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-Law suits are extremely expensive regardless of the case- means that litigants must be able to afford the suit as a pre requisite to being effective in it. Lawyers.com: |
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-Lawyers.com: Lawyers.com. Legal Website “What are "Costs" in a Civil Lawsuit?” No date. CH |
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-No matter what kind of case you're involved in, a civil lawsuit can be very expensive. In addition to attorney's fees, you are required to pay for filing fees, copying fees, expert witness fees, court reporter fees, transcripts, and many other costs along the way to trial. When you finally win your case, you might expect to be able to recover all of these costs as part of the judgment you obtain against the opposing party. Let's look at when this is likely, and when you may be out of luck. Awardable costs could be capped under an applicable state law, and that limit may not come close to making the prevailing party whole in terms of what was expended to successfully litigate the case. In most jurisdictions, courts award "costs" to the prevailing party in a lawsuit ~-~- the side who wins, in other words. However, the "costs" that are allowable may not compensate the prevailing party for all actual out-of-pocket expenditures. Instead, awardable costs could be capped under an applicable state law, and that limit may not come close to making the prevailing party whole in terms of what was expended to successfully litigate the case. So, the prevailing party could end up covering a significant percentage of the actual costs incurred, thereby reducing the amount of its net recovery. Attorney's fees are by far the largest component of a litigant's practical expenses in pursuing a lawsuit, but these fees are usually considered separately from "costs" when it comes to what the prevailing party may recover from the other side. Often a dedicated state law allows recovery of attorney's fees to the prevailing party in certain kinds of lawsuits, or the court considers a motion where the prevailing party requests reimbursement of their attorney's fees, based on the circumstances of the instant case. Learn more about Court-Awarded Attorney's Fees. So, a litigant who prevails in court isn't automatically entitled to recoup its attorney's fees as part of that judgment. In many cases, the amount of attorney's fees incurred in bringing the case to trial constitutes a large percentage of the judgment amount; as a result, the net amount of the recovery may be quite small. As an example, a litigant may obtain a judgment of $50,000 in a breach of contract case, but they may have incurred $30,000 in attorney's fees in the process. Finally, keep in mind that even when there is a statute that entitles the prevailing party to recover its attorney's fees, it still must be shown that the fees incurred were necessary and reasonable. |
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-By making their strategy of ethical righteousness only accessible those with money, the aff entrenches the capital based system and de-legitimizes their own movement. Higdon 10, |
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-Higdon: Higdon, Woodrow L. Investigative Photo Journalist, Former Police Officer “Public Corruption Cover Up Through Civil Litigation.” GTI News, March 2010. CH |
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-The so called "Civil and Criminal Justice Systems" in the United States, are systems controlled by money, and the access that money buys. In general, the more money you have, the more "Justice" you can buy. Good attorneys cost a lot more, than bad attorneys. District Attorneys and public agencies, have unlimited public tax dollar finances, which provide unlimited legal resources, for both criminal and civil cases. In the case of District Attorneys, it also provides almost unlimited power, to manipulate and obstruct criminal and civil law, and the lives of the people involved. This is why a corrupt public agency, or District Attorney's office, like the San Diego District Attorneys office, is so dangerous to the public welfare. It is also how many law enforcement agencies cover up public corruption, by obstructing the filing and investigation of citizen criminal complaints. This is done while knowing about citizens limitations in the civil legal system. Criminal investigations are blocked and citizens are pushed to hire a civil attorney, with the knowledge that very few can afford the cost of civil litigation. The few citizens that can afford to file a civil litigation, will quickly find that public agencies, and their employees, also have extensive protections from civil litigation, built into the legal system. These public entity civil litigation immunities were originally intended to protect the public agency for the financial benefit of the citizens. However, as time passed the public entities found the immunities could be used to protect tax dollar resources for the use of the public unions. Public agencies and DA's are well aware of these financial and legal advantages when they push citizens to drop criminal complaints, go away, and hire an attorney. It is also why "Civil Litigation", is one of the most effective public corruption cover up tools available to public agencies. |
