarchic or lawless as they emerge in Western thought; instead, it refuses settler sovereignty and calls for forms of collective Indigenous life that are attuned to queerness’s wretched histories and future-making potentialities. Indigeneity is an ante-ontology of sorts: it is prior to and therefore disruptive of ontology. Indigeneity makes manifest residues or pockets of times, worlds, and subjectivities that warp both common sense and philosophy into falsities that fall short of completely explaining what is going on. Indigenous life is truncated in the biopolitical category of Savage in order to make our attachments to ourselves assimilable inside settler colonialism’s national sensorium. Settler colonialism purges excessive forms of indigeneity that trouble its rubrics for sensing out the human and the nonhuman. In other words, settler colonialism works up modes of being-in-the-world that narrate themselves as the only options we have. What would it mean, then, to persist in the space of savagery, exhausting the present and holding out for futures that are not obsessed with the proper boundary between human and nonhuman life? This paper now turns to the present, asking: what happens when indigeneity collides with queerness inside the reserve, and how might a feral theory make sense of that collision? Deadly Presents “I went through a really hard time… I was beaten; more than once. I was choked” (Klassen 2014). These were the words of Tyler-Alan Jacobs, a two-spirit man from the Squamish Nation, capturing at once the terror of queer life on the reserve and the hardening of time into a thing that slows down bodies and pushes them outside its securitized geographies. Jacobs had grown up with his attackers, attackers who were energized by the pronouncement of queerness—how it insisted on being noticed, how it insisted on being. When the dust settled, “his right eye had dislodged and the side of his faced had caved in” (ibid.). Settler colonialism is fundamentally affective: it takes hold of the body, makes it perspire, and wears it out. It converts flesh into pliable automations and people into grim reapers who must choose which lives are worth keeping in the world. It can turn a person into a murderer in a matter of seconds; it is an epistemic rupturing of our attachments to life, to each other, and to ourselves. It is as if settler colonialism were simultaneously a rescue and military operation, a holy war of sorts tasked with exorcising the spectre of queer indigeneity and its putative infectivity. I rehearse this case because it allows me to risk qualifying the reserve as a geography saturated with heteronormativity’s socialities. This is a strategic interdiction that destroys supposedly degenerative queer affect worlds, untangling some bodies and not others from the future. I don’t have the statistics to substantiate these claims, but there is an archive of heartbreak and loss that is easy to come by if you ask the right people. Indeed, what would such statistics tell us that we don’t already know? What would the biopolitical work of data collection do to a knowledge-making project that thinks outside the big worlds of Statistics and Demography and, instead, inside the smaller, more precarious worlds created in the wake of gossip? I worry about ethnographic projects that seek to account for things and theory in the material in order to map the coordinates of an aberration to anchor it and its voyeurs in the theatres of the academy. The desire to attach to a body is too easily energized by a biological reading of gender that repudiates the very subjects it seeks so desperately to know and to study. What about the body? I have been asked this question, again and again. A feral theory is something of a call to arms: abolish this sort of ethnography and turn to those emergent methodologies that might better make sense of the affects and life-forms that are just now coming into focus and have been destroyed or made invisible in the name of research itself. Queer indigeneity, to borrow Fred Moten’s description of blackness, might “come most clearly into relief, by way of its negation” (2014). Perhaps decolonization needs to be a sort of séance: an attempt to communicate with the dead, a collective rising-up from the reserve’s necropolis, a feral becoming-undead. Boyd and Thrush’s Phantom Past, Indigenous Presence thinks indigeneity and its shaky histories vis-à-vis the language of haunting, where haunting is an endurant facet of “the experience of colonialism” (Bodinger de Uriarte 2012, 303). But, for me, ghostliness is differentially distributed: some more than others will be wrenched into the domain of the dead and forced to will their own ontologies into the now. Perhaps the universalist notion that haunting is a metonym for indigeneity repudiates the very life-forms that it claims to include: those who are differently queered and gendered, and, because of this, haunt waywardly and in ways that cannot be easily predicted (Ahmed 2015). This paper thus takes an imaginative turn and proceeds with something of an incantation to summon the figure of the queer Indigenous poltergeist—the feral monster in the horror story of decolonization. Queer Indigenous poltergeists do not linger inaudibly in the background; we are beside ourselves with anger, we make loud noises and throw objects around because we are demanding retribution for homicide, unloved love, and cold shoulders. We do not reconcile; we escape the reserve, pillage and mangle the settler-colonial episteme. Our arrival is both uneventful and apocalyptic, a point of departure and an entry point for an ontology that corresponds with a future that has yet to come. Sometimes all we have is the promise of the future. For the queer Indigenous poltergeist, resurrection is its own form of decolonial love. The poltergeist is an ontological anomaly: a fusion of human, object, and ghost, a “creature of social reality” and a “creature of fiction” (Haraway 1991, 149). From the German poltern meaning “to make noise, to rattle” and Geist or “ghost,” it literally means “noisy ghost,” speaking into existence an anti-subjectivity that emerges in the aftermath of death or murder (“Poltergeist”). It is the subject of Tobe Hooper’s 1982 film Poltergeist, which tells a story of “a haunting based on revenge” (Tuck and Ree 2013, 652). The film’s haunting is a wronging premised on an initial wrong: the eponymous poltergeist materializes when a mansion is constructed on a cemetery—a disturbing of spirits, if you will. José Esteban Muñoz argues that “The double ontology of ghosts and ghostliness, the manner in which ghosts exist inside and out and traverse categorical distinctions, seems especially useful for… queer criticism” (2009, 46). In this paper, the poltergeist names the form which indigeneity takes when it brings queer matter into its folds. In other words, this essay evokes haunting as a metaphor to hint at the ways in which queerness was murderously absorbed into the past and prematurely expected to stay there as an effect of colonialism’s drive to eliminate all traces of sexualities and genders that wandered astray. The poltergeist conceptualizes the work of queer indigeneity in the present insofar as it does not presuppose the mysterious intentions of the ghost—an otherworldly force that is bad, good, and undetectable all at once. Instead, the poltergeist is melancholic in its grief, but also pissed off. It refuses to remain in the spiritual, a space cheapened in relation to the staunch materiality of the real, and one that, though housing our conditions of possibility, cannot contain all of us. We protest forms of cruel nostalgia that tether ghosts to a discarded past within which queer Indigenous life once flourished because we know that we will never get it back and that most of us likely never experienced it in the first place. We long for that kind of love, but we know it is hard to come by. I turn to the poltergeist because I don’t have anywhere else to go. Help me, I could say. But I won’t. Queer indigeneity, then, is neither here nor there, neither dead nor alive but, to use Judith Butler’s language, interminably spectral (2006, 33). We are ghosts that haunt the reserve in the event of resurrection. According to Indigenous and Northern Affairs Canada, a reserve is a “tract of land, the legal title to which is held by the Crown, set apart for the use and benefit of an Indian band” (“Terminology”). The “reserve system” is part of the dispossessory ethos through which the settler state reifies land as the sign of sovereignty itself, and thus effects the political death of indigeneity, decomposing it into nothingness, into contaminated dirt. Reserves are the products of imaginations gone wild; they are ruins that bear “the physical imprint of the supernatural” on arid land, on decaying trailers arranged like weathered tombstones (Tuck and Ree 2013, 653). They are borderlands that connote simultaneous possession and dispossession: they represent the collision between settler sovereignty (insofar as the Crown holds the legal title to the land) and indigeneity (pointing to a genre of life that is distinctly Indigenous). Reserves were—some might say they still are—zones of death that regulated and regulate the movements of Indigenous bodies, quarantining their putatively contaminated flesh outside modern life in order to preserve settler-colonial futurities. It is as if the reserve were a site of complete atrophy, where indigeneity is supposed to waste away or degenerate, where queerness has already bled out. Look at the blood on your hands! The queer Indigenous poltergeist, however, foregrounds what I call a “reserve consciousness” —an awareness of the deathliness of the reserve. A reserve consciousness might be a kind of critical phenomenology that, to use Lisa Guenther’s description of this sort of insurgent knowledge project, pulls up “traces of what is not quite or no longer there—that which has been rubbed out or consigned to invisibility” (2015): here, the so-called on-reserve Indian. It might be about becoming a frictive surface; by rubbing up against things and resisting motion between objects, we might become unstuck. Queer Indigenous poltergeists are what Sara Ahmed calls “blockage points”: where communication stops because we cannot get through (2011, 68). That is, queer indigeneity connotes an ethical impasse, a dead end that presents us with two options: exorcism or resurrection. If settler colonialism is topological, if it persists despite elastic deformations such as stretching and twisting, wear and tear, we might have to make friction to survive. I turn to the reserve because it is a geography of affect, one in which the heaviness of atmospheres crushes some bodies to death and in which some must bear the weight of settler colonialism more than others. The violence done to us has wrenched us outside the physical world and into the supernatural. Some of us are spirits—open wounds that refuse to heal because our blood might be the one thing that cannot be stolen. Does resistance always feel like resistance, or does it sometimes feel like bleeding out (Berlant 2011)? Feral Socialities I must leave the beaten path and go where we are not. Queerness, according to Muñoz, is not yet here; it is an ideality that “we may never touch,” that propels us onward (2009, 1). Likewise, Halberstam suggests that the presentness of queerness signals a kind of emerging ontology. He argues that failure “is something that queers do and have always done exceptionally well in contrast to the grim scenarios of success” that structure “a heteronormative, capitalist society” (2011, 2-3). For Muñoz, queer failure is about “doing something that is missing in straight time’s always already flawed temporal mapping practice” (2009, 174). We know, however, that this isn’t the entire story. Whereas Muñoz’s queer past morphs into the here and now of homonormativity’s carceral tempos, indigeneity’s queernesses are saturated with the trauma of colonialism’s becoming-structure. Queer death doubles as the settler state’s condition of possibility. Pre-contact queer indigeneities had been absorbed into colonialism’s death grip; however, this making-dead was also a making-undead in the enduring of ghosts (Derrida 1994, 310). If haunting, according to Tuck and Ree, “lies precisely in its refusal to stop,” then the queer Indigenous poltergeist fails to have died by way of time travel (2013, 642). Queer indigeneity might be a kind of “feral sociality”: we are in a wild state after escaping colonial captivity and domestication. When the state evicts you, you might have to become feral to endure. To be feral is to linger in the back alleys of the settler state. It is a refusal of settler statecraft, a strategic failing to approximate the metrics of colonial citizenship, a giving up on the ethical future that reconciliation supposedly promises. As an aside, I suspect that the settler state’s reconciliatory ethos is always-already a domesticating project: it contains Indigenous suffering within the spectacularized theatre of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, building a post-Residential School temporality in which Indigenous peoples have been repaired through monetary reparations and storytelling. In the melodrama of reconciliation, the settler state wins its centuries-long war against Indian lawlessness by healing Indigenous peoples of the trauma that blocked them from becoming properly emotive citizens. Queer indigeneity, however, escapes discursive and affective concealment and therefore the category of the human itself, disturbing the binary clash between the living and nonliving by way of its un-humanity, a kind of “dead living” whereby flesh is animated through death. Perhaps we must become feral to imagine other space-times, to imagine other kinds of queerness. If settler colonialism incentivizes our collusion with the humanist enterprise of multiculturalism (and it does), what would it mean to refuse humanity and actualize other subject formations? In other words, how do the un-living live? Here, I want to propose the concept of “Indian time” to theorize the temporality and liminality of queer indigeneity as it festers in the slippage between near-death and the refusal to die. Indian time colloquially describes the regularity with which Indigenous peoples arrive late or are behind schedule. I appropriate this idiom to argue that the presentness of queer indigeneity is prefigured by an escape from and bringing forward of the past as well as a taking residence in the future. To be queer and Indigenous might mean to live outside time, to fall out of that form of affective life. Indian time thus nullifies the normative temporality of settler colonialism in which death is the telos of the human and being-in-death is an ontological fallacy. It connotes the conversion of queer indigeneity into non-living matter, into ephemera lurking in the shadows of the present, waiting, watching, and conspiring. Where Jasbir Puar argues that all things under the rubric of queer are always-already calculated into the state’s biopolitical mathematic, queer indigeneity cannot be held captive because it cannot be seen—we are still emerging in the social while simultaneously altering its substance (2012). If decolonization is, according to Tuck and K. Wayne Yang’s reading of Frantz Fanon, an “unclean break from a colonial condition,” perhaps the queer Indigenous poltergeist is feral enough to will a decolonial world into a future that hails rather than expels its ghosts (2012, 20). The queer Indigenous poltergeist might have nothing else to lose. The 1AC’s representations of space exploration are underscored by Western tropes of “knowledge” and “human”, ignoring Indigenous methodologies of space exploration – the K comes before the 1AC’s scholarship. Deondre Smiles 20 Deondre Smiles, Ph.D. is a postdoctoral scholar at The Ohio State University. A citizen of the Leech Lake Band of Ojibwe, his ongoing research agenda is situated at the intersection of critical Indigenous geographies and political ecology, centered in the argument that tribal protection of remains, burial grounds, and more-than-human environments represents an effective form of ‘quotidian’ resistance against the settler colonial state. "The Settler Logics of (Outer) Space," Society and Space (October 26, 2020), https://www.societyandspace.org/articles/the-settler-logics-of-outer-space, accessed 1-6-2022anop One scientist told me that astronomy is a “benign science” because it is based on observation, and that it is universally beneficial because it offers “basic human knowledge” that everyone should know “like human anatomy.” Such a statement underscores the cultural bias within conventional notions of what constitutes the “human” and “knowledge.” In the absence of a critical self-reflection on this inherent ethnocentrism, the tacit claim to universal truth reproduces the cultural supremacy of Western science as self-evident. Here, the needs of astronomers for tall peaks in remote locations supplant the needs of Indigenous communities on whose ancestral territories these observatories are built (2017: 8). As Casumbal-Salazar and other scholars who have written about the TMT and the violence that has been done to Native Hawai’ians (such as police actions designed to dislodge blockades that prevented construction) as well as the potential violence to come such as the construction of the telescope have skillfully said, when it comes to the infringement upon Indigenous space by settler scientific endeavors tied to space exploration, there is no neutrality to be had—dispossession and violence are dispossession and violence, no matter the potential ‘good for humanity’ that might come about through these things. Such contestations over outer space and ethical engagement with previously unknown spaces will continue to happen. Outer space is not the first ‘final frontier’ (apologies to Gene Roddenberry) that has been discussed in settler logics and academic spaces. In terms of settler colonialism, scholars have written about how Antarctica was initially thought of as the ‘perfect’ settler colony—land that could be had without the messy business of pushing Indigenous people off of it (see Howkins 2010). Of course, we know now that engagement with Antarctica should be constrained by ecological concern—who is to say that these concerns will be heeded in ‘unpopulated’ space? What can be done to push back against these settler logics? Indigenous Engagement with ‘Space’ "River of Souls" by Carl Gawboy (as published in Indian Country Today, 4/2/16) I want to now turn our attention towards the possibilities that exist regarding Indigenous engagement with outer space. After all, the timing could not be more urgent to do so—we are now at a point where after generations and generations of building the myth that America was built out of nothing, we are now ready to resume the project of extending the reach of American military and economic might in space. To be fair, there are plenty of advances that can be made scientifically with a renewed focus on space exploration. However, history shows us that space exploration has been historically tied to military hegemony, and there is nothing in Mr. Trump’s temperament or attitude towards a re-engagement with space that suggest that his push toward the stars will be anything different. A sustained conversation needs to be had—will this exploration be ethical and beneficial to all Americans? One potential avenue of Indigenous involvement comes through the active involvement of Indigenous peoples and Indigenous perspectives in space exploration, of course. This involvement can be possible through viewing outer space through a ‘decolonial’ lens, for instance. Astronomers such as Prescod-Weinstein and Walkowicz have spoken about the need to avoid replicating colonial frameworks of occupation and use of space when exploring places such as Mars, for example (Mandelbaum, 2018). The rise of logics of resource extraction in outer-space bodies have led to engagements by other academics such as Alice Gorman on the agency and personhood of the Moon. Collaborations between Indigenous people and space agencies such as NASA help provide the Indigenous perspective inside space exploration and the information that is gleaned from it, with implications both in space and on a Earth that is dealing with climate crisis (Bean, 2018; Bartels, 2019). Another potential avenue of engagement with Indigenous methodologies and epistemologies related to space comes with engaging with Indigenous thinkers who are already deeply immersed into explorations of Indigenous ‘space’ here on Earth—the recent works of Indigenous thinkers such as Waziyatawin (2008) Leanne Betasamosake Simpson (2017), Natchee Blu Barnd (2018) and others provide a unique viewpoint into the ways that Indigenous peoples make and remake space—perhaps this can provide another blueprint for how we might engage with space beyond Earth. And that is just the work that exists within the academic canon. Indigenous people have always been engaged with the worlds beyond the Earth, in ways that often stood counter to accepted ‘settler’ conventions of space exploration (Young, 1987). In one example, when asked about the Moon landings, several Inuit said, "We didn't know this was the first time you white people had been to the moon. Our shamans have been going for years. They go all the time...We do go to visit the moon and moon people all the time. The issue is not whether we go to visit our relatives, but how we treat them and their homeland when we go (Young, 1987: 272).” In another example, turning to my own people, the Ojibwe, we have long standing cultural connections to the stars that influence storytelling, governance, and religious tenets (CHIN, 2003). This engagement continues through to the present day, and points to a promising future. A new generation of Indigenous artists, filmmakers, and writers are beginning to create works that place the Indigenous individual themselves into narratives of space travel and futurity, unsettling existing settler notions of what our future in space might look like. As Leo Cornum (2015) writes, “Outer space, perhaps because of its appeal to our sense of endless possibility, has become the imaginative site for re-envisioning how black, indigenous and other oppressed people can relate to each other outside of and despite the colonial gaze.” (Photo Credit: Indigenous Education Institute) These previous examples should serve as a reminder that the historical underpinnings of our great national myth are built upon shaky intellectual ground—we need to be honest about this. America did not just spring forth out of nothing; it came from the brutal occupation and control of Native lands. Despite the best efforts of the settler state, Native people are still here, we still exist and make vital contributions to both our tribal communities and science. We cannot expect Donald Trump to turn his back on the national myth of what made the United States the United States—in his mind, this is the glorious history of what made America great in the past. And it should serve as no surprise that Trump and others wish to extend this history into outer space. Even when Trump’s days in the White House are over, the settler colonial logics that underpin our engagement with land on Earth will still loom large over the ways that we may potentially engage with outer space. But for those of us who do work in Indigenous geographies and Indigenous studies, it becomes even more vital that we heed the calls of Indigenous thinkers inside and outside formal academic structures, validate Indigenous histories, and push to deconstruct the American settler myth and to provide a new way of looking at the stars, especially at a crucial moment where the settler state turns its gaze towards the same. Western colonial frameworks render Nativeness as the raw material for settler vitality — refuse the re-scripting of Native life and death onto settler landscapes and colonial cartographies Urbanski 16. Claire Urbanski is a doctoral candidate in Feminist Studies with a designated emphasis in Critical Race and Ethnic Studies. As a scholar and social justice activist invested in collective liberation, her work considers how settler colonial ideologies of Indigenous dispossession and gendered violence structure and inform relationships between place, identity, and land. Her doctoral research examines how knowledges of spiritual afterlife have shaped ongoing material structures of United States settler colonial empire ("Genocidal Intimacies: Settler Desire and Carceral Geographies," 2016, American Studies Association) vikas Connecting Kim TallBear and Philip Deloria’s work, we can understand how Western colonial scientific frameworks render ‘Nativeness’ into a material resource, already belonging to settler society, which can be mined for value; its imaginary, raw, authentic qualities are desired to make settler identity meaningful and to construct intimate belongings with landscape. Thinking about desires to consume and own flesh (or bone), and rendering bone into personal property, Alexander Weheliye’s concept of ‘pornotroping’ gets at the ways that the captive body is a “source of an irresistible, destructive sensuality” and at the same time is “reduced to a thing, to being for the captor” (90). Orlando Patterson also discusses the imagined intimacy between enslavers and captive bodies, as well as a fear of danger waiting in the spiritual realm for the enslaver because of his actions; which is assuaged through imagining a ‘benevolent enslavement,’ thus assuring a salvation for the enslaver. I do not mean to collapse the very differing racializing projects of antiBlackness and Indigenous dispossession into being the same thing, while also recognizing their inseparable entanglements in the mutual constitution of settler colonialism, and also acknowledging that perhaps my easy comparison here is very problematic; I do want to think about the space of settler sexualized desire for captive bodies, and connect it to a sexualized and intimate desire for captured dead bodies. How do settlers form (imagined) belongings through imagined intimacies with Indigenous dead? How does anti-Black consumption facilitate white settler intimacies with landscapes? What kinds of sexualized and intimate fantasies are being enacted through the dissection and hoarding of corpses, or the extraction of energy from human bones? When does the researcher, or witch, imagine and perform a fabricated emotional intimacy with the dead, and when is the dead body simply an object from which to extract, or dismember? I’m reflecting on Audra Simpson’s comments on yesterday’s panel “Colonial Unknowing and Biopolitics,” which speaking on the ruse of consent that settler society depicts in its relations with Indigenous peoples, I call attention to the coercive intimacy researchers, and perhaps witches, enforce onto the dead. I do acknowledge and hesitate at my oversimplification of histories and meanings of witchcraft, and at the same time, I do take seriously the settler colonial fantasies that very much inform the increasing popularity of witchcraft particularly amongst white queer identified settlers. To conclude, I have begun to consider the historical and ongoing extractive projects that seek to render Indigenous bones into material resources - to be excavated, consumed, dismembered, and the particular logics of containment projected onto the dead through settler imaginaries. I ask how are the bones of the dead consumed in order to enact queer settler belongings imagined to be subversive to the state, yet ultimately naturalizing of, and thus reinforcing to, a settler colonial project? Thinking with the work of Sylvia Wynter and Jodi Byrd, projects of settler colonial grave excavation reveal an important process in how meanings of ‘symbolic life and death’ are mapped onto landscape through their centrality in establishing the normative standards of ‘Western Man’ as ‘human’ and as foundational to the parameters of US legal personhood, furthermore, genocidal intimacies draws attention to the sexualized productions of colonial carceral geographies. Settler belonging is accessed through genocidal intimacies, which are both informed by and reproductive of the carceral grounds from which militarized settler space and racializing technologies of social death can be erected and enacted. The alternative is to refuse the affirmative’s endorsement of settler political selfhood. This isn’t “reject the aff”—it’s a micro-political process that destabilizes the settler psyche by breaking down the coherence of settler colonialism built through repetition. Debate is an ethical affirmation of a certain ideology. Voting neg forces a confrontation of the genocidal settlement, destabilizing the settler subject—that comes prior to evaluating the settler truth claims of the aff. Henderson 15 Henderson, Phil. (2015). Imagoed communities: the psychosocial space of settler colonialism. Settler Colonial Studies, 7(1), 40–56. doi:10.1080/2201473x.2015.1092194 JParkrecut anop At a distance, the duplicity here is quite strange. Lines are drowned, forests are cut, nets are stolen, because settlers know reflexively that they have a right – duty even – to shape the vacant land according to their collective and individual needs. Yet, the very things which they seek to remove should prove the falsity of terra nullius, as they evidence indigenous presence. The settler subject is able to gloss the violence of his actions so easily, however, because he is ultimately the product of, and dependent upon, a series of power relations that actively disappear indigenous peoples as active sovereign bodies. Within the psychosocial order of settler sovereignty, supported by the settler imago, these acts are understood as progressive or represent an adherence to the law, and become unreadable to the settler for what they are: the latest in a series of dispossessive acts. Destabilizing a dispossessive subject Not only does the concept of the spatial imago allow us to interrogate the formation of the settler as a subject, it also provides a powerful analytical tool to explain the extreme vitriolic reactions that indigenous peoples constantly face from settlers. Many point to racism as 10 P. HENDERSON Downloaded by New York University at 15:35 26 February 2016 the source of such reactions, and this is not without cause, as settlers have long imbibed a sense of racial and cultural superiority – particularly toward indigenous peoples. Despite these prejudices, however, Wolfe notes that the ‘primary motive’ of settler colonialism’s domination ‘is not race’ but ‘access to territory’. 63 Thus, inasmuch as the settler colonial imago validates access to territory by occluding indigenous sovereignty, the ongoing presences on and claims to the land by indigenous peoples trouble the settler imago and induce panic in settler subjects. Facing assertive indigenous presences within settler colonial spaces, settlers must answer the legitimate charge that their daily life – in all its banality – is predicated upon the privileges produced by ongoing genocide. The jarring nature of such charges offers an irreconcilable challenge to settlers qua settlers.64 Should these charges become impossible to ignore, they threaten to explode the imago of settler colonialism, which had hitherto operated within the settler psyche in a relatively smooth and benign manner. This explosion is potentiated by the revelation of even a portion of the violence that is required to make settler life possible. If, for example, settlers are forced to see ‘their’ beach as a site of murder and ongoing colonization, it becomes more difficult to sustain it within the imaginary as a site of frivolity.65 As Brown writes, in the ‘loss of horizons, order, and identity’ the subject experiences a sense of enormous vulnerability.66 Threatened with this ‘loss of containment’, the settler subject embarks down the road to psychosis.67 Thus, to parlay Brown’s thesis to the settler colonial context, the uncontrollable rage that indigenous presences induce within the settler is not evidence of the strength of settlers, but rather of a subject lashing out on the brink of its own dissolution. This panic – this rabid and insatiable anger – is always already at the core of the settler as a subject. As Lorenzo Veracini observes, the settler necessarily remains in a disposition of aggression ‘even after indigenous alterities have ceased to be threatening’. 68 This disposition results from the precarity inherent in the maintenance of settler colonialism’s imago, wherein any and all indigenous presences threaten subjective dissolution of the settler as such. Trapped in a Gordian Knot, the very thing that provides a balm to the settler subject – further development and entrenchment of the settler colonial imago – is also what panics the subject when it is inevitably contravened.69 We might think of this as a process of hardening that leaves the imago brittle and more susceptible to breakage. Their desire to produce a firm imago means that settlers are also always already in a psychically defensive position – that is, the settler’s offensive position on occupied land is sustained through a defensive posture. For while settlers desire the total erasure of indigenous populations, the attendant desire to disappear their own identity as settlers necessitates the suppression of both desires, if the subject’s reliance on settler colonial power structure is to be psychically naturalized. Settlers’ reactions to indigenous peoples fit, almost universally, with the two ego defense responses that Sigmund Freud observed. The first of these defenses is to attempt a complete conversion of the suppressed desire into a new idea. In settler colonial contexts, this requires averting attention from the violence of dispossession; as such, settlers often suggest that they aim to create a ‘city on the hill’. 70 Freud noted that the conversion defense mechanism does suppress the anxiety-inducing desire, but it also leads to ‘periodic hysterical outbursts’. Such is the case when settlers’ utopic visions are forced to confront the reality that the gentile community they imagine is founded in and perpetuates irredeemable suffering. A second type of defense is to channel the original desire’s energy into an obsession or a phobia. The effects of this defense are seen in the preoccupation that settler colonialism has with purity of blood or of community.71 As we have already seen, this obsession at once solidifies the power of the settler state, thereby naturalizing the settler and simultaneously perpetuating the processes of erasing indigenous peoples. Psychic defenses are intended to secure the subject from pain, and whether that pain originates inside or outside the psyche is inconsequential. Because of the threat that indigeneity presents to the phantasmatic wholeness of settler colonialism, settlers must always remain suspended in a state of arrested development between these defensive positions. Despite any pretensions to the contrary, the settler is necessarily a parochial subject who continuously coils, reacts, disavows, and lashes out, when confronted with his dependency on indigenous peoples and their territory. This psychic precarity exists at the core of the settler subject because of the unending fear of its own dissolution, should indigenous sovereignty be recognized.72 Goeman writes as an explicit challenge to other indigenous peoples, but this holds true to settler-allies as well, that decolonization must include an analysis of the dominant ‘self-disciplining colonial subject’. 73 However, as this discussion of subjective precarity demonstrates, the degree of to which these disciplinary or phenomenological processes are complete should not be overstated. For settler-allies must also examine and cultivate the ways in which settler subjects fail to be totally disciplined. Evidence of this incompletion is apparent in the subject’s arrested state of development. Discovering the instability at the core of the settler subject, indeed of all subjects, is the central conceit of psychoanalysis. This exception of at least partial failure to fully subjectivize the settler is also what sets my account apart from Rifkin’s. His phenomenology falls into the trap that Jacqueline Rose observes within many sociological accounts of the subject: that of assuming a successful internalization of norms. From the psychoanalytical perspective, the ‘unconscious constantly reveals the “failure”’ of internalization.74 As we have seen, within settler subjects this can be expressed as an irrational anxiety that expresses itself whenever a settler is confronted with the facts regarding their colonizing status. Under conditions of total subjectification, such charges ought to be unintelligible to the settler. Thus, the process of subject formation is always in slippage and never totalized as others might suggest.75 Because of this precarity, the settler subject is prone to violence and lashing out; but the subject in slippage also provides an avenue by which the process of settler colonialism can be subverted – creating cracks in a phantasmatic wholeness which can be opened wider. Breakages of this sort offer an opportunity to pursue what Paulette Regan calls a ‘restorying’ of settler colonial history and culture, to decanter settler mythologies built upon and within the dispossession of indigenous peoples.76 The cultivation of these cracks is a necessary part of decolonizing work, as it continues to panic and thus to destabilize settler subjects. Resistance to settler colonialism does not occur only in highly visible moments like the famous conflict at Kanesatake and Kahnawake,77 it also occurs in reiterative and disruptive practices, presences, and speech acts. Goeman correctly observes that the ‘repetitive practices of everyday life’ are what give settler spaces their meaning, as they provide a degree of naturalness to the settler imago and its psychic investments.78 As such, to disrupt the ease of these repetitions is at once to striate radically the otherwise smooth spaces of settler colonialism and also to disrupt the easy (re)production of the settler subject. Goeman calls these subversive acts the ‘micro-politics of resistance’, which historically 12 P. HENDERSON Downloaded by New York University at 15:35 26 February 2016 took the form of ‘moving fences, not cooperating with census enumerators, sometimes disrupting survey parties’ amongst other process.79 These acts panic the subject that is disciplined as a product of settler colonial power, by forcing encounters with the sovereign indigenous peoples that were imagined to be gone. This reveals to the settler, if only fleetingly, the violence that founds and sustains the settler colonial relationship. While such practices may not overthrow the settler colonial system, they do subvert its logics by insistently drawing attention to the ongoing presence of indigenous peoples who refuse erasure. Today, we can draw similar inspiration from the variety of tactics used in movements like Idle No More. From flash mobs in major malls, to round dances that block city streets, and even projects to rename Toronto locations, Idle No More is engaged in a series of micro-political projects across Turtle Island.80 The micro-politics of the movement strengthen indigenous subjects and their spatialities, while leaving an indelible imprint in the settler psyche. Predictably, rage and resentment were provoked in some settlers;81 however, Idle No More also drew thousands of settler-allies into the streets and renewed conversations about the necessity of nation-to-nation relationships. With settler colonial spaces disrupted and a relationship of domination made impossible to ignore, in the tradition of centuries of indigenous resistance, Idle No More put the settler subject into serious flux once more. The counterinterpretation is that you should evaluate the 1AC as an object of study a Sociogeny – debate may not spill over to political change but it has the potential to reproduce affirmations and negations that trigger neurohcmeical responses via reward and punishment mechanisms privilege certain research methods as valuable in the way debaters view the world. b Objectivity – consequence based plan focus shifts the focus of debate from our investments in settler colonialism to a plan text, which is incoherent because debate is a communicative activity and their inter sidesteps discussions of genocide. c Temporality – the affs models teaches violence can be wished away through administrative tinkering propogating desires within debate to play as activits without reimagnign the social structures that cause violence in the first place. Viewing the ballot as an mechanism to restore ethicality fails – they still dogmatically adhere to these protocols even though they know debate doesn’t caus emateiral change. That creates an process where nativeness is confined to death as their promise of a fiated political horizon relies on a politics of futurity
1/8/22
JF - T - Unjust
Tournament: Churchill | Round: 1 | Opponent: Strake JW | Judge: Breigh Plat Interp: The affirmative must defend the ban of private actor appropriation of Outer Space - not a reduction.
