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... ... @@ -1,19 +1,0 @@ 1 -Municipal budgets are on the brink in the status-quo. 2 -LILP 16. The Lincoln Institute of Land Policy is an independent, nonpartisan organization whose mission is to help solve global economic, social, and environmental challenges to improve the quality of life through creative approaches to the use, taxation, and stewardship of land. As a private operating foundation whose origins date to 1946, the Lincoln Institute seeks to inform public dialogue and decisions about land policy through research, training, and effective communication. By bringing together scholars, practitioners, public officials, policy makers, journalists, and involved citizens, the Lincoln Institute integrates theory and practice and provides a forum for multidisciplinary perspectives on public policy concerning land, both in the United States and internationally. The Lincoln Institute's work is organized in five major areas: Planning and Urban Form, Valuation and Taxation, International and Institute-Wide Initiatives, the People's Republic of China, and Latin America and the Caribbean., 1-15-2016, "Cities on the brink: monitoring municipal fiscal health," LILP, http://www.lincolninst.edu/news/lincoln-house-blog/cities-brink-monitoring-municipal-fiscal-health //RS 3 - 4 -Northeastern University political science professor Benedict S. Jimenez shared the results of an ambitious customized survey of cities on their strategies for dealing with fiscal stress, at Lincoln House just before the holidays. Results show an emphasis on cutting expenditures over revenue-raising approaches – and that most cities say they are on the brink of crisis. Research on fiscal retrenchment at the local government level has been severely hampered by limited data on city finances after the Great Recession of 2007-09, he said. Comprehensive Annual Financial Reports (CAFRs) require a Freedom of Information Act request, and one third of states do not require local governments to file them. Census of Governments and the Annual Survey of State and Local Government Finances provide limited information. The Lincoln Institute database Fiscally Standardized Cities allows the comparison of budgets for 112 municipalities. Jimenez thus started his own survey, targeting appointed managers and budget or finance directors in cities with a population of 50,000 or more, and got 268 of the 674 queried cities to respond. The results provide a new window into the state of local public finance, and showed that most cities were relying on piecemeal strategies to stay away from insolvency year after year. The conditions are harsh: 42 reported that spending is growing faster than revenues; 36 reported increasing spending for current benefits; 35 cited dependence on fewer resources; 34 noted the further constraint of tax limits; and 29 were dealing with increased spending on post-employment benefits. In the area of personnel, almost two-thirds of respondents said they were leaving vacant positions unfilled, freezing hiring or salaries, and cutting professional development. Fewer were engaged in layoffs, moving employees part-time, revising union contracts, or reducing salaries for current employees. In services, almost one-third reported deferring capital projects and maintenance projects, rather than eliminating services outright, closing facilities, or cutting key services such as public safety. In striving for efficiency, many cities were asking more state aid or changes in aid formulas, or shifting the responsibility of functions and services to another level of government. More than half reported making better use of technology. On the revenue side, cities are relying on increased user fees – something the Lincoln Institute researchers have also found. Much less common was trying to increase the property tax rate and expand the property tax base, or increase the sales tax. While economic cycles, and the Great Recession in particular, have great impact, cities report long-term structural issues that make fiscal stress the “new normal” for most. Overall, 7 out of 10 cities reported that they are on the precipice of another budget crisis – and don’t expect that feeling to change in the next five years. This lecture was the first in the 2015-2016 series as part of the campaign of the Lincoln Institute to promote municipal fiscal health. The video can be viewed in its entirety here. 5 - 6 -Indemnification tanks municipal budgets and wrecks accountability – turns case, Ferguson proves. 7 -Prall 14. Derek Prall is a professional journalist who has held numerous positions with a variety of print and online publications including the New Jersey Herald. He is a 2008 graduate of Furman University holding bachelor's degrees in both English Literature and Communications Studies., 12-10-2014, "Who pays for police misconduct?," No Publication, http://americancityandcounty.com/law-enforcement/who-pays-police-misconduct //RS 8 - 9 -Cases like those of Michael Brown and Eric Garner have communities abuzz about police misconduct and possible punitive damages, but, when the police are convicted of misconduct, more often than not, it's taxpayers – not the offending officers or agencies – who foot the bill. In a recent paper published in the New York University Law Review, Joanna Schwartz, an assistant law professor at UCLA and expert in police misconduct cases, says that “taxpayers almost always satisfy both compensatory and punitive damages awards entered against their sworn servants.” Meaning: It’s the city’s taxpayers – not the offending officer or the department – that pays when officers are found to be at fault. “My study reveals that police officers are virtually always indemnified: During the study period, governments paid approximately 99.98 percent of the dollars that plaintiffs recovered in lawsuits alleging civil rights violations by law enforcement,” Schwartz wrote. “Law enforcement officers in my study never satisfied a punitive damages award entered against them and almost never contributed anything to settlements or judgments — even when indemnification was prohibited by law or policy, and even when officers were disciplined, terminated or prosecuted for their conduct.” To reach these conclusions, Schwartz looked at misconduct cases in 44 large and 37 small or mid-sized police departments from 2006 to 2011. City Lab reports that together, these departments made up about 20 percent of the nation’s police officers. The data showed officers rarely pay out of their own pockets for civil-rights violations. In 9,225 cases from large cities that were settled or judged for the victim, $735 million in damages was awarded, with officers paying .02 percent of that figure - $171,300. In small to mid-sized cities, officers paid no part of the $9.4 million awarded. Schwartz told City Lab there is no reason to expect suits in Ferguson, Mo., or New York City will play out any differently. According to the Associated Press, Eric Garner’s family has filed suit against the city, the NYPD and the six officers involved for $75 million dollars. ThinkProgress reports six protesters in Ferguson are suing for $40 million in the first of many federal lawsuits expected to be filed. It is unclear how Ferguson will handle the financial burden – the figure dwarfs the city’s revenues for the fiscal year, and ThinkProgress reports the city is already budgeting for the fallout. Solutions for the problem are unclear. Schwartz told City Lab municipalities don’t necessarily need to eliminate indemnification, but suggests that holding more officers financially accountable for their actions would be a step in the right direction. 10 - 11 -Cities make police more aggressive, they’re forced to issue more tickets to make up for budget deficits – turns case. 12 -Vibes 14. John Vibes is an author, researcher and investigative journalist who takes a special interest in the counter culture and the drug war. In addition to his writing and activist work he is also the owner of a successful music promotion company. In 2013, he became one of the organizers of the Free Your Mind Conference, which features top caliber speakers and whistle-blowers from all over the world. You can contact him and stay connected to his work at his Facebook page. You can find his 65 chapter Book entitled “Alchemy of the Timeless Renaissance” at bookpatch.com. , 12-15-2014, "Ferguson to Solve Budget Crisis by Ordering Their Police to be More Aggressive," Free Thought Project, http://thefreethoughtproject.com/ferguson-police-ordered-start-writing-tickets-solve-citys-budget-crisis/#D9HXDXvtpXzikWDF.99. //RS 13 - 14 -While controversy about the police killing of teenager Michael Brown has been the primary focus in Ferguson this year, the city’s government is also facing a massive budget crisis, which they are hoping to solve by ordering their police officers to write more tickets. Many residents in Ferguson have already pointed out that once this policy is implemented, it will strain the already high tensions between the community and the police. In a telephone interview with Bloomberg News this week, Ferguson’s finance director, Jeffrey Blume explained that in order for the city’s government to stay above their budget, the police would have to write millions of dollars in tickets for small, non-violent infractions. “There are a number of things going on in 2014 and one is a revenue shortfall that we anticipate making up in 2015. There’s about a million-dollar increase in public-safety fines to make up the difference,” Blume said. Police generated revenue from writing tickets is already the city’s second larges source of revenue after sales taxes, and the money brought in through the police departments is expected to grow with these new guidelines. “They said they weren’t going to go after poor people, so to speak, to fund their budget, but I guess that’s changed,” Tim Fischesser, executive director of the St. Louis Municipal League told Bloomberg. Some state politicians are worried that this could contribute to further unrest so they are seeking to limit how much money the local government can draw from police generated revenue. A number of state senators have filed two bills that would put these types of limits on the local government in Ferguson. “For Ferguson to respond to all of this and say that increasing ticketing was a good idea is outrageous,” one of the bill’s sponsors, Scott Sifton said. According to Sifton, the bills will be voted on sometime after January 7th, and if approved the limits would not go into effect until at least August. Missouri State Treasurer Clint Zweifel, also spoke in opposition of the new policies, saying that a strong focus on revenue generating does not make communities any safer. “Increasing reliance on such fines is the wrong way to go, period. Residents and neighborhoods are safer when police can focus on public safety, not a municipality’s need to protect a revenue stream,” Zweifel said. 15 - 16 -Tickets perpetuate structural inequalities – turns case. 17 -Solon 14. Sarah Solon: Communications Strategist, ACLU, 6-18-2014, "Preying on the Poor: For-Profit Probation Edition," American Civil Liberties Union, https://www.aclu.org/blog/preying-poor-profit-probation-edition //RS 18 - 19 -Welcome to Alabama, the state of the never-ending seat belt ticket. Hali Wood is 17. She's applied to work at several grocery stores in her home town of Columbiana, but none are hiring. A few months back, cops ticketed Hali for not wearing a seat belt. The fine: $41. Hali has paid $41 and then some, but she's still hundreds of dollars in debt. Why? Because the court contracts with JCS, a for-profit probation company that forces Hali to choose between paying their exorbitant fees and going to jail. Here's how the scheme works: Privacy statement. This embed will serve content from youtube.com Borrowing from the payday lender playbook, companies like JCS often sign contracts in cities and counties strapped for cash. For the county, the deal seems like a sweet one: The company will collect outstanding court debts for free and make all their profits from charging probationers fees. But the problem is that many of these people were put on probation because they were too poor to pay their fine in the first place and for them, the additional fees are huge. People find themselves scrambling for money they don't have and forgoing basic necessities to avoid being thrown behind bars for missing a payment. The impact on communities, especially low-income communities of color, is devastating. Sadly, the for-profit probation business is booming. Every year, hundreds of thousands of people are sentenced to probation, often for misdemeanors including unpaid parking tickets. Instead of being able to just pay those fines and move on with their lives, many get sucked into spiraling debt traps they cannot escape. There are hundreds of thousands of people like Hali out there, for whom small court fines have ballooned into hundreds of dollars of debt. The for-profit probation racket isn't benefiting society; it's only benefiting these companies' bottom line. We need to remember two things: 1) If probationers miss a payment and end up behind bars, taxpayers foot the bill for this imprisonment; and 2) Our communities are not better off when we force people in poverty to choose between their liberty and putting food on their table —and needlessly lining the pockets of for-profit probation companies in the process. Counties and courts do not need to contract with these debt collectors on steroids. Publicly run probation exists, and it works while doing much less damage to communities. It's time to urge courts to cut their ties with the for-profit probation industry. - EntryDate
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... ... @@ -1,29 +1,0 @@ 1 -The 1AC’s form of justice is dependent on money, re-entrenching capitalism. The cost of civil suits means only the rich can afford their liberation strategy. 2 -Higdon 10. Woodrow L. Higdon – Investigative Photo Journalist, March 2010, "PUBLIC-CORRUPTION-COVER-UP-THRU-CIVIL-LITIAGTION-ABUSE," No Publication, http://www.gtinewsphoto.com/PUBLIC-CORRUPTION-COVER-UP-THRU-CIVIL-LITIAGTION.html //RS 3 - 4 -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. 5 - 6 -The 1AC’s belief in reforming the police is flawed – they ignore that capitalism is the foundation of police violence. 