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-Structural violence is based upon exclusion, and thus precludes our cognitive processes and ability to engage in ethical discussion- realizing structural violence’s presence and working to minimize it is key. Winter and Leighton 99 |
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-Winter and Leighton 99 Deborah DuNann Winter and Dana C. Leighton. Winter|Psychologist that specializes in Social Psych, Counseling Psych, Historical and Contemporary Issues, Peace Psychology. Leighton: PhD graduate student in the Psychology Department at the University of Arkansas. Knowledgable in the fields of social psychology, peace psychology, and justice and intergroup responses to transgressions of justice “Peace, conflict, and violence: Peace psychology in the 21st century.” Pg 4-5 |
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-She argues that our normal perceptual cognitive processes divide people into in-groups and out-groups. Those outside our group lie outside our scope of justice. Injustice that would be instantaneously confronted if it occurred to someone we love or know is barely noticed if it occurs to strangers or those who are invisible or irrelevant. We do not seem to be able to open our minds and our hearts to everyone, so we draw conceptual lines between those who are in and out of our moral circle. Those who fall outside are morally excluded, and become either invisible, or demeaned in some way so that we do not have to acknowledge the injustice they suffer. Moral exclusion is a human failing, but Opotow argues convincingly that it is an outcome of everyday social cognition. To reduce its nefarious effects, we must be vigilant in noticing and listening to oppressed, invisible, outsiders. Inclusionary thinking can be fostered by relationships, communication, and appreciation of diversity. Like Opotow, all the authors in this section point out that structural violence is not inevitable if we become aware of its operation, and build systematic ways to mitigate its effects. Learning about structural violence may be discouraging, overwhelming, or maddening, but these papers encourage us to step beyond guilt and anger, and begin to think about how to reduce structural violence. All the authors in this section note that the same structures (such as global communication and normal social cognition) which feed structural violence, can also be used to empower citizens to reduce it. |
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-Capitalism is the worst form of structural violence, literally classifying as structural genocide- condoning its mindset makes you complicit in violent oppression. Sethness 13 |
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-Sethness, Javier. "The Structural Genocide That Is Capitalism." Truthout. N.p., 16 June 2013. Web. 16 Oct. 2016. http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/16887-the-structural-genocide-that-is-capitalism. |
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-Garry Leech, an author who had previously penned a book on the FARC insurgency in Colombia (2011), has assembled a forceful denunciation of the status quo withCapitalism: A Structural Genocide. In essence, he argues cogently in this work that the devastating structural violence experienced by societies subjected to the rule of capital since its historical emergence - and that particularly felt by the world's presently impoverished social majorities - is, instead of being an aberration or distortion of market imperatives, central and inherent to the division of society along class lines and the enthronement of private property. Even a cursory examination of the depth of human suffering perpetuated historically and contemporarily by the hegemony of capital should lead disinterested observers to agree with Leech that the catastrophic scale of violence for which this system is responsible can be considered nothing less than genocidal, however shocking such a conclusion might prove to be. In this book, Leech guides his readers through theoretical examinations of the concept of genocide, showing why the term should in fact be applied to the capitalist mode of production. He then illustrates capitalism's genocidal proclivities by exploring four case studies: the ongoing legacy of the 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in Mexico; the relationship between trade liberalization and genetically-modified seeds on the one hand and mass-suicide on the part of Indian agriculturalists on the other; material deprivation and generalized premature death throughout much of the African continent and the global South, as results from hunger, starvation, and preventable disease; and the ever-worsening climatic and environmental crises. Leech then closes by considering the relevance of Antonio Gramsci's conceptions of cultural hegemony in attempting to explain the puzzling consent granted to this system by large swathes of the world's relatively privileged people - specifically, those residing in the imperial core of Europe and the United States - and then recommending the socialist alternative as a concrete means of abolishing genocide, while looking to the Cuban and Venezuelan regimes as imperfect, but inspirational experiments in these terms. In sum, while I take issue with some of his analysis and aspects of his conceptualization of anticapitalist alternatives, his