Unjust means dialectically contrary to law – only ban does that. The Law Dictionary, ND, Def of Unjust, URL: https://thelawdictionary.org/unjust/#:~:text=Contrary20to20right20and20justice,conduct20furnished20by20the20laws, KR Contrary to right and justice, or to the enjoyment of his rights by another, or to the standards of conduct furnished by the laws. Unjust means opposed to law. FreeDictionary TheFreeDictionary, Unjust, xx-xx-xxxx,https://legal-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/Unjust, 12-17-2021 amrita UNJUST. That which is done against the perfect rights of another; that which is against the established law; that which is opposed to a law which is the test of right and wrong.
Merriam Webster defines restrict as: put a limit on; keep under control
Standards: Limits – their interp explodes the topic to any restraint on entities instead of banning them – regulating asteroid mining, creating cooperation between countries’ satellites, or creating safety measures in exploration tech – 2 impacts 1 clash – pushes neg prep to the fringes and forces generics that kill well researched contestation of the aff – o/w bc we can read books outside of round but clash is unique to debate 2 ground – they kill regulation CPs which are critical to neg ground because the lit advocates for safe exploration of space. Also kills DA ground bc they can mitigate link risk by advocating for regulations which means space exploration is still possible. Unfair division of ground o/w – pre round prep controls the internal link to in round abuse 3 Topic ed – Bans are one of the most common and is most germane to the literature – increases the amount of ground and ability to have deep debates on the model which the majority of the literature is centered around as opposed to an irrelevant model that kills critical thinking abilities.
1 Fairness – debate is a competitive activity that requires fairness for objective evaluation. 2 Education – only thing portable from debate we care about what we learn not if we’re fair
Drop the debater – a deter future abuse and b set better norms for debate.
Competing Interps: 1 reasonability on t is incoherent: you’re either topical or you’re not – it’s impossible to be 77 topical, links to all limits offense 2 functionally the same as reasonability – we debate over a specified briteline which is a counter interp 3 judge intervention – judge has to intervene on what’s reasonable, creates a race to the bottom where debaters exploit judge tolerance for questionable argumentation.
No RVIs 1 illogical for you to get offense just for being fair – it’s the 1ac’s burden 2 baiting - rvi’s incentivize debaters to read abusive positions to win off theory 3 discourages checking abuse since debaters will be afraid to lose on theory
1/8/22
ND - CP - ICJ
Tournament: Apple Valley | Round: 2 | Opponent: Proof DR | Judge: Claudia Ribera Counterplan text – The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland ought to ---enter a prior, binding, and genuine consultation with the International Court of Justice to issue a binding ruling to recognize an unconditional right of workers to strike. ---pass a concurrent resolution that non-compliance with the International Court of Justice’s ruling constitutes an enforceable violation of Charter obligations.
ICJ says yes and creates a culture of acculturation that socializes acceptance of international law – the aff shreds that. Brudney 21 James; 2/8/21; Joseph Crowley Chair in Labor and Employment Law, Fordham Law School; “The Right to Strike as Customary International Law,” THE YALE JOURNAL OF INTERNATIONAL LAW, Vol 46, https://digitalcommons.law.yale.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1710andcontext=yjil Justin Brackets in original C. FOA and the Right to Strike as Opinio Juris There is also considerable support for the proposition that the general practice of states on FOA and the right to strike stems from acceptance as a matter of legal obligation. Admittedly, while the existence of opinio juris may be inferred from a general practice, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) has at times noted the insufficiency or inconclusiveness of such practice, instead seeking confirmation that "states' conduct is 'evidence of a belief that this practice is rendered obligatory by the existence of a rule of law requiring it. ",149 Trade agreements, for instance, may represent treaty law and may qualify as evidence of general practice, but they are typically entered into by States that have specific economic or political objectives rather than from a desire to embrace obligations arising under international law.15° Further, it is possible that even with respect to ILO conventions, widespread ratification is in part a function of acculturation, insofar as endorsements across a region contribute to socialized acceptance of norms on FOA, reassuring peer countries that protecting rights to association including the right to strike will not place them in an inferior competitive position. 151 That said, the ICJ often does infer the existence of opinio juris from a general practice and/or from determinations by national or international tribunals.152 And there are ample reasons to draw such an inference here. To start, FOA is consciously accepted as an obligation by ILO member states not simply through ratification of Convention 87 (covering more than 80 percent of them) but by virtue of membership itself. The ILO Constitution expressly requires support for FOA principles, and these principles are further imbedded through a tripartite governance structure that allocates power-sharing roles to worker organizations alongside governments and employers. 153 Thus, ILO members understand there is an underlying obligation to respect FOA in law and practice.154 A second reason is that domestic law can provide relevant evidence regarding the presence of opinio juris among states. Commitments to FOA expressed in national constitutions, statutes, and court decisions are not necessarily evidence of a state's belief that the principle is international as opposed to domestic law. Nonetheless, the International Law Commission has made clear that evidence of acceptance as law (opinio juris) "may take a wide range of forms," including but not limited to "official publications; government legal opinions; and decisions of national courts." 155 In this regard, the CEACR in 2012 identified 92 countries where "the right to strike is explicitly recognized, including at the constitutional level"; the list includes six countries that have not ratified Convention 87.156 Recognition in domestic law of a right to strike alongside a conscious decision not to ratify Convention 87 could give rise to an inference that these six countries are rejecting the right as a principle of international law. However, as explained earlier, national courts for two of the six non-ratifying countries (Brazil and Kenya) expressly invoke ILO membership and/or principles as guidance in their domestic law decisions.157 In addition, Canada—a country not listed among the 92 endorsing the right to strike in the 2012 General Survey—has since recognized a constitutional right to strike under national law, relying in part on international law principles including CEACR and CFA determinations.158 The Canadian Supreme Court had previously been explicit in invoking Convention 87, ICESCR, and ICCPR as "documents that reflect not only international consensus but also principles that Canada has committed itself to uphold." 159 Further, a third country in the group of six—South Korea—has affirmed in its trade agreements with the United States and the EU its obligation to "adopt and maintain in its statutes and regulations, and practices" FOA in accordance with the ILO Declaration.16° And in various CFA complaints against South Korea for violating FOA principles, including the right to strike, the Government has disputed the facts of the complaints while at the same time recognizing that such rights are embedded in international law.161 Accordingly, a more relevant reference point in this setting may be that "when States act in conformity with a treaty provision by which they are not bound . . . this may evidence the existence of acceptance as law (opinio juris) in the absence of any explanation to the contrary.3 3162 Stepping back, domestic law on FOA and the right to strike, which for many countries developed after Convention 87 and its initial applications by the CEACR and CFA, may be viewed in part as a window into countries' sense of obligation in law and practice. A state may at times adopt labor provisions of a trade agreement for reasons of comity or relative competitive advantage. These reasons may play a more modest role with respect to adoption of certain human rights treaties or ILO conventions. 163 But evidence of practice and obligation in the domestic law sphere—especially when informed by regard for international instruments—seems almost by definition to be a function of acceptance as law rather than susceptibility to strategic motivations. In this regard, there are numerous instances in recent years where governments have expanded their legislative protections for the right to strike following a period of dialogue with the CEACR, and that committee has recognized and applauded the changes in law. 164 Of particular relevance to the U.S. setting, these expansions have included assuring the right to strike for public sector employees and prohibiting the hiring of replacements for strikers. 165 A third reason to infer opinio juris (in addition to the centrality of FOA principles within the ILO Constitution and the strong evidence of FOA and right-to-strike practice and obligation under domestic law) involves recent statements from high officials in the United Nations indicating that the right to strike is understood by its leaders as CIL. In his 2016 report to the U.N. General Assembly, the U.N. Special Rapporteur on the rights to freedom of peaceful assembly and association explained, "The right to strike has been established in international law for decades, in global and regional instruments, and is also enshrined in the constitutions of at least 90 countries. The right to strike has, in fact, become customary international law.'5166 In 2018, responding to a press briefing on a strike by U.N. employees following announced pay cuts, the Deputy Spokesman for the U.N. Secretary-General reiterated the U.N. view that the right to strike is indeed CIL and did so in the context of the right being asserted by public employees not involved in the administration of the state: Question: Does the Secretary-General believe that U.N. staff have a right to take part in industrial action? Deputy Spokesman: We believe the right to strike is part of customary international law. 167 These statements did not simply materialize in recent times. Two major U.N. Human Rights treaties—the ICESCR and the ICCPR—have been interpreted by their relevant treaty bodies to include a right to strike; these bodies have reaffirmed their joint commitment to the right to strike as part of FOA, and they regularly monitor governments' record of compliance with this right. 168 And as noted earlier, the two treaties—each ratified by over 80 percent of U.N members—include a clause explicitly identifying respect for ILO Convention 87. In sum, the principles of FOA including the right to strike would appear to satisfy both prongs of the CIL test. The widely recognized general practice on strikes has sufficient shape and contours: a basic right, three substantive exceptions (public servants involved in administration of the state, essential services in the strict sense of the term, and acute national emergencies), a recognition that strikers retain their employment relationship during the strike itself, and certain procedural prerequisites or attached conditions.169 There are variations in national practice and also disagreements at the margins about what the right to strike protects, but these aspects are not different in kind from diversity and contests regarding international rights prohibiting child labor, or for that matter domestic constitutional rights involving freedom of expression or the right to bear arms. As for opinio juris, a broad range of sources combine to establish that the general practice stems from a sense of acceptance and obligation: ILO foundation and structure; two widely endorsed United Nations human rights treaties; national constitutions; government representations; domestic legislative and judicial decisions that expressly refer to or impliedly accept international standards and practices; and contemporary U.N. leadership.
Ruling on the right to strike secures the legitimacy of the ICJ as an international mediation body. Hofmann and Schuster 16 Claudia and Norbert; February 2016; Dr. Claudia Hofmann works as a research associate at the Chair for Public Law and Policy at the University of Regensburg. She specializes in public international law (in particular the field of socio-economic human rights and equality-oriented policies), social law, constitutional and administrative law. Norbert Schuster works as a lawyer in Berlin and teaches at the University of Bremen. He specialises in labour law; “It ain’t over ‘til it’s over: the right to strike and the mandate of the ILO Committee of Experts revisited,” https://global-labour-university.org/fileadmin/GLU_Working_Papers/GLU_WP_No.40.pdf Justin BASES FOR A POTENTIAL RULING BY THE INTERNATIONAL COURT OF JUSTICE The question of whether the Committee has left the area of interpretation and entered the sphere of standard-setting can only be answered on a case by case basis. As has been indicated before, the primary question for an advisory opinion of the ICJ is whether Convention No. 87 contains a right to strike (see Section IV). What follows is, therefore, a cursory glance at the legal bases for an ICJ opinion, so as to sketch the broad outlines of a possible decision. Under Art 37.1 of the ILO Constitution, taken together with Art 36 of the ICJ Statute, the International Court of Justice is responsible for questions or differences of opinion about the interpretation of the ILO Constitution and the ILO Conventions. This reflects the function of the ICJ as an international mediation body inasmuch as cases are to be referred to the ICJ when the parties to a treaty disagree about the interpretation of a norm within the treaty. Let us assume that such a disagreement exists here as to whether, in particular, Art 3 of ILO Convention No. 87 also accords trade unions a right to strike.85 The Committee of Experts and the Committee on Freedom of Association have expressed a legal opinion on this. In the current legal situation, i.e. in the absence of concrete rules explicitly granting the Committee of Experts a corresponding interpretative competence, the competence to decide on this issue rests with the ICJ. Upon what sources of law and which principles will the ICJ base its decision? Two provisions are particularly relevant here. One is Art 38 of the ICJ Statute and the other is Art 31 of the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties (VCLT).
UN Charter solves – empirics. Abiodun 18 Amuda-Kannike, and Sylvanus Abila. "A Critical Examination of the Enforcement of ICJ Decisions through the Organs of the United Nations." Journal of Law and Criminal Justice 6.1 (2018): 21-46. Faculty of Law at Poma University Elmer Further, the study has also shown that irrespective of the powers of the enabling statute, there is the need to resort to the UN Charter for such directive especially where non-compliance of a recalcitrant party can threaten world peace and security. To this end, as was observed in the Pan Am case, the UN Charter is superior to any other international instrument and its provisions can be the basis for judgment enforcement directives to an international organization to act outside the mandates of its enabling statu8te. It is recommended that there should be immediate restriction of the use of “veto” power on the ICJ decisions in other to give enough respect to the said decision by not only the member nations but all the nations of the World. This will bring about separation of powers to work in favour of the ICJ as an independent institution instead of being subjected to the control and manipulations of the permanent members of the Security Council. The provisions of Article 94(2) of the UN Charter should be amended to state that the Security Council should immediately ensure compliance with the ICJ Decisions instead of “if they deem necessary”. It is equally recommended that once there is a decision of the ICJ, it must be readily carried out by all the organs of the United Nations and any member nation who refused to carry out or support the carrying out of such decision or decisions should be the suspended or expelled from membership of the organs of the United Nations, or even from the United Nations in General in addition to the penalty of a fine of $100,000 (one hundred thousand dollars) within 3 months of non-compliance.
ICJ legitimacy is key to global multilateralism and crisis stability – it’s declining now. Kornelios Korneliou 18 Permanent Representative of Cyprus and Vice-President of the 73rd Session of the UN General assembly, "Report of the International Court of Justice," United Nations, 10-25-2018 https://www.un.org/pga/73/2018/10/25/report-of-the-international-court-of-justice/ Recut Justin In the face of the headwinds against the multilateral system and global institutions, including direct attacks on their legitimacy, the International Court of Justice stands as testament to the principles of peace and justice in a multilateral world. Today’s debate builds on fifty years of exchange between the Court and the General Assembly, allowing Member States the opportunity to debate the work of the Court. This historic exchange is particularly pertinent to the 73rd Session of the General Assembly, which aims to ‘make the UN relevant to all’. The court system serves as a bulwark against arbitrariness and provides the mechanism for peaceful settlement of disputes, guaranteeing the stability so necessary for international cooperation. For the peoples of the world, the court may be far away but its impact is real. Excellencies, I am encouraged by the continued and enhanced confidence in the International Court of Justice. Not only has the Court’s workload increased over the last 20-years but this trend has continued into the period under review, demonstrating unequivocally that there remains a need and desire for a multilateral mechanism to address legal challenges of international concern. The variety of cases addressed by the court, and the fact that these cases stem from four continents, is also testament to the universality of the Court. In fact, as of today a total of 73 Member States have accepted, as compulsory, the jurisdiction of the Court. In addition to the Court’s role in advancing multilateralism, its judgements and advisory opinion directly influence the development and strengthening of the rule of law in countries the world over. As stated by the report: “everything the court does is aimed at promoting and reinforcing the rule of law, through its judgement and advisory opinions, it contributes to developing and clarifying international law.” Finally, at a time when human rights abuses and conflict devastate the lives of millions, and when tensions simmer in regions throughout the world, the adjudication of disputes between states remains an essential role of the Court in preserving peace and security. We welcome the continued readiness by the Court to intervene when other diplomatic or political means have proven unsuccessful. For Member States, respect for the decisions, judgements, advice, and orders of the Court remains critical for the efficacy and longevity of the international Justice System. The General Assembly has thus called upon States that have not yet done so to consider accepting the jurisdiction of the Court in accordance with its Statute. In closing, allow me to reiterate: if we are to preserve the international multilateral system, then adherence and respect for international law remains key.
Multilateralism solves a bunch of impacts – even a tiny net benefit is enough to o/w the AFF Esther Brimmer 14 Assistant Secretary for the Bureau of International Organization Affairs at the United States Department of State from April 2009 to June 2013, “Smart Power” and Multilateral Diplomacy, June, http://transatlantic.sais-jhu.edu/publications/books/Smarter20Power/Chapter20420brimmer.pdf Recut Justin Over the subsequent decade, the variable definitions of Smart Power have evolved to reflect a rapidly changing foreign affairs landscape – a landscape shaped increasingly by transnational issues and what can only be described as truly global challenges. Nations of the world must now calibrate their foreign policy investments to try to leverage new opportunities while protecting their interests from emerging vulnerabilities. Smart Power is no longer an alternative path; it is a four-lane imperative. ¶ The world in 2014 is fundamentally different from previous periods, growing vastly more interconnected, interdependent, networked, and complex. National economies are in many cases inextricably intertwined, with cross-border imports and exports increasing nearly tenfold over the past forty years, and more than doubling over just the past decade. At the same time, we are all connected – and connected immediately – to news and events that in past generations would have been restricted to their local vicinities.¶ Consider, for example, the 2011 tsunami that devastated parts of Japan. Not only did we know in real time of the earthquake that triggered the tsunami, we had live coverage of some of the tsunami’s most devastating impacts and then round-the-clock coverage of the Fukushima nuclear power plant crisis. Communications technology brings such events to us without delay and in high definition. This communications revolution, headlined by the explosion of social media, carries with it the almost unlimited potential to inform and educate. It also provides people and communities with new ability to influence and advance their causes – both benevolent and otherwise, as the dramatic events of recent years in North Africa and the Middle East have made clear. ¶ At the same time, global power is more diffuse today than in centuries. Although predictions of the nation-state’s demise have gone unrealized, non-state actors – including NGOs, corporations, and international organizations - are more influential today than perhaps at any point in human history. The same might be said for transnational criminal networks and other harmful actors. Concurrently, we are witnessing the rise of new centers of influence – the so-called “emerging” nations – that are seeking and gaining positions of global leadership. These emerging powers bring unique histories and new perspectives to the discussion of current challenges and the future of global governance. Several of these countries are democracies and share many of the core values of the United States; others have sharply different political systems and perspectives. All are gauging how to be more active in the global arena. ¶ It is this new, more diffused global system that must now find means of addressing today’s pressing global challenges – challenges that in many cases demand Smart Power ingenuity. From terrorism to nuclear proliferation, climate change to pandemic disease, transnational crime to cyber attacks, violations of fundamental human rights to natural disasters, today’s most urgent security challenges pay no heed to state borders. ¶ So, just as global power is more diffuse, so too are the opposing threats and challenges, and it is in this new reality that the United States must define and employ its Smart Power resources. That reality demands a definition that must now far exceed the origin parameters of hard and soft. Many of these challenges would be unresponsive to traditional Hard tools (coercion, economic sanctions, military force), while the application of Soft tools (norm advancement, cultural influence, public diplomacy) in customary channels is likely to provide unsatisfactory impact. ¶ Ultimately, the other component necessary in today’s Smart Power alchemy is robust, focused, and sustained international cooperation. In effect, in an increasing number of instances, Smart Power must now feature shared power, and in that context foreign policy choices must follow two related but distinct axes. ¶ First, those policy choices must strengthen a state’s overall stature and influence (rather than diminish it), leaving the state undertaking the action in a position of equal or greater global standing. This is easier said than done. The proliferation in challenges facing all states has created a need for multiple, simultaneous diplomatic transactions among a broadening cast of actors. Given the nature of today’s threats facing states both large and small, those transactions have never been more frequent and at times overlapping – a reality that requires new agility and synchronization within foreign policy hierarchies. States that are less capable of responding to this new reality may experience diminished political capital and international standing by acting on contemporary threats in isolation or without a full appreciation of the reigning international sentiment. Many observers have highlighted U.S. decision-making in advance of the 2003 Iraq invasion as indicative of just this phenomenon. ¶ Alternatively, states applying a new Smart Power approach to their foreign policy recognize the overlapping need to maintain global standing and stature while seeking resolution of individual policy challenges. We see considerable effort on the part of emerging powers to find just that balance, and I would argue that the United States has also made great strides in that regard since 2009. ¶ Second, Smart Power policy choices must contribute to the strength and resilience of the international system. As noted above, the globalization of contemporary challenges and security threats has augmented the need for effective cooperation among states and other international actors, and placed even greater demands on the global network of international institutions, conferences, frameworks, and groupings in which these challenges are more and more frequently addressed. Given this heightened need for structures to facilitate international collaboration, states are more rarely undertaking foreign policy courses of action that entirely lack a multilateral component, or that feature no interaction with or demands upon the international architecture. As recent American history shows, even states with unilateral tendencies have found themselves returning to the multilateral fold to address aspects of a threat or challenge that simply cannot be addressed effectively alone.
11/6/21
ND - DA - Econ
Tournament: Apple Valley | Round: 2 | Opponent: Proof DR | Judge: Claudia Ribera China’s economy is growing but at a slower pace – resource shortages and governmental policies make growth tentative Keith Bradsher 21 , China’s Economy Continues to Slow, Rattled by Real Estate and Energy. No Publication (10-17-2021) https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/17/business/economy/china-economy-gdp.html//anop BEIJING — Steel mills have faced power cuts. Computer chip shortages have slowed car production. Troubled property companies have purchased less construction material. Floods have disrupted business in north-central China. It has all taken a toll on China’s economy, an essential engine for global growth. The National Bureau of Statistics announced on Monday that China’s economy increased 4.9 percent in the third quarter from the same period last year; the period was markedly slower than the 7.9 percent increase in the previous quarter. Industrial output, the mainstay of China’s growth, faltered badly, especially in September, posting its worst performance since the early days of the pandemic. Two bright spots prevented the economy from stalling. Exports remained strong. And families, particularly prosperous ones, resumed spending money on restaurant meals and other services in September, as China succeeded again in quelling small outbreaks of the coronavirus. Retail sales were up 4.4 percent in September from a year earlier. Chinese officials are showing signs of concern, although they have refrained so far from unleashing a big economic stimulus. “The current international environment uncertainties are mounting, and the domestic economic recovery is still unstable and uneven,” said Fu Linghui, the spokesman for the National Bureau of Statistics. The government’s own efforts, though, are part of the current economic challenges. In recent months, the government has unleashed a raft of measures to address income inequality and tame businesses, in part with the goal of protecting the health of the economy. But those efforts, including penalizing tech companies and discouraging real estate speculation, have also weighed on growth in the current quarter. The government had also imposed limits on energy use as a part of a broader response to climate change concerns. Now, the power shortages are hurting industry, and the country is rushing to burn more coal. “The economy is sluggish,” said Yang Qingjun, the owner of a corner grocery store in an aging industrial neighborhood of shoe factories in Dongguan, near Hong Kong. Power cuts have prompted nearby factories to reduce operations and eliminate overtime pay. Local workers are living more frugally. “Money is hard to earn,” Mr. Yang said. Strikes deck economy– 3 warrants 1 Stop investment Tenza 20 - Tenza, Mlungisi. . Senior Lecturer, University of KwaZulu-Natal “The Effects of Violent Strikes on the Economy of a Developing Country: A Case of South Africa.” Obiter, Nelson Mandela University, 2020, http://www.scielo.org.za/scielo.php?script=sci_arttextandamp;pid=S1682-58532020000300004VS These strikes are not only violent but take long to resolve. Generally, a lengthy strike has a negative effect on employment, reduces business confidence and increases the risk of economic stagflation. In addition, such strikes have a major setback on the growth of the economy and investment opportunities. It is common knowledge that consumer spending is directly linked to economic growth. At the same time, if the economy is not showing signs of growth, employment opportunities are shed, and poverty becomes the end result. The economy of South Africa is in need of rapid growth to enable it to deal with the high levels of unemployment and resultant poverty. One of the measures that may boost the country's economic growth is by attracting potential investors to invest in the country. However, this might be difficult as investors would want to invest in a country where there is a likelihood of getting returns for their investments. The wish of getting returns for investment may not materialise if the labour environment is not fertile for such investments as a result of, for example, unstable labour relations. Therefore, investors may be reluctant to invest where there is an unstable or fragile labour relations environment. 2 Strikes negatively impact labor and confidence, causing major economic losses Tenza 20 - Tenza, Mlungisi. . Senior Lecturer, University of KwaZulu-Natal “The Effects of Violent Strikes on the Economy of a Developing Country: A Case of South Africa.” Obiter, Nelson Mandela University, 2020, http://www.scielo.org.za/scielo.php?script=sci_arttextandamp;pid=S1682-58532020000300004. VS When South Africa obtained democracy in 1994, there was a dream of a better country with a new vision for industrial relations.5 However, the number of violent strikes that have bedevilled this country in recent years seems to have shattered-down the aspirations of a better South Africa. South Africa recorded 114 strikes in 2013 and 88 strikes in 2014, which cost the country about R6.1 billion according to the Department of Labour.6 The impact of these strikes has been hugely felt by the mining sector, particularly the platinum industry. The biggest strike took place in the platinum sector where about 70 000 mineworkers' downed tools for better wages. Three major platinum producers (Impala, Anglo American and Lonmin Platinum Mines) were affected. The strike started on 23 January 2014 and ended on 25 June 2014. Business Day reported that "the five-month-long strike in the platinum sector pushed the economy to the brink of recession".7 This strike was closely followed by a four-week strike in the metal and engineering sector. All these strikes (and those not mentioned here) were characterised with violence accompanied by damage to property, intimidation, assault and sometimes the killing of people. Statistics from the metal and engineering sector showed that about 246 cases of intimidation were reported, 50 violent incidents occurred, and 85 cases of vandalism were recorded.8 Large-scale unemployment, soaring poverty levels and the dramatic income inequality that characterise the South African labour market provide a broad explanation for strike violence.9 While participating in a strike, workers' stress levels leave them feeling frustrated at their seeming powerlessness, which in turn provokes further violent behaviour.10 These strikes are not only violent but take long to resolve. Generally, a lengthy strike has a negative effect on employment, reduces business confidence and increases the risk of economic stagflation. In addition, such strikes have a major setback on the growth of the economy and investment opportunities. It is common knowledge that consumer spending is directly linked to economic growth. At the same time, if the economy is not showing signs of growth, employment opportunities are shed, and poverty becomes the end result. The economy of South Africa is in need of rapid growth to enable it to deal with the high levels of unemployment and resultant poverty. 3 Strikes harm key industries, stunting economic growth McElroy 19 John McElroy MPA at McCombs school of Business 10/25/2019 "Strikes Hurt Everybody" https://www.wardsauto.com/ideaxchange/strikes-hurt-everybody VS This creates a poisonous relationship between the company and its workforce. Many GM hourly workers don’t identify as GM employees. They identify as UAW members. And they see the union as the source of their jobs, not the company. It’s an unhealthy dynamic that puts GM at a disadvantage to non-union automakers in the U.S. like Honda and Toyota, where workers take pride in the company they work for and the products they make. Attacking the company in the media also drives away customers. Who wants to buy a shiny new car from a company that’s accused of underpaying its workers and treating them unfairly? Data from the Center for Automotive Research (CAR) in Ann Arbor, MI, show that GM loses market share during strikes and never gets it back. GM lost two percentage points during the 1998 strike, which in today’s market would represent a loss of 340,000 sales. Because GM reports sales on a quarterly basis we’ll only find out at the end of December if it lost market share from this strike. UAW members say one of their greatest concerns is job security. But causing a company to lose market share is a sure-fire path to more plant closings and layoffs. Even so, unions are incredibly important for boosting wages and benefits for working-class people. GM’s UAW-represented workers earn considerably more than their non-union counterparts, about $26,000 more per worker, per year, in total compensation. Without a union they never would have achieved that. Strikes are a powerful weapon for unions. They usually are the only way they can get management to accede to their demands. If not for the power of collective bargaining and the threat of a strike, management would largely ignore union demands. If you took away that threat, management would pay its workers peanuts. Just ask the Mexican line workers who are paid $1.50 an hour to make $50,000 BMWs. But strikes don’t just hurt the people walking the picket lines or the company they’re striking against. They hurt suppliers, car dealers and the communities located near the plants. The Anderson Economic Group estimates that 75,000 workers at supplier companies were temporarily laid off because of the GM strike. Unlike UAW picketers, those supplier workers won’t get any strike pay or an $11,000 contract signing bonus. No, most of them lost close to a month’s worth of wages, which must be financially devastating for them. GM’s suppliers also lost a lot of money. So now they’re cutting budgets and delaying capital investments to make up for the lost revenue, which is a further drag on the economy. According to CAR, the communities and states where GM’s plants are located collectively lost a couple of hundred million dollars in payroll and tax revenue. Some economists warn that if the strike were prolonged it could knock the state of Michigan – home to GM and the UAW – into a recession. That prompted the governor of Michigan, Gretchen Whitmer, to call GM CEO Mary Barra and UAW leaders and urge them to settle as fast as possible. So, while the UAW managed to get a nice raise for its members, the strike left a path of destruction in its wake. That’s not fair to the innocent bystanders who will never regain what they lost. John McElroyI’m not sure how this will ever be resolved. I understand the need for collective bargaining and the threat of a strike. But there’s got to be a better way to get workers a raise without torching the countryside.
Just the right to strike contributes to econ damage– the right to strike is accompanied with increased strikes, many of them being violent, devastating key industries and the economy Tenza 20 - Tenza, Mlungisi. . Senior Lecturer, University of KwaZulu-Natal “The Effects of Violent Strikes on the Economy of a Developing Country: A Case of South Africa.” Obiter, Nelson Mandela University, 2020, http://www.scielo.org.za/scielo.php?script=sci_arttextandamp;pid=S1682-58532020000300004. VS Economic growth is one of the most important pillars of a state. Most developing states put in place measures that enhance or speed-up the economic growth of their countries. It is believed that if the economy of a country is stable, the lives of the people improve with available resources being shared among the country's inhabitants or citizens. However, it becomes difficult when the growth of the economy is hampered by the exercise of one or more of the constitutionally entrenched rights such as the right to strike.1 Strikes in South Africa are becoming more common, and this affects businesses, employees and their families, and eventually, the economy. It becomes more dangerous for the economy and society at large if strikes are accompanied by violence causing damage to property and injury to people. The duration of strikes poses a problem for the economy of a developing country like South Africa. South Africa is rich in mineral resources, the world's largest producer of platinum and chrome, the second-largest producer of zirconium and the third-largest exporter of coal. It also has the largest economy in Africa, both in terms of industrial capacity and gross domestic product (GDP).2 However, these economic advantages have been affected by protracted and violent strikes.3 For example, in the platinum industries, labour stoppages since 2012 have cost the sector approximately R18 billion lost in revenue and 900 000 oz in lost output. The five-month-long strike in early 2014 at Impala Platinum Mine amounted to a loss of about R400 million a day in revenue.4 The question that this article attempts to address is how violent strikes and their duration affect the growth of the economy in a developing country like South Africa. It also addresses the question of whether there is a need to change the policies regulating industrial action in South Africa to make them more favourable to economic growth. Econ collapse goes nuclear — extinction Mann 14 (Eric Mann is a special agent with a United States federal agency, with significant domestic and international counterintelligence and counter-terrorism experience. Worked as a special assistant for a U.S. Senator and served as a presidential appointee for the U.S. Congress. He is currently responsible for an internal security and vulnerability assessment program. Bachelors @ University of South Carolina, Graduate degree in Homeland Security @ Georgetown. “AUSTERITY, ECONOMIC DECLINE, AND FINANCIAL WEAPONS OF WAR: A NEW PARADIGM FOR GLOBAL SECURITY,” May 2014, https://jscholarship.library.jhu.edu/bitstream/handle/1774.2/37262/MANN-THESIS-2014.pdf) The conclusions reached in this thesis demonstrate how economic considerations within states can figure prominently into the calculus for future conflicts. The findings also suggest that security issues with economic or financial underpinnings will transcend classical determinants of war and conflict, and change the manner by which rival states engage in hostile acts toward one another. The research shows that security concerns emanating from economic uncertainty and the inherent vulnerabilities within global financial markets will present new challenges for national security, and provide developing states new asymmetric options for balancing against stronger states.¶ The security areas, identified in the proceeding chapters, are likely to mature into global security threats in the immediate future. As the case study on South Korea suggest, the overlapping security issues associated with economic decline and reduced military spending by the United States will affect allied confidence in America’s security guarantees. The study shows that this outcome could cause regional instability or realignments of strategic partnerships in the Asia-pacific region with ramifications for U.S. national security. Rival states and non-state groups may also become emboldened to challenge America’s status in the unipolar international system.¶ The potential risks associated with stolen or loose WMD, resulting from poor security, can also pose a threat to U.S. national security. The case study on Pakistan, Syria and North Korea show how financial constraints affect weapons security making weapons vulnerable to theft, and how financial factors can influence WMD proliferation by contributing to the motivating factors behind a trusted insider’s decision to sell weapons technology. The inherent vulnerabilities within the global financial markets will provide terrorists’ organizations and other non-state groups, who object to the current international system or distribution of power, with opportunities to disrupt global finance and perhaps weaken America’s status. A more ominous threat originates from states intent on increasing diversification of foreign currency holdings, establishing alternatives to the dollar for international trade, or engaging financial warfare against the United States.