7 -Mitrani 14. Sam Mitrani Is An Associate Professor Of History At The College Of Dupage. He Earned His Phd From The University Of Illinois At Chicago In 2009 and His Book The Rise Of The Chicago Police Department: Class And Conflict, 1850-1894 Is Available From The University Of Illinois Press., 12-29-2014, "Stop Kidding Yourself: The Police Were Created to Control Working Class and Poor People," LAWCHA, http://lawcha.org/wordpress/2014/12/29/stop-kidding-police-created-control-working-class-poor-people/ //RS 8 - 9 -In most of the liberal discussions of the recent police killings of unarmed black men, there is an underlying assumption that the police are supposed to protect and serve the population. That is, after all, what they were created to do. If only the normal, decent relations between the police and the community could be re-established, this problem could be resolved. Poor people in general are more likely to be the victims of crime than anyone else, this reasoning goes, and in that way, they are in more need than anyone else of police protection. Maybe there are a few bad apples, but if only the police weren’t so racist, or didn’t carry out policies like stop-and-frisk, or weren’t so afraid of black people, or shot fewer unarmed men, they could function as a useful service that we all need. This liberal way of viewing the problem rests on a misunderstanding of the origins of the police and what they were created to do. The police were not created to protect and serve the population. They were not created to stop crime, at least not as most people understand it. And they were certainly not created to promote justice. They were created to protect the new form of wage-labor capitalism that emerged in the mid- to late-19th century from the threat posed by that system’s offspring, the working class. This is a blunt way of stating a nuanced truth, but sometimes nuance just serves to obfuscate. Before the 19th century, there were no police forces that we would recognize as such anywhere in the world. In the Northern United States, there was a system of elected constables and sheriffs, much more responsible to the population in a very direct way than the police are today. In the South, the closest thing to a police force was the slave patrols. Then, as Northern cities grew and filled with mostly immigrant wage workers who were physically and socially separated from the ruling class, the wealthy elite who ran the various municipal governments hired hundreds and then thousands of armed men to impose order on the new working class neighborhoods. Class conflict roiled late-19th century American cities like Chicago, which experienced major strikes and riots in 1867, 1877, 1886, and 1894. In each of these upheavals, the police attacked strikers with extreme violence, even if in 1877 and 1894 the U.S. Army played a bigger role in ultimately repressing the working class. In the aftermath of these movements, the police increasingly presented themselves as a thin blue line protecting civilization (by which they meant bourgeois civilization) from the disorder of the working class. This ideology of order that developed in the late 19th century echoes down to today—except that today, poor black and Latino people are the main threat, rather than immigrant workers. Of course, the ruling class did not get everything it wanted, and had to yield on many points to the immigrant workers it sought to control. This is why, for instance, municipal governments backed away from trying to stop Sunday drinking, and why they hired so many immigrant police officers, especially the Irish. But despite these concessions, businessmen organized themselves to make sure the police were increasingly isolated from democratic control, and established their own hierarchies, systems of governance, and rules of behavior. The police increasingly set themselves off from the population by donning uniforms; establishing their own rules for hiring, promotion and firing; working to build a unique esprit des corps and identifying themselves with order. And despite complaints about corruption and inefficiency, they gained more and more support from the ruling class, to the extent that in Chicago, for instance, businessmen donated money to buy the police rifles, artillery, Gatling guns, buildings, and money to establish a police pension out of their own pockets. There was a never a time when the big city police neutrally enforced “the law,” or came anywhere close to that ideal. (For that matter, the law itself has never been neutral.) In the North, they mostly arrested people for the vaguely defined “crimes” of disorderly conduct and vagrancy throughout the nineteenth century. This meant that the police could arrest anyone they saw as a threat to “order.” In the post-bellum South, they enforced white supremacy and largely arrested black people on trumped-up charges in order to feed them into convict labor systems. The violence the police carried out and their moral separation from those they patrolled were not the consequences of the brutality of individual officers, but were the consequences of careful policies designed to mold the police into a force that could use violence to deal with the social problems that accompanied the development of a wage-labor economy. For instance, in the short, sharp depression of the mid-1880s, Chicago was filled with prostitutes who worked the streets. Many policemen recognized that these prostitutes were generally impoverished women seeking a way to survive, and initially tolerated their behavior. But the police hierarchy insisted that the patrolmen do their duty whatever their feelings, and arrest these women, impose fines, and drive them off the streets and into brothels, where they could be ignored by some members of the elite and controlled by others. Similarly, in 1885, when Chicago began to experience a wave of strikes, some policemen sympathized with strikers. But once the police hierarchy and the mayor decided to break the strikes, policemen who refused to comply were fired. In these and a thousand similar ways, the police were molded into a force that would impose order on working class and poor people, whatever the individual feelings of the officers involved. Though some patrolmen tried to be kind and others were openly brutal, police violence in the 1880s was not a case of a few bad apples—and neither is it today. Much has changed since the creation of the police—most importantly the influx of black people into the Northern cities, the mid-twentieth century black movement, and the creation of the current system of mass incarceration in part as a response to that movement. But these changes did not lead to a fundamental shift in policing. They led to new policies designed to preserve fundamental continuities. The police were created to use violence to reconcile electoral democracy with industrial capitalism. Today, they are just one part of the “criminal justice” system which continues to play the same role. Their basic job is to enforce order among those with the most reason to resent the system—who in our society today are disproportionately poor black people. A democratic police system is imaginable—one in which police are elected by and accountable to the people they patrol. But that is not what we have. And it’s not what the current system of policing was created to be. If there is one positive lesson from the history of policing’s origins, it is that when workers organized, refused to submit or cooperate and caused problems for the city governments, they could back the police off from the most galling of their activities. Murdering individual police officers, as happened in in Chicago on May 3, 1886 and more recently in New York on December 20, 2014, only reinforced those calling for harsh repression—a reaction we are beginning to see already. But resistance on a mass scale could force the police to hesitate. This happened in Chicago during the early 1880s, when the police pulled back from breaking strikes, hired immigrant officers, and tried to re-establish some credibility among the working class after their role in brutally crushing the 1877 upheaval. The police might be backed off again if the reaction against the killings of Eric Garner, Michael Brown, Tamir Rice and countless others continues. If they are, it will be a victory for those mobilizing today, and will save lives—though as long as this system that requires police violence to control a big share of its population survives, any change in police policy will be aimed at keeping the poor in line more effectively. We shouldn’t expect the police to be something they’re not. We ought to know that origins matter, and the police were created by the ruling class to control working class and poor people, not help them. They’ve continued to play that role ever since. 10 - 11 -Capitalism propagates the need for surveillance – turns case. 12 -Foster 14. (John Bellamy, prof of sociology @ univ of Oregon, Robert W.**, prof @ univ of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, July-August 2014, “Surveillance Capitalism: Monopoly-Finance Capital, the Military-Industrial Complex, and the Digital Age”, http://monthlyreview.org/2014/07/01/surveillance-capitalism/, aps) 13 - 14 -Financialization—or the long-term growth of speculation on financial assets relative to GDP—meant the intrusion of finance into all aspects of life, requiring new extensions of surveillance and information control as forms of financial risk management. As the economy became more financialized, it became increasingly vulnerable to financial meltdowns, increasing risk perceptions on the part of investors and the perceived need for risk management, encryption of data, and security.¶ Today the fears of cyberwar aimed at financial institutions, the entire financial system, and the military system, is at the top of national security concerns. McConnell, who had left his job at Booz Allen to become director of national intelligence in 2007 under George W. Bush, informed the president that, “If the 9/11 perpetrators had focused on a single U.S. bank through cyberattack, and it had been successful, it would have had an order of magnitude greater impact on the U.S. economy than the physical attack.” Secretary of the Treasury Henry Paulson, former CEO of Goldman Sachs, agreed. Bush was so alarmed that within a short time the Comprehensive National Cybersecurity Initiative (2008) was in place, which greatly expanded the NSA’s authority to carry out surveillance on the Internet domestically, leading to the construction of its $1.5 billion data center in Utah.53 Leon Panetta, U.S. defense secretary under Obama, warned that a cyberattack on the U.S. financial system might be the “next Pearl Harbor.” In July 2011 Barack Obama signed an executive order declaring that the infiltration of financial markets by transnational criminal organizations constituted a national emergency. Symantec, a cybersecurity firm, estimated in 2010 that three-quarters of “phishing” attacks designed to get people to give up financial data were not aimed at individuals but were directed at the financial sector.54¶ In addition to hackers breaking into databases, large scale attacks on entire security systems are feared. The sudden drop in the stock market on May 6, 2010, attributed to high speed algorithmic trading, was thought to prefigure a new possible form of cyberwar aimed at dragging reeling markets down further using short-selling, options, and swaps—a kind of “force multiplier” in military-speak. Hackers using malicious codes to crash or jam whole networks can mobilize Botnets or robotic networks of hundreds of thousands of machines. According to Mortimer Zuckerman, chairman and editor-in-chief of U.S. News and World Report, writing in the Wall Street Journal, digitalized systems are extraordinarily vulnerable to attack: “the average offensive malware has about 175 lines of code, which can attack defense software using between 5 million and 10 million lines of code.” The U.S./Israeli-developed “Stutnex” worm aimed at Iran, which reportedly infiltrated the computers controlling Iranian nuclear centrifuge facilities, is seen as an indication of the scale and precision with which cyberattacks can now demobilize whole systems.55¶ The Internet and Monopoly Capital¶ ARPANET was connected only to those universities and their computer science departments that had Department of Defense funding and security clearances. With the success of the system, computer science departments at universities and private industry were all eager to be connected to the network. This resulted in the creation by the National Science Foundation of the Computer Science Research Network (CSNET), which consisted of ARPANET, a Telenet system, and PhoneNet for email. Soon other, private internets were created. In 1985 the National Science Foundation constructed five supercomputers across the country to be the backbone of a larger NSFNET, which brought universities in general and private corporations into what had merged into a much wider Internet with a common protocol, resulting in a massive growth of users who could access it through personal computers, via Internet Service Providers.¶ ARPANET ceased operations in 1989. In the early 1990s the World Wide Web was developed, leading to an astronomical increase in users, and the rapid commercialization of the Internet. Three key developments followed: (1) In 1995 NSFNET was privatized, and NSFNET itself decommissioned, with the backbone of the system being controlled by private Internet Service Providers;56 (2) the Telecommunications Act of 1996 introduced a massive deregulation of telecommunications and media, setting the stage for further concentration and cenoentralization of capital in these industries;57 (3) the Financial Services Modernization Act of 1999, promoted by Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin, and Deputy Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers under the Clinton administration, deregulated the financial sector in an attempt to feed the financial bubble that was developing.58 These three elements coalesced into one of the biggest merger waves in history, known as the dot-com or New Economy bubble. The ongoing concentration of capital was thus given a huge boost in the technology and finance sectors, leading to ever greater levels of monopoly power.¶ The dot-com bubble burst in 2000. But by that time a virtual Internet cartel had emerged, despite all the rhetoric of “friction-free capitalism” by Bill Gates and others.59 By the end of the decade the Internet had come to play a central role in capital accumulation, and the firms that ruled the Internet were almost all “monopolies,” by the way economists use the term. This did not mean that these firms sold 100 percent of an industry’s output, but rather that they sold a sufficient amount to control the price of the product and how much competition they would have. (Even John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil monopoly at its peak controlled just over 80 percent of the market.) By 2014, three of the four largest U.S. corporations in market valuation—Apple, Microsoft, and Google—were Internet monopolies. Twelve of the thirty most valuable U.S. corporations were media giants and/or Internet monopolies, including Verizon, Amazon, Disney, Comcast, Intel, Facebook, Qualcomm, and Oracle. These firms used network effects, technical standards, patent law, and good old-fashioned barriers-to-entry to lock in their market power, and they used their monopoly gushers to broaden their digital empires. With this economic power comes immense political power, such that these firms face no threat from regulators in Washington. To the contrary, the U.S. government is little short of a private army for the Internet giants as they pursue their global ambitions.60¶ The major means of wealth generation on the Internet and through proprietary platforms such as apps is the surveillance of the population, allowing for a handful of firms to reap the lion’s share of the gains from the enormous sales effort in the U.S. economy. The digitalization of surveillance has radically changed the nature of advertising. The old system of advertisers purchasing ad space or time in media with the hope of getting the media user to notice the advertisement while she sought out news or entertainment is becoming passé. Advertisers no longer need to subsidize journalism or media content production to reach their target audiences. Instead, they can pinpoint their desired audience to a person and locate them wherever they are online (and often where they are in physical space) due to ubiquitous surveillance. The premise of the system is that there is no effective privacy. The consequences are that the commercial system of media content production, especially journalism, is in collapse, with nothing in the wings to replace it.