work should certainly be well-received, read and discussed by large multitudes. Leech begins his text by referencing the original formulator of the concept of structural violence, Johan Galtung. In 1969, Galtung famously expanded prevailing notions of societal violence to include consideration of "the avoidable impairment of fundamental human needs or . . . of human life." Key to Galtung's formulation of structural violence in this sense is the gap between "the potential and the actual," or "what could have been and what is." Thus, avoidable death resulting from preventable or treatable diseases today constitutes violence, given the technological progression of modern medicine, whereas centuries ago this would not have been the case, according to Galtung. For Leech, then, capitalist society is indelibly marked by structural violence, as the vast inequalities in wealth and access to which it gives rise lead small minorities to be overwhelmingly privileged, while large groups of others are prevented from meeting their basic needs. Transitioning then to consideration of the question of whether the large number of avoidable deaths observed under conditions of capitalism should in fact be considered genocidal, Leech concedes that the UN's 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide excludes mass death resulting from one's pertaining to a given social class as constituting genocide. However, he notes that an initial draft of the Convention from 1947 did include death or injury resulting from "lack of proper housing, clothing, food, hygiene and medical care, or excessive work or physical exertion" within the definition of genocide. Hence, while such a formulation did not appear in the final version with which we are all familiar, Leech does not accept legal positivism in this case as final; in this vein, he could have done well to have also mentioned that Raphael Lemkin, inventor of the concept of genocide, himself believed the charge should include mass murder of persons following from their belonging to particular classes. Leech nonetheless does mention that the 1998 Rome Statute defines the crime of extermination in part as "the intentional infliction of . . . deprivation of access to food and medicine calculated to bring about the destruction of part of a population," so in this sense has the weight of international law behind him. Leech's only remaining theoretical difficulty, then, is to argue that intentionality exists within the context of the perpetuation of capital-induced genocide: This proves an easy task, for the question of intent in judging capitalism is not one of examining the actions of particular persons or states (as in most traditional cases of the charge of genocide) but rather of judging the "logic" of the system as a whole. Hence, structural genocide - defined by Leech as "structural violence that intentionally inflicts on any group or collectivity conditions of life that bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part" - can be said to be an intentional outcome of adherence to norms which govern a social system that by nature "inevitably results in . . . death on a mass scale," as does capital. For Leech, the proffered defense of willful blindness - "such was not our intention," the system's managers might exclaim - is no defense at all. Or, in Jean-Paul Sartre's words: "The genocidal intent is implicit in the facts. It is not necessarily premeditated." Following this opening discussion of the theoretical case for considering capitalism to be genocidal, Leech takes a few particularly devastating examples from the contemporary world to illuminate his argument. In Mexico, the passing of NAFTA in 1994 has led to the dispossession of campesinos (peasants) on a grand scale, as the country's stipulated importation of heavily subsidized maize and other crops from the United States effectively led millions to abandon agriculture and migrate to Mexican and US cities in search of employment in the manufacturing sector, in accordance with neoclassical theories of "comparative advantage" - and very much mirroring the means by which capitalism emerged historically through the destruction of the commons in England. For Leech, this forcible displacement has resulted in the explosion of precarity within the informal sector of the economy in Mexico, as many ex-campesinos fail to find traditional proletarian jobs, and it has also driven the horrifying feminicides of maquiladora workers in the Mexican border regions, migration en masse to the United States (and attendant mass death in the Sonoran desert), as well as the horrid drug war launched in 2006 by then-president Felipe Calderón. Leech sees similar processes in Colombia, which hosts the second-largest number of internally displaced persons in the world (4 million), with many of these people having been removed from their lands due to military and paramilitary operations undertaken to make way for megaprojects directed by foreign corporations. Alarmingly, in India, Leech reports that more than 216,000 farmers committed suicide between 1997 and 2009, largely out of desperation over crushing debts they accumulated following the introduction of genetically-modified seed crops, as demanded by the transnational Agreement on Trade-Related Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS, 1994) and the general shift from subsistence to export-oriented