11/6/21
ND - DA - Inflation
Tournament: Apple Valley | Round: 4 | Opponent: Lincoln East BH | Judge: Chetan Hertzig Best studies conclude inflation is expected to level out and is transitory – err neg other predictions are based off intuitions and have bad track records. Mark Hulbert 10/26 , Why These Economists Aren't Worried About Inflation. Barrons (10-26-2021) https://www.barrons.com/articles/inflation-economists-51635264860?tesla=y//anop The consumer price index is likely to rise next year by about 3—and perhaps even less. If so, of course, inflation in 2022 could be much less the 5.4 rate at which the CPI has risen over the past 12 months. This rosy projection comes from the inflation models that have the best historical track records, according to a new study. Focusing on the models with the best track records would seem to be an obvious approach to the debate over whether inflation’s recent spike is transitory. But surprisingly few commentators have done so. Many appear to have instead based their projections on little more than intuitions and hunches, picking and choosing among the myriad pieces of available economic data and anecdotal evidence to find what supports their prior beliefs. Their approach, in effect, is: “Here’s the conclusion on which I will base my facts.” The new study that instead focuses on historical track records is written by two economists at the Cleveland Federal Reserve Bank, Randal Verbrugge and Saeed Zaman. Their study is entitled “Whose Inflation Expectations Best Predict Inflation”? (Note that the conclusions of their study are theirs, they write, “and not necessarily those of the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland or the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System.”) After studying a number of competing models, the economists found that the models based on the forecasts of “professional economists and businesses have tended to provide more accurate predictions of future inflation than the models based on expectations of households and of financial market participants.” That’s good news because households are among those who currently believe that inflation’s recent spike will be more than transitory. Consider the University of Michigan’s Survey of Consumers, which finds that consumers on average expect the CPI to rise 4.7 over the coming year. That’s only slightly below the 5.4 rate at which the CPI has risen over the trailing year. In contrast, consider the much lower projections of three models that are based on the forecasts of professional economists and businesses: The quarterly survey of 36 professional economic forecasters conducted by the Philadelphia Fed. Their latest median forecast for the CPI’s increase in 2022 is 2.4—barely half that of consumers’ expectations. Wolters Kluwer Blue Chip. The median of their 2022 CPI forecasts is for an increase of 3.3. That’s higher than in the Philadelphia Fed’s survey, but still a lot lower than the CPI’s trailing 12-month increase. The Atlanta Fed each month surveys approximately 300 businesses in the Southeast U.S., asking for their inflation expectations for the subsequent year. The consensus expectation in the latest such survey is an increase of 3.1. The average of these three projections is below 3. In an email, Dr. Zaman mentioned another inflation model whose record in their study was almost as good. This additional model, which was devised a number of years ago by the Cleveland Fed, has a number of inputs, including Treasury yields, surveys of professional forecasters, and inflation swaps (derivatives in which one party to the transaction agrees to swap fixed payments in return for payments tied to the inflation rate). This model is currently forecasting that the CPI over the next 12 months will rise 1.8. There’s no guarantee that any of these models’ projections will be accurate, needless to say. But if you believe that inflation will be much higher, the burden of proof is on you to both codify the model on which your belief is based and document that it has a superior historical record. It’s not good enough simply to refer to potentially inflationary factors like supply-chain bottlenecks , higher energy prices, increased government borrowing, or the (hopefully) imminent end of pandemic-induced dampers on economic activity. Those factors are also being taken into account by the professional economists, forecasters, and businesses whose median projections came out ahead in this new study’s performance ranking. And yet they, on balance, are still in the “inflation is transitory” camp. What about the “break-even inflation rate“—the inflation model that is referred to most often in the financial press? It measures the difference between the yields on nominal Treasuries and those of Treasury inflation-protected securities, or TIPS, of similar maturities. It’s referred to as the break-even rate because it is the future inflation rate that would mean the total return from investing in TIPS today would be identical to that from buying nominal Treasuries. But, as Dr. Verbrugge said in an email, “Breakevens are notoriously poor predictors of inflation, compared to these other measures” that their study found to have decent track records. The plan spurs persistent inflation – unions realize they are disenfranchised but have a unique opportunity to rebuild into disruptive strikes. Liz Peek 21 Liz Peek is a former partner of major bracket Wall Street firm Wertheim and Company, Biden's Big Labor policies will create next round of inflation. The Hill. (10-22-2021) https://thehill.com/opinion/finance/577933-bidens-big-labor-policies-will-create-next-round-of-inflation//anop Americans blame President Biden for rising inflation; it could get worse. The administration’s big-spending policies and inability to cure our supply chain woes have driven prices higher. In addition, Biden’s generous handouts and vaccine mandates have pushed workers to the sidelines, making it difficult to fill jobs and raising costs even further. But it is Biden’s enthusiasm for Big Labor that is going to make matters worse. We are now entering a new phase of inflation pressures. A rising cost of living is pushing workers to demand higher wages, which in turn prompts companies to raise prices even more, igniting an unholy cycle that penalizes everyone. ADVERTISEMENT Unions, cheered on by Biden’s White House, have decided to take advantage of this moment. Labor strikes are on the increase, which will lead to higher wages, take workers offline and make it even harder to get goods to customers. Those bare shelves popping up around the country may just be a teaser for what comes next. A wage-price spiral is the phenomenon that causes inflation to become “persistent” and not “transitory.” This is what Democrats will bring to the 2022 midterm elections. A recent Morning Consult/Politico poll found that 62 percent of registered voters, including 61 percent of independents and even 41 percent of Democrats, blame Biden’s policies for soaring inflation. With prices rising at the fastest rate in 13 years, less than half of those surveyed attribute the increase to Americans returning to pre-pandemic behavior. Though the policies that contributed to price hikes on everything from rents to gasoline to chicken were not specified in this poll, other surveys have found voters pinning rising inflation on Democrats’ big spending programs, such as the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan. That is one reason (along with a healthy survival instinct) that moderate Democrats are now slow-walking Biden’s $3.5 trillion “social infrastructure” bill. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg acknowledged the connection the other day, when he shirked responsibility for port delays and trucker shortages by arguing that we don’t have just a supply problem but also a demand problem. Buttigieg is correct. With Congress authorizing an unprecedented $5 trillion in “relief” spending over the past two years and with the Federal Reserve pumping trillions into the money supply, the country is awash with money. Put most simply, there is too much money chasing too few goods. As a consequence, prices in September rose 5.4 percent from the year before, faster that the growth in wages, which increased 4.6 percent. Over the past year, real average hourly wages are down almost one percent. Workers are falling behind, and they know it. Unions have taken notice and decided that this is the time to begin rebuilding their ranks among private companies. Only 6.3 percent of private-sector workers today belong to unions, a massive drop from 12 percent in 1990. Clearly, labor leaders would like to reverse that trend. With the nation short of workers, this may be the perfect time to do so. Just recently, 10,000 United Auto Workers at tractor manufacturer John Deere went out on strike for the first time in three decades, while 31,000 employees at Kaiser Permanente are also staging a walkout. Some 1,400 workers at cereal-maker Kellogg are striking. All in, there have been 12 strikes of 1,000 workers or more so far this year, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and a total of 178 work stoppages. Those figures are way above 2020 totals, but about the same as in 2018 and 2019. My guess: We’re in the early innings. Workers are aware that they have leverage, and union leaders know there is a pro-Big Labor president in the White House. Early in his tenure, Biden posted a message about workers’ right to organize and the virtues of collective bargaining on Twitter that many saw as encouraging employees at an Amazon facility in Alabama to vote in favor of forming a union. It was an unprecedented intrusion by a president into such contests. As it happened, Biden’s push failed when workers overwhelmingly defeated the organizing effort. President Biden has gone further, inserting into his stimulus bills pro-union items like making union dues deductible and requiring that federal funds flow predominantly to union shops. As important, he has packed the National Labor Relations Board with former union lawyers committed to advancing the cause. Politico reports that the agency’s expected rulings could “serve as a backdoor for enacting provisions … that would vastly expand workers’ ability to join unions in potentially the most important overhaul of U.S. labor law since the 1940s.” Organizing gig workers is one of the new board's top ambitions. The Los Angeles Times affirms: “Biden has put unions at the center of policy — viewing them as vehicles not only to rebuild middle-class jobs but also to address climate change and racial and gender inequity.” The John Deere workers rejected a contract that would have awarded raises of 5 percent to 6 percent and offered another 3 percent wage hike in 2023 and 2025. Deere’s employees are emboldened by the company’s current profitability and the struggle to hire new employees. Most likely, workers elsewhere will follow suit. We have not seen a wave of disruptive labor strikes for many years. For the past two decades globalization put a lid on the demands of workers who were wary of shipping jobs overseas, and the Great Recession crimped corporate profits. ADVERTISEMENT White House 'confident' Manchin will back reconciliation framework Only 35 percent say US economy doing well: poll Biden’s pro-union efforts could win back some of those blue-collar workers who defected to Donald Trump in 2016, but the president’s encouragement of Big Labor will surely lead to higher wages. Those pay hikes will spur even higher inflation; it will be hard to stop the merry-go-round. It will also be hard for Biden and his fellow Democrats to escape responsibility for what many voters consider the country’s number one problem: inflation. Excess inflation causes collapse – destroys savings of millions of households. Jo Harper 21 Jo Harper is a freelance British journalist based in Warsaw, writing for the BBC, Politico, Deutsche Welle and others. How big a threat is inflation? – DW – 07/30/2021. dw (7-30-2021) https://beta.dw.com/en/how-big-a-threat-is-inflation/a-58653487//anop Many economists advocate a middle-ground of low to moderate inflation of around 2 per year. When inflation breaches that figure some benefit and others lose out. Inflation is usually considered a problem when it goes above 5, Brigitte Granville, a professor of economics at Queen Mary University, London, told DW. If inflation causes a currency to decline, then it can benefit exporters by making their goods more affordable when priced in other currencies. People with assets that are priced in a particular currency, like property or commodities, may like to see some inflation as that raises the price of their assets. Inflation can also increase profit margins and reduce debt in real terms. It can benefit borrowers because the inflation-adjusted value of their outstanding debts shrinks. However, higher inflation tends to harm savers as it erodes the purchasing power of the money they have saved. People holding assets denominated in currency, such as cash or bonds, may also not like inflation, as it erodes the real value of their holdings. Moreover, if central banks felt obliged to tighten monetary policy to check rising prices, it could cause a sharp correction in financial markets, which have been pumped up by a decade of QE-style liquidity injections. "Millions of middle-class households which have been placing increasing proportions of their savings in mutual funds invested in equities would suffer," Granville says. However, inflation of 3 or 4 could be positive for many economies at the moment. There are economists who argue strongly that it would reduce the debt overhang in real terms, for example. Recuperating growth is key to international cooperation to solve multiple existential threats Haass 17 Richard Haass, President of the Council on Foreign Relations, previously served as Director of Policy Planning for the US State Department (2001-2003), and was President George W. Bush's special envoy to Northern Ireland and Coordinator for the Future of Afghanistan. “A World in Disarray: American Foreign Policy and the Crisis of the Old Order” published January 10, 2017 A large portion of the burden of creating and maintaining order at the regional or global level will fall on the United States. This is inevitable for several reasons, only one of which is that the United States is and will likely remain the most powerful country in the world for decades to come. The corollary to this point is that no other country or group of countries has either the capacity or the mind-set to build a global order. Nor can order ever be expected to emerge automatically; there is no invisible hand in the geopolitical marketplace. Again, a large part of the burden (or, more positively, opportunity) falls on the principal power of the day. There is more than a little self-interest at stake. The United States cannot remain aloof, much less unaffected by a world in disarray. Globalization is more reality than choice. At the regional level, the United States actually faces the opposite problem, namely, that certain actors do have the mind-set and means to shape an order. The problem is that their views of order are in part or in whole incompatible with U.S. interests. Examples would include Iran and ISIS in the Middle East, China in Asia, and Russia in Europe. It will not be an easy time for the United States. The sheer number and range of challenges is daunting. There are a large number of actors and forces to contend with. Alliances, normally created in opposition to some country or countries, may not be as useful a vehicle in a world in which not all foes are always foes and not all friends are always friendly. Diplomacy will count for a great deal; there will be a premium on dexterity. Consultations that aim to affect the actions of other governments and their leaders are likely to matter more than negotiations that aim to solve problems. Another reality is that the United States for all its power cannot impose order. Partially this reflects what might be called structural realities, namely, that no country can contend with global challenges on its own given the very nature of these challenges. The United States could reduce its carbon footprint dramatically, but the effect on global climate would be modest if India and China failed to follow suit. Similarly, on its own the United States cannot maintain a world trading system or successfully combat terrorism or disease. Adding to these realities are resource limits. The United States cannot provide all the troops or dollars to maintain order in the Middle East and Europe and Asia and South Asia. There is simply too much capability in too many hands. Unilateralism is rarely a serious foreign policy option. Partners are essential. That is one of the reasons why sovereign obligation is a desirable compass for U.S. foreign policy. Earlier I made the case that it represents realism for an era of globalization. It also is a natural successor to containment, the doctrine that guided the United States for the four decades of the Cold War. There are basic differences, however. Containment was about holding back more than bringing in and was designed for an era when rivals were almost always adversaries and in which the challenges were mostly related to classical geopolitical competition.1 Sovereign obligation, by contrast, is designed for a world in which sometime rivals are sometime partners and in which collective efforts are required to meet common challenges. Up to this point, we have focused on what the United States needs to do in the world to promote order. That is what one would expect from a book about international relations and American foreign policy. But a focus on foreign policy is not enough. National security is a coin with two sides, and what the United States does at home, what is normally thought of as belonging to the domestic realm, is every bit as much a part of national security as foreign policy. It is best to understand the issue as guns and butter rather than guns versus butter. When it comes to the domestic side, the argument is straightforward. In order to lead and compete and act effectively in the world, the United States needs to put its house in order. I have written on what this entails in a book titled Foreign Policy Begins at Home.2 This was sometimes interpreted as suggesting a turn away from foreign policy. It was nothing of the sort. Foreign policy begins at home, but it ends there only at the country’s peril.3 Earlier I mentioned that the United States has few unilateral options, that there are few if any things it can do better alone than with others. The counterpart to this claim is that the world cannot come up with the elements of a working order absent the United States. The United States is not sufficient, but it is necessary. It is also true that the United States cannot lead or act effectively in the world if it does not have a strong domestic foundation. National security inevitably requires significant amounts of human, physical, and financial resources to draw on. The better the United States is doing economically, the more it will have available in the way of resources to devote to what it wants and needs to do abroad without igniting a divisive and distracting domestic debate as to priorities. An additional benefit is that respect for the United States and for the American political, social, and economic model (along with a desire to emulate it) will increase only if it is seen as successful. The most basic test of the success of the model will be economic growth. U.S. growth levels may appear all right when compared with what a good many other countries are experiencing, but they are below what is needed and fall short of what is possible. There is no reason why the United States is not growing in the range of 3 percent or even higher other than what it is doing and, more important, not doing.4
11/6/21
ND - DA - Innovation
Tournament: Apple Valley | Round: 2 | Opponent: Proof DR | Judge: Claudia Ribera Global tech innovation high now. Mercury News et al 6/4 Mercury News and East Bay Times Editorial Boards, June 4, 2021, “Editorial: How America can Win the Global Tech War” https://www.mercurynews.com/2021/06/04/editorial-why-silicon-valley-needs-endless-frontier-bill/gord0 The nation that wins the global tech race will dominate the 21st century. This has been true since the 1800s. Given the rapid pace of innovation and tech’s impact on our economy and defense capabilities in the last decade, there is ample evidence to suggest that the need for investment in tech research and development has never been greater. China has been closing the tech gap in recent years by making bold investments in tech with the intent of overtaking the United States. This is a tech war we cannot afford to lose. It’s imperative that Congress pass the Endless Frontier Act and authorize the biggest RandD tech investment in the United States since the Apollo years. Rep. Ro Khanna, D-Santa Clara, made a massive increase in science and technology investment a major part of his platform while campaigning for a seat in Congress in 2016. Now the co-author of the 600-page legislation is on the cusp of pushing through a bipartisan effort that has been years in the making. Khanna and his co-authors, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., Sen. Todd Young, R-Ind., and Rep. Mike Gallagher, R-Wisc., are shepherding the bill through the Senate, which is expected to approve it sometime later this month. That would set up a reconciliation debate between the House and Senate that would determine the bill’s final language. The ultimate size of the investment is still very much up in the air. Khanna would like Congress to authorize $100 billion over a five-year period for critical advancements in artificial intelligence, biotechnology, cybersecurity, semiconductors and other cutting-edge technologies. The Senate is talking of knocking that number down to $50 billion or $75 billion. They should be reminded of China Premier Li Keqiang’s March announcement that China would increase its research and development spending by an additional 7 per year between 2021 and 2025. The United States still outspends China in RandD, spending $612 billion on research and development in 2019, compared to China’s $514 billion. But the gap is narrowing. At the turn of the century, China was only spending $33 billion a year on RandD, while the United States was spending nearly 10 times that amount. The bill would authorize 10 technology hubs throughout the nation designed to help build the infrastructure, manufacturing facilities and workforce needed to help meet the nation’s tech goals. Building tech centers throughout the United States should also create more support for the industry across the country. Tech’s image has taken a beating in recent years — the emergence of the term “Big Tech” is hardly a positive development — and the industry will need all the support it can muster in Congress. The United States continues to have a crucial tech edge over its competitors, most notably China. The only way we can hope to win the 21st century is to make significant investments in research and development that will spark the next wave of innovation. Violent strike efforts are increasing – they slow innovation, specifically in the tech sector. Hanasoge 16 Chaithra; Senior Research Analyst, Market Researcher, Consumer Insights, Strategy Consulting; “The Union Strikes: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly,” Supply Wisdom; April/June 2016 (Doesn’t specifically say but this is the most recent event is cites); https://www.supplywisdom.com/resources/the-union-strikes-the-good-the-bad-and-the-ugly///SJWen The result: Verizon conceded to several of the workers’ demands including hiring union workers, protection against outsourcing of call-center jobs, and employee benefits such as salary hikes and higher pension contributions, among others and thus bringing an end to the strike in June. The repercussion: The strike witnessed several instances of social disorder, violence and clashes, ultimately calling for third party intervention (Secretary of Labor – Thomas Perez) to initiate negotiations between the parties. Also, as a result of the strike, Verizon reported lower than expected revenues in the second quarter of 2016. Trade unions/ labor unions aren’t just this millennia’s product and has been in vogue since times immemorial. Unions, to ensure fairness to the working class, have gone on strike for better working conditions and employee benefits since the industrial revolution and are as strong today as they were last century. With the advent of technology and advancement in artificial intelligence, machines are grabbing the jobs which were once the bastion of the humans. So, questions that arise here are, what relevance do unions have in today’s work scenario? And, are the strikes organized by them avoidable? As long as the concept of labor exists and employees feel that they are not receiving their fair share of dues, unions will exist and thrive. Union protests in most cases cause work stoppages, and in certain cases, disruption of law and order. Like in March 2016, public servants at Federal Government departments across Australia went on a series of strikes over failed pay negotiations, disrupting operations of many government departments for a few days. Besides such direct effects, there are many indirect effects as well such as strained employee relations, slower work processes, lesser productivity and unnecessary legal hassles. Also, union strikes can never be taken too lightly as they have prompted major overturn of decisions, on a few occasions. Besides the Verizon incident that was a crucial example of this, nationwide strikes were witnessed in India in March and April this year when the national government introduced reforms related to the withdrawal regulations and interest rate of employee provident fund, terming it as ‘anti-working class’. This compelled the government to withhold the reform for further review. In France, strike against labor law reforms in May turned violent, resulting in riots and significant damage to property. The incident prompted the government to consider modifications to the proposed reforms. However, aside from employee concerns, such incidents are also determined by a number of other factors such as the country’s political scenario, economy, size of the overall workforce and the unions, history of unionization, labor laws, and culture. For example, it is a popular saying that the French are always on strike as per tradition (although recent statistics indicate a decline in frequency). In a communist government like China, strikes have steadily risen in number. In 2015, China Labor Bulletin (CLB), a Hong Kong-based workers’ rights group recorded 2,700 incidents of strikes and protests, compared to 1,300 incidents in 2014. Most of them have stemmed out of failure by the government to respect the basic rights of employees and address labor concerns. Interestingly, unions have not been able to gain a strong foothold in the IT-BPO industry. While many countries do have a separate union to represent workers from the sector, incidents of strikes like Verizon have been relatively low. However, workplace regulations, in addition to other factors mentioned could be a trigger for such incidents, even if on a smaller scale. For example, a recent survey that interviewed several BPO employees in India revealed that while forming a union in the BPO sector was difficult, irksome workplace regulations such as constant surveillance, irregular timings and incentives have prompted employees to express their resentment in smaller ways such as corruption of internal servers and so on. Such risks are further enhanced in a city like Kolkata, which carries a strong trade union culture. Victories like the aff mobilizes unions in the IT sector. Vynck et al 21 Gerrit De; Carleton University, BA in Journalism and Global Politics, tech reporter for The Washington Post. He writes about Google and the algorithms that increasingly shape society. He previously covered tech for seven years at Bloomberg News; Nitashu Tiku; Columbia University, BA in English, New York University, MA in Journalism, Washington Post's tech culture reporter based in San Francisco; Macalester College, BA in English, Columbia University, MS in Journalism, reporter for The Washington Post who is focused on technology coverage in the Pacific Northwest; “Six things to know about the latest efforts to bring unions to Big Tech,” The Washington Post; https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/01/26/tech-unions-explainer///SJWen In response to tech company crackdowns and lobbying, gig workers have shifted their strategy to emphasize building worker-led movements and increasing their ranks, rather than focusing on employment status as the primary goal, says Veena Dubal, a law professor at the University of California Hastings College of the Law in San Francisco. The hope is that with President Biden in the White House and an even split in the Senate, legislators will mobilize at the federal level, through the NLRA or bills such as the PRO Act, to recognize gig worker collectives as real unions. Technological innovation solves every existential threat – which outweighs. Matthews 18 Dylan. Co-founder of Vox, citing Nick Beckstead @ Rutgers University. 10-26-2018. "How to help people millions of years from now." Vox. https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2018/10/26/18023366/far-future-effective-altruism-existential-risk-doing-good If you care about improving human lives, you should overwhelmingly care about those quadrillions of lives rather than the comparatively small number of people alive today. The 7.6 billion people now living, after all, amount to less than 0.003 percent of the population that will live in the future. It’s reasonable to suggest that those quadrillions of future people have, accordingly, hundreds of thousands of times more moral weight than those of us living here today do. That’s the basic argument behind Nick Beckstead’s 2013 Rutgers philosophy dissertation, “On the overwhelming importance of shaping the far future.” It’s a glorious mindfuck of a thesis, not least because Beckstead shows very convincingly that this is a conclusion any plausible moral view would reach. It’s not just something that weird utilitarians have to deal with. And Beckstead, to his considerable credit, walks the walk on this. He works at the Open Philanthropy Project on grants relating to the far future and runs a charitable fund for donors who want to prioritize the far future. And arguments from him and others have turned “long-termism” into a very vibrant, important strand of the effective altruism community. But what does prioritizing the far future even mean? The most literal thing it could mean is preventing human extinction, to ensure that the species persists as long as possible. For the long-term-focused effective altruists I know, that typically means identifying concrete threats to humanity’s continued existence — like unfriendly artificial intelligence, or a pandemic, or global warming/out of control geoengineering — and engaging in activities to prevent that specific eventuality. But in a set of slides he made in 2013, Beckstead makes a compelling case that while that’s certainly part of what caring about the far future entails, approaches that address specific threats to humanity (which he calls “targeted” approaches to the far future) have to complement “broad” approaches, where instead of trying to predict what’s going to kill us all, you just generally try to keep civilization running as best it can, so that it is, as a whole, well-equipped to deal with potential extinction events in the future, not just in 2030 or 2040 but in 3500 or 95000 or even 37 million. In other words, caring about the far future doesn’t mean just paying attention to low-probability risks of total annihilation; it also means acting on pressing needs now. For example: We’re going to be better prepared to prevent extinction from AI or a supervirus or global warming if society as a whole makes a lot of scientific progress. And a significant bottleneck there is that the vast majority of humanity doesn’t get high-enough-quality education to engage in scientific research, if they want to, which reduces the odds that we have enough trained scientists to come up with the breakthroughs we need as a civilization to survive and thrive. So maybe one of the best things we can do for the far future is to improve school systems — here and now — to harness the group economist Raj Chetty calls “lost Einsteins” (potential innovators who are thwarted by poverty and inequality in rich countries) and, more importantly, the hundreds of millions of kids in developing countries dealing with even worse education systems than those in depressed communities in the rich world. What if living ethically for the far future means living ethically now? Beckstead mentions some other broad, or very broad, ideas (these are all his descriptions): Help make computers faster so that people everywhere can work more efficiently Change intellectual property law so that technological innovation can happen more quickly Advocate for open borders so that people from poorly governed countries can move to better-governed countries and be more productive Meta-research: improve incentives and norms in academic work to better advance human knowledge Improve education Advocate for political party X to make future people have values more like political party X ”If you look at these areas (economic growth and technological progress, access to information, individual capability, social coordination, motives) a lot of everyday good works contribute,” Beckstead writes. “An implication of this is that a lot of everyday good works are good from a broad perspective, even though hardly anyone thinks explicitly in terms of far future standards.” Look at those examples again: It’s just a list of what normal altruistically motivated people, not effective altruism folks, generally do. Charities in the US love talking about the lost opportunities for innovation that poverty creates. Lots of smart people who want to make a difference become scientists, or try to work as teachers or on improving education policy, and lord knows there are plenty of people who become political party operatives out of a conviction that the moral consequences of the party’s platform are good. All of which is to say: Maybe effective altruists aren’t that special, or at least maybe we don’t have access to that many specific and weird conclusions about how best to help the world. If the far future is what matters, and generally trying to make the world work better is among the best ways to help the far future, then effective altruism just becomes plain ol’ do-goodery.
11/6/21
ND - DA - Reconciliation
Tournament: Apple Valley | Round: 4 | Opponent: Lincoln East BH | Judge: Chetan Hertzig Reconciliation passes now - Biden PC is key to getting democratic skeptics on board, but it’s tentative Cochrane and Weisman 11/05 Emily Cochrane - correspondent based in Washington. She has covered Congress since late 2018, focusing on the annual debate over government funding and economic legislation, ranging from emergency pandemic relief to infrastructure, Jonathan Weisman - congressional correspondent, veteran Washington journalist and author of the novel “No. 4 Imperial Lane” and the nonfiction book “
Semitism
: Being Jewish in America in the Age of Trump.” His career in journalism stretches back 30 years, “Live Updates: House Democrats Push Toward Votes on Biden’s Agenda”, 11-05-2021, https://www.nytimes.com/live/2021/11/05/us/biden-spending-infrastructure-bill//pranav At the White House, Mr. Biden called on lawmakers to pass the legislation. “I’m asking every House member, member of the House of Representatives, to vote yes on both these bills right now,” the president said. Spooked by Tuesday’s electoral drubbing, Democrats labored to overcome concerns among moderates about the cost and details of a rapidly evolving, $1.85 trillion social safety net and climate plan and push it through over unified Republican opposition. They also hoped to clear a Senate-passed $1 trillion bipartisan infrastructure bill — the largest investment in the nation’s aging public works in a decade — for Mr. Biden’s signature. Top Democratic officials said they were confident they could complete both measures by day’s end, but Speaker Nancy Pelosi of California and her team continued to haggle with holdouts. Several moderates were pushing for more information about the cost of the sprawling plan, including a nonpartisan analysis from the Congressional Budget Office, the official scorekeeper responsible for calculating the fiscal impact of the 2,135-page legislation. “I think everyone’s waiting for the C.B.O. to do their job,” said Representative Jared Golden, Democrat of Maine, speaking to reporters on Friday morning as he left Ms. Pelosi’s office, where White House officials were also meeting on next steps. But Representative Steny H. Hoyer of Maryland, the majority leader, said the cost estimate would not be ready by the end of the day, and a person familiar with the discussions said a score from the budget office was weeks away from completion. “We’re working on it,” Mr. Hoyer said. Ms. Pelosi spent much of the day on Thursday buttonholing lawmakers on the House floor to try to corral support for the social policy bill, which includes monthly payments to families with children, universal prekindergarten, a four-week paid family and medical leave program, health care subsidies and a broad array of climate change initiatives. Mr. Biden and members of his cabinet worked the phones to win over Democratic skeptics. With Republicans united in opposition, Democrats could afford to lose as few as three votes from their side. As Democrats labored to unite their members behind the bill, Republicans sought to wreak procedural havoc on the House floor, forcing a vote to adjourn the chamber that leaders held open for hours to buy time for their negotiations. While the Senate approved the $1 trillion infrastructure bill in August, the measure has stalled as progressives have repeatedly refused to supply their votes for it until there is agreement on the other bill. Business lobbying backlash ensures Sinema flips – empirics prove she doesn’t like similar bills Duda ’21 Jeremy, Prior to joining the Arizona Mirror, he worked at the Arizona Capitol Times, where he spent eight years covering the Governor's Office and two years as editor of the Yellow Sheet Report, “Business groups urge Kelly, Sinema to oppose pro-union PRO Act”, 08-30-2021, https://www.azmirror.com/2021/08/30/business-groups-urge-kelly-sinema-to-oppose-pro-union-pro-act///pranav Business groups publicly called on Democratic U.S. Sens. Mark Kelly and Kyrsten Sinema to oppose a sweeping piece of pro-organized labor legislation that would wipe out Arizona’s “right-to-work” law that prohibits mandatory union membership. At a press conference at the office of the Arizona chapter of the Associated General Contractors near the state Capitol on Monday, leaders of several business groups warned that the Protecting the Right to Organize Act — or PRO Act, as it’s more commonly known — would undermine Arizona’s recovery from the economic slump it faced last year due to the COVID-19 pandemic, undermine the “gig economy,” jeopardize secret ballots in union organization votes, give unions access to confidential employee information and strip Arizonans of their right not to join a union. The bill would allow unions to override right-to-work laws and collect union dues from non-members who still benefit from collective bargaining. It would also prohibit company-sponsored meetings to urge employees against unionizing, define most independent contractors as employees, protect employees who are attempting to unionize from being fired and allow unions to engage in secondary strikes in support of other striking workers, among other provisions. “We want to thank and tell Senator Sinema and Senator Kelly that we appreciate them for not signing on as co-sponsors to the PRO Act, because if they were to change their opinions, New York Sen. Chuck Schumer will put this up for a vote,” said Danny Seiden, president and CEO of the Arizona Chamber of Commerce and Industry. Kelly and Sinema are two of only three Senate Democrats, along with Virginia’s Mark Warner, who haven’t co-sponsored the bill or thrown their public support behind it. Kelly last month told the Huffington Post that he opposes the independent contractor provision, but that he supports the “overall goals” of the legislation. Sinema is widely known as a holdout on the Democratic side and hasn’t supported the PRO Act, but spokesman Pablo Sierra-Carmona indicated that she hasn’t made up her mind, and that she won’t do so unless and until it comes up for a vote in the Senate. They lash out against Reconciliation – it includes similar provisions FURCHTGOTT-ROTH 10/09 Diana, former acting assistant secretary for economic policy at the U.S. Department of the Treasury, is adjunct professor of economics at George Washington University, “Democrats can't pass the PRO Act, so it's buried in the reconciliation bill”, 10-09-2021, https://thehill.com/opinion/white-house/575992-dems-cant-pass-the-pro-act-so-its-buried-in-the-reconciliation-bill//pranav Union membership has been declining for decades as workers find better uses than union dues for their hard-earned dollars. But union bosses and their supporters are trying to change the law to force hard-working Americans into unions. How? Through the Protecting the Right to Organize Act (PRO Act), a bill that would expand the power of union leaders at the expense of workers. After sailing through the House, the PRO Act now appears stalled in the Senate and Democrats are trying to slip some PRO Act provisions into a massive reconciliation bill. American workers are wise to turn down union membership. Union pension plans are in trouble. In 2020, the Labor Department listed 121 union plans in critical status, defined as less than 65 percent funded, and 61 in endangered status, with less than 80 percent funded. Unions desperately need new workers to join, because they pay contributions for many years without withdrawing money. Most recently, Amazon workers in Alabama resoundingly rejected efforts by the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store International Union to organize their plant, with more than 70 percent of workers voting against the union. The union’s plan was in critical status between 2015 and 2019, and the Labor Department informed the plan’s administrators that it had to be reorganized by reducing benefits and increasing contributions. Union leaders and their allies on Capitol Hill believe the way to increase membership after decades of decline is to pass elements of the PRO Act through reconciliation. Unlike the PRO Act, which needs 60 votes in the Senate to enable it to move to President Biden’s desk for signature, the reconciliation bill, which deals with taxes and spending, needs only a simple majority. So via a massive reconciliation bill, congressional Democrats are trying to move some labor union provisions of the PRO Act by arguing they are actually revenue raisers. Reconciliation is k2 stopping existential climate change – warming is incremental and every change in temperature is vital Higgins 8/16 Trevor, Senior Director, Domestic Climate and Energy, “Budget Reconciliation Is the Key to Stopping Climate Change”, 08-16-2021, https://www.americanprogress.org/issues/green/news/2021/08/16/502681/budget-reconciliation-key-stopping-climate-change///pranav The United States is suffering acutely from the chaotic changes in climate that scientists now directly attribute to the burning of fossil fuels and other human activity. The drought, fires, extreme heat, and floods that have already killed hundreds this summer across the continent and around the world are a tragedy—and a warning of worsening instability yet to come. However, this week, the Senate initiated an extraordinary legislative response that would set the world on a different path. Enacting the full scope of President Joe Biden’s Build Back Better agenda would put the American economy to work leading a global transition to clean energy and stabilizing the climate. A look at what’s coming next through the budget reconciliation process reveals a ray of hope that is easy to miss amid the fitful negotiations of recent months: At long last, Congress is on the verge of major legislation that would build a more equitable, just, and inclusive clean energy economy. This is our shot to stop climate change. Building a clean energy future must start now Until the global economy stops polluting the air and instead starts to draw down the emissions of years past, the world will continue to heat up, blundering past perilous tipping points that threaten irreversible and catastrophic consequences. Stemming the extent of warming at 1.5 degrees Celsius rather 2 degrees or worse will reduce the risk of crossing such tipping points or otherwise exceeding the adaptive capacity of human society. Every degree matters. Stabilizing global warming at 1.5 degrees Celsius starts with cutting annual greenhouse gas emissions in the United States to half of peak levels by 2030. This isn’t about temporary offsets or incremental gains in efficiency—it’s about the rapid adoption of scalable solutions that will work throughout the world to eliminate global net emissions by 2050 and sustain net-negative emissions thereafter. Building this better future will tackle climate change, deliver on environmental justice, and create good jobs. It will give us a shot to stop the planet from continuously warming. It will alleviate the concentrated burdens of fossil fuel pollution, which are concentrated in systemically disadvantaged, often majority Black and brown communities. It will empower American workers to compete in the global clean energy economy of the 21st century. There is no time to lose in the work of building a clean energy future.