¶ These monopolistic corporate entities readily cooperate with the repressive arm of the state in the form of its military, intelligence, and police functions. The result is to enhance enormously the secret national security state, relative to the government as a whole. Edward Snowden’s revelations of the NSA’s Prism program, together with other leaks, have shown a pattern of a tight interweaving of the military with giant computer-Internet corporations, creating what has been called a “military-digital complex.”61 Indeed, Beatrice Edwards, the executive director of the Government Accountability Project, argues that what has emerged is a “government-corporate surveillance complex.”62¶ This extends beyond the vast private contractor network to “secret collaboration” with the main Internet and telecom companies.63 Notable examples of partly cooperative, partly legally coerced sharing of data include:¶ A 2009 report by the NSA’s inspector general leaked by Snowden stated that the NSA has built collaborative relationships with over “100 companies.”64¶ Microsoft provided the NSA with pre-encryption “back door” access to its popular Outlook.com email portal, to its Skype Internet phone calls and chat (with its 663 million global users), and to SkyDrive, Microsoft’s cloud storage system (which has 250 million users). The Snowden files show that Microsoft actively collaborated with the NSA. Glenn Greenwald writes: “Microsoft spent ‘many months’ working to provide the government easy access to that the SkyDrive data.” The same was the case for Skype, while in the case of Outlook.com it took only a few months for the Microsoft and the NSA working together to ensure the NSA’s complete access.65¶ The NSA paid $10 million to the computer security company RSA to promote a back door to encryption products. The NSA devised a flawed formula for generating random numbers for encryption with RSA inserting it into its software tool Bsafe, which had been designed to enhance security in personal computers and other digital products.66¶ ATandT voluntarily sold metadata on phone calls to the CIA for over $10 million a year in connection with the latter’s counterterrorism investigations.67¶ Verizon (and likely ATandT and Sprint as well) provided the NSA with metadata on all calls in its (their) systems, both within the United States and between the United States and other countries. Such metadata has been supplied to the NSA under both the Bush and Obama administrations.68¶ Microsoft, Google, Yahoo, and Facebook turned over the data from tens of thousands of their accounts on individuals every six months to the NSA and other intelligence agencies, with a rapid rise in the number of accounts turned over to the secret government.69¶ In 2012 DARPA Director Regina Dugan left her position to join Google. During her period as director, DARPA had been at the forefront of drone research, presenting the first prototype demonstrations in the early 1990s. However, the outgrowth of this in the deployment of General Atomic Aeronautical System’s Predator drones in warfare did not occur until the late 1990s in the Kosovo War, with Clark as the Supreme Allied Commander. The first use of such drones for global, extra-territorial assassination, outside a field of war—now a staple of Obama’s “anti-terrorism” strategy—took place in 2002.70 In the opening years of this century DARPA extended its research to developing drones that could be used for mobile wi-fi capabilities. Dugan’s switch to Google in the private sector—at a time when she was under governmental investigation for giving hefty DARPA contracts to RedX, a bomb-detection corporation that she had co-founded and partly owned—was connected to Google’s interest in developing high-altitude drones with wi-fi delivering capabilities. In 2014 Google announced that it was buying Titan Aerospace, a U.S.-based start-up company for building drones which cruise at the very edge of the atmosphere. Facebook meanwhile bought the UK corporation, Ascenta, which specializes in making high-altitude solar drones. Such drones would allow the spread of the Internet to new areas. The goal was to capitalize on a new military technology and create larger global Internet monopolies, while expanding the military-digital complex.71¶ By 2005–2007 broad estimates suggested that U.S. marketing expenditures (defined fairly narrowly) were running at about $1 trillion a year; real (both acknowledged and unacknowledged) military expenditures at about $1 trillion annually; and FIRE (finance, insurance, and real estate) expenditures at approximately $2.5 trillion.72 In the digital age, these three sectors of the political economy, each of which arose parasitically on the production base of the economy, were increasingly connected in a web of technology and data sharing. As the most advanced technologies (usually military developed) went private, many of those involved in the warfare economy, such as DARPA’s Dugan, were in a position to exploit the knowledge and connections that they had accumulated by shifting to the private sector, crossing fairly easily from one system of security and surveillance to another.¶ A kind of linguistic convergence mirrored the centralized structure of monopoly-finance capital in the age of digital surveillance with “securitization” increasingly standing simultaneously for a world dominated by: (1) financial derivatives trading, (2) a network of public and private surveillance, (3) the militarization of security-control systems, and (4) the removal of judicial processes from effective civilian control. 15 - 16 -Capitalism and slavery produced anti-blackness, not the reverse. A shift in economic conditions made African slavery more cost-effective than white indentured servitude, producing the Atlantic slave trade. Only our approach can decipher the way violence functions. 17 -Selfa 2010 Lance, Lance Selfa is a frequent contributor to the International Socialist Review, and writes a column on U.S. politics in Socialist Worker newspaper. “The Roots of Racism.” http://socialistworker.org/2010/10/21/the-roots-of-racism//MM 18 - 19 -Although it is a commonplace for academics and opponents of socialism to claim that Karl Marx ignored racism, Marx in fact described the processes that created modern racism. His explanation of the rise of capitalism placed the African slave trade, the European extermination of indigenous people in the Americas and colonialism at its heart. In Capital, Marx writes: The discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement and entombment in mines of the indigenous population of the continent, the beginnings of the conquest and plunder of India, and the conversion of Africa into a preserve for the commercial hunting of black skins are all things that characterize the dawn of the era of capitalist production. Marx connected his explanation of the role of the slave trade in the rise of capitalism to the social relations that produced racism against Africans. In Wage Labor and Capital, written 12 years before the American Civil War, he explains: What is a Negro slave? A man of the black race. The one explanation is as good as the other. A Negro is a Negro. He only becomes a slave in certain relations. A cotton spinning jenny is a machine for spinning cotton. It only becomes capital in certain relations. Torn away from these conditions, it is as little capital as gold by itself is money, or as sugar is the price of sugar. In this passage, Marx shows no prejudice to Blacks ("a man of the black race," "a Negro is a Negro"), but he mocks society's equation of "Black" and "slave" ("one explanation is as good as another"). He shows how the economic and social relations of emerging capitalism thrust Blacks into slavery ("he only becomes a slave in certain relations"), which produce the dominant ideology that equates being African with being a slave. These fragments of Marx's writing give us a good start in understanding the Marxist explanation of the origins of racism. As the Trinidadian historian of slavery Eric Williams put it: "Slavery was not born of racism: rather, racism was the consequence of slavery." And, one should add, the consequence of modern slavery at the dawn of capitalism. While slavery existed as an economic system for thousands of years before the conquest of America, racism as we understand it today did not exist. From time immemorial? The classical empires of Greece and Rome were based on slave labor. But ancient slavery was not viewed in racial terms. Slaves were most often captives in wars or conquered peoples. If we understand white people as originating in what is today Europe, then most slaves in ancient Greece and Rome were white. Roman law made slaves the property of their owners, while maintaining a "formal lack of interest in the slave's ethnic or racial provenance," wrote Robin Blackburn in The Making of New World Slavery. Over the years, slave manumission produced a mixed population of slave and free in Roman-ruled areas, in which all came to be seen as "Romans." The Greeks drew a sharper line between Greeks and "barbarians," those subject to slavery. Again, this was not viewed in racial or ethnic terms, as the socialist historian of the Haitian Revolution, C.L.R. James, explained: Historically, it is pretty well proved now that the ancient Greeks and Romans knew nothing about race. They had another standard~-~-civilized and barbarian~-~-and you could have white skin and be a barbarian, and you could be black and civilized. More importantly, encounters in the ancient world between the Mediterranean world and Black Africans did not produce an upsurge of racism against Africans. In Before Color Prejudice, Howard University classics professor Frank Snowden documented innumerable accounts of interaction between the Greco-Roman and Egyptian civilizations and the Kush, Nubian, and Ethiopian kingdoms of Africa. He found substantial evidence of integration of Black Africans in the occupational hierarchies of the ancient Mediterranean empires and Black-white intermarriage. Black and mixed race gods appeared in Mediterranean art, and at least one Roman emperor, Septimius Severus, was an African. Between the 10th and 16th centuries, the chief source of slaves in Western Europe was Eastern Europe. In fact, the word "slave" comes from the word "Slav," the people of Eastern Europe. This outline doesn't mean to suggest a "pre-capitalist" Golden Age of racial tolerance, least of all in the slave societies of antiquity. Empires viewed themselves as centers of the universe and looked on foreigners as inferiors. Ancient Greece and Rome fought wars of conquest against peoples they presumed to be less advanced. Religious scholars interpreted the Hebrew Bible's "curse of Ham" from the story of Noah to condemn Africans to slavery. Cultural and religious associations of the color white with light and angels and the color black with darkness and evil persisted. But none of these cultural or ideological factors explain the rise of New World slavery or the "modern" notions of racism that developed from it. The African slave trade The slave trade lasted for a little more than 400 years, from the mid-1400s, when the Portuguese made their first voyages down the African coast, to the abolition of slavery in Brazil in 1888. Slave traders took as many as 12 million Africans by force to work on the plantations in South America, the Caribbean and North America. About 13 percent of slaves (1.5 million) died during the Middle Passage~-~-the trip by boat from Africa to the New World. The African slave trade~-~-involving African slave merchants, European slavers and New World planters in the traffic in human cargo~-~-represented the greatest forced population transfer ever. The charge that Africans "sold their own people" into slavery has become a standard canard against "politically correct" history that condemns the European role in the African slave trade. The first encounters of the Spanish and Portuguese, and later the English, with African kingdoms revolved around trade in goods. Only after the Europeans established New World plantations requiring huge labor gangs did the slave trade begin. African kings and chiefs did indeed sell into slavery captives in wars or members of other communities. Sometimes, they concluded alliances with Europeans to support them in wars, with captives from their enemies being handed over to the Europeans as booty. The demands of the plantation economies pushed "demand" for slaves. Supply did not create its own demand. In any event, it remains unseemly to attempt to absolve the European slavers by reference to their African partners in crime. As historian Basil Davidson rightly argues about African chiefs' complicity in the slave trade: "In this, they were no less 'moral' than the Europeans who had instigated the trade and bought the captives." Onboard, Africans were restricted in their movements so that they wouldn't combine to mutiny on the ship. In many slave ships, slaves were chained down, stacked like firewood with less than a foot between them. On the plantations, slaves were subjected to a regimen of 18-hour workdays. All members of slave families were set to work. Since the New World tobacco and sugar plantations operated nearly like factories, men, women and children were assigned tasks, from the fields to the processing mills. Slaves were denied any rights. Throughout the colonies in the Caribbean to North America, laws were passed establishing a variety of common practices: Slaves were forbidden to carry weapons, they could marry only with the owner's permission, and their families could be broken up. They were forbidden to own property. Masters allowed slaves to cultivate vegetables and chickens, so the master wouldn't have to attend to their food needs. But they were forbidden even to sell for profit the products of their own gardens. Some colonies encouraged religious instruction among slaves, but all of them made clear that a slave's conversion to Christianity didn't change their status as slaves. Other colonies discouraged religious instruction, especially when it became clear to the planters that church meetings were one of the chief ways that slaves planned conspiracies and revolts. It goes without saying that slaves had no political or civil rights, with no right to an education, to serve on juries, to vote or to run for public office. The planters instituted barbaric regimes of repression to prevent any slave revolts. Slave catchers using tracker dogs would hunt down any slaves who tried to escape the plantation. The penalties for any form of slave resistance were extreme and deadly. One description of the penalties slaves faced in Barbados reports that rebellious slaves would be punished by "nailing them down on the ground with crooked sticks on every Limb, and then applying the Fire by degrees from Feet and Hands, burning them gradually up to the Head, whereby their pains are extravagant." Barbados planters could claim a reimbursement from the government of 25 pounds per slave executed. The African slave trade helped to shape a wide variety of societies from modern Argentina to Canada. These differed in their use of slaves, the harshness of the regime imposed on slaves, and the degree of mixing of the races that custom and law permitted. But none of these became as virulently racist~-~-insisting on racial separation and a strict color bar~-~-as the English North American colonies that became the United States. Unfree labor in the North American colonies Notwithstanding the horrible conditions that African slaves endured, it is important to underscore that when European powers began carving up the New World between them, African slaves were not part of their calculations. When we think of slavery today, we think of it primarily from the point of view of its relationship to racism. But planters in the 17th and 18th centuries looked at it primarily as a means to produce profits. Slavery was a method of organizing labor to produce sugar, tobacco and cotton. It was not, first and foremost, a system for producing white supremacy. How did slavery in the U.S. (and the rest of the New World) become the breeding ground for racism? For much of the first century of colonization in what became the United States, the majority of slaves and other "unfree laborers" were white. The term "unfree" draws the distinction between slavery and servitude and "free wage labor" that is the norm in capitalism. One of the historic gains of capitalism for workers is that workers are "free" to sell their ability to labor to whatever employer will give them the best deal. Of course, this kind of freedom is limited at best. Unless they are independently wealthy, workers aren't free to decide not to work. They're free to work or starve. Once they do work, they can quit one employer and go to work for another. But the hallmark of systems like slavery and indentured servitude was that slaves or servants were "bound over" to a particular employer for a period of time, or for life in the case of slaves. The decision to work for another master wasn't the slave's or the servant's. It was the master's, who could sell slaves for money or other commodities like livestock, lumber or machinery. The North American colonies started predominantly