agriculture. In many cases, the genetically engineered seed varieties failed to expand yields to the levels promised by Monsanto, Cargill, and co., leading farmers then to take on further debt merely to cover the shortfalls as well as to pay for the next iteration of crops - which by conscious design were modified at the molecular level so as not to be able to reproduce naturally, thus ensuring biotech firms sustained profitability (a "captured market," as it were). That such a dynamic should end in a downward spiral of death and destruction should be unsurprising, for all its horror. Leech further illustrates his case regarding capitalism's structurally genocidal nature in a chapter examining Africa south of the Sahel. It is this world region that has been "most severely impacted" by capital's genocidal imperatives, claims Leech, and it is difficult to argue with this claim: Merely consider the millions who succumb to AIDS on the continent each year or the other millions who perish in the region annually due to lack of medical treatment for complications within pregnancy or conditions such as diarrhea and malaria, themselves catalyzed by pre-existing background malnutrition. All this deprivation is exacerbated, argues Leech, by food-aid regimes overseen by wealthier societies - which in the US case demands that food be purchased from and shipped by US companies, thus effectively removing a full half of the total resources intended for the hungry - and the infamous land-grabs being perpetrated on the continent in recent years by investors from such countries as Saudi Arabia and South Korea. Fundamentally, though, the conflict is one based on the guiding principles of capital: Because Africans in general do not possess the requisite income to "demand" food commodities within international capitalism, they themselves do not constitute a "viable market" and so are rendered invisible - nonpersons, or "unpeople." In these terms, Leech also discusses the toxic role of the capitalist pharmaceutical industry, which famously and "logically" invests an overwhelming percentage of its research and development funds in highly profitable schemes for lifestyle drugs directed at first-world consumers - at their most absurd, treatments for baldness, erectile dysfunction, and so on - instead of in essential medicines that could relieve the horrendous disease burden borne by the peoples of the global South. Leech starkly illustrates these tensions by noting that, were the eight largest US pharmaceutical companies to have gained an average profit of $6.8 billion instead of $7.7 billion in 2008, with the difference going to purchase anti-retrovirals for the 3.8 million HIV+ Africans who go without any treatment at all, a considerable percentage of the estimated 1.3 million annual deaths observed on the continent resulting from HIV/AIDS could be prevented. Leech summarizes this all rather starkly: "There is no clearer illustration of the shortcomings in trying to reform the behavior of capital than the ongoing annihilation of poor people in sub-Saharan Africa who are dying as a result of the structural violence inherent in capitalism." A similarly horrifying genocidal tendency for which capitalism is responsible is the next one briefly examined by Leech: that of the specter of catastrophic climate change. Leech claims it to be a "truly inconvenient truth" that the capitalist system itself is incapable of mitigating the total threat posed by global warming and instead precipitates this grim eventuality due to its incessant need for ceaseless expansion and profit, based principally on the indefinite exploitation of hydrocarbon resources. |
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-The alternative is refusal to obey the system- this requires you to reject the affirmatives perpetuation of capitalism in favor of the negative’s rebellion. Holloway 05’ |
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-Holloway, 05 (John, Ph.D in Political Science from the University of Edinburgh, “Can we change the World without taking power”, A debate between Holloway and Alex Callinicos, August 16th, http://www.zmag.org/znet/viewArticle/5616) |
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-I don't know the answer. Perhaps we can change the world without taking power. Perhaps we cannot. The starting point: for all of us, I think: is uncertainty, not knowing, a common search for a way forward. Because it becomes more and more clear that capitalism is a catastrophe for humanity. A radical change in the organisation of society, that is, revolution, is more urgent than ever. And this revolution can only be world revolution if it is to be effective. But it is unlikely that world revolution can be achieved in one single blow. This means that the only way in which we can conceive of revolution is as interstitial revolution, as a revolution that takes place in the interstices of capitalism, a revolution that occupies spaces in the world while capitalism still exists. The question is how we conceive of these interstices, whether we think of them as states or in other ways. In thinking about this, we have to start from where we are, from the many rebellions and insubordinations that have brought us to Porto Alegre. The world is full of such rebellions, of people saying NO to capitalism: NO, we shall not live our lives according to the dictates