11/6/21
ND - K - Set Col
Tournament: Glenbrooks | Round: 1 | Opponent: Peninsula KD | Judge: Colton Gilbert Indigeneity connotates a state of non-ontology allowing for the construction of the human that legitimizes its self into a history of elimination, jettisoned from or assimilated into the national body to cohere settler temporality Belcourt 16. Billy-Ray Belcourt is from the Driftpile Cree Nation. He is a 2016 Rhodes Scholar and is reading for an M.St. in Women’s Studies at the University of Oxford. He was named by CBC Books as one of six Indigenous writers to watch, and his poetry has been published or is forthcoming in Assaracus: A Journal of Gay Poetry, Red Rising Magazine, SAD Mag, mâmawi-âcimowak, PRISM International, and The Malahat Review. ("A POLTERGEIST MANIFESTO," 2016, Feral Feminism) vikas recut aaditg Admittedly, the feral is a precarious space from which to theorize, sullied with an injurability bound up in the work of liberal humanism as such, an enterprise that weaponizes a set of moral barometers to distribute ferality unevenly to differently citizened and raced bodies—ones that are too close for comfort and must be pushed outside arm’s reach. Perhaps ferality traverses a semantic line of flight commensurate¬ with that of savagery, barbarism, and lawlessness, concreting into one history of elimination: that is, a history of eliminating recalcitrant indigeneities incompatible within a supposedly hygienic social. The word savage comes from the Latin salvaticus, an alteration of silvaticus, meaning “wild,” literally “of the woods.” Of persons, it means “reckless, ungovernable” (“Savage”). In the space-time of settler states, savagery temporarily stands in for those subjectivities tethered to a supposedly waning form of indigeneity, one that came from the woods and, because of this, had to be jettisoned from or assimilated into the national body. Here is Audra Simpson on the history of Indian “lawlessness”: Its genealogy extends back to the earliest moments of recorded encounter, when Indians appeared to have no law, to be without order, and thus, to be in the colonizer’s most generous articulation of differentiation, in need of the trappings of civilization. “Law” may be one instrument of civilization, as a regulating technique of power that develops through the work upon a political body and a territory. (2014, 144) According to Simpson, the recognition of Indigenous peoples as lawless rendered them governable, motivating the settler state (here, Canada) to curate and thus contain atrophied indigeneities—and, consequently, their sovereignties, lands, and politics—within the borders of federal law (2014, 144-45). Similarly, in The Transit of Empire Jodi Byrd traces the epistemological gimmicks through which the concept of “Indianness” came to align with “the savage other” (2011, 27). For her, this alignment provided the “rationale for imperial domination” and continues to stalk philosophy’s patterns of thinking (ibid.). Simpson, writing about the Mohawks of Kahnawake, argues that “a fear of lawlessness” continues to haunt the colonial imaginary, thereby diminishing “Indigenous rights to trade and to act as sovereigns in their own territories” (2014, 145). We might take the following lyrics from the popular Disney film Pocahontas as an example of the ways indigeneity circulates as a feral signifier in colonial economies of meaning-making: Ratcliffe What can you expect From filthy little heathens? Their whole disgusting race is like a curse Their skin’s a hellish red They’re only good when dead They’re vermin, as I said And worse English settlers They’re savages! Savages! Barely even human. (Gabriel and Goldberg 1995) Savagery connotes a state of non-ontology: Indigenous peoples are forced to cling to a barely extant humanity and coterminously collapse into a putatively wretched form of animality. Savagery is lethal, and its Indian becomes the prehistoric alibi through which the human is constituted as such. Indigenous peoples have therefore labored to explain away this savagery, reifying whitened rubrics for proper citizenship and crafting a genre of life tangible within the scenes of living through that are constitutive of settler colonialism as such. These scenes, however, are dead set on destroying the remnants of that savagery, converting their casualties into morally compatible subjects deserving of rights and life in a multicultural state that stokes the liberal fantasy of life after racial trauma at the expense of decolonial flourishing itself. This paper is therefore interested in the subjectivities and forms of sociality that savagery destroys when applied from without, and the political work of appropriating that savagery in the name of decolonization. Ours is a form of indigeneity that hints at a fundamental pollutability that both confirms and threatens forms of ontology tethered to a taxonomized humanity built in that foundational episode of subjection of which Simpson speaks. I am suggesting that savagery always-already references an otherworld of sorts: there are forms of life abandoned outside modernity’s episteme whose expressivities surge with affects anomalous within the topography of settler colonialism. This paper is not a historicist or nostalgic attachment to a pre-savage indigeneity resurrected from a past somehow unscathed by the violence that left us in the thick of things in the first place. Instead, I emphasize the potentiality of ferality as a politics in a world bent on our destruction—a world that eliminates indigeneities too radical to collapse into a collective sensorium, training us to a live in an ordinary that the settler state needs to persist as such, one that only some will survive. This world incentivizes our collusion with a multicultural state instantiated through a myth of belonging that actively disavows difference in the name of that very difference. We are repeatedly hurried into a kind of waning sociality, the content and form of which appear both too familiar and not familiar enough. In short, we are habitually left scavenging for ways to go on without knowing what it is we want. Let’s consider Jack Halberstam’s thoughts on “the wild”: It is a tricky word to use but it is a concept that we cannot live without if we are to combat the conventional modes of rule that have synced social norms to economic practices and have created a world order where every form of disturbance is quickly folded back into quiet, where every ripple is quickly smoothed over, where every instance of eruption has been tamped down and turned into new evidence of the rightness of the status quo. (2013, 126) Where Halberstam finds disturbance, I find indigeneity-cum-disturbance par excellence. Halberstam’s “wild” evokes a potentiality laboured in the here and now and “an alternative to how we want to think about being” in and outside an authoritarian state (2013, 126-27). Perhaps the wild risks the decolonial, a geography of life-building that dreams up tomorrows whose referents are the fractured indigeneities struggling to survive a historical present built on our suffering. Ferality is a stepping stone to a future grounded in Indigenous peoples’ legal and political orders. This paper does not traffic in teleologies of the anarchic or lawless as they emerge in Western thought; instead, it refuses settler sovereignty and calls for forms of collective Indigenous life that are attuned to queerness’s wretched histories and future-making potentialities. Indigeneity is an ante-ontology of sorts: it is prior to and therefore disruptive of ontology. Indigeneity makes manifest residues or pockets of times, worlds, and subjectivities that warp both common sense and philosophy into falsities that fall short of completely explaining what is going on. Indigenous life is truncated in the biopolitical category of Savage in order to make our attachments to ourselves assimilable inside settler colonialism’s national sensorium. Settler colonialism purges excessive forms of indigeneity that trouble its rubrics for sensing out the human and the nonhuman. In other words, settler colonialism works up modes of being-in-the-world that narrate themselves as the only options we have. What would it mean, then, to persist in the space of savagery, exhausting the present and holding out for futures that are not obsessed with the proper boundary between human and nonhuman life? This paper now turns to the present, asking: what happens when indigeneity collides with queerness inside the reserve, and how might a feral theory make sense of that collision? Deadly Presents “I went through a really hard time… I was beaten; more than once. I was choked” (Klassen 2014). These were the words of Tyler-Alan Jacobs, a two-spirit man from the Squamish Nation, capturing at once the terror of queer life on the reserve and the hardening of time into a thing that slows down bodies and pushes them outside its securitized geographies. Jacobs had grown up with his attackers, attackers who were energized by the pronouncement of queerness—how it insisted on being noticed, how it insisted on being. When the dust settled, “his right eye had dislodged and the side of his faced had caved in” (ibid.). Settler colonialism is fundamentally affective: it takes hold of the body, makes it perspire, and wears it out. It converts flesh into pliable automations and people into grim reapers who must choose which lives are worth keeping in the world. It can turn a person into a murderer in a matter of seconds; it is an epistemic rupturing of our attachments to life, to each other, and to ourselves. It is as if settler colonialism were simultaneously a rescue and military operation, a holy war of sorts tasked with exorcising the spectre of queer indigeneity and its putative infectivity. I rehearse this case because it allows me to risk qualifying the reserve as a geography saturated with heteronormativity’s socialities. This is a strategic interdiction that destroys supposedly degenerative queer affect worlds, untangling some bodies and not others from the future. I don’t have the statistics to substantiate these claims, but there is an archive of heartbreak and loss that is easy to come by if you ask the right people. Indeed, what would such statistics tell us that we don’t already know? What would the biopolitical work of data collection do to a knowledge-making project that thinks outside the big worlds of Statistics and Demography and, instead, inside the smaller, more precarious worlds created in the wake of gossip? I worry about ethnographic projects that seek to account for things and theory in the material in order to map the coordinates of an aberration to anchor it and its voyeurs in the theatres of the academy. The desire to attach to a body is too easily energized by a biological reading of gender that repudiates the very subjects it seeks so desperately to know and to study. What about the body? I have been asked this question, again and again. A feral theory is something of a call to arms: abolish this sort of ethnography and turn to those emergent methodologies that might better make sense of the affects and life-forms that are just now coming into focus and have been destroyed or made invisible in the name of research itself. Queer indigeneity, to borrow Fred Moten’s description of blackness, might “come most clearly into relief, by way of its negation” (2014). Perhaps decolonization needs to be a sort of séance: an attempt to communicate with the dead, a collective rising-up from the reserve’s necropolis, a feral becoming-undead. Boyd and Thrush’s Phantom Past, Indigenous Presence thinks indigeneity and its shaky histories vis-à-vis the language of haunting, where haunting is an endurant facet of “the experience of colonialism” (Bodinger de Uriarte 2012, 303). But, for me, ghostliness is differentially distributed: some more than others will be wrenched into the domain of the dead and forced to will their own ontologies into the now. Perhaps the universalist notion that haunting is a metonym for indigeneity repudiates the very life-forms that it claims to include: those who are differently queered and gendered, and, because of this, haunt waywardly and in ways that cannot be easily predicted (Ahmed 2015). This paper thus takes an imaginative turn and proceeds with something of an incantation to summon the figure of the queer Indigenous poltergeist—the feral monster in the horror story of decolonization. Queer Indigenous poltergeists do not linger inaudibly in the background; we are beside ourselves with anger, we make loud noises and throw objects around because we are demanding retribution for homicide, unloved love, and cold shoulders. We do not reconcile; we escape the reserve, pillage and mangle the settler-colonial episteme. Our arrival is both uneventful and apocalyptic, a point of departure and an entry point for an ontology that corresponds with a future that has yet to come. Sometimes all we have is the promise of the future. For the queer Indigenous poltergeist, resurrection is its own form of decolonial love. The poltergeist is an ontological anomaly: a fusion of human, object, and ghost, a “creature of social reality” and a “creature of fiction” (Haraway 1991, 149). From the German poltern meaning “to make noise, to rattle” and Geist or “ghost,” it literally means “noisy ghost,” speaking into existence an anti-subjectivity that emerges in the aftermath of death or murder (“Poltergeist”). It is the subject of Tobe Hooper’s 1982 film Poltergeist, which tells a story of “a haunting based on revenge” (Tuck and Ree 2013, 652). The film’s haunting is a wronging premised on an initial wrong: the eponymous poltergeist materializes when a mansion is constructed on a cemetery—a disturbing of spirits, if you will. José Esteban Muñoz argues that “The double ontology of ghosts and ghostliness, the manner in which ghosts exist inside and out and traverse categorical distinctions, seems especially useful for… queer criticism” (2009, 46). In this paper, the poltergeist names the form which indigeneity takes when it brings queer matter into its folds. In other words, this essay evokes haunting as a metaphor to hint at the ways in which queerness was murderously absorbed into the past and prematurely expected to stay there as an effect of colonialism’s drive to eliminate all traces of sexualities and genders that wandered astray. The poltergeist conceptualizes the work of queer indigeneity in the present insofar as it does not presuppose the mysterious intentions of the ghost—an otherworldly force that is bad, good, and undetectable all at once. Instead, the poltergeist is melancholic in its grief, but also pissed off. It refuses to remain in the spiritual, a space cheapened in relation to the staunch materiality of the real, and one that, though housing our conditions of possibility, cannot contain all of us. We protest forms of cruel nostalgia that tether ghosts to a discarded past within which queer Indigenous life once flourished because we know that we will never get it back and that most of us likely never experienced it in the first place. We long for that kind of love, but we know it is hard to come by. I turn to the poltergeist because I don’t have anywhere else to go. Help me, I could say. But I won’t. Queer indigeneity, then, is neither here nor there, neither dead nor alive but, to use Judith Butler’s language, interminably spectral (2006, 33). We are ghosts that haunt the reserve in the event of resurrection. According to Indigenous and Northern Affairs Canada, a reserve is a “tract of land, the legal title to which is held by the Crown, set apart for the use and benefit of an Indian band” (“Terminology”). The “reserve system” is part of the dispossessory ethos through which the settler state reifies land as the sign of sovereignty itself, and thus effects the political death of indigeneity, decomposing it into nothingness, into contaminated dirt. Reserves are the products of imaginations gone wild; they are ruins that bear “the physical imprint of the supernatural” on arid land, on decaying trailers arranged like weathered tombstones (Tuck and Ree 2013, 653). They are borderlands that connote simultaneous possession and dispossession: they represent the collision between settler sovereignty (insofar as the Crown holds the legal title to the land) and indigeneity (pointing to a genre of life that is distinctly Indigenous). Reserves were—some might say they still are—zones of death that regulated and regulate the movements of Indigenous bodies, quarantining their putatively contaminated flesh outside modern life in order to preserve settler-colonial futurities. It is as if the reserve were a site of complete atrophy, where indigeneity is supposed to waste away or degenerate, where queerness has already bled out. Look at the blood on your hands! The queer Indigenous poltergeist, however, foregrounds what I call a “reserve consciousness” —an awareness of the deathliness of the reserve. A reserve consciousness might be a kind of critical phenomenology that, to use Lisa Guenther’s description of this sort of insurgent knowledge project, pulls up “traces of what is not quite or no longer there—that which has been rubbed out or consigned to invisibility” (2015): here, the so-called on-reserve Indian. It might be about becoming a frictive surface; by rubbing up against things and resisting motion between objects, we might become unstuck. Queer Indigenous poltergeists are what Sara Ahmed calls “blockage points”: where communication stops because we cannot get through (2011, 68). That is, queer indigeneity connotes an ethical impasse, a dead end that presents us with two options: exorcism or resurrection. If settler colonialism is topological, if it persists despite elastic deformations such as stretching and twisting, wear and tear, we might have to make friction to survive. I turn to the reserve because it is a geography of affect, one in which the heaviness of atmospheres crushes some bodies to death and in which some must bear the weight of settler colonialism more than others. The violence done to us has wrenched us outside the physical world and into the supernatural. Some of us are spirits—open wounds that refuse to heal because our blood might be the one thing that cannot be stolen. Does resistance always feel like resistance, or does it sometimes feel like bleeding out (Berlant 2011)? Feral Socialities I must leave the beaten path and go where we are not. Queerness, according to Muñoz, is not yet here; it is an ideality that “we may never touch,” that propels us onward (2009, 1). Likewise, Halberstam suggests that the presentness of queerness signals a kind of emerging ontology. He argues that failure “is something that queers do and have always done exceptionally well in contrast to the grim scenarios of success” that structure “a heteronormative, capitalist society” (2011, 2-3). For Muñoz, queer failure is about “doing something that is missing in straight time’s always already flawed temporal mapping practice” (2009, 174). We know, however, that this isn’t the entire story. Whereas Muñoz’s queer past morphs into the here and now of homonormativity’s carceral tempos, indigeneity’s queernesses are saturated with the trauma of colonialism’s becoming-structure. Queer death doubles as the settler state’s condition of possibility. Pre-contact queer indigeneities had been absorbed into colonialism’s death grip; however, this making-dead was also a making-undead in the enduring of ghosts (Derrida 1994, 310). If haunting, according to Tuck and Ree, “lies precisely in its refusal to stop,” then the queer Indigenous poltergeist fails to have died by way of time travel (2013, 642). Queer indigeneity might be a kind of “feral sociality”: we are in a wild state after escaping colonial captivity and domestication. When the state evicts you, you might have to become feral to endure. To be feral is to linger in the back alleys of the settler state. It is a refusal of settler statecraft, a strategic failing to approximate the metrics of colonial citizenship, a giving up on the ethical future that reconciliation supposedly promises. As an aside, I suspect that the settler state’s reconciliatory ethos is always-already a domesticating project: it contains Indigenous suffering within the spectacularized theatre of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, building a post-Residential School temporality in which Indigenous peoples have been repaired through monetary reparations and storytelling. In the melodrama of reconciliation, the settler state wins its centuries-long war against Indian lawlessness by healing Indigenous peoples of the trauma that blocked them from becoming properly emotive citizens. Queer indigeneity, however, escapes discursive and affective concealment and therefore the category of the human itself, disturbing the binary clash between the living and nonliving by way of its un-humanity, a kind of “dead living” whereby flesh is animated through death. Perhaps we must become feral to imagine other space-times, to imagine other kinds of queerness. If settler colonialism incentivizes our collusion with the humanist enterprise of multiculturalism (and it does), what would it mean to refuse humanity and actualize other subject formations? In other words, how do the un-living live? Here, I want to propose the concept of “Indian time” to theorize the temporality and liminality of queer indigeneity as it festers in the slippage between near-death and the refusal to die. Indian time colloquially describes the regularity with which Indigenous peoples arrive late or are behind schedule. I appropriate this idiom to argue that the presentness of queer indigeneity is prefigured by an escape from and bringing forward of the past as well as a taking residence in the future. To be queer and Indigenous might mean to live outside time, to fall out of that form of affective life. Indian time thus nullifies the normative temporality of settler colonialism in which death is the telos of the human and being-in-death is an ontological fallacy. It connotes the conversion of queer indigeneity into non-living matter, into ephemera lurking in the shadows of the present, waiting, watching, and conspiring. Where Jasbir Puar argues that all things under the rubric of queer are always-already calculated into the state’s biopolitical mathematic, queer indigeneity cannot be held captive because it cannot be seen—we are still emerging in the social while simultaneously altering its substance (2012). If decolonization is, according to Tuck and K. Wayne Yang’s reading of Frantz Fanon, an “unclean break from a colonial condition,” perhaps the queer Indigenous poltergeist is feral enough to will a decolonial world into a future that hails rather than expels its ghosts (2012, 20). The queer Indigenous poltergeist might have nothing else to lose. Systems of knowledge serve to institute and replicate settler colonialism — the human is a storytelling species and knowledge systems are always already being chartered through the replication of sociogenic codes Wynter and McKittrick 15. Sylvia Wynter is a Professor Emerita at Stanford University. Katherine McKittrick is a professor in Gender Studies at Queen's University. She is an academic and writer whose work focuses on black studies, cultural geography, anti-colonial and diaspora studies, with an emphasis on the ways in which liberation emerges in black creative texts. (Sylvia Wynter: On Being Human as Praxis, Duke University Press, 2015) vikas To resolve the aporia of this cognitive dilemma, I turn again to Césaire’s proposed new and hybrid bios / mythoi science of the Word. Here because, as he proposed, and as earlier cited, the study of the Word / the mythoi will now determine the study of the bios / of the brain, and this will thereby enable us to gain an external (demonic ground) perspective on the always already storytellingly chartered / encoded discursive formations / aesthetic fields, as well as of, co- relatedly, our systems of knowledge. And, with this gain insight into how these systems of knowledge, each together with its genre- specific “truth of solidarity,” all institute and stably replicate our genres of being hybridly human with the also communitarian viability of each respective societal order. Yet with all of the above—including, in macro terms, the instituting of our contemporary secular and “single model” liberal (now neoliberal) monohumanist Western / Westernized transnational world system—what again must be emphasized is that the respective “truths” of their knowledge systems are always already prespecified by our storytellingly chartered sociogenic replicator code of symbolic life / death, its Word and / or Bateson- type “descriptive statement” as rigorously discursively elaborated by its “status quo system of learning” and its overall epistemological order. This order circularly ensures that each such genre- specific regime / program of truth, will law- likely function to semantically- neurochemically induce the performative enactment of our ensemble of always already role- allocated individual and collective behaviors within the reflexly and subjectively experienced terms of a cognitively closed, thereby genre- specific and fictively eusocializing, autonomously functioning, higher- level living autopoietic system. Cosmogonies of Our Planetary Life and Our Chartered Codes of Symbolic Life and Symbolic Death: Fictively Induced Modes of Inter- Altruistic Kin Recognition and Auto- Instituted Pseudospeciated Mode of Kind KM: Here Wynter elaborates on storytelling beginnings and cosmogonies. She returns to her extension of Frantz Fanon’s conception of our being hybridly human, both bios and mythoi, in order to address the unsolved phenomenon of human consciousness. She explores how our chartering / encoding genre- specific cosmogonies provide the narrative source of our fictively eusocializing subjectivities, thus enabling us to be reborn- through- initiation as always already sociogenically encoded inter- altruistically kin- recognizing members of each referent- we. At the same time, however, the law- like reification of each fictively induced and subjectively experienced order of consciousness of each referent- we is, itself, absolutized by what Wynter identifies as the law of cognitive closure. SW: Fanon put forward the idea of our skin / masks, thereby of the hybridity of our being human, in 1952. Crick and Watson cracked the genetic code in 1953. Now, I argue that Fanon’s masks enact a “second set of instructions”: that of the sociogenic code of symbolic life / death. Further, within the overall enactment of each such “second set of instructions,” the ism of gender is itself—while only one member class—a founding member class. Gender is a founding member because in order to auto- institute ourselves as subjects of a genre- specific referent- we, we must, first, co- relatedly and performatively enact each such code’s “second set of instructions” at the familial level, in terms of our gender roles. We know of this brilliant concept of the performative enactment of gender from Judith Butler.60 I am suggesting that the enactments of such gender roles are always a function of the enacting of a specific genre of being hybridly human. Butler’s illuminating redefinition of gender as a praxis rather than a noun, therefore, set off bells ringing everywhere! Why not, then, the performative enactment of all our roles, of all our role allocations as, in our contemporary Western / Westernized case, in terms of, inter alia, gender, race, class / underclass, and, across them all, sexual orientation? All as praxes, therefore, rather than nouns. So here you have the idea that with being human everything is praxis. For we are not purely biological beings! As far as the eusocial insects like bees are concerned, their roles are genetically preprescribed for them. Ours are not, even though the biocentric meritocratic iq bourgeois ideologues, such as the authors of The Bell Curve, try to tell us that they / we are.61 So the question is: What are the mechanisms, what are the technologies, what are the strategies by which we prescribe our own roles? What is common to all are cosmogonies and origin narratives. The representations of origin, which we ourselves invent, are then retroactively projected onto an imagined past. Why so? Because each such projection is the shared storytelling origin out of which we are initiatedly reborn. In this case we are no longer, as individual biological subjects, primarily born of the womb; rather, we are both initiated and reborn as fictively instituted inter- altruistic kinrecognizing members of each such symbolically re- encoded genre- specific referent- we. This is to say we are all initiatedly reborn—renatus in Saint Thomas Aquinas’s Christian term—to subjectively experience ourselves as subjects of the same encoded symbolic life kind. Why this imperative? Because for all genre- specific subjects who are reborn from the same eusocializing origin myth and / or cosmogony, their genetically encoded individual biological life and its attendant imperative of naked self- preservation must at the same time be, via initiation, aversively experienced as symbolic death. 62 This is the concomitant condition of inducing in all subjects the mimetic desire for the group- collective symbolic life of its genre- specific referent- we, its fictive mode of pseudospeciated kind. The centrality of the ritually initiated and enacted storytelling codes, and thus their positive / negative, symbolic life / death semantically- neurochemically activated “second set of instructions,” emerges here: these codes are specific to each kind. The positive verbal meanings attributed to their respective modes of kind are alchemically transformed into living flesh, as its members all reflexly subjectively experience themselves, in the mimetically desirable, because opiate-rewarded, placebo terms of that mode of symbolic life prescribed by the storytelling code. This at the same time as they subjectively experience their former “born of the womb” purely biological life as mimetically aversive, because they are doing so in now opiate- reward- blocked symbolic death, nocebo terms.63 For the preservation of which of these lives, then, do you think wars are fought? In the wake of the answer to the above, we see our chartering cosmogonies as being isomorphic with what we now define as our “cultures”— in both cases we are talking about our hybrid sociogenic codes and their “second set of instructions.” These are codes that are even able to override where necessary—this with respect to our auto- instituted, non– genetically restricted fictive modes of eusociality—the first set of instructions of our own dna (unlike as is the case with all other primates). The logical corollary is this: our modes of auto- institution, together with their initiatory rituals of rebirth—as iconized by the ritual of Christian baptism—are indispensable to the enacting of the human as the only living species on Earth who is the denizen of its third and hybrid bios / mythoi level of existence! Our mode of hybrid living being alone—this together with our also hitherto always genre- specific bios / mythoi enacted orders of supraindividual consciousness—is thereby to arrive on the scene all at once! With the Big Bang of the biomutational Third Event! So you see now why we still can’t solve the problem of consciousness? In spite of the most dedicated efforts of natural scientists, brain scientists, and philosophers? For what becomes clear here is that our human orders of consciousness / modes of mind cannot exist outside the terms of a specific cosmogony. Therefore, human orders of consciousness / modes of mind cannot preexist the terms of the always already mythically chartered, genre- specific code of symbolic life / death, its “second set of instructions” and thus its governing sociogenic principle— or, as Keith Ward puts it, its nonphysical principle of causality.64 To give an example: here we are, we are talking and thinking. We are, in fact, reflexly talking and thinking in terms of Darwin’s biocosmogonically chartered definitive version—in The Descent of Man (1871)—of the British bourgeoisie’s ruling class’s earlier reinvention of Man1’s civic humanist homo politicus as that of liberal monohumanist Man2 as homo oeconomicus, together with its now fully desupernaturalized sociogenically encoded order of consciousness. These are the very terms, therefore, in which we ourselves, in now historically postcolonial / postapartheid contexts, are. If in our case, only mimetically so! This at the same time as we are also struggling to think outside the limits of the purely biocentric order of consciousness that is genre- specific to the Western bourgeoisie’s homo oeconomicus. But it’s extremely difficult to do, right? You know why? Because Darwinism’s powerful, seductive force as a cosmogony, or origin narrative, is due to the fact that it is the first in our human history to be not only part myth but also part natural science. In fact, this mutation—the part myth / part natural science workings of Darwinism—draws attention to Darwin’s powerful neoMalthusian conceptual leap.65 A leap by means of which—over and against Cardinal Bellarmine—Darwin was to definitively replace the biblical Cre- ation account of the origin of all forms of biological life, including the major bios aspect of our being hybridly human, with a new evolutionary account. Why, then, say that this Darwinian account is only part science? Biologist Glyn Isaac, in his essay “Aspects of Human Evolution” (1983), provides the answer. Isaac makes us aware of the ecumenically human trap into which Darwin had also partly fallen: Understanding the literature on human evolution calls for the recognition of special problems that confront scientists who report on this topic. Regardless of how the scientists present them, accounts of human origins are read as replacement materials for genesis. They fulfill needs that are reflected in the fact that all societies have in their culture some form of origin beliefs, that is, some narrative or configurational notion of how the world and humanity began. Usually, these beliefs do more than cope with curiosity, they have allegorical content, and they convey values, ethics and attitudes. The Adam and Eve creation story of the Bible is simply one of a wide variety of such poetic formulations. . . . The scientific movement which culminated in Darwin’s compelling formulation of evolution as a mode of origin seemed to sweep away earlier beliefs and relegate them to the realm of myth and legend. Following on from this, it is often supposed that the myths have been replaced by something quite different, which we call “science.” However, this is only partly true; scientific theories and information about human origins have been slotted into the same old places in our minds and our cultures that used to be occupied by the myths. . . . Our new origin beliefs are in fact surrogate myths, that are themselves part science, part myths. 66 So the trap, you see, is that of the paradox that lies at the core of our metaDarwinian hybridity. For what I’m saying is that as humans, we cannot / do not preexist our cosmogonies, our representations of our origins—even though it is we ourselves who invent those cosmogonies and then retroactively project them onto a past. We invent them in formulaic storytelling terms, as “donor figures” or “entities,” who have extrahumanly (supernaturally, but now also naturally and / or bioevolutionarily, therefore secularly) mandated what the structuring societal order of our genre- specific, eusocial or cultural present would have to be.67 As the French cultural anthropologist Maurice Godelier also makes clear, with respect to the above: we, too, hitherto have also systematically kept the reality of our own agency—from our origins until today—opaque to ourselves. 