as private business enterprises in the early 1600s. Unlike the Spanish, whose conquests of Mexico and Peru in the 1500s produced fabulous gold and silver riches for Spain, settlers in places like the colonies that became Maryland, Rhode Island, and Virginia made money through agriculture. In addition to sheer survival, the settlers' chief aim was to obtain a labor force that could produce the large amounts of indigo, tobacco, sugar and other crops that would be sold back to England. From 1607, when Jamestown was founded in Virginia to about 1685, the primary source of agricultural labor in English North America came from white indentured servants. The colonists first attempted to press the indigenous population into labor. But the Indians refused to be become servants to the English. Indians resisted being forced to work, and they escaped into the surrounding area, which, after all, they knew far better than the English. One after another, the English colonies turned to a policy of driving out the Indians. The colonists then turned to white servants. Indentured servants were predominantly young white men~-~-usually English or Irish~-~-who were required to work for a planter master for some fixed term of four to seven years. The servants received room and board on the plantation but no pay. And they could not quit and work for another planter. They had to serve their term, after which they might be able to acquire some land and to start a farm for themselves. They became servants in several ways. Some were prisoners, convicted of petty crimes in Britain, or convicted of being troublemakers in Britain's first colony, Ireland. Many were kidnapped off the streets of Liverpool or Manchester, and put on ships to the New World. Some voluntarily became servants, hoping to start farms after they fulfilled their obligations to their masters. For most of the 1600s, the planters tried to get by with a predominantly white, but multiracial workforce. But as the 17th century wore on, colonial leaders became increasingly frustrated with white servant labor. For one thing, they faced the problem of constantly having to recruit labor as servants' terms expired. Second, after servants finished their contracts and decided to set up their farms, they could become competitors to their former masters. And finally, the planters didn't like the servants' "insolence." The mid-1600s were a time of revolution in England, when ideas of individual freedom were challenging the old hierarchies based on royalty. The colonial planters tended to be royalists, but their servants tended to assert their "rights as Englishmen" to better food, clothing and time off. Most laborers in the colonies supported the servants. As the century progressed, the costs of servant labor increased. Planters started to petition the colonial boards and assemblies to allow the large-scale importation of African slaves. Black slaves worked on plantations in small numbers throughout the 1600s. But until the end of the 1600s, it cost planters more to buy slaves than to buy white servants. Blacks lived in the colonies in a variety of statuses~-~-some were free, some were slaves, some were servants. The law in Virginia didn't establish the condition of lifetime, perpetual slavery or even recognize African servants as a group different from white servants until 1661. Blacks could serve on juries, own property and exercise other rights. Northampton County, Virginia, recognized interracial marriages and, in one case, assigned a free Black couple to act as foster parents for an abandoned white child. There were even a few examples of Black freemen who owned white servants. Free Blacks in North Carolina had voting rights. In the 1600s, the Chesapeake society of eastern Virginia had a multiracial character, according to historian Betty Wood: There is persuasive evidence dating from the 1620s through the 1680s that there were those of European descent in the Chesapeake who were prepared to identify and cooperate with people of African descent. These affinities were forged in the world of plantation work. On many plantations, Europeans and West Africans labored side by side in the tobacco fields, performing exactly the same types and amounts of work; they lived and ate together in shared housing; they socialized together; and sometimes they slept together. The planters' economic calculations played a part in the colonies' decision to move toward full-scale slave labor. By the end of the 17th century, the price of white indentured servants outstripped the price of African slaves. A planter could buy an African slave for life for the same price that he could purchase a white servant for 10 years. As Eric Williams explained: Here, then, is the origin of Negro slavery. The reason was economic, not racial; it had to do not with the color of the laborer, but the cheapness of the labor. The planter would have gone to the moon, if necessary, for labor. Africa was nearer than the moon, nearer too than the more populous countries of India and China. But their turn would soon come. Planters' fear of a multiracial uprising also pushed them towards racial slavery. Because a rigid racial division of labor didn't exist in the 17th century colonies, many conspiracies involving Black slaves and white indentured servants were hatched and foiled. We know about them today because of court proceedings that punished the runaways after their capture. As historians T.H. Breen and Stephen Innes point out, "These cases reveal only extreme actions, desperate attempts to escape, but for every group of runaways who came before the courts, there were doubtless many more poor whites and blacks who cooperated in smaller, less daring ways on the plantation." The largest of these conspiracies developed into Bacon's Rebellion, an uprising that threw terror into the hearts of the Virginia Tidewater planters in 1676. Several hundred farmers, servants and slaves initiated a protest to press the colonial government to seize Indian land for distribution. The conflict spilled over into demands for tax relief and resentment of the Jamestown establishment. Planter Nathaniel Bacon helped organize an army of whites and Blacks that sacked Jamestown and forced the governor to flee. The rebel army held out for eight months before the Crown managed to defeat and disarm it. Bacon's Rebellion was a turning point. After it ended, the Tidewater planters moved in two directions: first, they offered concessions to the white freemen, lifting taxes and extending to them the vote; and second, they moved to full-scale racial slavery. Fifteen years earlier, the Burgesses had recognized the condition of slavery for life and placed Africans in a different category as white servants. But the law had little practical effect. "Until slavery became systematic, there was no need for a systematic slave code. And slavery could not become systematic so long as an African slave for life cost twice as much as an English servant for a five-year term," wrote historian Barbara Jeanne Fields. Both of those circumstances changed in the immediate aftermath of Bacon's Rebellion. In the entire 17th century, the planters imported about 20,000 African slaves. The majority of them were brought to North American colonies in the 24 years after Bacon's Rebellion. In 1664, the Maryland legislature passed a law determining who would be considered slaves on the basis of the condition of their father~-~-whether their father was slave or free. It soon became clear, however, that establishing paternity was difficult, but that establishing who was a person's mother was definite. So the planters changed the law to establish slave status on the basis of the mother's condition. Now white slaveholders who fathered children by slave women would be guaranteed their offspring as slaves. And the law included penalties for "free" women who slept with slaves. But what's most interesting about this law is that it doesn't really speak in racial terms. It attempts to preserve the property rights of slaveholders and establish barriers between slave and free which were to become hardened into racial divisions over the next few years. Taking the Maryland law as an example, Fields made this important point: Historians can actually observe colonial Americans in the act of preparing the ground for race without foreknowledge of what would later arise on the foundation they were laying. The purpose of the experiment is clear: to prevent the erosion of slaveowners' property rights that would result if the offspring of free white women impregnated by slave men were entitled to freedom. The language of the preamble to the law makes clear that the point was not yet race. Race does not explain the law. Rather, the law shows society in the act of inventing race. After establishing that African slaves would cultivate major cash crops of the North American colonies, the planters then moved to establish the institutions and ideas that would uphold white supremacy. Most unfree labor became Black labor. Laws and ideas intended to underscore the subhuman status of Black people~-~-in a word, the ideology of racism and white supremacy~-~-emerged full-blown over the next generation. "All men are created equal" Within a few decades, the ideology of white supremacy was fully developed. Some of the greatest minds of the day~-~-such as Scottish philosopher David Hume and Thomas Jefferson, the man who wrote the Declaration of Independence~-~-wrote treatises alleging Black inferiority. The ideology of white supremacy based on the natural inferiority of Blacks, even allegations that Blacks were subhuman, strengthened throughout the 18th century. This was the way that the leading intellectual figures of the time reconciled the ideals of the 1776 American Revolution with slavery. The American Revolution of 1776 and later the French Revolution of 1789 popularized the ideas of liberty and the rights of all human beings. The Declaration of Independence asserts that "all men are created equal" and possess certain "unalienable rights"~-~-rights that can't be taken away~-~-of "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." As the first major bourgeois revolution, the American Revolution sought to establish the rights of the new capitalist class against the old feudal monarchy. It started with the resentment of the American merchant class that wanted to break free from British restrictions on its trade. But its challenge to British tyranny also gave expression to a whole range of ideas that expanded the concept of "liberty" from being just about trade to include ideas of human rights, democracy, and civil liberties. It legitimized an assault on slavery as an offense to liberty. Some of the leading American revolutionaries, such as Thomas Paine and Benjamin Franklin, endorsed abolition. Slaves and free Blacks also pointed to the ideals of the revolution to call for abolishing slavery. But because the revolution aimed to establish the rule of capital in America, and because a lot of capitalists and planters made a lot of money from slavery, the revolution compromised with slavery. The Declaration initially contained a condemnation of King George for allowing the slave trade, but Jefferson dropped it following protests from representatives from Georgia and the Carolinas. How could the founding fathers of the U.S.~-~-most of whom owned slaves themselves~-~-reconcile the ideals of liberty for which they were fighting with the existence of a system that represented the exact negation of liberty? The ideology of white supremacy fit the bill. We know today that "all men" didn't include women, Indians or most whites. But to rule Black slaves out of the blessings of liberty, the leading head-fixers of the time argued that Blacks weren't really "men," they were a lower order of being. Jefferson's Notes from Virginia, meant to be a scientific catalogue of the flora and fauna of Virginia, uses arguments that anticipate the "scientific racism" of the 1800s and 1900s. With few exceptions, no major institution~-~-such as the universities, the churches or the newspapers of the time~-~-raised criticisms of white supremacy or of slavery. In fact, they helped pioneer religious and academic justifications for slavery and Black inferiority. As C.L.R. James put it, "The conception of dividing people by race begins with the slave trade. This thing was so shocking, so opposed to all the conceptions of society which religion and philosophers had, that the only justification by which humanity could face it was to divide people into races and decide that the Africans were an inferior race." White supremacy wasn't only used to justify slavery. It was also used to keep in line the two-thirds of Southern whites who weren't slaveholders. Unlike the French colony of St. Domingue or the British colony of Barbados, where Blacks vastly outnumbered whites, Blacks were a minority in the slave South. A tiny minority of slave-holding whites, who controlled the governments and economies of the Deep South states, ruled over a population that was roughly two-thirds white farmers and workers and one-third Black slaves. The slaveholders' ideology of racism and white supremacy helped to divide the working population, tying poor whites to the slaveholders. Slavery afforded poor white farmers what Fields called a "social space" whereby they preserved an illusory "independence" based on debt and subsistence farming, while the rich planters continued to dominate Southern politics and society. "A caste system as well as a form of labor," historian James M. McPherson wrote, "slavery elevated all whites to the ruling caste and thereby reduced the potential for class conflict." The great abolitionist Frederick Douglass understood this dynamic: The hostility between the whites and blacks of the South is easily explained. It has its root and sap in the relation of slavery, and was incited on both sides by the cunning of the slave masters. Those masters secured their ascendancy over both the poor whites and the Blacks by putting enmity between them. They divided both to conquer each. Slaveholders denounced emancipation as tending to put the white working man on an equality with Blacks, and by this means, they succeed in drawing off the minds of the poor whites from the real fact, that by the rich slave-master, they are already regarded as but a single remove from equality with the slave. Slavery and capitalism Slavery in the colonies helped produce a boom in the 18th century economy that provided the launching pad for the industrial revolution in Europe. From the start, colonial slavery and capitalism were linked. While it is not correct to say that slavery created capitalism, it is correct to say that slavery provided one of the chief sources for the initial accumulations of wealth that helped to propel capitalism forward in Europe and North America. The clearest example of the connection between plantation slavery and the rise of industrial capitalism was the connection between the cotton South, Britain and, to a lesser extent, the Northern industrial states. Here, we can see the direct link between slavery in the U.S. and the development of the most advanced capitalist production methods in the world. Cotton textiles accounted for 75 percent of British industrial employment in 1840, and, at its height, three-fourths of that cotton came from the slave plantations of the Deep South. And Northern ships and ports transported the cotton. To meet the boom in the 1840s and 1850s, the planters became even more vicious. On the one hand, they tried to expand slavery into the West and Central America. The fight over the extension of slavery into the territories eventually precipitated the Civil War in 1861. On the other hand, they drove slaves harder~-~-selling more cotton to buy more slaves just to keep up. On the eve of the Civil War, the South was petitioning to lift the ban on the importation of slaves that had existed officially since 1808. Karl Marx clearly understood the connection between plantation slavery in the cotton South and the development of capitalism in England. He wrote in Capital: While the cotton industry introduced child-slavery into England, in the United