of capitalism, we shall do what we consider necessary or desirable and not what capital tells us to do. Sometimes we just see capitalism as an all-encompassing system of domination and forget that such rebellions exist everywhere. At times they are so small that even those involved do not perceive them as refusals, but often they are collective projects searching for an alternative way forward and sometimes they are as big as the Lacandon Jungle or the Argentinazo of three years ago or the revolt in Bolivia just over a year ago. All of these insubordinations are characterised by a drive towards self-determination, an impulse that says, 'No, you will not tell us what to do, we shall decide for ourselves what we must do.' These refusals can be seen as fissures, as cracks in the system of capitalist domination. Capitalism is not (in the first place) an economic system, but a system of command. Capitalists, through money, command us, telling us what to do. To refuse to obey is to break the command of capital. |
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-Capitalism makes police misconduct and brutality inevitable- K turns case. The alt is the only hope of solving. Internationalist 15, |
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-The Internationalist, Summer 2015, Killer Cops, White Supremacists: Racist Terror Talks Strike Black America, http://www.internationalist.org/killercopswstalkblackamerica1507.html DOA: 10-2-16 |
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-No amount of protest will convince the ruling class to muzzle their uniformed guard dogs, whom it requires to keep the poor and working people down. What’s needed is militant class struggle on a revolutionary program. The Internationalist Group has called for an end to all drug laws. We call for labor/black/immigrant mobilization against police terror. We have acted to carry this out, with the unprecedented port shutdown to “Stop Police Terror” by Local 10 of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union in Oakland this past May Day, and the “Labor Against Police Murder” contingent the same day, organized by Class Struggle Workers – Portland. Bringing to bear workers’ power to stop the wheels of commerce could stay the rulers’ hand for a time. At the height of struggle one can also mobilize to get the police and military occupation forces out, as the IG called for in Ferguson last August and again in Baltimore this spring.”10 But such actions can only have a temporary effect. Ultimately, there is no solution to racist police brutality under capitalist rule: it is inherent in the system. Racist vigilantes, from George Zimmerman to Dylann Roof, act as auxiliaries. Whether in the form of slave catchers, KKK nightriders and racist sheriffs under Jim Crow, or mass incarceration combined with paramilitary police forces today, supplemented by massacres, American capitalism has always devised a way to keep its black, Latino and now increasingly immigrant wage slaves in thrall. The killer cops aren’t running amok, in contradiction to their assigned task, they’re doing their job to enforce racist “law and order” which is essential to American capitalism and has been ever since African slaves were brought here in chains. The fact that year after year, from one end of the country to the other, virtually no police are indicted – much less convicted – for killing over 1,000 civilians a year is no accident. As we wrote in The Internationalist No. 1(January-February 1997): “Trigger-happy cops with Glocks pop anyone they consider ‘suspects’ or ‘perps,’ not to mention bystanders, subway riders, drivers who are parking, drivers who are stopped at stop lights, passengers in cars, pedestrians on the street, patrons in restaurants, young men playing football, young men outside bars, young men inside bars – particularly if the victims are black, Hispanic or Asian – as well as roaming around housing projects in off-duty vigilante squads, and not infrequently bumping off their own wives and girlfriends. They think they can get away with murder, and history – recent and past – shows they are right. Why? Because they are the enforcers of the monopoly of violence in the hands of the capitalist state, the apparatus set up to guarantee the profits and the rule of the bourgeoisie…. “To get rid of racist cop terror, you have to sweep away the system that spawns it. That system is capitalism, and what’s needed is a socialist revolution to make the working class and its allies the rulers of society.” While various pseudo-socialists are always seeking to build a new “movement,” adapting their politics to whatever is the flavor of the day, such amorphous “coalitions” always end up reducing their program to the lowest common denominator. This may at times bring many people into the street, but it cannot point the way forward to actually win. The struggle for socialist revolution requires a leadership, a multi-racial workers party with a clear revolutionary program, a party that champions the cause of all the oppressed and can overcome the rulers’ attempts to set one ethnic group against another, employed workers against the unemployed, etc. In short, we need, as we wrote in 1997, to “forge a revolutionary leadership, with a core of cadre tested in the class struggle, like the Bolshevik Party of Lenin and Trotsky which led the October 1917 Russian Revolution. ■ |