68 Thus all our humanly invented chartering cosmogonies, including our contemporary macro (monohumanistic / monotheistic) cosmogonies, are law- likely configured as being extrahumanly mandated.69 All such sacred theological discourses ( Judaism, Islamism, Christianity, for example) continue to function in the already theo- cosmogonically mandated cognitively closed terms that are indispensable to the enacting of their respective behavior- inducing and behavior- regulatory fictively eusocializing imperative. This is especially apparent, too, in the secular substitute monohumanist religion of Darwin’s neo- Malthusian biocosmogony: here, in the biocosmogony of symbolic life / death—as that of selection / dysselection and eugenic / dysgenic codes—the incarnation of symbolic life, will law- likely be that of the ruling- class bourgeoisie as the naturally selected (eugenic) master of Malthusian natural scarcity. With this emerges, cumulatively, the virtuous breadwinner, together with his pre- 1960s virtuous housewife, and, corelatedly, the savvy investor, the capital accumulator, or at least the steady job holder.70 In effect, wealth, no longer in its traditional, inherited freehold landowning form, but in its now unceasingly capital- accumulating, global form, is itself the sole macro- signifier of ultimate symbolic life. Symbolic death, therefore, is that of having been naturally dysselected and mastered by Malthusian natural scarcity: as are the globally homogenized dysgenic non- breadwinning jobless poor / the pauper / homeless / the welfare queens. Poverty itself, therefore, is the “significant ill” signifier of ultimate symbolic death and, consequently, capital accumulation, and therefore symbolic life signifies and narrates a plan of salvation that will cure the dysselected significant ill! The systemic reproduction of the real- life categories of both signifiers are indispensable to the continued enactment of the ruling - class bourgeoisie’s governing code of symbolic life / death and the defining of liberal (now neoliberal) monohumanist Man2. This now purely secular coding of life / death is itself discursively—indeed rigorously—elaborated bioepistemologically, on the model of a natural organism, by the disciplines of our social sciences and humanities, together with their respective genre- specific and ethno- class truths of solidarity.71 Consequently, within the laws of hybrid auto- institution and / or pseudospeciation the (humanities and social science) disciplinary truths of solidarity enact their biocosmogonically chartered sociogenic code of symbolic life / death, also imperatively calling to be discursively elaborated in cognitively (cum psychoaffectively / aesthetically) closed terms. Settler colonialism expropriates native bodies through a process of proletarianization and racialization grounds Traditional Western Labor movements necessitating an analysis of coloniality Englert 20 Sai Englert is a lecturer in the Institute for Area Studies. I work on political economy and development in the Middle East. July 20, 2020 “Settlers, Workers, and the Logic of Accumulation by Dispossession” https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/anti.12659aaditg An Alternative Reading: Settler Colonies and the Exploitation of the Native By focusing on an ideal form of settler colonialism, SCS directs much of its analytical focus to the Anglo-Saxon settler colonial world, in particular, to North America and Australia. There are important exceptions, including for example, the excellent collection edited by Elkins and Pedersen (2005), Saranillio’s (2013) focus on Asian settler colonisation, or the 2018 special issue of Settler Colonial Studies on Algeria (Barclay et al. 2018), but these remain outliers. The near absence of studies of South American or African settler colonies is striking, as has been remarked on by a host of different scholars including Kelley (2017), Vimalassery et al. (2016) and Speed (2017). These authors also make the connection between these silences and the identification of elimination as the specific characteristic of settler colonial regimes. Kelley (2017:269) points out that the African encounter with settler colonialism was primarily marked by exploitative processes. He demonstrates this not only through the case of enslaved African population, discussed above, but also through the centrality of exploitation in the case of settler colonialism in South Africa. He shows convincingly how, in the construction of white settler social relations in the country, “the expropriation of the native from the land was a fundamental objective, but so was proletarianization. They wanted the land and the labour, but not the people—that is to say, they sought to eliminate stable communities and their cultures of resistance”. The attempted elimination of collective peoplehood, Kelley shows, is here a political goal pursued through exploitation, unsettling the sharp division theorised by Wolfe and Veracini. Following a similar critique with a focus on South American settler regimes, Speed (2017:784) argues they have remained largely outside of the framework of SCS precisely because Spanish settlers did not either exploit or eliminate but did both, in different ways, depending on time and place. The issue of labour alongside that of land defines much of these experiences, as does indigenous labour resistance: “In places like Mexico and Central America, such labour regimes … were often the very mechanisms that dispossessed indigenous peoples of their lands, forcing them to labour in extractive undertakings on the very land that had been taken from them”. As these cases show, here are settler colonies that were deeply dependent on the labour of the indigenous population and although displacement and expropriation were definitely a central part of their modus vivendi, as was the undermining of collective indigenous claims over the land, so was the exploitation of their labour. Furthermore, as O’Brien (2017) points out, even within SCS’ favoured settings, such as North America, the overemphasis on elimination as foundational can have complicated consequences. She points out—alongside others discussed above—that an important distinction should be made between “logics” of political elimination and actual elimination. Failing to do so can overstate the power of settler regimes and fail to capture the ongoing importance of indigenous resistance. O’Brien (2017:254) instead argues that “Indigenous resistance to colonial power … continues to override the logic of elimination”. This critique is not only important in terms of understanding different forms of settler colonial regimes, but also in reflecting on processes of de-colonisation. It is striking, for example, that settler colonies based primarily on the exploitation of the indigenous population more often achieved their independence from both the settler state and the metropolis. Acknowledging this, Mamdani (2015:596) notes that “for students of settler colonialism in the modern era, Africa and America represent two polar opposites. Africa is the continent where settler colonialism has been defeated; America is where settler colonialism triumphed”. While taking seriously the unfinished nature of this triumph, pointed out above, and the ongoing nature of indigenous resistance, the difference in outcomes so far can be accounted for through the different treatment by the settler colonial regimes of the indigenous populations. It was the very dependence of settler colonial regimes in Africa on native labour, which laid the foundation for their destruction. It was the ability of indigenous resistance movements in Algeria and Southern Africa to shut down the settler economy as well as challenge the colonial states militarily that made decolonisation possible.2 This is also a reality that settlers themselves understood. As Lockman (2012) argues, it was, in part, the example of resistance by indigenous labour in other settler colonial settings, in particular in South Africa, that convinced Labour Zionists in Palestine to reject a model based on the exploitation of the indigenous population and opt for its exclusion instead (see below). In fact, some scholars, such as Fieldhouse (1982) in hisThe Colonial Empires, made the existing variety of labour regimes central to the study of settler colonialism. He took the presence of settlers, and the establishment of European societies within the colonial territories, as the determining characteristics of “colonies of settlements” as opposed to “colonies of occupation”. Fieldhouse then divided settler colonies in three categories: “pure”, “mixed”, and “plantation” settlements, which denote, respectively, settler societies based on imported settler labour, those constructed around a significant but minoritarian settler population where indigenous labour continued to play a central role, and those where imported enslaved populations worked on plantations for small settler minorities. Importantly, Fieldhouse’s approach (and that of others after him, such as Shafir 1996) demonstrates the danger of supposing a hermetic separation between different models. Instead, settler colonies have a variety of different strategies at their disposal, which can include exploitation, elimination, or both. One strategy can morph into another through such processes as the development of new strategic necessities for the colonial powers, interactions with indigenous resistance, or changing economic relations with the metropolis. Fieldhouse (1982:181) shows how the French colonisation of Algeria started as a colony of occupation in the North of the country. It was only in response to the 1834 Algerian revolt that France annexed more of the country and established French settlements in an attempt to pacify the indigenous peoples. In South Africa, Fieldhouse (1982:188–189) argues that the interaction between Boer and British colonisation, indigenous resistance, and the discovery of precious metal and diamonds in the second half of the 19th century, changed the nature of the settler colonial enterprise from pure to mixed. The question of labour (and therefore exploitation) is then a crucial aspect in the organisation of settler colonialism. This is true both in terms of the relationship between the settler colonial power and the native populations, but also in terms of social relations within the settler colonial polity. In fact, the labour movement within settler colonies has often been at the forefront of the imposition of racial segregation through colour bars, limits on racialised migration, and “whites-only” policies. The reasons behind this tendency will be discussed in greater detail below, but for now it will suffice to point out that from the late-19th century onwards, white working class movements across the settler colonial world organised over the question of limiting, excluding, or containing the use of indigenous and/or racialised workers. They furthermore rebelled against the settler states, or united with indigenous workers for collective improvement to their labour rights. In the United States, white workers organised against the competition of African American workers in the aftermath of emancipation, as well as the barring of Chinese migration to California, which successfully passed into law in the late 19th century (see Day 2016; Karuka 2019). Similar campaigns where waged in both South Africa and Australia against the immigration of Asian workers in the early 20th century. In fact, the formation of the Australian Labour Party took place on the basis of taking the “white Australia” campaign into parliament (Hyslop 1999; Shafir 1996). Perhaps the most emblematic example of these labour campaigns for the exclusion of racialised workers is that for the colour bar in South Africa (and later for the imposition of Apartheid) by the white workers' movement. In a strange mixture of internationalist rhetoric and settler colonial racism the white miners in 1922 raised the slogan: “Workers of the World, Unite and Fight for a White South Africa” (Reddy 2016:101). In the case of the Zionist colonisation of Palestine, the labour movement even became the social actor behind which the entire settler polity united. As Shafir (1996) has shown, Zionist colonial strategy in Palestine transformed, under the leadership of the Labour Zionist movement in the early decades of the 20th century, from a settler colonial project based primarily on exploited Palestinian labour to one which emphasised their exclusion and reliance on “Hebrew labour” instead. The change was brought about by the campaigns led by the settler labour movement, colonial responses to Palestinian resistance, and the material problems faced by the Zionist movement in attempting to attract new settlers to Palestine. More will be said about this in the fifth section of this paper. For now it will suffice to point out that the Labour Zionist movement fought for this form of settler organisation against Palestinian workers as well as against settler bosses and their project for a settler economy based on the exploitation—not the elimination—of the natives. The guiding principle of this movement was that to make settlement effective Jewish workers needed to be granted higher wages and living standards, while indigenous workers needed to be excluded from the labour market all together. It is this logic of full separation, that Sayegh (2012:214), described as lying at the root of the Zionist project in Palestine: “Racial self-segregation, racial exclusiveness and racial supremacy”. A series of important points emerge from this alternative view of settler colonialism. Firstly, the exclusive Wolfe-an focus on elimination of the native as opposed to exploitation, although of central importance within some periods and locales of settler colonialism, does not allow one to develop an effective general axiomatic analysis of the settler colonial form and its social relations. Secondly, the racial organisation of labour—whether settler, enslaved, or indigenous—and the struggle over its organisation between settlers and indigenous populations, as well as between settlers themselves, are a crucial aspect of settler colonialism, both in its eliminatory and/or exploitative forms (on which more below). Thirdly, the participation of settler labour movements in the colonial project, particularly in the process of control and/or expulsion of racialised, enslaved, and/or indigenous population appears as a key characteristic across the settler colonial world. The aff’s analysis of health overlooks structures of white supremacy and settler colonialism dictating healtb conditions for indigenous people which turns the case. Kashyap 20 Monika Batra Kashyap is a Visiting Assistant Professor at Seattle University School of Law, Ronald A. Peterson Law Clinic. J.D., University of California Berkeley School of Law. November 2020 California Law Review “U.S. Settler Colonialism, White Supremacy, and the Racially Disparate Impacts of COVID-19” https://www.californialawreview.org/settler-colonialism-white-supremacy-covid-19/aaditg A settler colonialism framework recognizes that the United States is a present-day settler colonial society whose laws, institutions, and systems of governance continue to enact an ongoing “structure of invasion” that persists to this day.55 ... Scholars across multiple disciplines have turned towards using a settler colonialism framework in their analyses to broaden understandings of how systems of subordination are structured in the United States.66 ... A framework of settler colonialism understands that the three foundational processes upon which the United States was built—Indigenous elimination, anti-Black racism, and immigrant exploitation—are ongoing processes that continue to shape present-day systemic inequities.77 In other words, a settler colonialism framework acknowledges the endurance of three ongoing “strategies of colonization” that continue to maintain settler colonialism’s structure of invasion: 1) strategies of elimination targeting Indigenous peoples; 2) strategies of subjugation targeting Black people (anti-Black racism); and 3) strategies of exploitation and exclusion targeting immigrants of color.88 ... Moreover, a settler colonialism framework acknowledges that the ongoing strategies of colonization continue to be fueled, enabled and bolstered by an elaborate set of racial logics that Andrea Smith describes as the “logics of White supremacy.”99 ... Smith argues that White supremacy in the U.S. context is enacted through three primary interrelated logics: 1) the view of Indigenous people as necessarily disappearing;1010 ... 2) the view of Black people as enslavable;1111 ... and 3) the view of immigrants of color as inferior and permanent “threats to the empire” who must either be exploited or excluded.1212 ... While the manifestations of these White supremacist logics may change over time, “they remain as persistently present today as they were five hundred years ago.”1313 This Essay will connect the persistent strategies, logics, and identities created by settler colonialism to the disparate health impacts of COVID-19 in Indigenous, Black, and immigrant of color communities in the United States. By offering a framework that uncovers the root causes of ongoing patterns of systemic oppression, this Essay hopes to inspire reform efforts that seek to alter such patterns by advancing reform efforts that are grounded in truth, justice, and reconciliation. I. Strategies of Indigenous Elimination: The Impacts of COVID-19 on Indigenous Communities Settler colonialism has eliminated Indigenous peoples in the United States through a host of strategies meant to obtain and maintain territorial control of the settler state.1414 As historian Patrick Wolfe explains, settler colonialism “requires the elimination of the owners of that territory, but not in any particular way.”1515 Elimination strategies employed by settler colonialism include genocidal violence, biological warfare through the introduction of infectious diseases, forced removal and relocation, confinement to reservations, child abduction, religious conversion, forced resocialization in residential boarding schools, and intricate biological and cultural assimilation programs that strip Indigenous people of their culture and replace it with settler culture.1616 White supremacist logics support the idea that Indigenous people are “nonhuman wild savages unsuited for civilization” who must therefore be eliminated, rendered expendable, or made invisible in order to justify dispossessing them of their lands.1717 ... These logics continue to underpin the removal of Indigenous people from settler spaces in both literal and conceptual ways.1818 ... For example, despite the fact that Indigenous peoples are killed in police encounters at a higher rate than any other racial or ethnic group, these deaths rarely gain the national spotlight, and are instead rendered invisible.1919 ... Moreover, contemporary popular narratives that designate European settlers as the “founding fathers” and refer to the United States as a “nation of immigrants” erase the existence of Indigenous peoples and render them invisible.2020 ... Another significant way in which settler colonialism’s ongoing strategy of Indigenous elimination manifests today is through devastating health disparities in Indigenous communities, which result in higher death rates for Indigenous peoples.2121 ... Important medical research implicates settler colonialism in contributing to poor health outcomes and high mortality rates in Indigenous communities in the United States.2222 ... This research highlights the devastating health impacts resulting from the brutal dispossession of traditional lands, the forced relocation to unproductive and polluted lands contaminated by heavy metals and industrial waste, the introduction of infectious settler diseases, and the introduction of harmful substances such as tobacco and alcohol.2323 ... This research also affirms a report previously published by the World Health Organization finding that Indigenous health is significantly affected by factors related to loss of language and connection to the land, environmental deprivation, and spiritual, emotional, and mental disconnectedness resulting from the loss of Indigenous traditions, culture, and identity.2424 ... The research concludes that these “oppressive factors” caused by colonialism perpetuate “severe inequalities in Indigenous health status, unsatisfactory disease and vital statistics, impaired emotional and social wellbeing, and poor prospects for future generations.”2525 Indigenous Health Part 1, supra note 22, at 66. The devastating health impacts resulting from settler colonialism’s strategy of Indigenous elimination have led to disproportionately high rates of pre-existing health conditions such as asthma, diabetes, hypertension and heart disease2626 ... that put Indigenous peoples at a higher risk of death by COVID-19.2727 ... And historical and structural inequities in federal funding—such as lack of support for municipal plumbing systems—have further exacerbated the health disparities that put Indigenous peoples at higher-risk in the COVID-19 crisis.2828 ... For example, 40 percent of Navajo households do not have access to running water, making it difficult to comply with handwashing recommendations.2929 ... As a result, Indigenous communities who were previously decimated by the imposition of settler diseases such as measles, whooping cough, small-pox, influenza, and tuberculosis continue to be eliminated by health disparities that make them disproportionately vulnerable to a new disease: COVID-19.3030 ... Today, Indigenous peoples in the United States are dying 3.2 times the rate of White people as a result of COVID-19.3131 The alternative is refusal – a political depression that recognizes reconciliation will never be enough and creates harmful optimism to the political. Instead, embrace an affective pessimism that grounds alternative futures. The question is not whether Native people want the world, but if the world wants Native people Belcourt 2016 (Billy-ray Belcourt is from the Driftpile Cree Nation. He is a 2016 Rhodes Scholar and is reading for an M.St. in Women's Studies at the University of Oxford. He was named by CBC Books as one of six Indigenous writers to watch,Political Depression in a Time of Reconciliation, Jan 15, 2016, http://activehistory.ca/2016/01/political-depression-in-a-time-of-reconciliation/)//NotJacob//recut anop It’s tough: knowing that you might not get the world you want and the world that wants you back, that your bones might never stop feeling achy and fragile from the wear and tear of mere existence, from the hard labour of getting through the day. Ours are bodies that have been depleted by time, that have been wrenched into a world they can’t properly bend or squirm into because our flesh is paradoxically both too much and not enough for it. In the wake of both eventful and slowed kinds of premature death, what does it mean that the state wants so eagerly to move Indigenous bodies, to touch them, so to speak? Reconciliation is an affective mess: it throws together and condenses histories of trauma and their shaky bodies and feelings into a neatly bordered desire; a desire to let go, to move on, to turn to the future with open arms, as it were. Reconciliation is stubbornly ambivalent in its potentiality, an object of desire that we’re not entirely certain how to acquire or substantiate, but one that the state – reified through the bodies of politicians, Indigenous or otherwise – is telling us we need. In fact, Justice Murray Sinclair noted that the launch of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s final report on December 15, 2015, puts us at the “threshold of a new era in this country.”1 I am interested in how life might be lived willfully and badly in the face of governmental forms of redress when many of us are stretched thin, how reconciliation, though instantiating a noticeable shift in the national affective atmosphere,2 doesn’t actually remake the substance of the social or the political such that we’re still tethered to scenes of living that can’t sustain us. What I am trying to get at is: reconciliation works insofar as it is a way of looking forward to being in this world, at the expense of more radical projects like decolonization that want to experiment with different strategies for survival.3 This way of doing things isn’t working and, because of that, optimism is hard to come by. According to cultural theorist Ann Cvetkovich, political depression emerges from the realization “that customary forms of political response, including direct action and critical analysis, are no longer working either to change the world or to make us feel better.”4 It is the pestering sense that whatever you do, it won’t be enough; that things will continue uninterrupted, teasing you because something different is all you’ve wanted from the start. To be politically depressed is to worry about the temporal reach of neoliberal projects like reconciliation, to question their orientation toward the future because the present requires all of your energy in order to feel like anything but dying. Political depression is of a piece with a dispossessory enterprise that remakes the topography of the ordinary such that the labour of maintaining one’s life becomes too hard to keep up. We have to wait for the then and there in the here and now; how do we preserve ourselves until then? As Leanne Simpson points out, reconciliation has been reparative for some survivors, encouraging them to tell their stories, to keep going, so to speak.5 But, what of the gendered and racialized technologies of violence that created our scenes of living, scenes we’ve been forced to think are of our own choosing? Optimism for the work of reconciliation disappeared in the face of multiple crises: of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls, of HIV infection rates, of mass incarceration, of diabetes, of suicide. Reconciliation, at once a heuristic and a form of statecraft, fakes a political that doesn’t actually exist as such, one that not only presupposes that we – Indigenous peoples, that is – are willing to stay attached to it, but that we are already folded into it, that we’ve already consented to it. What does it mean, for example, to consent to a nation-to-nation relationship if there are no other options to choose from? Reconciliation wants so badly to be a keyword of sorts, to contain so much inside its semantic confines, to be “wide-reaching in its explanatory power.”6 I’m not surprised things have started to leak all over the place. Decolonization might need something of an affective turn: I think there are ways of being attuned to our bodies such that we can gauge if our visceral responses are trained or not, parasitic or not. In short: what do our tears signal, what do his – Justin Trudeau’s – signal? We cry because pain holds our world together. I don’t want pain to hold our world together anymore. Perhaps admitting we are politically depressed is one of the most important things we could do in this day and age. When survival becomes radical and death becomes part and parcel of the ordinary itself, political depression might be our only point of departure. But, political depression is also about dreaming up alternatives that can sustain your attachments to life. Cvetkovich reminds us that we need “other affective tools for transformation” because hope and blind allegiance have failed too many of us too often.7 I am interested in the generative work of pessimism, how being fed up propels us onward, and keeps us grounded in the now, such that we can make it to the future, even if that’s just tomorrow. As Kim TallBear put it, we’ve been living in a post-apocalyptic world (in its ecological ruins and in the face of its crisis-making politics) for quite some time,8 one that exhausts our bodies to the point of depression and death and one that slowly removes us from the non-normative or the astray.9 We are stuck in the thick of things, left clinging to an impasse without an exit strategy. We might need reconciliation today, but Indigenous peoples need a more capacious world-building project for tomorrow, one that can bear all of us and the sovereignties built into our breathing. We should not be asked: do you want the world today? Instead, we should be asking: does the world want us? The counterinterpretation is that you should evaluate the 1AC as an object of study a Sociogeny – debate may not spill over to political change but it has the potential to reproduce affirmations and negations that trigger neurohcmeical responses via reward and punishment mechanisms privilege certain research methods as valuable in the way debaters view the world. b Objectivity – consequence based plan focus shifts the focus of debate from our investments in settler colonialism to a plan text, which is incoherent because debate is a communicative activity and their inter sidesteps discussions of genocide. c Temporality – the affs models teaches violence can be wished away through administrative tinkering propogating desires within debate to play as activits without reimagnign the social structures that cause violence in the first place. Viewing the ballot as an mechanism to restore ethicality fails – they still dogmatically adhere to these protocols even though they know debate doesn’t caus emateiral change. That creates an process where nativeness is confined to death as their promise of a fiated political horizon relies on a politics of futurity.
11/20/21
ND - NC - Kant
Tournament: Glenbrooks | Round: 5 | Opponent: Marlborough WR | Judge: Lauren Woodall Permissibility, presumption, and skep negate: 1 Obligations- the resolution indicates the affirmative has to prove an obligation, and permissibility would deny the existence of an obligation 2 Falsity- Statements are more often false than true because proving one part of the statement false disproves the entire statement. Presuming all statements are true creates contradictions which would be ethically bankrupt. 3 Affirmation theory- Affirming requires unconditionally maintaining an obligation Affirm: maintain as true. That’s Dictionary.com- “affirm” https://www.dictionary.com/browse/affirm
The meta-ethic is practical reason— 1 Inescapability— I can question why to follow or the validity of an ethical theory, which concedes the authority of reason as if I question reason, I use reason to question. Outweighs on validity—any other truth risks falsity Reality may be fake, our experiences may be arbitrary, and experience may be descriptive not normative, but questioning the validity of reason requires reason, conceding its validity. Any other ethic begs the question of why, meaning it’s arbitrary and nonbinding 2 Action theory— Only reason can explain why we take transitional action to an overall end. For example, setting the end of tea provides me a reason to unify the necessary actions to produce tea, like getting a pot, filling it with water, etc. Any other explanation fails since it can’t give meaning to why we take transitioning action – freezing action. 2 Impacts— a That’s a side constraint on the AC—ethics is a guide to action so it must appeal to a structure of action. b Bindingness—reason is intrinsic to actions since only it can provide value to transitioning action, which justifies universality If we are all reasoners, we must all be able to determine if an action is good. An action that maximizes my freedom at the cost of others then would have to be recognized as good by everyone, but that leads to a contradiction where everyone takes other’s freedoms to maximize theirs, making it impossible to reach my end Thus, the standard is respecting a system of inner and outer freedom Negate— 1 Strikes use others as a mere means to achieve the end of the strikers. Fourie 17 Johan Fourie 11-30-2017 "Ethicality of Labor-Strike Demonstrates by Social Workers" https://www.otherpapers.com/essay/Ethicality-of-Labor-Strike-Demonstrates-by-Social-Workers/62694.html (Johan Fourie is professor of Economics and History at Stellenbosch University.) JG A further formula of the Categorical Imperative is "so, act as to treat humanity, whether in your own person or in that of any other context, never solely as a means to an end but always as an end within itself' (Parrott, 2006, p. 51). By this Kant meant people should be valued and respected as an individual and not used for the benefit of others. Participating in a labor-strike demonstration/action is a direct violation of this categorical perspective as it would not be ethically permissible because the severe dependence and well-being of clients, the effective functioning of the employer organization, and society is used to duly and unduly influence the bargaining process for better working conditions. In participating in the labor strike demonstration, the humanity, and well-being of clients and society is not seen as crucial and as an 'end', but rather used to demonstrate the undeniable need for the skills and expertise of social workers. Furthermore, through withholding services, social worker professionals demonstrate that the well-being and welfare of society have lost its inherent importance/value. Though the value of overall well-being is taught throughout the social work training process and is enshrined in the professional ethical codes. 2 The process of strike uses patients or beneficiaries of work as a means to an end Howard 20 Danielle Howard Mar 2020, "What Should Physicians Consider Prior to Unionizing?," Journal of Ethics | American Medical Association, https://journalofethics.ama-assn.org/article/what-should-physicians-consider-prior-unionizing/2020-03 LEX JB - Written in the context of doctors, warrant can be used for all jobs The possible disadvantage to patients highlights the crux of the moral issue of physician strikes. In Immanuel Kant’s Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals, one formulation of the categorical imperative is to “Act in such a way as to treat humanity, whether in your own person or in that of anyone else, always as an end and never merely as a means.”24 When patient care is leveraged by physicians during strikes, patients serve as a means to the union’s ends. Unless physicians act to improve everyone’s care, union action—if it jeopardizes the care of some hospitalized patients, for example—cannot be ethical. It is for this reason that, in the case of physicians looking to form a new union, the argument can be made that unionization should be used only as a last resort. Physician union members must be prepared to utilize collective action and accept its risks to patient care, but every effort should be made to avoid actions that risk harm to patients. 3 Going on strike isn’t universalizable – a) if everyone leaves work then there will be no concept of a job b) everyone means the employer even leaves which is a contradiction in conception because you can’t improve work conditions if there’s no more work
11/21/21
ND - PIC - Police
Tournament: Apple Valley | Round: Doubles | Opponent: Park City NL | Judge: Jenn Melin, Grant Brown, Joseph Georges CP Text: A just government ought to recognize an unconditional right of all workers except police to strike.
Police Strikes are used to combat racial progress and attempts to limit police union power. Making them legal and easier only make progress much harder. Grim 2020 Andrew Grim What is the ‘blue flu’ and how has it increased police power? https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2020/07/01/what-is-blue-flu-how-has-it-increased-police-power/SJKS But the result of such protests matter deeply as we consider police reform today. Historically, blue flu strikes have helped expand police power, ultimately limiting the ability of city governments to reform, constrain or conduct oversight over the police. They allow the police to leverage public fear of crime to extract concessions from municipalities. This became clear in Detroit more than 50 years ago. In June 1967, tensions arose between Detroit Mayor Jerome Cavanagh and the Detroit Police Officers Association (DPOA), which represented the city’s 3,300 patrol officers. The two were at odds primarily over police demands for a pay increase. Cavanagh showed no signs of caving to the DPOA’s demands and had, in fact, proposed to cut the police department’s budget. On June 15, the DPOA escalated the dispute with a walkout: 323 officers called in sick. The number grew over the next several days as the blue flu spread, reaching a height of 800 absences on June 17. In tandem with the walkout, the DPOA launched a fearmongering media campaign to win over the public. They took out ads in local newspapers warning Detroit residents, “How does it feel to be held up? Stick around and find out!” This campaign took place at a time of rising urban crime rates and uprisings, and only a month before the 1967 Detroit riot, making it especially potent. The DPOA understood this climate and used it to its advantage. With locals already afraid of crime and displeased at Cavanagh’s failure to rein it in, they would be more likely to demand the return of the police than to demand retribution against officers for an illegal strike. The DPOA’s strategy paid off. The walkout left Detroit Police Commissioner Ray Girardin feeling “practically helpless.” “I couldn’t force them to work,” he later told The Washington Post. Rather than risk public ire by allowing the blue flu to continue, Cavanagh relented. Ultimately, the DPOA got the raises it sought, making Detroit officers the highest paid in the nation. This was far from the end of the fight between Cavanagh and the DPOA. In the ensuing months and years, they continued to tussle over wages, pensions, the budget, the integration of squad cars and the hiring of black officers. The threat of another blue flu loomed over all these disputes, helping the union to win many of them. And Detroit was not an outlier. Throughout the 1960s, ’70s and ’80s, the blue flu was a ubiquitous and highly effective tactic in Baltimore, Memphis, New Orleans, Chicago, Newark, New York and many other cities. In most cases, as author Kristian Williams writes, “When faced with a walkout or slowdown, the authorities usually decided that the pragmatic need to get the cops back to work trumped the city government’s long term interest in diminishing the rank and file’s power.” But each time a city relented to this pressure, they ceded more and more power to police unions, which would turn to the strategy repeatedly to defend officers’ interests — particularly when it came to efforts to address systemic racism in police policies and practices. In 1970, black residents of Pittsburgh’s North Side neighborhood raised an outcry over the “hostile sadistic treatment” they experienced at the hands of white police officers. They lobbied Mayor Peter F. Flaherty to assign more black officers to their neighborhood. The mayor agreed, transferring several white officers out of the North Side and replacing them with black officers. While residents cheered this decision, white officers and the Fraternal Order of Police (FOP), which represented them, were furious. They slammed the transfer as “discrimination” against whites. About 425 of the Pittsburgh Police Department’s 1,600 police officers called out sick in protest. Notably, black police officers broke with their white colleagues and refused to join the walkout. They praised the transfer as a “long overdue action” and viewed the walkout as a betrayal of officers’ oath to protect the public. Nonetheless, the tactic paid off. After several days, Flaherty caved to the “open revolt” of white officers, agreeing to halt the transfers and instead submit the dispute to binding arbitration between the city and the police union. Black officers, though, continued to speak out against their union’s support of racist practices, and many of them later resigned from the union in protest. Similar scenarios played out in Detroit, Chicago and other cities in the 1960s and ’70s, as white officers continually staged walkouts to preserve the segregated status quo in their departments. These blue flu strikes amounted to an authoritarian power grab by police officers bent on avoiding oversight, rejecting reforms and shoring up their own authority. In the aftermath of the 1967 Detroit walkout, a police commissioner’s aide strongly criticized the police union’s strong-arm tactics, saying “it smacks of a police state.” The clash left one newspaper editor wondering, “Who’s the Boss of the Detroit Police?” But in the “law and order” climate of the late 1960s, such criticism did not resonate enough to stir a groundswell of public opinion against the blue flu. And police unions dismissed critics by arguing that officers had “no alternative” but to engage in walkouts to get city officials to make concessions. Crucially, the very effectiveness of the blue flu may be premised on a myth. While police unions use public fear of crime skyrocketing without police on duty, in many cases, the absence of police did not lead to a rise in crime. In New York City in 1971, for example, 20,000 officers called out sick for five days over a pay dispute without any apparent increase in crime. The most striking aspect of the walkout, as one observer noted, “might be just how unimportant it seemed.” Today, municipalities are under immense pressure from activists who have taken to the streets to protest the police killings of black men and women. Some have already responded by enacting new policies and cutting police budgets. As it continues, more blue flus are likely to follow as officers seek to wrest back control of the public debate on policing and reassert their independence.