States, it gave the impulse for the transformation of the more or less patriarchal slavery into a system of commercial exploitation. In fact, the veiled slavery of the wage-laborers in Europe needed the unqualified slavery of the New World as its pedestal. Capital comes dripping from head to toe, from every pore, with blood and dirt. The close connection between slavery and capitalism, and thus, between racism and capitalism, gives the lie to those who insist that slavery would have just died out. In fact, the South was more dependent on slavery right before the Civil War than it was 50 or 100 years earlier. Slavery lasted as long as it did because it was profitable. And it was profitable to the richest and most "well-bred" people in the world. The Civil War abolished slavery and struck a great blow against racism. But racism itself wasn't abolished. On the contrary, just as racism was created to justify colonial slavery, racism as an ideology was refashioned. It now no longer justified the enslavement of Blacks, but it justified second-class status for Blacks as wage laborers and sharecroppers. Racist ideology was also refashioned to justify imperialist conquest at the turn of the last century. As a handful of competing world powers vied to carve up the globe into colonial preserves for cheap raw materials and labor, racism served as a convenient justification. The vast majority of the world's people were now portrayed as inferior races, incapable of determining their own future. Slavery disappeared, but racism remained as a means to justify the domination of millions of people by the U.S., various European powers, and later by Japan. Because racism is woven right into the fabric of capitalism, new forms of racism arose with changes in capitalism. As the U.S. economy expanded and underpinned U.S. imperial expansion, imperialist racism~-~-which asserted that the U.S. had a right to dominate other peoples, such as Mexicans and Filipinos~-~-developed. As the U.S. economy grew and sucked in millions of immigrant laborers, anti-immigrant racism developed. But these are both different forms of the same ideology~-~-of white supremacy and division of the world into "superior" and "inferior" races~-~-that had their origins in slavery. Racism and capitalism have been intertwined since the beginning of capitalism. You can't have capitalism without racism. Therefore, the final triumph over racism will only come when we abolish racism's chief source~-~-capitalism~-~-and build a new socialist society. 20 - 21 -Our alternative is to vote negative to refuse to participate in activities that support capitalism – key to hollowing out capitalist structures. 22 -Herod 4. Herod, Columbia University Graduate and Political Activist, 2004 (James, Getting Free, http://site.www.umb.edu/faculty/salzman_g/Strate/GetFre/06.htm, JC) 23 - 24 -It is time to try to describe, at first abstractly and later concretely, a strategy for destroying capitalism. This strategy, at its most basic, calls for pulling time, energy, and resources out of capitalist civilization and putting them into building a new civilization. The image then is one of emptying out capitalist structures, hollowing them out, by draining wealth, power, and meaning out of them until there is nothing left but shells. This is definitely an aggressive strategy. It requires great militancy, and constitutes an attack on the existing order. The strategy clearly recognizes that capitalism is the enemy and must be destroyed, but it is not a frontal attack aimed at overthrowing the system, but an inside attack aimed at gutting it, while simultaneously replacing it with something better, something we want. Thus capitalist structures (corporations, governments, banks, schools, etc.) are not seized so much as simply abandoned. Capitalist relations are not fought so much as they are simply rejected. We stop participating in activities that support (finance, condone) the capitalist world and start participating in activities that build a new world while simultaneously undermining the old. We create a new pattern of social relations alongside capitalist relations and then we continually build and strengthen our new pattern while doing every thing we can to weaken capitalist relations. In this way our new democratic, non-hierarchical, non-commodified relations can eventually overwhelm the capitalist relations and force them out of existence. This is how it has to be done. This is a plausible, realistic strategy. To think that we could create a whole new world of decent social arrangements overnight, in the midst of a crisis, during a so-called revolution, or during the collapse of capitalism, is foolhardy. Our new social world must grow within the old, and in opposition to it, until it is strong enough to dismantle and abolish capitalist relations. Such a revolution will never happen automatically, blindly, determinably, because of the inexorable, materialist laws of history. It will happen, and only happen, because we want it to, and because we know what we’re doing and know how we want to live, and know what obstacles have to be overcome before we can live that way, and know how to distinguish between our social patterns and theirs. But we must not think that the capitalist world can simply be ignored, in a live and let live attitude, while we try to build new lives elsewhere. (There is no elsewhere.) There is at least one thing, wage-slavery, that we can’t simply stop participating in (but even here there are ways we can chip away at it). Capitalism must be explicitly refused and replaced by something else. This constitutes War, but it is not a war in the traditional sense of armies and tanks, but a war fought on a daily basis, on the level of everyday life, by millions of people. It is a war nevertheless because the accumulators of capital will use coercion, brutality, and murder, as they have always done in the past, to try to block any rejection of the system. They have always had to force compliance; they will not hesitate to continue doing so. Nevertheless, there are many concrete ways that individuals, groups, and neighborhoods can gut capitalism, which I will enumerate shortly. We must always keep in mind how we became slaves; then we can see more clearly how we can cease being slaves. We were forced into wage-slavery because the ruling class slowly, systematically, and brutally destroyed our ability to live autonomously. By driving us off the land, changing the property laws, destroying community rights, destroying our tools, imposing taxes, destroying our local markets, and so forth, we were forced onto the labor market in order to survive, our only remaining option being to sell, for a wage, our ability to work. It’s quite clear then how we can overthrow slavery. We must reverse this process. We must begin to reacquire the ability to live without working for a wage or buying the products made by wage-slaves (that is, we must get free from the labor market and the way of living based on it), and embed ourselves instead in cooperative labor and cooperatively produced goods. Another clarification is needed. This strategy does not call for reforming capitalism, for changing capitalism into something else. It calls for replacing capitalism, totally, with a new civilization. This is an important distinction, because capitalism has proved impervious to reforms, as a system. We can sometimes in some places win certain concessions from it (usually only temporary ones) and win some (usually short-lived) improvements in our lives as its victims, but we cannot reform it piecemeal, as a system.¶ Thus our strategy of gutting and eventually destroying capitalism requires at a minimum a totalizing image, an awareness that we are attacking an entire way of life and replacing it with another, and not merely reforming one way of life into something else. Many people may not be accustomed to thinking about entire systems and social orders, but everyone knows what a lifestyle is, or a way of life, and that is the way we should approach it. The thing is this: in order for capitalism to be destroyed millions and millions of people must be dissatisfied with their way of life. They must want something else and see certain existing things as obstacles to getting what they want. It is not useful to think of this as a new ideology. It is not merely a belief-system that is needed, like a religion, or like Marxism, or Anarchism. Rather it is a new prevailing vision, a dominant desire, an overriding need. What must exist is a pressing desire to live a certain way, and not to live another way. If this pressing desire were a desire to live free, to be autonomous, to live in democratically controlled communities, to participate in the self-regulating activities of a mature people, then capitalism could be destroyed. Otherwise we are doomed to perpetual slavery and possibly even to extinction. 25 - 26 -The role of the ballot is challenging capitalism in educational spaces – it has seeped into educational sites and has corrupted our epistemology, means K is a prior question. 27 -Giroux ’08. (Henry A, Global Network Television Chair in English and Cultural Studies at McMaster University, and Susan S, Associate Professor of English and Cultural Studies at McMaster University, “Education After Neoliberalism”, December 31 2008, http://www.truth-out.org/archive/component/k2/item/81781:education-after-neoliberalism, 28 - 29 -In spite of the crucial connection between various modes of domination and pedagogy, there is little input from progressive social theorists of what it might mean to theorize how education as a form of cultural politics actually constructs particular modes of address, identification, affective investments and social relations that produce consent and complicity with the ethos and practice of neoliberalism. Hence, while the current economic crisis has called into question the economic viability of neoliberal values and policies, it often does so by implying that neoliberal rationality can be explained through an economic optic alone, and consequently gives the relationship of politics, culture and inequality scant analysis. Neoliberal rationality is lived and legitimated in relation to the intertwining of culture, politics and meaning. Any viable challenge to the culture of neoliberalism as well as the current economic crisis it has generated must address not merely the diffuse operations of power throughout civil society and the globe, but also what it means to engage those diverse educational sites producing and legitimating neoliberal common sense, whether they be newspapers, advertising, the Internet, television or more recent spheres developed as part of the new information revolution. In addition, it is crucial to examine what role public intellectuals, think tanks, the media and universities actually play pedagogically in constructing and legitimating neoliberal world views, and how the latter works pedagogically in producing neoliberal subjects and securing consent. - EntryDate
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... ... @@ -1,11 +1,0 @@ 1 -Endowments are high now but dropping rapidly - protests are alienating alumni donors, who are of older generations 2 -Hartocollis 8/4 (Anemona Hartocollis. Anemona Hartocollis is a metro reporter who began covering courts for The New York Times in October 2005. On the courts beat, she has written front-page stories about the trial of accused Gambino crime family leader John Gotti, which ended in a hung jury, and the trial of 18 "grannies" acquitted of disorderly conduct during a demonstration against the war in Iraq. From 2002 until 2005, Ms. Hartocollis wrote the “Coping” column in the Sunday City section, a weekly column about life in New York City. From 1997 until 2002, she covered education for the Times, writing about policy issues like whether parents in Greenwich Village should be allowed to pay for a public-school teacher out of their own pockets and the pros and cons of testing school children. Before coming to the Times, Ms. Hartocollis had been a reporter and feature writer for The New York Daily News, New York Newsday, The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Detroit News, The Staten Island Advance and Flatbush Life, a weekly paper in Brooklyn. She has freelanced for Martha Stewart Living and LIFE magazines. Ms. Hartocollis was born on November 3, 1955 in Lausanne, Switzerland. She received her bachelor’s degree in comparative literature from Harvard University in 1977. She has won the Newswomen’s Club of New York Front Page Award (twice); the New York State AP Writing Contest, first place for continuing coverage of education (1996), first place features (1992) and third place features (1995); the Society of Silurians investigative reporting award and the Deadline Club of New York award, among others. Ms. Hartocollis is the author of “Seven Days of Possibilities: One Teacher, 24 Kids, and the Music that Changed Their Lives Forever,” (Public Affairs, 2004) a book about a young music teacher in the Bronx, which began as a series of stories in the Times. “College Students Protest, Alumni’s Fondness Fades And Checks Shrink”. 08-04-2016. New York Times. http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/05/us/college-protests-alumni-donations.html?_r=1) //TruLe 3 -Scott MacConnell cherishes the memory of his years at Amherst College, where he discovered his future métier as a theatrical designer. But protests on campus over cultural and racial sensitivities last year soured his feelings. Now Mr. MacConnell, who graduated in 1960, is expressing his discontent through his wallet. In June, he cut the college out of his will. “As an alumnus of the college, I feel that I have been lied to, patronized and basically dismissed as an old, white bigot who is insensitive to the needs and feelings of the current college community,” Mr. MacConnell, 77, wrote in a letter to the college’s alumni fund in December, when he first warned that he was reducing his support to the college to a token $5. A backlash from alumni is an unexpected aftershock of the campus disruptions of the last academic year. Although fund-raisers are still gauging the extent of the effect on philanthropy, some colleges — particularly small, elite liberal arts institutions — have reported a decline in donations, accompanied by a laundry list of complaints. Alumni from a range of generations say they are baffled by today’s college culture. Among their laments: Students are too wrapped up in racial and identity politics. They are allowed to take too many frivolous courses. They have repudiated the heroes and traditions of the past by judging them by today’s standards rather than in the context of their times. Fraternities are being unfairly maligned, and men are being demonized by sexual assault investigations. And university administrations have been too meek in addressing protesters whose messages have seemed to fly in the face of free speech. Scott C. Johnston, who graduated from Yale in 1982, said he was on campus last fall when activists tried to shut down a free speech conference, “because apparently they missed irony class that day.” He recalled the Yale student who was videotaped screaming at a professor, Nicholas Christakis, that he had failed “to create a place of comfort and home” for students in his capacity as the head of a residential college. A rally at New Haven Superior Court demanding justice for Corey Menafee, an African-American dining hall worker at Yale’s Calhoun College who was charged with breaking a window pane that depicted black slaves carrying cotton. CreditPeter Hvizdak/New Haven Register, via Associated Press “I don’t think anything has damaged Yale’s brand quite like that,” said Mr. Johnston, a founder of an internet start-up and a former hedge fund manager. “This is not your daddy’s liberalism.” “The worst part,” he continued, “is that campus administrators are wilting before the activists like flowers.” Yale College’s alumni fund was flat between this year and last, according to Karen Peart, a university spokeswoman. Among about 35 small, selective liberal arts colleges belonging to the fund-raising organization Staff, or Sharing the Annual Fund Fundamentals, that recently reported their initial annual fund results for the 2016 fiscal year, 29 percent were behind 2015 in dollars, and 64 percent were behind in donors, according to a steering committee member, Scott Kleinheksel of Claremont McKenna College in California. His school, which was also the site of protests, had a decline in donor participation but a rise in giving. At Amherst, the amount of money given by alumni dropped 6.5 percent for the fiscal year that ended June 30, and participation in the alumni fund dropped 1.9 percentage points, to 50.6 percent, the lowest participation rate since 1975, when the college began admitting women, according to the college. The amount raised from big donors decreased significantly. Some of the decline was because of a falloff after two large reunion gifts last year, according to Pete Mackey, a spokesman for Amherst. At Princeton, where protesters unsuccessfully demanded the removal of Woodrow Wilson’s name from university buildings and programs, undergraduate alumni donations dropped 6.6 percent from a record high the year before, and participation dropped 1.9 percentage points, according to the university’s website. A Princeton spokesman, John Cramer, said there was no evidence the drop was connected to campus protests. 