These strikes strengthen unions that contribute to increased violence, and protection of misconduct Serwer 6/24 Serwer, Adam. “Bust the Police Unions.” The Atlantic, Atlantic Media Company, 24 June 2021, www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2021/07/bust-the-police-unions/619006/SJKS Police unions found that they had new leverage at the bargaining table. In contract negotiations with cities, they sought not merely higher pay or better benefits, but protections for officers accused of misconduct. At this, they proved remarkably successful. Reviewing 82 active police-union contracts in major American cities, a 2017 Reuters investigation found that a majority “call for departments to erase disciplinary records, some after just six months.” Many contracts allow officers to access investigative information about complaints or charges against them before being interrogated, so they can get their stories straight. Some require the officer’s approval before making information regarding misconduct public; others set time limits on when citizens can file complaints. A 2017 Washington Post investigation found that since 2006, of the 1,881 officers fired for misconduct at the nation’s largest departments, 451 had been reinstated because of requirements in union contracts. For many police unions, enacting and enforcing barriers to accountability became a primary concern. In 2014, in San Antonio, the local police union was willing to accept caps on pay and benefits as long as the then–city manager abandoned her efforts to, among other reforms, prevent police from erasing past misconduct records. The damage that these types of provisions have done is hard to overstate. In one recent study, the economist Rob Gillezeau of the University of Victoria found that after departments unionized, there was a “substantial increase” in police killings of civilians. Neither crime rates nor the safety of officers themselves was affected. The provisions do more than simply protect bad actors. They cultivate an unhealthy and secretive culture within police departments, strengthening a phenomenon known as the code of silence. In a 2000 survey of police officers by the National Institute of Justice, only 39 percent of respondents agreed with the statement “Police officers always report serious criminal violations involving abuse of authority by fellow officers.” That leads to endless amounts of racist violence and the bolstering of the prison industrial complex. Chaney and Ray 13, Cassandra (Has a PhD and is a professor at LSU. Also has a strong focus in the structure of Black families) , and Ray V. Robertson (Also has a PhD and is a criminal justice professor at LSU). "Racism and police brutality in America." Journal of African American Studies 17.4 (2013): 480-505. SMdo I really need a card for this Racism and Discrimination According to Marger (2012), “racism is an ideology, or belief system, designed to justify and rationalize racial and ethnic inequality” (p. 25) and “discrimination, most basically, is behavior aimed at denying members of particular ethnic groups’ equal access to societal rewards” (p. 57). Defining both of these concepts from the onset is important for they provide the lens through which our focus on the racist and discriminatory practices of law enforcement can occur. Since the time that Africans African Americans were forcibly brought to America, they have been the victims of racist and discriminatory practices that have been spurred and/or substantiated by those who create and enforce the law. For example, The Watts Riots of 1965, the widespread assaults against Blacks in Harlem during the 1920s (King 2011), law enforcement violence against Black women (i.e., Malaika Brooks, Jaisha Akins, Frankie Perkins, Dr. Mae Jemison, Linda Billups, Clementine Applewhite) and other ethnic women of color (Ritchie 2006), the beating of Rodney King, and the deaths of Amadou Diallo in the 1990s and Trayvon Martin more recently are just a few public examples of the historical and contemporaneous ways in which Blacks in America have been assaulted by members of the police system (King 2011; Loyd 2012; Murch 2012; Rafail et al. 2012). In Punishing Race (2011), law professor Michael Tonry’s research findings point to the fact that Whites tend to excuse police brutality against Blacks because of the racial animus that they hold against Blacks. Thus, to Whites, Blacks are viewed as deserving of harsh treatment in the criminal justice system (Peffley and Hurwitz 2013). At first glance, such an assertion may seem to be unfathomable, buy that there is an extensive body of literature which suggests that Black males are viewed as the “prototypical criminal,” and this notion is buttressed in the media, by the general public, and via disparate sentencing outcomes (Blair et al. 2004; Eberhardt et al. 2006; Gabiddon 2010; Maddox and Gray 2004; Oliver and Fonash 2002; Staples 2011). For instance, Blair et al. (2004) revealed that Black males with more Afrocentric features (e.g., dark skin, broad noses, full lips) may receive longer sentences than Blacks with less Afrocentric features, i.e., lighter skin and straighter hair (Eberhardt et al. 2006). Shaun Gabiddon in Criminological Theories on Race and Crime (2010) discussed the concept of “Negrophobia” which was more extensively examined by Armour (1997). Negrophobia can be surmised as an irrational of Blacks, which includes a fear of being victimized by Black, that can result in Whites shooting or harming an AfricanAmerican based on criminal/racial stereotypes (Armour 1997). The aforementioned racialized stereotypical assumptions can be deleterious because they can be used by Whites to justify shooting a Black person on the slightest of pretense (Gabiddon 2010). Finally, African-American males represent a group that has been much maligned in the larger society (Tonry 2011). Further, as victims of the burgeoning prison industrial complex, mass incarceration, and enduring racism, the barriers to truly independent Black male agency are ubiquitous and firmly entrenched (Alexander 2010; Chaney 2009; Baker 1996; Blackmon 2008; Dottolo and Stewart 2008; Karenga 2010; Martin et al. 2001; Smith and Hattery 2009). Thus, racism and discrimination heightens the psychological distress experienced by Blacks (Robertson 2011; Pieterse et al. 2012), as well as their decreased mortality in the USA (Muennig and Murphy 2011). Police Brutality Against Black Males According to Walker (2011), police brutality is defined as “the use of excessive physical force or verbal assault and psychological intimidation” (p. 579). Although one recent study suggests that the NYPD has become better behaved due to greater race and gender diversity (Kane and White 2009), Blacks are more likely to be the victims of police brutality. A growing body of scholarly research related to police brutality has revealed that Blacks are more likely than Whites to make complaints regarding police brutality (Smith and Holmes 2003), to be accosted while operating driving a motorized vehicle (“Driving While Black”), and to underreport how often they are stopped due to higher social desirability factors (TomaskovicDevey et al. 2006). Interestingly, data obtained from the General Social Survey (GSS), a representative sample conducted biennially by the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago for the years 1994 through 2004, provide further proof regarding the acceptance of force against Blacks. In particular, the GSS found Whites to be significantly (29.5 ) more accepting of police use of force when a citizen was attempting to escape custody than Blacks when analyzed using the chi-squared statistical test (p The average Southern policeman is a promoted poor White with a legal sanction to use a weapon. His social heritage has taught him to despise the Negroes, and he has had little education which could have changed him….The result is that probably no group of Whites in America have a lower opinion of the Negro people and are more fixed in their views than Southern policeman. (Myrdal 1944, pp. 540–541) Myrdal (1944) was writing on results from a massive study that he undertook in the late 1930s. He was writing at a time that even the most conservative among us would have to admit was not a colorblind society (if one even believes in such things). But current research does corroborate his observations that less educated police officers tend to be the most aggressive and have the most formal complaints filed against them when compared to their more educated counterparts (Hassell and Archbold 2010; Jefferis et al. 2011). Tonry (2011) delineates some interesting findings from the 2001 Race, Crime, and Public Opinion Survey that can be applied to understanding why the larger society tolerates police misconduct when it comes to Black males. The survey, which involved approximately 978 non-Hispanic Whites and 1,010 Blacks, revealed a divergence in attitudes between Blacks and Whites concerning the criminal justice system (Tonry 2011). For instance, 38 of Whites and 89 of Blacks viewed the criminal justice system as biased against Blacks (Tonry 2011). Additionally, 8 of Blacks and 56 of Whites saw the criminal justice system as treating Blacks fairly (Tonry 2011). Perhaps most revealing when it comes to facilitating an environment ripe for police brutality against Black males, 68 of Whites and only 18 of Whites expressed confidence in law enforcement (Tonry 2011). Is a society wherein the dominant group overwhelming approves of police performance willing to do anything substantive to curtail police brutality against Black males? Police brutality is not a new phenomenon. The Department of Justice (DOJ) office of Civil Rights (OCR) has investigated more than a dozen police departments in major cities across the USA on allegations of either racial discrimination or police brutality (Gabbidon and Greene 2013). To make the aforementioned even more clear, according to Gabbidon and Greene (2013), “In 2010, the OCR was investigating 17 police departments across the country and monitoring five settlements regarding four police agencies” (pp. 119–120). Plant and Peruche (2005) provide some useful information into why police officers view Black males as potential perpetrators and could lead to acts of brutality. In their research, the authors suggest that since Black people in general, and Black males in particular, are caricatured as aggressive and criminal, police are more likely to view Black men as a threat which justifies the disproportionate use of deadly force. Therefore, it is not beyond the realm of possibility that police officers’ decisions to act aggressively may, to some extent, be influenced by race (Jefferis et al. 2011). The media’s portrayals of Black men are often less than sanguine. Bryson’s (1998) work in this area provides empirical evidence that the mass media that has been instrumental in portraying Black men as studs, super detectives, or imitation White men and has a general negative effect on how these men are regarded by others. Such characterizations can be so visceral in nature that “prototypes” of criminal suspects are more likely to be African-American (Oliver et al. 2004). Not surprisingly, the more Afrocentric the African-American’s facial features, the more prone he or she is expected to be deviant (Eberhardt et al. 2006). Interestingly, it is probable that less than flattering depictions of Black males on television and in news stories are activating pre-existing stereotypes possessed by Whites as opposed to facilitating their creation. According to Oliver et al. (2004), “it is important to keep in mind that media consumption is an active process, with viewers’ existing attitudes and beliefs playing a larger role in how images are attended to, interpreted, and remembered” (p. 89). Moreover, it is reductionist to presuppose that individual is powerless in constructing a palatable version of reality and is solely under the control of the media and exercises no agency. Lastly, Peffley and Hurwitz (2013) describe what can be perceived as one of the more deleterious results of negative media caricatures of Black males. More specifically, the authors posit that most Whites believe that Blacks are disproportionately inclined to engage in criminal behavior and are the deserving on harsh treatment by the criminal justice system. On the other hand, such an observation is curious because most urban areas are moderate to highly segregated residentially which would preclude the frequent and significant interaction needed to make such scathing indictments (Bonilla-Silva 2009). Consequently, the aforementioned racial animus has the effect of increased White support for capital punishment if questions regarding its legitimacy around if capital punishment is too frequently applied to Blacks (Peffley and Hurwitz 2013; Tonry 2011). Ultimately, erroneous (negative) portrayals of crime and community, community race and class identities, and concerns over neighborhood change all contribute to place-specific framing of “the crime problem.” These frames, in turn, shape both intergroup dynamics and support for criminal justice policy (Leverentz 2012). The inclusion of the police into the right to strike erases difference – the essence of a cop is to practice brutality and crackdowns strikes Marcy ’15 Sam, “The year of the pig: Should workers support police strikes?”, 01-08-2015, https://www.workers.org/2015/01/17782///pranav Are strikes by the police to be regarded approximately the same way as strikes by ordinary workers? A reading of the treatment accorded to the New York police strike by the Daily World (the paper of the Communist Party which professes to be Marxist-Leninist) clearly conveys this impression. A column by George Morris, the Daily World’s labor analyst, waxes eloquent about the cops’ strike and says “it is in the spirit of rebellion we see everywhere today as in unions against the long entrenched bureaucracy.” He further says that the cops are “beginning to see themselves as in much the same position as other city employees and workers.” Finally, he admonishes his readers that “fire should not be blunderbussed against all on the police force.” You see, the way to look at it is that there are good cops and bad cops, just like there are good capitalists and bad ones. We must assume then, that there are good storm troopers and bad ones if we use the logic of George Morris. In this way, Morris substitutes bourgeois morality for Marxist analysis of class antagonisms and contradictions between class groupings. The cops’ strike is not an isolated phenomenon. There is one in progress right now in Milwaukee. Earlier there were strikes or stoppages in Detroit and Youngstown, Ohio. Strike preparations are underway in perhaps a dozen other cities throughout the country. It is therefore necessary and in the vital interests of the working class to restate the fundamental position of revolutionary Marxism on this crucial question. Should strikes of cops be treated on an equal level with workers’ strikes? Emphatically, no! A striking worker and a striking police officer may on the surface appear to have the same immediate aims — to get higher pay and better conditions for themselves. But this is to take an extremely narrow and superficial view of their apparently similar situations. The truth, however, is that there is objectively speaking not a shred of class identity between workers and the police. The fundamental interests of the workers are diametrically opposed to those of the police and are absolutely irreconcilable with them. Producers or parasites? A worker is, above all, a producer. The police officer is a parasite who lives off what the worker produces. No truer words could be said! All the material wealth which is now in the possession of the capitalist class was produced by the workers. When a worker goes out on strike she or he is merely trying to retrieve a portion of the wealth which her or his labor power produced. The worker gets back in the form of wages only a portion of what he or she produces. The rest is what the capitalist class retains in the form of profit (really the unpaid labor of the workers). The gross national income of the U.S. last year reached the astronomical sum of one trillion dollars. It was all produced by workers: Black, Brown, white, men and women and even children. The struggles of all the workers, insofar as their immediate demands are concerned, are merely to retrieve a larger portion of this wealth which they produced for the bosses and which the bosses keep for themselves. Contribute nothing to social wealth What have the cops contributed to the production of this unprecedented amount of wealth? Nothing at all. In fact, their principal function is to guard the wealth for the capitalists, protect their monopolist profits from the demands of the workers. Even as the New York cops were out on strike, their emergency crews were busily clubbing the heads of striking telephone workers. That’s the very essence of a cop: to crack the heads of strikers and practice the most inhuman brutality against the Black, Puerto Rican and Chicano/a communities. A cop is a mercenary hired by the capitalist class through their agent (the city government) to keep the mass of the workers and the oppressed in complete subjection. They utilize all the forces and violence at their disposal whenever the masses rise up in rebellion against the unendurable conditions imposed by the master class. The police are the most parasitic social grouping in society. When they work — if that’s what it can possibly be called — their labor is directed against the workers and oppressed. Graft, corruption, intimate collaboration with all sorts of underworld figures and enterprises such as gambling, narcotics and a thousand other shady businesses — that’s what cops are really engaged in. They are utterly inseparable from crime and corruption itself. One could not exist without the other. Both are nourished and supported by the nature of the capitalist system itself. To put the police on a par with the workers is to erase the difference between the persecutors and their victims.
11/20/21
ND - T - Unconditional
Tournament: Glenbrooks | Round: 1 | Opponent: Peninsula KD | Judge: Colton Gilbert Interpretation: Unconditional means not conditional or limited. – to clarify, the affirmative must defend the right of all workers to strike at any time. Merriam Webster (https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/unconditional)//ww pbj not conditional or limited Violation: they don’t Standards: 1 Limits – allows an aff infinite permutations of arbitrary conditions like no striking for medical workers, not if it causes harm, or only for a certain duration. Explosion of aff ground makes neg prep burden impossible, either killing neg ground or forcing the neg to read generics that barely link, always letting aff win. Force the 1AR to read a definition card with a clear list of when its okay to put conditions and what they are – otherwise, its arbitrary and you should vote neg since they can’t put a clear limit on the topic. Our interp solves – it establishes a clear bright-line for that gives the neg a chance to predict and prepare for every aff ahead of time.
Drop the Debater – 1 sets a precedent that debaters wont be abusive 2 DTA is the same since you drop the aff
Voters: 1 Fairness – constitutive to the judge to decide the better debater, only fairness is in your jurisdiction because it skews decision making 2 Education – the only portable education from debate that we care about
Competing Interps: 1 reasonability on t is incoherent: you’re either topical or you’re not – it’s impossible to be 77 topical, links to all limits offense 2 functionally the same as reasonability – we debate over a specified briteline which is a counter interp 3 judge intervention – judge has to intervene on what’s reasonable, creates a race to the bottom where debaters exploit judge tolerance for questionable argumentation.
No RVIs 1 illogical for you to get offense just for being fair – it’s the 1ac’s burden 2 baiting - rvi’s incentivize debaters to read abusive positions to win off theory 3 discourages checking abuse since debaters will be afraid to lose on theory
11/20/21
ND - T - Worker
Tournament: Glenbrooks | Round: 5 | Opponent: Marlborough WR | Judge: Lauren Woodall Interpretation: Workers must be employees within market work. Zatz 8 (Noah D. Zatz, Professor of Law at UCLA who received an A.B. and M.A. from Cornell University and a J.D. from Yale, awarded a Skadden Fellowship to work at the National Employment Law Project (NELP) in New York City 4/2008, Vanderbilt Law Review, https://scholarship.law.vanderbilt.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1509andcontext=vlr) This Article brings these two conversations together 7 by identifying a fundamental problem in employment law that has escaped scholarly attention. The boundary between market and nonmarket work is central to legal definitions of employment. Determining who is an employee requires deciding where to draw that boundary, or whether to do so at all. The opening quotation from Vanskike v. Peters reveals this dynamic. There, the Seventh Circuit decided that prison inmates could not demand the minimum wage for their work as janitors, kitchen aides, and garment workers in an Illinois prison.8 The penal context of their labor rendered it nonmarket work; this nonmarket character rendered the relationship noneconomic; and absent an economic relationship to the prison, inmates could not be employees, bearers of labor rights. 9 Violation: they spec incarcertaed workers – they’re nonmarket workers that’s Zatz Standards: 1 Limits – it’s a court case which is the most explicit in setting a precedent for definitions – that makes it easiest to engage in. Their interp justifies affs about volunteering, yardwork, and hobbies which explodes the topic away from employment and decks negative engagement. Clash outweighs – only thing intrinsic to debate. Also kills topic lit because the resolution is about jobs where labor standards exist. 2 Precision – not defending the text of the resolution justifies the affirmative doing away with random words in the resolution which a means they’re not within the topic which is a voter for jurisdiction since you can only vote affirmative on the resolution and this debate never should have happened, b they’re unpredictable and impossible to engage in so we always lose Drop the Debater – 1 sets a precedent that debaters wont be abusive 2 DTA is the same since you drop the aff
Voters: 1 Fairness – constitutive to the judge to decide the better debater, only fairness is in your jurisdiction because it skews decision making 2 Education – the only portable education from debate that we care about
Competing Interps: 1 reasonability on t is incoherent: you’re either topical or you’re not – it’s impossible to be 77 topical, links to all limits offense 2 functionally the same as reasonability – we debate over a specified briteline which is a counter interp 3 judge intervention – judge has to intervene on what’s reasonable, creates a race to the bottom where debaters exploit judge tolerance for questionable argumentation.
No RVIs 1 illogical for you to get offense just for being fair – it’s the 1ac’s burden 2 baiting - rvi’s incentivize debaters to read abusive positions to win off theory 3 discourages checking abuse since debaters will be afraid to lose on theory
11/21/21
SO - CP - Patent Pools
Tournament: St Marks | Round: 5 | Opponent: Southlake Carroll AS | Judge: Vishan Chaudary CP Text: Member nations of the World Trade Organization should create patent pool licensing platforms for genomic medicines. Solves accessibility of medicines AND innovations Their author Stramiello 18 (Michael, PhD, an intellectual property litigation associate in Washington, DC. His practice focuses on the life sciences industry) “CRISPR: The New Frontier of Biotechnology Innovation” American Bar Association, Jan/Feb 2018. https://www.americanbar.org/groups/intellectual_property_law/publications/landslide/2017-18/january-february/crispr-new-frontier-biotechnology-innovation-digital-feature///pranav As CRISPR marches on, there may be an elegant solution for making it widely available without government intervention in licensing: patent pools. These joint licensing platforms enable owners to combine their IP rights into bundles that are made accessible, nonexclusively, to a broad range of users via a single transaction with predictable terms. As a result, licensors and licensees can concentrate on innovation and commercial development, respectively, while minimizing transaction costs and litigation risk.32 This model was popularized in the 1990s, when the consumer electronics industry adopted it to facilitate deployment of the MPEG-2 digital video standard, which has yielded about $5 trillion in worldwide product sales since 1997.33 A key coordinator of that effort, MPEG LA LLC, now invites CRISPR/Cas9 patent holders to participate in their own pool. MPEG LA has been gauging interest from CRISPR rights holders since at least April 2017.34 Broad and Rockefeller University announced that they had submitted nearly two dozen “key CRISPR-Cas9 patents,”35 from 10 families, “for evaluation of eligibility to participate in discussions facilitated by MPEG LA regarding creation of a CRISPR Joint Licensing Platform.”36 UC reportedly has no plans to follow suit, citing potential conflicts with its existing licenses.37 The effect that pooling would have on such arrangements may remain unclear until contributors finalize pool terms, which could take years. Early efforts might focus on pooling foundational patents, and there has also been speculation about specialized pools geared toward particular CRISPR applications (e.g., agriculture and industrial biotechnology).38 Pooling may prove to be more of a challenge with respect to human therapeutics, a field where rights holders typically expect exclusivity as a reward for their enormous investment in rigorous clinical trials.
11/5/21
SO - DA - Counterfeits
Tournament: Grapevine | Round: 3 | Opponent: Coppell ER | Judge: Nicky Smith The counterfeit medicine market is attracting new suppliers, but new technologies are evolving to crack down on counterfeits – it’s prevalence is tentative Hallie B Forcinio 21 Hallie Forcinio is BioPharm International's packaging editor, editorhal@sbcglobal.net . PharmTech, 2-2-2021, "Countering Counterfeiters and Diverters," https://www.pharmtech.com/view/countering-counterfeiters-and-diverters//anop The never-ending battle against counterfeit pharmaceutical products has become fiercer with the pandemic. With product protection a constant concern, the market for anticounterfeiting technologies is strong, regulatory efforts are ongoing, and authentication and anticounterfeiting technologies are evolving. As a result, the anticounterfeiting packaging market is projected to grow at a 7.8 compound annual growth rate to $189.9 billion in 2026 (1). A major driver for this growth is the expanding use of e-commerce platforms, which make it easy to set up shop to sell fraudulent products and are largely unregulated. A study by Local Circles noted that approximately 20 of all products sold on e-commerce sites are counterfeit (1). Anticounterfeiting laws and regulations, such as the European Union’s Falsified Medicine Directive and the US’s Drug Supply Chain Security Act (DSCSA), safeguard prescription drugs available from pharmacies. “However, pharmaceutical manufacturers should be aware that these measures alone will not guarantee a product’s integrity and authenticity,” says Gene Dul, president of Schreiner MediPharm US. He says, “Only additional counterfeit-proof authenticity features can provide a comprehensive approach against fraud, misuse, and tampering.” Unfortunately, the coronavirus pandemic has increased the opportunities for counterfeiting. “In a survey issued by IDC in June 2020, 70 of companies agreed that their supply chain is ‘very vulnerable’ to suffering more problems if the COVID-19 crisis lasted more than a couple of months longer, and 75 of companies agreed that the COVID-19 pandemic has ‘greatly increased/will greatly increase’ problems with diversion, theft, and counterfeiting of critical products such as test kits, vaccines, and antivirals,” reports Aimee Genzler, vice-president, Corporate and Brand Communications at TraceLink, the study sponsor (2). In fact, in anticipation of a spike in counterfeiting, the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) has launched Operation Stolen Promise 2, to halt the production, distribution, and sale of illicit COVID-19 treatments and vaccines. HSI reported that its agents have seized illicit proceeds and goods, made arrests, and shut down fraudulent websites (3), including the seizure of two domain names in December 2020 (4). The proliferation of counterfeit goods stems in part from the shift to e-commerce, which has been accelerated by stay-at-home orders and advisories and reduced access to physical retail pharmacies. “The emergence of on-line pharmacies poses a significant threat of escalation in counterfeit pharmaceuticals and underscores the urgent need for on-dose countermeasures,” reports Peter Wong, chief operating officer at TruTag Technologies, which recently entered a partnership with Colorcon to provide advanced security coatings for on-dose use. “Counterfeiters are opportunistic,” explains John Pitts, key account manager for Antares Vision, noting, “COVID-19 provided the ‘perfect storm’ for the counterfeiters: panic in consumers; product shortages from the brand name ethical providers; desire and, in many cases, requirement to purchase via e-commerce; and lack of and often conflicting information from the media and authorities.” Joe Farrell, life sciences expert at Loftware, concurs, “It seems clear that whenever there are high-value pharmaceutical products, there will be people trying to profit illegally. The fact that the COVID-19 vaccines need to be shipped in stringent cold storage containers with radio frequency identification (RFID) temperature sensors along with specialized transportation methods will make it more difficult for counterfeiters to enter the supply chain, but not impossible.” With COVID-19 vaccines now rolling out in limited quantities, demand will outstrip supply in the coming months. “This will create a ripe environment for unscrupulous parties to offer fake product,” says Wong, noting, “Distribution of the COVID-19 vaccine is designed to go to many more points of dispensing than for a normal pharmaceutical drug, as governments seek to deliver vaccinations broadly and as quickly as possible while maintaining demanding cold-chain requirements. These logistical requirements will create higher than normal transition points in the overall supply chain, which in turn create increase opportunities for diversion, adulteration, and fake product to reach the patient.” Counterfeiting countermeasures The pharmaceutical industry has been on the leading edge of anticounterfeiting and brand protection efforts for many years. “Anticounterfeit solutions are usually tailor-made according to the needs of the brand owner,” says Paavo Sillanpää, senior business manager, Pharma at UPM Raflatac. A diverse strategy considering threat scenario and product is needed. “Most pharma companies have a multi-layered approach,” notes Farrell. The most common physical solutions are tamper-evident labels and packaging materials, designs that prevent the placement of a counterfeit product into the original packaging, serialization, and overt and covert authentication methods such as holograms, invisible markers, and taggants. “Ideally, multi-level security concepts should be used that are individually tailored to a specific use case, combining analog and digital features, which can be verified by different stakeholders within the supply chain,” says Dul. There is heightened interest in tools and technologies that go beyond the package to protect patients, such as on-dose solutions. In addition, says Wong, “the industry is increasing its public awareness campaigns of the problem of fake and unsafe medicine in an effort to educate consumers about the dangers of unauthentic drug products.” As a result, Pitts predicts an increased focus on consumer engagement. He notes, “Enabling the end consumer and the dispenser to authenticate their products is powerful on so many levels. It makes counterfeiting more difficult, provides vital and real-time data to the consumer, and can offer the manufacturer feedback.” Labeling technologies Labeling plays an important role in the fight against counterfeit products. As the passport for moving products through the global supply chain, it contains any track-and-trace or authentication information. “In the label business, we have seen an increased interest in various tamper-evident (TE) solutions and holograms,” reports Sillanpää. One new product from UPM Raflatac combines heat resistance, advanced adhesion, and conformability. Designed primarily for the European market where cartoned blister packaging is common, the heat-resistant TE label won’t shrink in heat tunnels used to produce multipacks. UPM Raflatac has also introduced sustainable TE labeling. It’s produced from Forest Film, which Sillanpää says is “the world’s first wood-based plastic labeling material.” Benefits include performance equivalent to traditional plastic film label materials and the ability to help pharmaceutical brands achieve sustainability goals. Demand for more sustainable products extends to RFID and near-field communication (NFC) tags. Eco-friendly RFID and NFC tags from Identiv feature paper-based transponder inlays that reduce polyethylene terephthalate content, resulting in a repulpable substrate (5). RFID technology is integral to the Cap-Lock plus RFID cap adapter and label combination from Schreiner MediPharm. The label-integrated RFID inlay provides digital proof of integrity and first-opening evidence for syringes as well as product authentication. Dul explains, “The adapter is placed on top of the syringe’s primary closure and interlinked with it to equalize the diameter differences of the syringe body and closure. The label wraps around the syringe body and cap adapter and—once opened—provides irreversible tamper evidence due to an integrated perforation.” Printing and tagging technologies Magnetic ink is another potential anticounterfeiting tool. Technology from Inspectron relies on a proprietary reader, track-and-trace software, and magnetic ink, long used on checks to facilitate automated sorting. The magnetic ink is used to print a barcode, which is detectable even if it’s not visible to the eye. That means the code, which may be serialized, can be hidden on the inside of a carton or under a label and still be read. The current reader works from a distance of up to 2 mm, but units with longer read ranges are under development. “However, longer read ranges require bigger codes,” notes Nathalie Muller, head of Innovation at Inspectron. Although the first commercial application of the technology inkjets the codes on paper to enable identification of diverted product, Muller says, the permanent magnetic codes could be printed on plastic or glass containers and potentially support tasks like vial tracking. Also under development is a hybrid one- and two-dimensional barcode that would hold more data. On-dose technology enables authentication at the product level. Edible microparticles coupled with the Smart Medicine solution from TruTag Technologies confirms product authenticity and can help boost patient adherence and outcomes. A new Pharma Mobile App allows patients to scan each dose with their smartphone, authenticate it, and record that it was taken. If desired, the record of the dose can be shared with healthcare providers. The system also can link to other product information. In April 2020, FDA accepted molecular tagging technology from Applied DNA Sciences into its Emerging Technology Program (6). The company says that its technology is a multilayered platform that gives both the dose and the packaging an immutable identity for authentication. On Nov. 30, 2020, AlpVision launched its Alpvision COVID-19 Initiative to protect COVID-19-related therapeutics and vaccines against counterfeiting. Under the program, AlpVision provides pharmaceutical companies and their suppliers with the tools to deploy its Cryptoglyph digital security feature on their packaging. Invisible to the human eye, the Cryptoglyph feature can be authenticated via smartphone. Adopting the technology does not change the production process or involve additional consumables. In addition, the smartphone applications connect to AlpVision’s Brand Monitoring System, a centralized server platform that enables real-time monitoring of product authentication activities. AlpVision plans to provide this service for free until the World Health Organization declares the pandemic has ended (7). Software tools Physical technologies are common anticounterfeiting tools, but counterfeit and diversion prevention also relies on software. Farrell reports, “At Loftware, we are being asked for help in getting the correct information onto the label. It’s important to have an enterprise labeling solution that integrates with a company’s sources of data to make sure the correct approved information is automatically applied to the labels. This includes languages, barcodes, regulatory symbology, and regional product information. You also need a labeling solution that can aid with approving, managing, and promoting electronic information for use data to help speed the process for a faster time to market for these critical products.” Although not specifically an anticounterfeiting product, Loftware Spectrum software integrates with serialization solutions and ensures labeling is consistent, accurate, and contains the right serialized data and barcodes. “The use of global templates in an enterprise solution also helps our life sciences customers to globally standardize on the look of their supply chain labels to help identify counterfeited products,” he explains. The scalable Track My Way platform from Antares Vision offers single-unit, batch, and custom traceability; provides direct consumer engagement; and can extend from raw materials tracking to end-of-life package disposal/recycling. Geolocation functionality can track the harvesting of the raw materials, packaging locations, the movement of products through the supply chain, and the point-of-sale location. In April 2020, TraceLink released an anticounterfeiting tool called Smart Distribution Tracking. By integrating the Internet of Things with product serialization, Smart Distribution Tracking provides full track-and-trace visibility for the secure delivery of vaccines, test kits, and high-value products. Another software tool, the Summit Authentication Platform from Microtrace Solutions, is a customized system consisting of a self-authenticating, encrypted barcode; a Spectral Taggant; and a handheld detector