4 - 5 -Endowments key to education quality and accessibility to marginalized bodies. 6 -ACE 14. The American Council on Education is a U.S. higher education organization established in 1918., 2014, " Understanding College and University Endowments," http://www.acenet.edu/news-room/Documents/Understanding-Endowments-White-Paper.pdf //RS 7 -An endowment is an aggregation of assets invested by a college or university to support its educational mission in perpetuity. An institution’s endowment actually comprises hundreds or thousands of individual endowments. An endowment allows donors to transfer their private dollars to public purposes with the assurance that their gifts will serve these purposes for as long as the institution continues to exist. An endowment represents a compact between a donor and an institution. It links past, current, and future generations. It also allows an institution to make commitments far into the future, knowing that resources to meet those commitments will continue to be available. Endowments serve institutions and the public by: • Providing stability. College and university revenues fluctuate over time with changes in enrollment (tuition), donor interest (gifts), and public (largely state and federal) support. Although endowment earnings also vary with changes in financial markets and investment strategies, most institutions follow prudent guidelines (spending rates) to buffer economic fluctuations that are intended to produce a relatively stable stream of income. Since endowment principal is not spent, the interest generated by endowment earnings supports institutional priorities year after year. This kind of stability is especially important for activities that cannot readily be started and stopped, or for which fluctuating levels of support could be costly or debilitating. Endowments frequently support student aid, faculty positions, innovative academic programs, medical research, and libraries. • Leveraging other sources of revenue. In recent years, as the economy has been severely stressed, institutions have dramatically increased their own student aid expenditures, and endowments have enabled institutions to respond more fully to changing demographics and families’ financial need. It is not surprising that the colleges and universities with the largest endowments are also the ones most likely to offer needblind admission (admitting students without regard to financial circumstances and then providing enough financial aid to enable those admitted to attend). An endowment also allows a college or university to provide a higher level of quality or service at a lower price than would otherwise be possible. This has been especially important in recent years, particularly for publicly supported institutions that have experienced significant cuts in state support. Without endowments or other private gifts, institutions would have had to cut back even further on their programs, levy even greater increases in their prices to students, and/or obtain additional public funding to maintain current programs at current prices. 8 - 9 -And, diversity outweighs and turns the case – calls into question how we view and assess learning. 10 -Chang 2. Chang, Mitchell J. "Perservation or Transformation: Where's the Real Educational Discourse on Diversity?." The Review of Higher Education 25.2 (2002): 125-140. 11 -Historically, postsecondary institutions did not willingly embrace, let¶ alone collectively defend, diversity-related efforts. It took heavy-handed¶ intervention by the federal government to open wider the doors of higher¶ education to students of color. This change and subsequent institutional¶ alterations now considered under the rubric of diversity varied in the ease¶ with which different campuses implemented them; but it is fair to say that¶ much ongoing administrative resistance (Altbach, 1991; Olivas, 1993; Trent,¶ 1991a) and prolonged acrimonious debate (Levine, 1996) characterized the¶ typical campus dealing with diversity issues. Institutional conflicts typically¶ occurred because, as Hurtado (1996) observed, “These diversity issues¶ often required fundamental changes in premises and practices at many levels”¶ (p. 27), which, according to Chan (1989), threatened the very structure¶ of power both within and outside the university.¶ Because the diversity agenda and its related efforts seek to effect change¶ at almost all levels of higher education, it has been described as a “transformative¶ enterprise” (Nakanishi and Leong, 1978; Wei, 1993). In this view, diversity¶ initiatives are not simply innocuous extensions of preexisting¶ institutional interests but are instead efforts that challenge and seek to¶ transform traditional institutional practices and arrangements toward making¶ education more equitable, diverse, and inclusive, as well as more open¶ to alternative perspectives (Hirabayashi, 1997). Perhaps because the transformative¶ aims associated with diversity tend to challenge existing arrangements,¶ colleges and universities have not done all that they must do to¶ maximize the educational benefits associated with diversity (Allen, 1992;¶ Chang, 1999b). Hurtado (1996) held that “both resistance and change are¶ inevitable parts of the major transformation that is under way in the mission¶ of postsecondary institutions—a mission that includes diversity as a¶ key component” (p. 29). Therefore, she maintained, some tension and conflict¶ are likely at the level of deep institutional change in the history of individual¶ campus diversity efforts. In an educational setting, however, tension¶ and conflict are not necessarily problematic for learning (Gurin, 1999), unless¶ they prevent campuses from successfully implementing a multifaceted¶ approach to diversity.¶ Given that the transformative aims often clash with deep-seated institutional¶ assumptions and values, the educational benefits associated with diversity¶ emerge, more often than not, out of institutional transformation¶ and not out of preexisting ways of operating and behaving. In other words,¶ educational benefits for students emanate from changes that challenge prevailing¶ educational sensibilities and that enhance educational participation. Accordingly, retired Harvard professor Charles Willie pointed out in an interview¶ that the educational significance of diversity is best observed when¶ viewed as “the foundation for institutional change and self-correction” (qtd.¶ in Buchbinder, 1998) and not as an uncritical manifestation of preexisting¶ institutional values and ideals. As such, diversity calls into question not only¶ how learning is viewed and what is valued, but also how learning should be¶ assessed. In the next section, I will discuss further how the diversity agenda¶ seeks to transform higher education’s understanding of and impact on learning. - EntryDate
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... ... @@ -1,27 +1,0 @@ 1 -I value morality as per the evaluative term “ought” in the resolution, which is defined as “used to express duty or moral obligation”. By Merriam-Webster. 2 - 3 -The standard is minimizing oppression 4 - 5 -Structural violence is based in moral exclusion, which is fundamentally flawed because exclusion is based on arbitrarily perceived difference. 6 -Winter and Leighton 01. Winter, D. D., and Dana C. Leighton." Structural violence." Peace, conflict and violence: Peace psychology for the 21st century (2001): 99-101. 7 -Finally, to recognize the operation of structural violence forces us to ask questions about how and why we tolerate it, questions which often have painful answers for the privileged elite who unconsciously support it. A final question of this section is how and why we allow ourselves to be so oblivious to structural violence. Susan Opotow offers an intriguing set of answers, in her article Social Injustice. 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. In the long run, reducing structural violence by reclaiming neighborhoods, demanding social jus- tice and living wages, providing prenatal care, alleviating sexism, and celebrating local cultures, will be our most surefooted path to building lasting peace. 8 - 9 -The 1AC doesn’t account for empirical society (i.e. consequences and oppression), and thus fails to guide normative acton. 10 -Farrely 07. Colin Farrelly, 2007, Professor of Political Studies, Queen's University, "Justice in Ideal Theory: A Refutation", Political Studies, 2007. RFK 11 -Political philosophers have recently begun to take seriously methodological questions concerning what a theoretical examination of political ideals (e.g. justice) is supposed to accomplish and how effective theorizing in ideal theory is in securing those aims. Andrew Mason (2004) and G. A. Cohen (2003), for example, believe that the fundamental principles of justice are logically independent of issues of feasibility and questions about human nature. Their position contrasts sharply with political theorists like John Dunn (1990) and Joseph Carens (2000) who believe that normative theorizing must be integrated with an appreciation of the empirical realities of one’s society. Rather than bracket questions of feasibility and human nature, empirically oriented political theorists believe that real, non-ideal considerations (like our historical circumstances, problems of institutional design, etc.) must be taken seriously when deriving normative theories of justice.1 And some justice theorists, most notably John Rawls (1971; 1996), attempt to occupy a middle position that acknowledges some moderate feasibility constraints (e.g. pluralism) but also employs a number of idealizing assumptions (e.g. society is closed, full compliance, etc.) when deriving the principles of justice. The disagreement between those political philosophers who feel inclined to invoke highly abstract hypotheticals when deriving the principles of justice, and those political theorists who take seriously real, non-ideal considerations, is a disagreement over how fact-sensitive a theory of distributive justice ought to be. Mason raises a challenge for the more empirically grounded political theorists when he asks: ‘what reason do we have for thinking that any adequate analysis of an ideal such as justice must be conducted in the light of an investigation of what is feasible?’ (Mason, 2004, p. 255). In this article I hope to provide a compelling response to Mason’s question. I believe there is some conceptual incoherence involved in saying ‘This is what justice involves, but there is no way it could be implemented’ (Mason, 2004, p. 255).This incoherence stems from the fact that a theory of social justice, and the principles of justice it endorses, must function as an adequate guide for our collective action. A theory of social justice that yields impotent or misguided practical prescriptions is a deficient theory of justice. If the collective aspiration to implement the conclusions of a theory would not result in any noticeable increase in the justness of one’s society, then it fails as a normative theory. In this article I argue that theorising about justice at the level of ideal theory is inherently flawed and thus has impoverished liberal egalitarianism. I believe that moderate ideal theorists, such as Rawls and Ronald Dworkin, are actually much closer to the idealizing end of the spectrum and thus their theories are not adequately fact-sensitive to be considered realistically utopian.2 Ideal theorists (falsely) assume that a political philosopher can easily determine (or has privileged access to) what constitutes the ‘best foreseeable conditions’. Furthermore, by assuming full compliance, ideal theorists violate the constraints of a realistic utopia. Determining what is feasible in partially compliant societies that exist in the modern area of rapid globalisation is perhaps one of the major sources of political disagreement in contemporary democratic societies. Rather than side-stepping such disagreement, political philosophers should advance theories of justice that adopt a critically reflective attitude towards their own background empirical assumptions concerning what is realistically possible. The moderate ideal theories of Rawls and Dworkin fail to internalize such a reflective attitude. By illustrating the shortcomings of Rawls and Dworkin I hope to convince political philosophers that they need to take the empirical realities of real societies more seriously. Rather than moving in the direction advocated by Cohen and Mason (i.e. towards a more extreme idealized position) political philosophers should take more seriously non-ideal theory. This will help equip them with a theory of justice that can provide some normative guidance for real, non-ideal societies. More specifically, I argue that liberal egalitarians who function at the level of ideal theory adopt a cost-blind approach to rights and a narrow view of possible human misfortune. The former issue leads liberal egalitarians to give priority to a serially ordered principle of equal basic liberties (Rawls, 1971; 1996) or to treat rights as ‘trumps’ (Dworkin, 1978); and the latter to a stringent prioritarian principle (Rawls’ difference principle) or luck egalitarianism. Taken together, the costblind approach to rights, coupled with the narrow view of human misfortune, mean the liberal egalitarian theories of justice cannot address the issue of tradeoffs that inevitably arises in real non-ideal societies that face the fact of scarcity. This makes liberal egalitarianism an ineffective theory of social justice. Liberal egalitarian theories of justice are theories that typically function at the level of ideal theory. The distinction between ideal and non-ideal theory is not given rigorous classification in the existing literature. As Mason (2004, p. 265) notes, this distinction is employed by Rawls in The Law of Peoples. An account of justice in ideal theory must recognize ‘some moderately strong feasibility constraints which require it to be realistic in the best of foreseeable conditions’ (Mason, 2004, p. 265). Rawls describes ideal theory as being realistically utopian. Political philosophy is realistically utopian ‘when it extends what are ordinarily thought of as limits of practical political possibility’ (Rawls, 1999a, p. 6). This contrasts with non-ideal theory, which is concerned with problems of noncompliance or unfavourable (historical, social or economic) conditions. 