plus a smartphone mobile app. “Our Spectral Taggant is a chemistry formulated into an ink that, when printed, is a highly secure ‘signature’ or ‘fingerprint,’” explains Brian Brogger, president at Microtrace Solutions. This signature can be authenticated instantly via the handheld spectrometer or smartphone without an Internet connection. For vaccines and therapeutics, the barcode and Spectral Taggant can be applied to security labels. The mobile app is then able to verify that the barcode was genuinely issued and the Spectral Taggant verifies that the barcode has not been copied. The system also can provide real-time reporting and analysis. The latest release of the Systech Brand Protection Suite from Systech International, the software solutions division of Markem-Imaje, delivers a fully integrated solution to combat counterfeiters, identifies product diversion, meets regulatory compliance, and provides analytics. The centerpiece of the suite, the company’s non-additive e-Fingerprint technology, turns any existing barcode into a unique, digital identifier to provide end-to-end visibility and actionable information as a product moves through the supply chain. New functions include the ability to push unique responses and content to users and smartphone authentication of e-Fingerprinted products. Responses can be tailored to the user, location, time, and safety of the product, and include photos or other information. A new analytics platform, Systech Insight, offers a series of Information on Demand dashboards and an analytics data pool (8). IP protection prevents and quickly stops spread counterfeit medicines – multiple warrants FIFARMA 21, FIFARMA is the Latin American Federation of the Pharmaceutical Industry created in 1962. We represent 16 research-based biopharmaceutical companies and 11 local associations dedicated to discovering and developing innovative, quality and safe health products and services that improve the lives of patients in Latin America and the Caribbean and advocate for patient-centric, sustainable health systems characterized by high regulatory standards and ethical principles. (Apr 22, 2021), "This is how we fight counterfeit medicines with Intellectual Property," https://fifarma.org/en/this-is-how-we-fight-counterfeit-medicines-with-intellectual-property///anop In addition to functioning as a tool to maintain constant innovation in the industry, IP helps reducing counterfeit medicines because medicines have better technologies and ingredients are more difficult to copy. This means that, through market incentives, the industry manages to have high quality infrastructure, new technology and trained personnel, to create specialized and specific medicines and therapies, which is why they are difficult to replicate. On the other hand, political will functions as another important axis, as it must prosecute those who are making counterfeit medicines. This is achieved through a constant conversation between industry and governments. Therefore, it will be absolutely clear how to identify the authenticity of medicines. In short, IP allows quality standards to be clearer and stricter, and regulators to have greater knowledge and traceability of each product that enters the market. Through IP, you can establish a record of all products globally, which makes it easier to find possible counterfeit medicines. Consequently, the best way to fight counterfeit medicines is through accessing the best quality medicines and for this to happen, an ecosystem between countries, regulators and industry is needed. This ecosystem shall take into account the structural deficiencies of each country and addresses them in a holistic manner, to provide the best quality medicines. In the end, with the Intellectual Property associated with the creation of the product, there are also associated standards of transparency and detailed information that every regulatory agency can access. Moreover, the value chains will receive all this information in order to be aware of the appearance of products that are not registered with the standards of a product protected by IP. Also, IP helps to combat counterfeit medicines internationally, since there are laws that cover all member countries of the United Nations and punish more severely those who commit this crime. Likewise, these laws provide countries with the necessary mechanisms to take concrete action once a counterfeit medicine is discovered. This, of course, must go hand in hand with the political will of each country, because only with collaboration between different actors will it be possible to prosecute the entire chain of counterfeit medicines. Plus, IP owners can receive electronic notifications worldwide more quickly and can take direct communication actions. In a nutshell, IP allows the industry to show the public almost immediately that there is a counterfeit medicine in a country or that a website is selling counterfeit medicines. This is because legally infringing a product protected by IP allows action to be taken to prosecute the counterfeit products. This is especially important for those consumers or small organizations that do not have access to information like a hospital or public health center has. However, it is necessary to involve other actors of the health system so that information about counterfeit medicines reaches remote regions or places, which do not have an internet connection. On the other hand, thanks to IP, the industry is creating specialized safety technology in order for each country to easily identify a drug that comes with a brand but does not belong to that brand. The industry has also used mobile laboratories to test samples of suspected medicines and report them quickly to the value chain. Thus, technology is becoming an important element in fighting this problem. Counterfeit medicines have a wide range of negative effects for different actors and especially for the people who fall victim of them. However, more and more governments and industries are creating concrete actions to pursue the entire chain of counterfeiters, as this is the only way to eradicate the problem all together. The tools to combat counterfeiting exist, the important thing is that actors know how to use them for the benefit of the greatest number of people in the world. Pharmaceutical counterfeiting is increasingly used to support terrorism – used for funding and mediums of attacks née Lybecker 18, Kristina M.L. Acri Kristina M. L. Acri née Lybecker is an Associate Professor of Economics in the Department of Economics and Business at Colorado College in Colorado Springs, CO. (February 2018), "Pharmaceutical Counterfeiting: Endangering Public Health, Society and the Economy" Fraser Institute, https://www.fraserinstitute.org/sites/default/files/pharmaceutical-counterfeiting-endangering-public-health-society-and-the-economy.pdf//anop Pharmaceutical counterfeiting is linked to numerous forms of organized crime: drug trafficking, money laundering, and terrorism (Lybecker, 2016; Pfizer, 2007; Redpath, 2012; Criminal Intelligence Service Canada, 2006; UNODC, 2017). As reported by Redpath (2012: 7), “not only have groups such as the Russian mafia, Colombian drug cartels, Chinese triads and Mexican drug gangs all become heavily involved in producing and trafficking counterfeit drugs over the past decade, but mounting evidence also points to the direct involvement of Hezbollah and al Qaeda.” Given the profitability of the endeavor, it is not surprising that pharmaceutical counterfeiting is increasingly a source of funding for terrorist groups (Lybecker, 2016; Pfizer, 2007; Redpath, 2012). Moreover, by their very nature, organized criminal operations are well suited to the intricacies of pharmaceutical counterfeiting. “Criminal organisations have the advantage of huge resources, international networks and skilled labour. They can move with a speed that often confounds the authorities. Counterfeit versions of the antiviral drug Tamiflu were available on fake internet pharmacy sites, like the one posing as the ‘Canadian Pharmacy,’ within weeks of the World Health Organization declaration of H1N1 as a pandemic” (Redpath 2012: 8). While anecdotal evidence of the link is quite plentiful, the clandestine nature of the business as well as the secrecy maintained by law enforcement make it virtually impossible to either completely understand or measure the extent of the trade. A 2014 INTERPOL study provides perspective on pharmaceutical crime and organized criminal groups. INTERPOL’s Medical Product Counterfeiting and Pharmaceutical Crime Sub-Directorate has prepared an analysis of available data, dating from 2008 to 2014, to establish the extent of organized criminal groups (OCGs) activity in the realm of pharmaceutical crime (INTERPOL, 2014).5 According to the report, a recent Europol threat assessment concludes that there are “a wide variety of actors, operating within the pharmaceutical crime arena, encompassing both OCGs and individual criminals, both of which are involved at any point in the supply chain.” The report points to the involvement of both traditionally structured hierarchical crime groups in addition to highly organized, yet generally informal, networks of illicit online pharmacies and finally, small groups of three to ten members. The INTERPOL study, as well as those from other agencies, provides some perspective on the involvement of organized criminal groups in Canada. Numerous investigations in the US, Canada, and Sweden have linked the Hell’s Angels to the production and distribution of counterfeit medicines, in particular ED medications and steroids (INTERPOL, 2014). • Fake oxycontin pills containing fentanyl were responsible for more than 50 deaths in Alberta in 2015. The counterfeit pills are also responsible for three deaths in Saskatchewan (Partnership for Safe Medicines, 2015b). • In November 2013, Canadian authorities began an organized crime investigation named “Project Forseti,” targeting the Hells Angels and the Fallen Saints (Customs Today Report, 2015). In January of 2015, police in Saskatchewan and Alberta, Canada seized guns and drugs, including significant amounts of counterfeit oxycontin. A United Nations Interregional Crime and Justice Research Institute (UNICRI) study suggests that criminal networks use routes and methods to transport counterfeit medicines that are similar to those used to traffic in drugs, firearms, and people (UNICRI, 2012). Evidence suggests that organized criminal gangs involved in the production of synthetic drugs are able to easily access the materials and expertise needed to also produce counterfeit medicines. In both Europe and Southeast Asia, authorities cite evidence of “criminal manufacturers of amphetamine-type substances that have been involved in the production and distribution of counterfeit medicines” (INTERPOL, 2014). Terrorism escalates to nuclear war Ayson 10 (Robert Ayson. Robert Ayson is Professor of Strategic Studies at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand, where he works closely with the Centre for Strategic Studies. “After a Terrorist Nuclear Attack: Envisaging Catalytic Effects”. 6-21-2010. Studies in Conflict and Terrorism. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/1057610X.2010.483756?journalCode=uter20)TruLe But these two nuclear worlds—a non-state actor nuclear attack and a catastrophic interstate nuclear exchange—are not necessarily separable. It is just possible that some sort of terrorist attack, and especially an act of nuclear terrorism, could precipitate a chain of events leading to a massive exchange of nuclear weapons between two or more of the states that possess them. In this context, today’s and tomorrow’s terrorist groups might assume the place allotted during the early Cold War years to new state possessors of small nuclear arsenals who were seen as raising the risks of a catalytic nuclear war between the superpowers started by third parties. These risks were considered in the late 1950s and early 1960s as concerns grew about nuclear proliferation, the so-called n+1 problem. It may require a considerable amount of imagination to depict an especially plausible situation where an act of nuclear terrorism could lead to such a massive inter-state nuclear war. For example, in the event of a terrorist nuclear attack on the United States, it might well be wondered just how Russia and/or China could plausibly be brought into the picture, not least because they seem unlikely to be fingered as the most obvious state sponsors or encouragers of terrorist groups. They would seem far too responsible to be involved in supporting that sort of terrorist behavior that could just as easily threaten them as well. Some possibilities, however remote, do suggest themselves. For example, how might the United States react if it was thought or discovered that the fissile material used in the act of nuclear terrorism had come from Russian stocks,40 and if for some reason Moscow denied any responsibility for nuclear laxity? The correct attribution of that nuclear material to a particular country might not be a case of science fiction given the observation by Michael May et al. that while the debris resulting from a nuclear explosion would be “spread over a wide area in tiny fragments, its radioactivity makes it detectable, identifiable and collectable, and a wealth of information can be obtained from its analysis: the efficiency of the explosion, the materials used and, most important … some indication of where the nuclear material came from.”41 Alternatively, if the act of nuclear terrorism came as a complete surprise, and American officials refused to believe that a terrorist group was fully responsible (or responsible at all) suspicion would shift immediately to state possessors. Ruling out Western ally countries like the United Kingdom and France, and probably Israel and India as well, authorities in Washington would be left with a very short list consisting of North Korea, perhaps Iran if its program continues, and possibly Pakistan. But at what stage would Russia and China be definitely ruled out in this high stakes game of nuclear Cluedo? In particular, if the act of nuclear terrorism occurred against a backdrop of existing tension in Washington’s relations with Russia and/or China, and at a time when threats had already been traded between these major powers, would officials and political leaders not be tempted to assume the worst? Of course, the chances of this occurring would only seem to increase if the United States was already involved in some sort of limited armed conflict with Russia and/or China, or if they were confronting each other from a distance in a proxy war, as unlikely as these developments may seem at the present time. The reverse might well apply too: should a nuclear terrorist attack occur in Russia or China during a period of heightened tension or even limited conflict with the United States, could Moscow and Beijing resist the pressures that might rise domestically to consider the United States as a possible perpetrator or encourager of the attack? Washington’s early response to a terrorist nuclear attack on its own soil might also raise the possibility of an unwanted (and nuclear aided) confrontation with Russia and/or China. For example, in the noise and confusion during the immediate aftermath of the terrorist nuclear attack, the U.S. president might be expected to place the country’s armed forces, including its nuclear arsenal, on a higher stage of alert. In such a tense environment, when careful planning runs up against the friction of reality, it is just possible that Moscow and/or China might mistakenly read this as a sign of U.S. intentions to use force (and possibly nuclear force) against them. In that situation, the temptations to preempt such actions might grow, although it must be admitted that any preemption would probably still meet with a devastating response. As part of its initial response to the act of nuclear terrorism (as discussed earlier) Washington might decide to order a significant conventional (or nuclear) retaliatory or disarming attack against the leadership of the terrorist group and/or states seen to support that group. Depending on the identity and especially the location of these targets, Russia and/or China might interpret such action as being far too close for their comfort, and potentially as an infringement on their spheres of influence and even on their sovereignty. One far-fetched but perhaps not impossible scenario might stem from a judgment in Washington that some of the main aiders and abetters of the terrorist action resided somewhere such as Chechnya, perhaps in connection with what Allison claims is the “Chechen insurgents’ … long-standing interest in all things nuclear.”42 American pressure on that part of the world would almost certainly raise alarms in Moscow that might require a degree of advanced consultation from Washington that the latter found itself unable or unwilling to provide. There is also the question of how other nuclear-armed states respond to the act of nuclear terrorism on another member of that special club. It could reasonably be expected that following a nuclear terrorist attack on the United States, bothRussia and China would extend immediate sympathy and support to Washington and would work alongside the United States in the Security Council. But there is just a chance, albeit a slim one, where the support of Russia and/or China is less automatic in some cases than in others. For example, what would happen if the United States wished to discuss its right to retaliate against groups based in their territory? If, for some reason, Washington found the responses of Russia and China deeply underwhelming, (neither “for us or against us”) might it also suspect that they secretly were in cahoots with the group, increasing (again perhaps ever so slightly) the chances of a major exchange. If the terrorist group had some connections to groups in Russia and China, or existed in areas of the world over which Russia and China held sway, and if Washington felt that Moscow or Beijing were placing a curiously modest level of pressure on them, what conclusions might it then draw about their culpability.
9/11/21
SO - DA - FDI
Tournament: Grapevine | Round: 1 | Opponent: McNeil YM | Judge: JP Stuckert FDI is expected to recover but is tentative – uncertainties from pandemic and economic recovery UNCTAD 7/21, 6-21-2021, United Nations Conference on Trade and Development "Global foreign direct investment set to partially recover in 2021 but uncertainty remains," UNCTAD, https://unctad.org/news/global-foreign-direct-investment-set-partially-recover-2021-uncertainty-remains//anop Looking ahead, global FDI flows are expected to bottom out in 2021 and recover some lost ground with an increase of 10 to 15 (Figure 2). “This would still leave FDI some 25 below the 2019 level. Current forecasts show a further increase in 2022 which, at the upper bound of projections, bring FDI back to the 2019 level,” said UNCTAD’s director of investment and enterprise, James Zhan. Figure 2 - Foreign direct investment outflows, top 20 home economies, 2017 and 2018 (Billions of dollars) Figure 2 - Foreign direct investment outflows Source: UNCTAD, World Investment Report 2021. Prospects are highly uncertain and will depend on, among other factors, the pace of economic recovery and the possibility of pandemic relapses, the potential impact of recovery spending packages on FDI, and policy pressures. The relatively modest recovery in global FDI projected for 2021 reflects lingering uncertainty about access to vaccines, the emergence of virus mutations and the reopening of economic sectors. “Increased expenditures on both fixed assets and intangibles will not translate directly into a rapid FDI rebound, as confirmed by the sharp contrast between rosy forecasts for capex and still-depressed greenfield project announcements,” Mr. Zhan said. The FDI recovery will be uneven. Developed economies are expected to drive global growth in FDI, both because of strong cross-border mergers and acquisitions (MandA) activity and large-scale public investment support. FDI inflows to Asia will remain resilient as the region has stood out as an attractive destination for international investment throughout the pandemic. A substantial recovery of FDI to Africa and to Latin America and the Caribbean is unlikely in the near term. The plan decreases foreign direct investment from negative signals – turns case Kogan 11, Lawrence A Lawrence A. Kogan is founder and Managing Attorney of The Kogan Law Group, P.C., a New York City–based multidisciplinary professional services firm specialized in identifying and addressing emerging regulatory, policy and trade risks posed to multinational company assets, operations and supply-chains. (2011), "Commercial High Technology Innovations Face Uncertain Future Amid Emerging “BRICS” Compulsory Licensing and IT Interoperability Frameworks" San Diego International, https://digital.sandiego.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1091andcontext=ilj//anop Similarly, the enactment of national laws and regulations promoting the availability and flexible use by governments of a compulsory licensing mechanism as an exception or limitation to the patent right to secure foreign companies’ patented high technologies at less than their fair market value can increase economic risks and result in acts of regulatory arbitrage and protectionist opportunism by home country as well as foreign companies operating pursuant to divergent business models. The security of property rights has been placed into question where compulsory licenses have been issued or threatened against foreign patented high technologies. Studies have shown that a corresponding reduction in the flow of knowledge-based foreign direct investment (FDI) will follow.81 82 The practice of compulsory licensing comes with a price: the temporary or permanent deprivation of some part of a patent owner’s right to exclude disrupts the investment-backed expectation of the property right. In the future, pharmaceutical companies and other industries dependent upon intellectual property rights may mistrust licensing nations’ promises to protect and enforce patent rights, not to mention copyrights, and trademarks. As a result, industries that find the security of property rights lacking in a given nation may avoid engaging in foreign direct investment with that nation. Because foreign direct investment (FDI) is a major potential source of economic growth for recipient nations, the loss of such investment resources arising from compulsory licensing practices could force developing nations to pay a particularly heavy cost for providing needed medicines for its citizens.83 While government patent policy by itself is an incomplete measurement of a country’s market and investment friendliness, it is generally agreed that such legal protections reflect a country’s interest in fostering business and technology development. Through effective deterrence of imitation, “patents reduce the costs of enforcing contracts and at the same time increase the expected returns on FDI and licensing, which will have a positive effect on technology transfer. Patent rights encourage technology transfer by providing owners with legal certainty.”84 Consequently, the passage of IP laws that do not include a provision for compulsory licensing, for example, may favorably signal to foreign investors that a government is willing to allow strategic business decisions without undue interference and ensure more transparent and unbiased application of commercial laws with the prospect of reduced government corruption.85 “There is little doubt that developing countries who issue compulsory licenses also face additional risks in attracting global capital. Particularly, for MDC’s middle developing countries, a compulsory license can trigger the loss of significant FDI.”86 If patent ownership rights indicate to prospective investors a firm’s proper regard for its intellectual property security, then surely a company’s willingness to engage in a foreign market where the government has decided to adopt or enforce anti-patent measures will convey negative signals to the investment community about the company, the quality of its management, and the strength and economic value of its patents and associated projected revenue streams. Just as the sale of a product through a low-status selling channel of a product can signal a diminution in brand status to the consumer, exposure of a patent to an uncertain legal environment can signal that the firm may not consider the patent to be as valuable as others believe. Even the threat of an ‘anti-patent’ such as a compulsory license can impair firm equity, thereby reducing the attractiveness of a country as an investment partner. Any firm calculating its returns from FDI will have to account for the possibility of these signaling-based losses.87 FDI is key to long term economic stability – it dictates future investments and industries Susic et al 17 I Susic1 , M Stojanovic-Trivanovic2 and M Susic3 1University of Business Studies, Jovan Ducic Street, No 23A, 78000 Banja Luka, Bosnia and Herzegovina 2 Independent University Banjaluka, Veljka Mladjenovica Street No 12E, 78000 Banja Luka, Bosnia and Herzegovina 3Enterprise Fructa Trade – Kort, Marije Bursac Street No 70, 74400 Derventa, Bosnia and Herzegovina 2017 IOP Conf. Ser.: Mater. Sci. Eng. 200 012019. https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1757-899X/200/1/012019/pdf//anop Foreign direct investments (FDI) represent such a form of investment in which foreign investor keeps the ownership right, provides the control and the management of the firm in which they invested the funds, in order to achieve long-term interests. These investments are the most important instrument of foreign capital inflow because they represent a direct inflow from abroad, i.e. direct inflow of the capital in the economic system of the host country. Foreign direct investment, as a form of international capital mobility, represents an important contributor to more efficient activities in the economy. They provide faster exit to the international market and as the aftermath are ensuring improved the living standard of the society. Evaluation of investment efficiency is the basis for making investment decisions from one country to another, which will consequently lead to improvement of the economy. Foreign investments are a key development factor in the modern economy, and jointly with the trade, represent the most important leverage of an enterprise, organization of production, supplying goods and services on a global scale. FDI are supporting the companies in organizing production on a global scale, providing an efficient supply of raw materials, energy, labor as the input, and are facilitating the placement of products and services as the output in the most important markets in a profitable way. On the basis of such activities, the companies can on optimal way use its advantages in technology, expertise, and economies of scale. Developing countries having high state debt and unfavorable economic situation show huge interest in gaining as higher foreign investments as possible. It has been especially important after bank loans and various financial aid ceased to arrive in some countries. Countries in transition, aiming to integrate into the world economic system, can overcome negative economic tendencies with the help of international capital inflow. Developed countries, faced with a financial crisis, have been also interested in an increased inflow of foreign capital, since the foreign investments are the most important element of development strategies in general. With foreign direct investment is not coming just the capital from one country to another, but also the investment package containing new technologies, managerial skills and new markets. In addition, bearing higher risks, FDIs are significantly increasing the opportunities for making profits. Foreign direct investments are autonomous transactions of long-term capital movements, motivated by economic interests, with the profit at the first place.\ FDI is key to COVID recovery – increases employment and strengthens relations between countries. Chalamish et al 20 Dr. Efraim Chalamish is a Senior Advisor with Duff and Phelps and an Adjunct Professor of Law at New York University. Nicole Y. Lamb-Hale is a former Assistant Secretary of Commerce in the International Trade Administration and Managing Director and Chair of the CFIUS and National Security Practice at Kroll, a division of Duff and Phelps. She is a member of the Board of Directors of the Center for International Private Enterprise. Andrew Wilson is the Executive Director of the Center for International Private Enterprise. ANDREW WILSON, DR. EFRAIM CHALAMISH, NICOLE Y. LAMB-HALE. Center for International Private Enterprise, 10-21-2020, "Foreign Investment in a Post-COVID-19 World," https://www.cipe.org/blog/2020/10/21/foreign-investment-in-a-post-covid-19-world///anop Just as the adverse health effects of COVID-19 will not vanish immediately but will be resolved in stages, so too will the global economy recover in stages, across industries and around the world. As both Western economies and emerging markets consider approaches to accelerate post COVID-19 economic recovery, foreign direct investment (FDI) will be an important tool for success. FDI has been one of the primary drivers of global GDP growth in recent years. FDI not only benefits economies by creating good paying jobs, it also strengthens bilateral and regional diplomatic and commercial relations among countries. Further, FDI enables the private sector to “export” best business practices, such as good corporate governance, anti-corruption, and transparency. During the pre-COVID-19 economic boom, for example, FDI in the U.S. grew dramatically. In 2015, total foreign investment in America peaked at $477 billion. In 2018, FDI fell to $296 billion, but was still significant. Attracting FDI was also an important policy objective in emerging economies prior to the COVID-19 pandemic. According to the UNCTAD 2020 World Investment Report, in 2019, 54 countries introduced at least 107 measures affecting foreign investment, most of them focused on investment liberalization, promotion and facilitation. This effort was led by Asian developing countries and emerging economies. The goal of expanding investment incentives regimes in diverse sectors, from mining to financial services, and streamlining administrative procedures, has been to maintain and increase high volumes of FDI into developing markets. COVID-19 may lead to some changes in the tactics that countries employ to attract FDI. Governments will be under pressure to ensure that the quest for FDI is appropriately balanced with efforts to protect economic resilience and national security. Can FDI stimulate the world economy post-COVID-19? It appears likely, as many assets have seen reduced valuations that can attract foreign investment. Yet while both developed and emerging economies signal that they are open for investment, COVID-19 may lead to some changes in the tactics that countries employ to attract FDI. Governments will be under pressure to ensure that the quest for FDI is appropriately balanced with efforts to protect economic resilience and national security. This may mean increased screening by investment review agencies, such as the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS). COVID-19 has exposed supply chain vulnerabilities in the U.S. and other countries and has shown how struggles to acquire the products to meet citizens’ healthcare needs can become a matter of national security. In COVID-19’s wake, the scope of transactions to be reviewed by entities like CFIUS from a national security standpoint may need to be expanded to include health care considerations, to ensure that FDI does not interfere with the ability to procure necessary supplies. Continued recession causes war – stats support transition wars, resource conflicts, terrorism, and diversionary wars – other authors don’t base their analysis on global studies Royal ’10 Jedediah, Director of Cooperative Threat Reduction at the U.S. Department of Defense, “Economic Integration, Economic Signaling and the Problem of Economic Crises”, 2010, Economics of War and Peace: Economic, Legal and Political Perspectives, ed. Goldsmith and Brauer, p. 213-215PM Less intuitive is how periods of economic decline may increase the likelihood of external conflict. Political science literature has contributed a moderate degree of attention to the impact of economic decline and the security and defence behaviour of interdependent slates. Research in this vein has been considered at systemic, dyadic and national levels. Several notable contributions follow. First, on the systemic level. Pollins (2008) advances Modelski and Thompson's (19) work on leadership cycle theory, finding that rhythms in the global economy are associated with the rise and fall of a pre-eminent power and the often-bloody transition from one pre-eminent leader to the next. As such, exogenous shocks such as economic crises could usher in a redistribution of relative power (sec also Gilpin. 1981) that leads to uncertainty about power balances, increasing the risk of miscalculation (Fearon, 1995). Alternatively, even a relatively certain redistribution of power could lead to a permissive environment for conflict as a rising power may seek to challenge a declining power (Werner, 1999). Separately. Pollins (1996) also shows that global economic cycles combined with parallel leadership cycles impact the likelihood of conflict among major, medium and small powers, although he suggests that the causes and connections between global economic conditions and security conditions remain unknown. Second, on a dyadic level. Copeland's (1996. 2000) theory of trade expectations suggests that 'future expectation of trade' is a significant variable in understanding economic conditions and security behaviour of states. He argues that interdependent states are likely to gain pacific benefits from trade so long as they have an optimistic view of future trade relations. However, if the expectations of future trade decline, particularly for difficult to replace items such as energy resources, likelihood for conflict increases. as states will be inclined to use force to gain access to those resources. Crises could potentially be the trigger for decreased trade expectations either on its own or because it triggers protectionist moves by interdependent states.4 Third, others have considered the link between economic decline and external armed conflict at a national level. Blomberg and Hess (2002) find a strong correlation between internal conflict and external conflict, particularly during periods of economic downturn. They write, The linkages between internal and external conflict and prosperity are strong and mutually reinforcing. Economic conflict tends to spawn internal conflict, which in turn returns the favour. Moreover, the presence of a recession lends to amplify the extent to which international and external conflicts self-reinforce each other. (Blomberg and I less. 2002. p. 89) Economic decline has also been linked with an increase in the likelihood of terrorism (Blomberg. Hess. and Wccrapana. 2004). which has the capacity to spill across borders and lead to external tensions. Furthermore, crises generally reduce the popularity of a sitting government. "Diversionary theory' suggests that, when facing unpopularity arising from economic decline, sitting governments have increased incentives to fabricate external military conflicts to create a 'rally around the flag' effect. Wang (1996), DcRoucn (1995), and Blomberg. Mess, and Thacker (2006) find supporting evidence showing that economic decline and use of force are at least indirectly correlated. Gelpi (1997), Miller (1999), and Kisangani and Pickering (2009) suggest that the tendency towards diversionary tactics are greater for democratic states than autocratic states, due to the fact that democratic leaders are generally more susceptible to being removed from office due to lack of domestic support. DcRoucn (2000) has provided evidence showing that periods of weak economic performance in the United States, and thus weak Presidential popularity, are statistically linked to an increase in the use of force. In summary, recent economic scholarship positively correlates economic integration with an increase in the frequency of economic crises, whereas political science scholarship links economic decline with external conflict at systemic, dyadic and national levels.5 This implied connection between integration, crises and armed conflict has not featured prominently in the economic-security debate and deserves more attention. This observation is not contradictory to other perspectives that link economic interdependence with a decrease in the likelihood of external conflict, such as those mentioned in the first paragraph of this chapter. Those studies tend to focus on dyadic interdependence instead of global interdependence and do not specifically consider the occurrence of and conditions created by economic crises. As such, the view presented here should be considered ancillary to those views. That causes global nuclear war. Merlini ’11 Cesare, was a nonresident senior fellow at the Center on the United States and Europe and is chairman of the Board of Trustees of the Italian Institute for International Affairs (IAI) in Rome, “A Post-Secular World?”, 03-30-2011, Routledge, https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/04_international_relations_merlini.pdfPM Two neatly opposed scenarios for the future of the world order illustrate the range of possibilities, albeit at the risk of oversimplification. The first scenario entails the premature crumbling of the post-Westphalian system. One or more of the acute tensions apparent today evolves into an open and traditional conflict between states, perhaps even involving the use of nuclear weapons. The crisis might be triggered by a collapse of the global economic and financial system, the vulnerability of which we have just experienced, and the prospect of a second Great Depression, with consequences for peace and democracy similar to those of the first. Whatever the trigger, the unlimited exercise of national sovereignty, exclusive self-interest and rejection of outside interference would likely be amplified, emptying, perhaps entirely, the half-full glass of multilateralism, including the UN and the European Union. Many of the more likely conflicts, such as between Israel and Iran or India and Pakistan, have potential religious dimensions. Short of war, tensions such as those related to immigration might become unbearable. Familiar issues of creed and identity could be exacerbated. One way or another, the secular rational approach would be sidestepped by a return to theocratic absolutes, competing or converging with secular absolutes such as unbridled nationalism.