12 - 13 -Discussions of free speech and the constitution mandate a consequentialist approach 14 -Goldberg 15 (Erica Goldberg is a Climenko Fellow and Lecturer on Law for the Harvard Law School and Assistant Professor for the Ohio Northern Law School. “FREE SPEECH CONSEQUENTIALISM,” Columbia Law Review Vol. 116:687. August 17, 2015. https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2645869) //WW JA 1/5/16 15 -Even scholars who favor what they deem nonconsequentialist theories of free speech, and who believe, for example, that free speech has inherent value and is a right of autonomous moral agents,16 will in some circumstances balance these values against the harms speech causes. This balancing would occur for so-called nonconsequentialists either in defining what constitutes speech, in determining which categories of speech are protected, or in evaluating whether speech that is protected can nonetheless be prohibited because its harms greatly outweigh its virtues.17 Some scholars would argue that free speech rights are balanced not against harms but against other rights, such as the right to privacy, property, or reputation. However, unless one of the rights at issue is defined absolutely, resolving this conflict would also require consideration of the harms at issue and the value of the speech. Thus, the question becomes not whether free speech consequentialism is appropriate, but how harms caused by speech should be accounted for in First Amendment jurisprudence. The allure of free speech consequentialism is also reflected in the courts. Describing the Supreme Court’s approach to content-based restrictions on speech is superficially simple. Laws that suppress speech on the basis of content are subject to the strictest constitutional scrutiny, which is often outcome determinative.18 Strict scrutiny is a demanding standard.19 But in operation, the doctrine is much more complex—it incorporates considerations of harm in multiple ways. In a variety of cases, different groups of concurring and dissenting Justices have shown willingness to relax the strict scrutiny applied to content-based restrictions in order to account for the harm from depictions of animal cruelty,20 violent video games,21 and lies about military honors.22 The Supreme Court is not even clear on at what point in its First Amendment analysis, or at what level of abstraction, this balancing should be performed, if at all, when free speech doctrine intersects with both criminal and tort law.23 16 - 17 -4. 18 - 19 -5. 20 - 21 -6. Experience is epistemic – it is how we empirically ground our existence. Pain is universally bad and pleasure is universally good. 22 -Nagel 86 (Thomas “The View From Nowhere”, 1986) 23 -I shall defend the unsurprising claim that sensory pleasure is good and pain bad, no matter who’s they are. The point of the exercise is to see how the pressures of objectification operate in a simple case. Physical pleasure and pain do not usually depend on activities or desires which themselves raise questions of justification and value. They are just is a sensory experiences in relation to which we are fairly passive, but toward which we feel involuntary desire or aversion. Almost everyone takes the avoidance of his own pain and the promotion of his own pleasure as subjective reasons for action in a fairly simple way; they are not back up by any further reasons. On the other hand if someone pursues pain or avoids pleasure, either it as a means to some end or it is backed up by dark reasons like guilt or sexual masochism. What sort of general value, if any, ought to be assigned to pleasure and pain when we consider these facts from an objective standpoint? What kind of judgment can we reasonably make about these things when we view them in abstraction from who we are? We can begin by asking why there is no plausibility in the zero position, that pleasure and pain have no value of any kind that can be objectively recognized. That would mean that I have no reason to take aspirin for a severe headache, however I may in fact be motivated; and that looking at it from outside, you couldn't even say that someone had a reason not to put his hand on a hot stove, just because of the pain… Without some positive reason to think there is nothing in itself good or bad about having an experience you intensely like or dislike, we can't seriously regard the common impression to the contrary as a collective illusion. Such things are at least good or bad for us, if anything is. What seems to be going on here is that we cannot from an objective standpoint withhold a certain kind of endorsement of the most direct and immediate subjective value judgments we make concerning the contents of our own consciousness. We regard ourselves as too close to those things to be mistaken in our immediate, nonideological evaluative impressions. No objective view we can attain could possibly overrule our subjective authority in such cases. There can be no reason to reject the appearances here. 24 - 25 -7. Intent and means-based frameworks reflect privilege and decenter oppressed voices 26 -Utt ’13. Jamie Utt is a writer and a diversity and inclusion consultant and sexual violence prevention educator, “Intent vs. Impact: Why Your Intentions Don’t Really Matter,” July 30, 2013 27 -Imagine for a moment that you’re standing with your friends in a park, enjoying a nice summer day. You don’t know me, but I walk right up to you holding a Frisbee. I wind up – and throw the disc right into your face. Understandably, you are indignant. Through a bloody nose, you use a few choice words to ask me what the hell I thought I was doing. And my response? “Oh, I didn’t mean to hit you! That was never my intent! I was simply trying to throw the Frisbee to my friend over there!” Visibly upset, you demand an apology. But I refuse. Or worse, I offer an apology that sounds like “I’m sorry your face got in the way of my Frisbee! I never intended to hit you.” Sound absurd? Sound infuriating enough to give me a well-deserved Frisbee upside the head? Yeah. So why is this same thing happening all of the time when it comes to the intersection of our identities and oppressions or privileges? Intent v. Impact From Paula Deen to Alec Baldwin to your annoying, bigoted uncle or friend, we hear it over and over again: “I never meant any harm…” “It was never my intent…” “I am not a racist…” “I am not a homophobe…” “I’m not a sexist…” I cannot tell you how often I’ve seen people attempt to deflect criticism about their oppressive language or actions by making the conversation about their intent. At what point does the “intent” conversation stop mattering so that we can step back and look at impact? After all, in the end, what does the intent of our action really matter if our actions have the impact of furthering the marginalization or oppression of those around us? In some ways, this is a simple lesson of relationships. If I say something that hurts my partner, it doesn’t much matter whether I intended the statement to mean something else – because my partner is hurting. I need to listen to how my language hurt my partner. I need to apologize. And then I need to reflect and empathize to the best of my ability so I don’t do it again. But when we’re dealing with the ways in which our identities intersect with those around us – and, in turn, the ways our privileges and our experiences of marginalization and oppression intersect – this lesson becomes something much larger and more profound. This becomes a lesson of justice. What we need to realize is that when it comes to people’s lives and identities, the impact of our actions can be profound and wide-reaching. And that’s far more important than the question of our intent. We need to ask ourselves what might be or might have been the impact of our actions or words. And we need to step back and listen when we are being told that the impact of our actions is out of step with our intents or our perceptions of self. Identity Privilege and Intent For people of identity privilege, this is where listening becomes vitally important, for our privilege can often shield us from understanding the impact of our actions. After all, as a person of privilege, I can never fully understand the ways in which oppressive acts or language impact those around me. What I surely can do is listen with every intent to understand, and I can work to change my behavior. Because what we need to understand is that making the conversation about intent is inherently a privileged action. The reason? It ensures that you and your identity (and intent) stay at the center of any conversation and action while the impact of your action or words on those around you is marginalized. So, if someone ever tells you to “check your privilege,” what they may very well mean is: “Stop centering your experience and identity in the conversation by making this about the intent of your actions instead of their impact.” That is: Not everything is about you. “What They Did” vs. “What They Are” The incredible Ill Doctrine puts it well when he explains the difference between the “What They Did” conversation and the “What They Are” conversation, which you can watch here. In essence, the “intent” conversation is one about “what they are.” Because if someone intended their action to be hurtful and racist/sexist/transphobic/pickyourpoison, then they must inherently be racist/sexist/transphobic/pickyourpoison. On the other hand, the “impact” conversation is one about “what they did.” For you, it takes the person who said or did the hurtful thing out of the center and places the person who was hurt in the center. It ensures that the conversation is about how “what they did” hurts other people and further marginalizes or oppresses people. And it’s important for people to understand the difference. Just because you did something sexist doesn’t mean that you are sexist. Just because you said something racist doesn’t mean that you are racist. When your actions are called into question, it’s important to recognize that that’s all that is being called into question – your actions, not your overall character. Listen. Reflect. Apologize. Do Better. It doesn’t matter whether we, deep down, believe ourselves to be __________-ist or whether we intended our actions to be hurtful or _________-ist. It. Doesn’t. Matter. If the impact of our actions is the furthering of oppression, then that’s all that matters. So we need to listen, reflect, apologize, and work to do better in the future. What does that look like? Well, to start, we can actually apologize. I don’t know about you, but I am sick of hearing the ““I am sorry your face got in the way of my Frisbee! I never intended to hit you” apologies. Whether it’s Paula Deen weeping on TV or Alec Baldwin asking us to simply trust that he’s not a “homophobe,” those are not apologies. That’s why I was incredibly inspired and relieved to see a major organization do it well when Kickstarter apologized and took full responsibility for their role in funding a creepy, rapey seduction guide. They apologized earnestly and accepted the role they played in something really terrible. hey pledged to never allow projects like this one to be funded in the future. And then they donated $25,000 to RAINN. At the interpersonal level, we can take a cue from Kickstarter. When we are told that the impact of our action, inaction, or words is hurtful and furthers oppression, we can start by apologizing without any caveats. From there, we can spend the time to reflect in hopes of gaining at least some understanding (however marginal) of the harmful impact. And we can do our best to move forward by acting more accountably. - EntryDate
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... ... @@ -1,15 +1,0 @@ 1 -Endowments are high now but dropping rapidly - protests are alienating alumni donors, who are of older generations 2 -Hartocollis 8/4 (Anemona Hartocollis. Anemona Hartocollis is a metro reporter who began covering courts for The New York Times in October 2005. On the courts beat, she has written front-page stories about the trial of accused Gambino crime family leader John Gotti, which ended in a hung jury, and the trial of 18 "grannies" acquitted of disorderly conduct during a demonstration against the war in Iraq. From 2002 until 2005, Ms. Hartocollis wrote the “Coping” column in the Sunday City section, a weekly column about life in New York City. From 1997 until 2002, she covered education for the Times, writing about policy issues like whether parents in Greenwich Village should be allowed to pay for a public-school teacher out of their own pockets and the pros and cons of testing school children. Before coming to the Times, Ms. Hartocollis had been a reporter and feature writer for The New York Daily News, New York Newsday, The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Detroit News, The Staten Island Advance and Flatbush Life, a weekly paper in Brooklyn. She has freelanced for Martha Stewart Living and LIFE magazines. Ms. Hartocollis was born on November 3, 1955 in Lausanne, Switzerland. She received her bachelor’s degree in comparative literature from Harvard University in 1977. She has won the Newswomen’s Club of New York Front Page Award (twice); the New York State AP Writing Contest, first place for continuing coverage of education (1996), first place features (1992) and third place features (1995); the Society of Silurians investigative reporting award and the Deadline Club of New York award, among others. Ms. Hartocollis is the author of “Seven Days of Possibilities: One Teacher, 24 Kids, and the Music that Changed Their Lives Forever,” (Public Affairs, 2004) a book about a young music teacher in the Bronx, which began as a series of stories in the Times. “College Students Protest, Alumni’s Fondness Fades And Checks Shrink”. 08-04-2016. New York Times. http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/05/us/college-protests-alumni-donations.html?_r=1) //TruLe 3 -Scott MacConnell cherishes the memory of his years at Amherst College, where he discovered his future métier as a theatrical designer. But protests on campus over cultural and racial sensitivities last year soured his feelings. Now Mr. MacConnell, who graduated in 1960, is expressing his discontent through his wallet. In June, he cut the college out of his will. “As an alumnus of the college, I feel that I have been lied to, patronized and basically dismissed as an old, white bigot who is insensitive to the needs and feelings of the current college community,” Mr. MacConnell, 77, wrote in a letter to the college’s alumni fund in December, when he first warned that he was reducing his support to the college to a token $5. A backlash from alumni is an unexpected aftershock of the campus disruptions of the last academic year. Although fund-raisers are still gauging the extent of the effect on philanthropy, some colleges — particularly small, elite liberal arts institutions — have reported a decline in donations, accompanied by a laundry list of complaints. Alumni from a range of generations say they are baffled by today’s college culture. Among their laments: Students are too wrapped up in racial and identity politics. They are allowed to take too many frivolous courses. They have repudiated the heroes and traditions of the past by judging them by today’s standards rather than in the context of their times. Fraternities are being unfairly maligned, and men are being demonized by sexual assault investigations. And university administrations have been too meek in addressing protesters whose messages have seemed to fly in the face of free speech. Scott C. Johnston, who graduated from Yale in 1982, said he was on campus last fall when activists tried to shut down a free speech conference, “because apparently they missed irony class that day.” He recalled the Yale student who was videotaped screaming at a professor, Nicholas Christakis, that he had failed “to create a place of comfort and home” for students in his capacity as the head of a residential college. A rally at New Haven Superior Court demanding justice for Corey Menafee, an African-American dining hall worker at Yale’s Calhoun College who was charged with breaking a window pane that depicted black slaves carrying cotton. CreditPeter Hvizdak/New Haven Register, via Associated Press “I don’t think anything has damaged Yale’s brand quite like that,” said Mr. Johnston, a founder of an internet start-up and a former hedge fund manager. “This is not your daddy’s liberalism.” “The worst part,” he continued, “is that campus administrators are wilting before the activists like flowers.” Yale College’s alumni fund was flat between this year and last, according to Karen Peart, a university spokeswoman. Among about 35 small, selective liberal arts colleges belonging to the fund-raising organization Staff, or Sharing the Annual Fund Fundamentals, that recently reported their initial annual fund results for the 2016 fiscal year, 29 percent were behind 2015 in dollars, and 64 percent were behind in donors, according to a steering committee member, Scott Kleinheksel of Claremont McKenna College in California. His school, which was also the site of protests, had a decline in donor participation but a rise in giving. At Amherst, the amount of money given by alumni dropped 6.5 percent for the fiscal year that ended June 30, and participation in the alumni fund dropped 1.9 percentage points, to 50.6 percent, the lowest participation rate since 1975, when the college began admitting women, according to the college. The amount raised from big donors decreased significantly. Some of the decline was because of a falloff after two large reunion gifts last year, according to Pete Mackey, a spokesman for Amherst. At Princeton, where protesters unsuccessfully demanded the removal of Woodrow Wilson’s name from university buildings and programs, undergraduate alumni donations dropped 6.6 percent from a record high the year before, and participation dropped 1.9 percentage points, according to the university’s website. A Princeton spokesman, John Cramer, said there was no evidence the drop was connected to campus protests. 