9/11/21
SO - DA - Infrastructure
Tournament: Grapevine | Round: 3 | Opponent: Coppell ER | Judge: Nicky Smith Infrastructure passes now with limited corporation support, but increased big Pharma backlash causes it to fail Waldman 8/31 Paul, opinion writer for the Plum Line blog. Before joining The Post, he worked at an advocacy group, edited an online magazine, taught at university and worked on political campaigns. He has authored or co-authored four books on media and politics, and his work has appeared in dozens of newspapers and magazines. He is also a senior writer at the American Prospect, “Opinion: Democrats, don’t knuckle under to corporations on the reconciliation bill”, 08-31-2021, Washington Post, https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/08/31/democrats-dont-knuckle-under-corporations-reconciliation-bill///pranav The infrastructure bill that passed the Senate and awaits action in the House was in some ways a model of bipartisanship, supported by some Republicans as well as all the chamber’s Democrats, and given a boost from traditionally Republican business groups. That wasn’t a surprise; big corporations need infrastructure to do business. If the government pays for better roads, a more resilient electrical grid and wider availability of broadband, it’ll probably help the bottom line. But what happens when the government suggests addressing Americans’ needs and asks those corporations to help pay for it? This is what happens: A torrent of political groups representing some of the country’s most influential corporations — including ExxonMobil, Pfizer, and the Walt Disney Company — is laying the groundwork for a massive lobbying blitz to stop Congress from enacting significant swaths of President Biden’s $3.5 trillion economic agenda. The emerging opposition appears to be vast, spanning drug manufacturers, big banks, tech titans, major retailers and oil-and-gas giants. In recent weeks, top Washington organizations representing these and other industries have started strategizing behind the scenes, seeking to battle back key elements in Democrats proposed overhaul to federal health care, education and safety net programs. This campaign will have lots of behind-the-scenes pressure: Together, these companies employ a group of lobbyists that are approximately equal in number to China’s People’s Liberation Army — as well as online and TV ads coming to a screen near you. So Democrats should now ask themselves: What are we doing here? As in, why did we decide to run for Congress? Because there are some moments that test your resolve, in which you have to ask what the purpose of public service is, and whether it’s more than just staying in your job for as long as possible. There are disagreements among Democrats about what should be in the final bill, and it’s almost certain that these corporations will have some success in stripping away some provisions they find threatening. There’s an increase in the corporate tax rate (though under every proposal, it would still be less than before the 2017 Republican tax cut). There’s money to boost Internal Revenue Service enforcement of existing tax laws, which the people who run corporations don’t like; an overstretched, overworked IRS that can’t manage to audit the super-rich is just how CEOs like things. Perhaps most threatening is the proposal to allow Medicare to negotiate prices for prescription drugs, as they are currently barred by law from doing. Democrats insist that change would pay for much of the trillions of dollars in new and beefed-up social programs this bill creates. Big Pharma hates the plan – empirics – err neg our ev literally cites their press releases PhRMA ’21 The Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA) represents the country’s leading innovative biopharmaceutical research companies, which are devoted to discovering and developing medicines that enable patients to live longer, healthier and more productive lives. Since 2000, PhRMA member companies have invested nearly $1 trillion in the search for new treatments and cures, including an estimated $83 billion in 2019 alone, “PhRMA Statement on WTO TRIPS Intellectual Property Waiver”, 05-05-2021, https://www.phrma.org/coronavirus/phrma-statement-on-wto-trips-intellectual-property-waiver//pranav WASHINGTON, D.C. (May 5, 2021) – Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA) president and CEO Stephen J. Ubl made the following statement after the United States Trade Representative expressed support for a proposal to waive patent protections for COVID-19 medicines: “In the midst of a deadly pandemic, the Biden Administration has taken an unprecedented step that will undermine our global response to the pandemic and compromise safety. This decision will sow confusion between public and private partners, further weaken already strained supply chains and foster the proliferation of counterfeit vaccines. “This change in longstanding American policy will not save lives. It also flies in the face of President Biden’s stated policy of building up American infrastructure and creating jobs by handing over American innovations to countries looking to undermine our leadership in biomedical discovery. This decision does nothing to address the real challenges to getting more shots in arms, including last-mile distribution and limited availability of raw materials. These are the real challenges we face that this empty promise ignores. “In the past few days alone, we’ve seen more American vaccine exports, increased production targets from manufacturers, new commitments to COVAX and unprecedented aid for India during its devastating COVID-19 surge. Biopharmaceutical manufacturers are fully committed to providing global access to COVID-19 vaccines, and they are collaborating at a scale that was previously unimaginable, including more than 200 manufacturing and other partnerships to date. The biopharmaceutical industry shares the goal to get as many people vaccinated as quickly as possible, and we hope we can all re-focus on that shared objective.” They lash out against infra and use COVID clout to kill it – they have public support, and a win now postpones reform indefinitely which turns case Fuchs et al. 09/02 Hailey Fuchs attended Yale University and was an inaugural Bradlee Fellow for The Washington Post, where she reported on national politics, Alice Ollstein is a health care reporter for POLITICO Pro, covering the Capitol Hill beat. Prior to joining POLITICO, she covered federal policy and politics for Talking Points Memo, Megan Wilson is a health care and influence reporter at POLITICO, “Drug industry banks on its Covid clout to halt Dems’ push on prices”, 09-02-2021, https://www.politico.com/news/2021/09/02/drug-prices-democrats-lobbying-508127//pranav As Democrats prepare a massive overhaul of prescription drug policy, major pharmaceutical companies are mounting a lobbying campaign against it, arguing that the effort could undermine a Covid fight likely to last far longer than originally expected. In meetings with lawmakers, lobbyists for the pharmaceutical industry have issued warnings about the reconciliation package now moving through both chambers of Congress that is set to include language allowing Medicare to negotiate the price of some drugs, which could generate billions of dollars in savings. In those conversations, K Street insiders say, lobbyists have explicitly mentioned that the fight against the coronavirus will almost certainly extend beyond the current surge of the Delta variant. And they’re arguing that now isn’t the time to hit the industry with new regulations or taxes, particularly in light of its successful efforts to swiftly develop vaccines for the virus. “For years, politicians have been saying that the federal government can interfere in the price of medicines and patients won’t suffer any harm,” said Brian Newell, a spokesperson for the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, or PhRMA, in a statement. “But in countries where this already happens, people experience fewer choices and less access to prescription medicines. Patients know if something sounds too good to be true, then it usually is.” The escalating warnings from the pharmaceutical industry are part of what is expected to be one of the more dramatic and expensive lobbying fights in recent memory, and a heightened repeat of the industry’s pushback to actions by former President Donald Trump to target drug prices. The proposal now under consideration in Democrats’ reconciliation package could save the federal government hundreds of billions of dollars by leveraging its ability to purchase prescription drugs, according to a report from the Congressional Budget Office. Without those funds, Democrats won’t be able to pay for the rest of the health care agenda they’ve promised to voters, including expansions of Medicare, Medicaid and Obamacare. But the plan has political power as more than a revenue raiser. Party leaders — from President Joe Biden to Senate Budget Chair Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) — are touting it as one of the most important components of the $3.5 trillion package, with the potential to lower out-of-pocket health spending for tens if not hundreds of millions of people. Outside advocates have also zeroed in on it as the most consequential policy fight on the horizon. “This is the best chance that we have seen in a couple of decades to enact meaningful reforms to drug pricing policy in the United States that will lower the prices of prescription drugs, and it’s very clear that the drug companies are going all out to stop it,” said David Mitchell, founder of Patients for Affordable Drugs. “This is Armageddon for pharma.” Progressive Democrats and their outside allies believe they’re closer than they’ve been in decades to imposing some price controls, and worry that failure to do so this year will delay progress indefinitely given the possibility of the party losing one or more chambers of Congress in the 2022 midterms. In April, the House passed a fairly aggressive version — H.R. 3 (117) — though a handful of moderate Democrats friendly to the industry have threatened to block it when it comes back to the floor for a vote later this fall. Leadership has largely shrugged off this threat, banking on the fact that the most vulnerable frontline Democrats are vocally in favor of the policy, while most of the dissenters sit in safe blue districts. The Senate is designing its own version, outlined by Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) in June, as a middle ground between HR3 and the more narrow, bipartisan bill he and Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) put forward last Congress. A senior Senate Democratic aide confirmed to POLITICO that the bill is nearly complete and that they’re in the process of shopping it around to undecided senators to make sure it has enough support to move forward in the 50-50 upper chamber. “It makes sense to get buy-in before releasing it rather than releasing it with fingers crossed and then tweaking it once members complain,” the aide said. But the reform push is coming at a time when the pharmaceutical industry is working hand-in-hand with government officials to combat the pandemic and enjoying a boost in public opinion as a result, even as drug costs continue to rise. The companies claim that fundamental changes to their bottom line — in addition to the Medicare provision, the reconciliation bill will likely raise corporate tax rate significantly, as high as 28 percent (a jump of 7 percentage points) — will threaten its current investments in research and development at a historically critical juncture. With the final draft of the bill expected in the coming weeks, the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, the lobbying arm of the pharmaceutical industry, is taking its case public. The group has recently spent at least seven figures on ads pressuring Congress not to change Medicare drug policy. Big pharma always wins – independently kills aff solvency bc it causes the plan to be watered down so much that de facto monopolies can survive Florko and Facher ‘19 Nicholas Florko is a Stat News Washington correspondent and Lev Facher is Stat News health and life sciences writer, “How pharma, under attack from all sides, keeps winning in Washington”, 07-16-2019, Stat News, https://www.statnews.com/2019/07/16/pharma-still-winning///pranav It does not seem to matter how angrily President Trump tweets, how pointedly House Speaker Nancy Pelosi lobs a critique, or how shrewdly health secretary Alex Azar drafts a regulatory change. The pharmaceutical industry is still winning in Washington. In the past month alone, drug makers and the army of lobbyists they employ pressured a Republican senator not to push forward a bill that would have limited some of their intellectual property rights, according to lobbyists and industry representatives. They managed to water down another before it was added to a legislative package aimed at lowering health care costs. Lobbyists also convinced yet another GOP lawmaker — once bombastically opposed to the industry’s patent tactics — to publicly commit to softening his own legislation on the topic, as STAT reported last month. Even off Capitol Hill, they found a way to block perhaps the Trump administration’s most substantial anti-industry accomplishment in the past two years: a rule that would have required drug companies to list their prices in television ads. To pick their way through the policy minefield, drug makers have successfully deployed dozens of lobbyists and devoted record-breaking sums to their federal advocacy efforts. But there is also a seemingly new strategy in play: industry CEOs have targeted their campaign donations this year on a pair of vulnerable Republican lawmakers — and then called on them not to upend the industry’s business model. In more than a dozen interviews by STAT with an array of industry employees, Capitol Hill staff, lobbyists, policy analysts, and advocates for lower drug prices, however, an unmistakable disconnect emerges. Even though Washington has stepped up its rhetorical attacks on the industry, and focused its policymaking efforts on reining in high drug prices, the pharmaceutical industry’s time-honored lobbying and advocacy strategies have kept both lawmakers and the Trump administration from landing any of their prescription-drug punches. “Big Pharma has replaced Big Tobacco as the most powerful brute in the ranks of Washington power brokers,” Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) said in a statement to STAT. Durbin, who recently saw the industry successfully oppose his proposal to curtail some of the industry’s patent maneuvering, added that, “Pharma’s billions allow them to continue to rip off American families and taxpayers.” The industry doesn’t get all the credit; it has also benefited from a fractured Congress and discord between President Trump’s most senior health care advisers. PhRMA, the drug industry’s largest lobbying group here, declined to comment for this article. But industry leaders have broadly argued against efforts to rein in the industry’s practices in terms of price hikes and patents, making the case that that could irreparably stifle medical innovation. The battle is far from over, and industry representatives and lobbyists are quick to hypothesize that the worst, for them, is yet to come. They point to several ongoing legislative initiatives, including in the Senate Finance Committee, that could take more concerted direct aim at their pricing strategies in Medicare. They’re waiting, too, to see if House Democrats can cut a drug pricing deal with the White House to empower Medicare to negotiate at least some drug prices. Another pending regulation, loathed by drug makers, might tie their pricing decisions in Medicare to an index of international prices. They’ve also bemoaned the Trump administration’s decision last week to abandon a policy change that would have ended drug rebates — which, the pharmaceutical industry has said, could have given drug makers more space to lower their prices voluntarily. “We’re getting killed!” one pharma lobbyist told STAT. Of course, the Trump administration’s supposedly devastating decision to abandon that proposal simply maintains the status quo. “Big Pharma has replaced Big Tobacco as the most powerful brute in the ranks of Washington power brokers.” n Valentine’s Day, Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.) enjoyed a showering of love that is familiar in Washington: a flood of campaign contributions, many at the federal limit of $2,800 for a candidate or $5,000 for an affiliated political committee. One donation came from Pfizer’s CEO, Albert Bourla, who donated $5,000 to Tillis and another $10,000 to Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) and associated campaign committees. Another came from Kenneth Frazier, the top executive at Merck. The Tillis campaign committee eventually cashed checks from CEOs and other high-ranking executives at those companies as well as Amgen, Eli Lilly, Sanofi, and Bristol Myers-Squibb, plus two high-ranking officials at the advocacy group PhRMA. Six lobbyists at one firm that works with PhRMA, BGR, also combined to contribute $100,000 to a bevy of Republican lawmakers and the party’s campaign arms. Tillis raised an additional $64,500 from drug industry political action committees in the past quarter, according to disclosures released on Monday. A Pfizer spokeswoman declined to comment about Bourla’s contributions, and representatives for the other companies did not respond to STAT’s request for comment. Tills was one of few individual lawmakers — in many cases, the only one — to whom the executives had written personal checks during the current election cycle. While drug industry CEOs frequently contribute to political committees for congressional leadership, the breadth of executives who donated Tillis specifically is notable, particularly considering his outspoken role on pharmaceutical industry issues. While lobbyists pushed back on the notion that campaign contributions directly influence votes, the donations targeted so specifically to a particular candidate could be seen as a prime example of Washington’s system for rewarding loyalty and how industries protect their interests. The same PhRMA PAC that donated to Tillis has given generously in recent years: nearly $200,000 in the 2018 campaign cycle, roughly 58 of which was targeted toward Republicans. Drug industry PACs donated $10.3 million in total in that cycle, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. The figure two years before was even higher: a total of $12.2 million from industry-aligned PACs alone. It is no accident that the pharmaceutical industry has maintained its reputation among the nation’s most powerful lobbies, said Sheila Krumholz, the executive director of the Center for Responsive Politics, an organization that tracks political influence. “Their access and influence goes beyond this Congress or even the administration,” Krumholz said in an interview, adding that she “was struggling to think of evidence” it had waned. Pharma has a reputation here for winning on policy — often thanks to the lawmakers who are among the biggest recipients of the millions that drug corporations, employees, and the industry political arms donate each year. Even as the rhetoric has escalated, the industry has quietly worked to insulate itself from any major legislative changes. Take, for example, a recent about-face from Cornyn, the Texas Republican who took in some campaign cash alongside Tillis. As recently as February, Cornyn seemed to be positioning himself as a rare Republican figurehead for anti-pharma congressional wrath. At a widely publicized hearing before the Senate Finance Committee, he went head-to-head with AbbVie CEO Richard Gonzalez, pressing him to explain why the company had filed more than 100 patents on its blockbuster arthritis drug Humira. Cornyn introduced legislation soon after the skirmish to crack down on patent “thicketing,” a term for a drug company tactic to accumulate tens, if not hundreds, of patents to shield a drug from potential generic competition. Pharma sprung into action. They recruited congressional allies, including Tillis, to pressure Cornyn to significantly rework the bill, and they succeeded. The version of the bill that eventually cleared the Senate Judiciary Committee was stripped of language that would have empowered the Federal Trade Commission to go after patent thicketing. Instead, the bill limited how many patents a drug maker could assert in a patent lawsuit. The new version of the bill lost “a lot of teeth” and “solves a narrower problem in a narrow way,” advocates told STAT when the change was first introduced. It is far from the only example of the industry’s aggressive interventions to water down legislation. “In lots of ways they’re like the National Rifle Association, because they have an incredible power to squash out any negative opinion, nor to feel any of the ill effects of those things,” said Pallavi Damani Kumar, an American University crisis communications professor who once worked in media relations for drug manufacturers. “It just speaks to how incredibly savvy they are.” Pharmaceutical industry lobbyists also successfully fought to keep another anti-drug industry patent proposal from Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.) and Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) out of a bipartisan drug pricing package moving through the Senate HELP Committee. The legislation would have allowed the FDA to approve cheaper versions of drugs, even when the more expensive product was protected by certain patents. Cassidy’s proposal never even made it into the HELP package. As the lobbyist who bemoaned the withdrawal of the rebate rule put it, Cassidy “simmered down” in the face of industry pressure. In recent weeks, the industry had targeted Cassidy in particular, in recent weeks, for fear he would break with many of his GOP colleagues to support a cap on some price hikes for drugs purchased under Medicare, a proposal so far pushed only by Democrats. “Sen. Cassidy doesn’t care what lobbyists think — he is going to do what’s best for patients,” said Ty Bofferding, a Cassidy spokesman. “Sen. Cassidy fought for the committee to include the REMEDY Act in the package, despite strong opposition from the pharmaceutical industry.” The committee eventually included half the bill’s provisions, he added, as well as four other pieces of legislation meant to prevent the industry from taking advantage of the patent system. The drug industry also notched a win by watering down another proposal in that package from Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) that would have blocked drug makers from suing over patents they didn’t disclose to the FDA. The version of the bill that actually made it into the package doesn’t block drug makers from suing, but instead directs the FDA to create a public list of companies that fail to disclose their patents. “This change is a big win for drug makers,” Michael Carrier, a Rutgers University professor and expert on patent gaming, told STAT. “Shaming is something drug makers don’t seem worried about.” Matthew Lane, the executive director of the Coalition Against Patent Abuse, likewise added that the altered bill “doesn’t seem to be doing much anymore.” Not all of the pharma-endorsed changes, however, are self-serving. Patent experts and federal regulators too had raised concerns with some of the bill being proposed. Cornyn’s patent bill was particularly controversial. “These provisions encourage ‘fishing expeditions’ by zealous bureaucrats, politically motivated by the popularity of efforts to reduce drug prices and garner the political benefits of being seen to be pursuing these ends,” Kevin Noonan, a patent lawyer at McDonnell Boehnen Hulbert and Berghoff wrote in a recent blog post, referring to the original Cornyn bill. Drug-pricing advocates said lobbyists have even managed to convince lawmakers to introduce some legislation they say has explicitly favored the drug industry, including intellectual property-focused legislation that would allow drug makers to patent human genes. That particular bill would “undo the bipartisan effort underway to fix pharma’s exploitation of the patent system,” said the Coalition Against Patent Abuse. And they were far from the only group raising concerns. The American Civil Liberties Union and more than 150 other groups wrote to lawmakers last month opposing the bill. Pharma’s list of policy victories goes on: Drug companies and allied patient groups forced the Trump administration to back off a proposal to make relatively minor changes to Medicare’s so-called protected classes policy. Currently, Medicare is required to cover all drugs for certain conditions, including depression and HIV. The Trump administration proposed in November that private Medicare plans should be able to remove certain drugs in those classes from their formularies, if the drugs were just new formulations of a cheaper, older version of the same drug, or when a drug spiked in price. But drug industry opposition helped convince the administration to spike that effort. A week ago, the industry struck its biggest blow yet. Three of the country’s largest pharmaceutical companies —Amgen, Eli Lilly, and Merck — prevailed in a lawsuit to strike down a Trump administration requirement that they disclose list prices in television advertisements. The lack of congressional action — despite the Democratic enthusiasm and bipartisan appetite — is still further evidence of industry’s ability to stave off defeat. As the dozens of Democrats running for president ramp up their anti-pharma rhetoric, both Trump and progressives have begun to fret that Washington’s efforts have proven to be all bark and no bite. With two weeks remaining before the August recess and an escalating 2020 campaign, some advocates fear that the window for bold action is closing quickly. “It’s appalling that we are six months into this Congress and we haven’t seen meaningful legislation passed on American’s number one issue for this congress,” said Peter Maybarduk, who leads drug-pricing initiatives for the advocacy group Public Citizen. “Congress needs to get its act together.” Infra’s k2 stopping existential climate change – warming is incremental and every change in temperature is vital Higgins 8/16 Trevor, Senior Director, Domestic Climate and Energy, “Budget Reconciliation Is the Key to Stopping Climate Change”, 08-16-2021, https://www.americanprogress.org/issues/green/news/2021/08/16/502681/budget-reconciliation-key-stopping-climate-change///pranav The United States is suffering acutely from the chaotic changes in climate that scientists now directly attribute to the burning of fossil fuels and other human activity. The drought, fires, extreme heat, and floods that have already killed hundreds this summer across the continent and around the world are a tragedy—and a warning of worsening instability yet to come. However, this week, the Senate initiated an extraordinary legislative response that would set the world on a different path. Enacting the full scope of President Joe Biden’s Build Back Better agenda would put the American economy to work leading a global transition to clean energy and stabilizing the climate. A look at what’s coming next through the budget reconciliation process reveals a ray of hope that is easy to miss amid the fitful negotiations of recent months: At long last, Congress is on the verge of major legislation that would build a more equitable, just, and inclusive clean energy economy. This is our shot to stop climate change. Building a clean energy future must start now Until the global economy stops polluting the air and instead starts to draw down the emissions of years past, the world will continue to heat up, blundering past perilous tipping points that threaten irreversible and catastrophic consequences. Stemming the extent of warming at 1.5 degrees Celsius rather 2 degrees or worse will reduce the risk of crossing such tipping points or otherwise exceeding the adaptive capacity of human society. Every degree matters. Stabilizing global warming at 1.5 degrees Celsius starts with cutting annual greenhouse gas emissions in the United States to half of peak levels by 2030. This isn’t about temporary offsets or incremental gains in efficiency—it’s about the rapid adoption of scalable solutions that will work throughout the world to eliminate global net emissions by 2050 and sustain net-negative emissions thereafter. Building this better future will tackle climate change, deliver on environmental justice, and create good jobs. It will give us a shot to stop the planet from continuously warming. It will alleviate the concentrated burdens of fossil fuel pollution, which are concentrated in systemically disadvantaged, often majority Black and brown communities. It will empower American workers to compete in the global clean energy economy of the 21st century. There is no time to lose in the work of building a clean energy future.
9/11/21
SO - NC - Kant
Tournament: St Marks | Round: 4 | Opponent: Immaculate Heart RR | Judge: Emmiee Malyugina 2 Permissibility, presumption, and skep negate: 1 Obligations- the resolution indicates the affirmative has to prove an obligation, and permissibility would deny the existence of an obligation 2 Falsity- Statements are more often false than true because proving one part of the statement false disproves the entire statement. Presuming all statements are true creates contradictions which would be ethically bankrupt. 3 Affirmation theory- Affirming requires unconditionally maintaining an obligation Affirm: maintain as true. That’s Dictionary.com- “affirm” https://www.dictionary.com/browse/affirm
The meta-ethic is practical reason— 1 Inescapability— I can question why to follow or the validity of an ethical theory, which concedes the authority of reason as if I question reason, I use reason to question. Outweighs on validity—any other truth risks falsity Reality may be fake, our experiences may be arbitrary, and experience may be descriptive not normative, but questioning the validity of reason requires reason, conceding its validity. Any other ethic begs the question of why, meaning it’s arbitrary and nonbinding 2 Action theory— Only reason can explain why we take transitional action to an overall end. For example, setting the end of tea provides me a reason to unify the necessary actions to produce tea, like getting a pot, filling it with water, etc. Any other explanation fails since it can’t give meaning to why we take transitioning action – freezing action. 2 Impacts— a That’s a side constraint on the AC—ethics is a guide to action so it must appeal to a structure of action. b Bindingness—reason is intrinsic to actions since only it can provide value to transitioning action, which justifies universality If we are all reasoners, we must all be able to determine if an action is good. An action that maximizes my freedom at the cost of others then would have to be recognized as good by everyone, but that leads to a contradiction where everyone takes other’s freedoms to maximize theirs, making it impossible to reach my end Thus, the standard is respecting a system of inner and outer freedom Negate— 1 Reducing intellectual property violates rights to property Riccardo Pozzo 06 January 2006, "Immanuel Kant on intellectual property," https://www.researchgate.net/publication/250048266_Immanuel_Kant_on_intellectual_property WW DL *We do not endorse the author’s gendered language Corpus mysticum, opus mysticum, propriété incorporelle, proprietà letteraria, geistiges Eigentum. All these terms mean intellectual property, the existence of which is intuitively clear because of the unbreakable bond that ties the work to its creator. The book belongs to whomever has written it, the picture to whomever has painted it, the sculpture to whomever has sculpted it; and this independently from the number of exemplars of the book or of the work of art in their passages from owner to owner. The initial bond cannot change and it ensures the author authority on the work. Kant writes in section 31/II of the Metaphysics of Morals: “Why does unauthorized publishing, which strikes one even at first glance as unjust, still have an appearance of being rightful? Because on the one hand a book is a corporeal artifact (opus mechanicum) that can be reproduced (by someone in legitimate possession of a copy of it), so that there is a right to a thing with regard to it. On the other hand a book is also a mere discourse of the pub 1 Lecturer (Full Professor) of History of Philosophy at University of Verona. Article received on oct/ 06 and approuved for publication on dec/06. 12 Trans/Form/Ação, São Paulo, 29(2): 11-18, 2006 lisher to the public, which the publisher may not repeat publicly without having a mandate from the author to do so (praestatio operae), and this is a right against a person. The error consists in mistaking one of these rights for the other” (Kant, 1902, t.6, p.290). The corpus mysticum, the work considered as an immaterial good, remains property of the author on behalf of the original right of its creation. The corpus mechanicum consists of the exemplars of the book or of the work of art. It becomes the property of whoever has bought the material object in which the work has been reproduced or expressed. Seneca points out in De beneficiis (VII, 6) the difference between owning a thing and owning its use. He tells us that the bookseller Dorus had the habit of calling Cicero’s books his own, while there are people who claim books their own because they have written them and other people that do the same because they have bought them. Seneca concludes that the books can be correctly said to belong to both, for it is true they belong to both, but in a different way. The peculiarity of intellectual property consists thus first in being indeed a property, but property of an action; and second in being indeed inalienable, but also transferable in commission and license to a publisher. The bond the author has on his work confers him a moral right that is indeed a personal right. It is also a right to exploit economically his work in all possible ways, a right of economic use, which is a patrimonial right. Kant and Fichte argued that moral right and the right of economic use are strictly connected, and that the offense to one implies inevitably offense to the other. In eighteenth-century Germany, the free use came into discussion among the presuppositions of a democratic renewal of state and society. In his Supplement to the Consideration of Publishing and Its Rights, Reimarus asked writers “instead of writing for the aristocracy, to write for the tiers état of the reader’s world.” (Reimarus, 1791b, p.595). He saluted with enthusiasm the claim of disenfranchising from the monopoly of English publishers expressed in the American Act for the Encouragement of Learning of May 31, 1790. Kant, however, was firm in embracing intellectual property. Referring himself to Roman Law, he asked for its legislative formulation not only as patrimonial right, but also as a personal right. In Of the Illegitimity of Pirate Publishing, he considered the moral faculties related to intellectual property as an “inalienable right (ius personalissimum) always himself to speak through anyone else, the right, that is, that no one may deliver the same speech to the public other than in his (the author’s) name” (Kant, 1902, t.8, p.85). Fichte went farther in the Demonstration of the Illegitimity of Pirate Publishing. He saw intellectual property as a part of his metaphysical construction of intellectual activity, which was based on the principle that thoughts “are not transmitted hand to hand, they are not paid with shining cash, neither are they transmitted to us if we take home the book Trans/Form/Ação, São Paulo, 29(2): 11-18, 2006 13 that contains them and put it into our library. In order to make those thoughts our own an action is still missing: we must read the book, meditate – provided it is not completely trivial – on its content, consider it under different aspects and eventually accept it within our connections of ideas” (Fichte, 1964, t.I/1, p.411).
10/17/21
SO - T - Medicine vs CRISPR
Tournament: St Marks | Round: 4 | Opponent: Immaculate Heart RR | Judge: Emmiee Malyugina Interpretation: Medicines are substances used to prevent, diagnose, or treat harms. MRS 20 (MAINE REVENUE SERVICE SALES, FUEL and SPECIAL TAX DIVISION) “A REFERENCE GUIDE TO THE SALES AND USE TAX LAW” https://www.maine.gov/revenue/sites/maine.gov.revenue/files/inline-files/Reference20Guide202020.pdf December 2020 SS Medicines means antibiotics, analgesics, antipyretics, stimulants, sedatives, antitoxins, anesthetics, antipruritics, hormones, antihistamines, certain “dermal fillers” (such as BoTox®), injectable contrast agents, vitamins, oxygen, vaccines and other substances that are used in the prevention, diagnosis or treatment of disease or injury and that either (1) require a prescription in order to be purchased or administered to the retail consumer or patient; or (2) are sold in packaging. Prefer – it’s a legal and has intent to define which proves we’re right and consistent with topic lit CRISPR is a platform technology, not a medicine. Editas Medicine (a clinical-stage biotechnology company which is developing therapies based on CRISPR–Cas9 gene editing technology)., No Date, CRISPR Gene Editing, https://www.editasmedicine.com/crispr-gene-editing/ Justin CRISPR (pronounced “crisper”) is an acronym for “Clustered, Regularly Interspaced, Short Palindromic Repeats,” and refers to a recently developed gene editing technology that can revise, remove, and replace DNA in a highly targeted manner. CRISPR is a dynamic, versatile tool that allows us to get to and edit nearly any location in the genome, and has the potential to help us develop medicines for people with a wide variety of diseases. We view CRISPR as a “platform” technology because of its ability to target DNA in any cell or tissue.
Their evidence proves the violation—it says CRISPR has the potential to treat which is distinct and the only example, CTX001, is a drug resulting from CRISPR tech, not CRISPR itself—we read blue. Sfera 2/24 (Dan, entrepreneur. Clinical Trials) “CRISPR Therapeutics creates gene-based medicines”, Real Dan Sfera, 2/24/2021. https://therealdansfera.medium.com/crispr-therapeutics-creates-gene-based-medicines-25a66c674998 BC Gene-Editing Genius CRISPR (clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats) has been making news about research and investment. Scientists learned that CRISPR, a naturally occurring gene-editing function of bacteria, has potential for treating genetic diseases. Now a number of companies are using gene-editing to try to cure illnesses caused by errors on a single gene. They include sickle cell disease, hemophilia and cystic fibrosis. Swiss-based CRISPR Therapeutics, a biopharmaceutical company attempting to create transformative gene-based medicines for serious diseases, “has produced results that could not only make it a winner in single-gene disorders, but position it to tackle much more complex — and profitable — diseases in the years ahead,” according to Jason Hawthorne of The Motley Fool (https://www.fool.com/investing/2020/12/15/where-will-crispr-therapeutics-be-in-10-years/). CRISPR Therapeutics, a gene-editing company, attempts to develop gene-based medicines for serious diseases using its proprietary CRISPR/Cas9 platform. CRISPR/Cas9 is a gene-editing technology that allows for precise, directed changes to genomic DNA. The company has a wholly-owned U.S. subsidiary, CRISPR Therapeutics, Inc., and RandD operations based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and business offices in London, United Kingdom. CRISPR’s CTX001 is a potential drug to treat sickle cell disease and beta-thalassemia, disorders that affect the oxygen-carrying cells in the blood. After harvesting a patient’s own cells from his or her own bone marrow, medical professionals use CTX001 to edit the gene responsible for red blood cell production and infuse the cells back into the body. In 2015, CRISPR entered into a partnership with Vertex Pharmaceuticals to develop a number of treatments using this technology, receiving cash, equity and future royalties, while Vertex obtained the rights to market the treatments to be developed.
Even if it can be used in that way not all applications can be so it’s extra T. Negate – 1 Limits – their model explodes it to medical devices, any form of strategy for medical research, databases that are used to create medicines and more – only our definition creates a reasonable caselist for medicines while they make prep impossible and wreck engagement. Our unifies the literature to only medicines, not what’s used to develop medicines which skirts discussions away from big pharma’s control over medicine
Fairness – debate is a competitive activity that requires fairness for objective evaluation. o/w because it’s the only intrinsic to your decisionmaking Education – only portable impact from debate we care about what we learn not if we’re fair
Drop the debater – a deter future abuse and b set better norms for debate.
Competing interps – a reasonability is arbitrary and encourages judge intervention since there’s no clear norm b it creates a race to the top where we create the best possible norms for debate.
No RVIs – a illogical, you don’t win for proving that you meet the burden of being fair, logic outweighs since it’s a prerequisite for evaluating any other argument b RVIs incentivize baiting theory and prepping it out which leads to maximally abusive practices
10/17/21
SO - T - Vaccine
Tournament: St Marks | Round: 2 | Opponent: Marlborough MJ | Judge: Derek Hilligoss Interp – the affirmative must defend a reduction of IP on a medicine. “medicines” treat or cure, whereas vaccines prevent – o/w on specificity since it’s about the COVID vaccine Vecchio 7/22 (Christopher Vecchio, CFA, Senior Strategist 7-22-2021, “Delta Variant Concerns Won't Cripple Markets, US Economy“, DailyFX, accessed: 8-9-2021, https://www.dailyfx.com/forex/video/daily_news_report/2021/07/22/market-minutes-delta-variant-concerns-wont-cripple-markets-us-economy.html) ajs Let’s stick to the facts. The COVID-19 vaccines are not medicines, which by definition “treat or cure diseases.” Vaccines “help prevent diseases,” an important distinction. Why does this matter? Because data coming out of some of the world’s developed economies with high adult vaccination rates suggest that the vaccines are working as intended: tail-risks have been reduced, with hospitalizations and deaths falling relative to the recent spike in infections (which have been occurring primarily among the unvaccinated at this point). Put another way, vaccines are like a Kevlar vest for the immune system; while they don’t make you bulletproof, they dramatically increase the odds of surviving an adverse event.s Violation – their advantage area is about vaccines which means either a. they solve nothing and vote neg on presumption because vaccines aren’t “COVID-19 medicines” or b. they violate
Negate – 1 Limits – expanding the topic to preventative treatment or medical interventions allows anything from surgery to medical devices to education strategies or mosquito repellent to prevent malaria. Destroys core generics like innovation which are exclusive to disease curing – core of the topic is about proprietary information.
Voters: Drop the debater – they have a 7-6 rebuttal advantage and the 2ar to make args I can’t respond to, Use competing interps reasonability invites arbitrary judge intervention since we don’t know your bs meter, No RVIs –illogical – you shouldn’t win for being fair – it’s a litmus test for engaging in substance, Comes first – indicts the 1ac – any potential neg abuse was caused by aff abuse