4 - 5 -The administration is controlled by private donors – the ability to regulate speech is key to maintain funding 6 -Press et al 16. (ALEX PRESS is a PhD student in sociology based in Boston. STUDENTNATION First-person accounts from student activists, organizers and journalists reporting on youth-oriented movements for social justice, economic equality and tolerance.) “Silence on Campus: Contingent Work and Free Speech.” The Nation. February 17, 2016. //AD 7 -Corporatization creates a dilemma for higher education: College, unlike most businesses, serves a social function—the production and transfer of knowledge—the achievement of which requires an environment of intellectual freedom that can conflict with profit margins, as some actors central to the model, such as donors, may take issue with controversial speech. In the past, tenure resolved some of this tension—once professors gain tenure, they’re walled off from these pressures, at least theoretically. With the erosion of tenure and a slack academic job market, free speech disappears as professors become increasingly disposable. As Steven Vallas, a sociologist at Northeastern University who researches the changing nature of work, argues, a professor’s right to speak freely presumes a foundation of job stability. “If you have an expansion of the adjunct, precarious professoriate, than you really are eroding the proportion of people who can speak their mind.” In contrast to claims that censorious students are the central threat to the ability of college to serve as a marketplace of ideas, the silencing of speech that comes with a sense of one’s disposability appears much more powerful. Conceding the difficulty of capturing the preemptive stifling of debate that comes with disposable worker status, we can take the severity of repercussions visited upon those who don’t censor themselves as indicative of the problem. Take the case of Steven Salaita, an indigenous studies scholar whose offer of a position at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign was rescinded after he tweeted critically about Israel’s 2014 attack on Gaza. A violation of academic freedom that resulted in a rare formal censure from the AAUP, for Salaita, administrative censorship is no secret. “For the uninitiated, the levels of vitriol and retribution that attend criticism of Israel can be stunning,” he writes, referencing a report authored by the Center for Constitutional Rights and Palestine Legal that details hundreds of reported acts of suppression of pro-Palestine advocacy in under two years. Salaita sued the University of Illinois for violating his rights. While he settled out of court for $875,000, discovery findings from his lawsuit reveal the likelihood of donor influence on the decision to fire him, with the chancellor communicating with donors about Salaita’s tweets and his possible dismissal. As Salaita’s case demonstrates, the extent of donor pressure goes a long way to explain why administrations might choose to silence speech, explains William Robinson, a professor at the University of California–Santa Barbara. In 2009, Robinson caught the attention of outside organizations that then pressured UCSB administrators to charge him with violating the university’s academic code of conduct, according to Robinson’s account of the incident, as well as details published by his supporters. Explaining the role financial needs play in decisions to censor faculty in public higher education, Robinson argues, “As public funding is cut, the administration becomes more reliant on private donors. These donors then use that leverage, threatening to withdraw donations if an administration doesn’t act.” The problem is worsening as public funds for higher education are drying up across the country, according to a recent report by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. As this money dwindles, administrations turn to wealthy donors, creating the conditions under which prestigious donors can sway administrator’s decisions on how to respond to controversial faculty, if those faculty can get hired in the first place. 8 - 9 -Endowments key to education quality and accessibility to marginalized bodies. 10 -ACE 14. The American Council on Education is a U.S. higher education organization established in 1918., 2014, " Understanding College and University Endowments," http://www.acenet.edu/news-room/Documents/Understanding-Endowments-White-Paper.pdf //RS 11 -An endowment is an aggregation of assets invested by a college or university to support its educational mission in perpetuity. An institution’s endowment actually comprises hundreds or thousands of individual endowments. An endowment allows donors to transfer their private dollars to public purposes with the assurance that their gifts will serve these purposes for as long as the institution continues to exist. An endowment represents a compact between a donor and an institution. It links past, current, and future generations. It also allows an institution to make commitments far into the future, knowing that resources to meet those commitments will continue to be available. Endowments serve institutions and the public by: • Providing stability. College and university revenues fluctuate over time with changes in enrollment (tuition), donor interest (gifts), and public (largely state and federal) support. Although endowment earnings also vary with changes in financial markets and investment strategies, most institutions follow prudent guidelines (spending rates) to buffer economic fluctuations that are intended to produce a relatively stable stream of income. Since endowment principal is not spent, the interest generated by endowment earnings supports institutional priorities year after year. This kind of stability is especially important for activities that cannot readily be started and stopped, or for which fluctuating levels of support could be costly or debilitating. Endowments frequently support student aid, faculty positions, innovative academic programs, medical research, and libraries. • Leveraging other sources of revenue. In recent years, as the economy has been severely stressed, institutions have dramatically increased their own student aid expenditures, and endowments have enabled institutions to respond more fully to changing demographics and families’ financial need. It is not surprising that the colleges and universities with the largest endowments are also the ones most likely to offer needblind admission (admitting students without regard to financial circumstances and then providing enough financial aid to enable those admitted to attend). An endowment also allows a college or university to provide a higher level of quality or service at a lower price than would otherwise be possible. This has been especially important in recent years, particularly for publicly supported institutions that have experienced significant cuts in state support. Without endowments or other private gifts, institutions would have had to cut back even further on their programs, levy even greater increases in their prices to students, and/or obtain additional public funding to maintain current programs at current prices. 12 - 13 -And, diversity outweighs and turns the case – calls into question how we view and assess learning. 14 -Chang 2. Chang, Mitchell J. "Perservation or Transformation: Where's the Real Educational Discourse on Diversity?." The Review of Higher Education 25.2 (2002): 125-140. 15 -Historically, postsecondary institutions did not willingly embrace, let¶ alone collectively defend, diversity-related efforts. It took heavy-handed¶ intervention by the federal government to open wider the doors of higher¶ education to students of color. This change and subsequent institutional¶ alterations now considered under the rubric of diversity varied in the ease¶ with which different campuses implemented them; but it is fair to say that¶ much ongoing administrative resistance (Altbach, 1991; Olivas, 1993; Trent,¶ 1991a) and prolonged acrimonious debate (Levine, 1996) characterized the¶ typical campus dealing with diversity issues. Institutional conflicts typically¶ occurred because, as Hurtado (1996) observed, “These diversity issues¶ often required fundamental changes in premises and practices at many levels”¶ (p. 27), which, according to Chan (1989), threatened the very structure¶ of power both within and outside the university.¶ Because the diversity agenda and its related efforts seek to effect change¶ at almost all levels of higher education, it has been described as a “transformative¶ enterprise” (Nakanishi and Leong, 1978; Wei, 1993). In this view, diversity¶ initiatives are not simply innocuous extensions of preexisting¶ institutional interests but are instead efforts that challenge and seek to¶ transform traditional institutional practices and arrangements toward making¶ education more equitable, diverse, and inclusive, as well as more open¶ to alternative perspectives (Hirabayashi, 1997). Perhaps because the transformative¶ aims associated with diversity tend to challenge existing arrangements,¶ colleges and universities have not done all that they must do to¶ maximize the educational benefits associated with diversity (Allen, 1992;¶ Chang, 1999b). Hurtado (1996) held that “both resistance and change are¶ inevitable parts of the major transformation that is under way in the mission¶ of postsecondary institutions—a mission that includes diversity as a¶ key component” (p. 29). Therefore, she maintained, some tension and conflict¶ are likely at the level of deep institutional change in the history of individual¶ campus diversity efforts. In an educational setting, however, tension¶ and conflict are not necessarily problematic for learning (Gurin, 1999), unless¶ they prevent campuses from successfully implementing a multifaceted¶ approach to diversity.¶ Given that the transformative aims often clash with deep-seated institutional¶ assumptions and values, the educational benefits associated with diversity¶ emerge, more often than not, out of institutional transformation¶ and not out of preexisting ways of operating and behaving. In other words,¶ educational benefits for students emanate from changes that challenge prevailing¶ educational sensibilities and that enhance educational participation. Accordingly, retired Harvard professor Charles Willie pointed out in an interview¶ that the educational significance of diversity is best observed when¶ viewed as “the foundation for institutional change and self-correction” (qtd.¶ in Buchbinder, 1998) and not as an uncritical manifestation of preexisting¶ institutional values and ideals. As such, diversity calls into question not only¶ how learning is viewed and what is valued, but also how learning should be¶ assessed. In the next section, I will discuss further how the diversity agenda¶ seeks to transform higher education’s understanding of and impact on learning. - EntryDate
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... ... @@ -1,23 +1,0 @@ 1 -Interpretation: The affirmative cannot defend anything beyond the United States guaranteeing the right to housing. 2 - 3 -Violation: They defend prohibiting forced evictions ~-~- that’s extra-T and dramatically explodes affirmative ground. 4 -PDHRE (The People's Movement for Human Rights Education, “Human Rights and Freedom from Forced Eviction”, http://www.pdhre.org/rights/eviction.html) 5 -The practice of forced eviction ~-~- the involuntary removal of persons, families and groups from their homes and communities ~-~- exacerbates global problems of inadequate housing and homelessness. Forced evictions are human rights violations! Reinforcing the right to housing and freedom from forced evictions are universal human rights standards defined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, CEDAW, the International Covenants and other widely adhered to international human rights treaties and Declarations ~-~- powerful tools that must be put to use in realizing the human right to freedom from forced evictions! The human right of all persons to freedom from forced evictions includes: The human right to adequate housing. The human right to an adequate standard of living. The human right to security, including enforceable legal security of tenure. The human right to protection from forced evictions and the destruction and/or demolition of one¹s home including in situations of military occupation, international and civil armed conflict, establishment and construction of alien settlements, population transfer, development projects and international events. The human right to freedom of expression. The human right to freedom of association. The human right to education and access to information. The human right to participate in public decision-making. The human right to freedom from discrimination based on sex, race, or any other status. The human right to equal protection of the law and to judicial remedy in case of violation of the right to protection from forced eviction. The human right to choose one's residence, to determine where and how to live, and to freedom of movement. The human right to livelihood and land. The human right to freedom from arbitrary interference with one's privacy. The human right to access to safe drinking water and sanitation. The human right to the highest attainable standard of physical and mental health. The human right to a safe and healthy environment. The human right to access to resources, including energy for cooking, heating, and lighting. The human right of access to basic services, schools, transportation and employment options. The human right of the child to an environment appropriate for physical and mental development. 6 - 7 -Extra-topicality allows the affirmative to add an infinite number of unpredictable advantages and solvency mechanisms to garner offense from areas outside of the resolution, this explodes limits and creates impossible research burdens which turns participation. If clash never occurs, we’ll never get depth of knowledge. 8 -Harris 13. Scott Harris ’13; Director of Debate at U Kansas, 2006 National Debate Coach of the Year, Vice President of the American Forensic Association, 2nd speaker at the NDT in 1981; “This ballot.” 5 April 2013 9 -I understand that there has been some criticism of Northwestern’s strategy in this debate round. This criticism is premised on the idea that they ran framework instead of engaging Emporia’s argument about home and the Wiz. I think this criticism is unfair. Northwestern’s framework argument did engage Emporia’s argument. Emporia said that you should vote for the team that performatively and methodologically made debate a home. Northwestern’s argument directly clashed with that contention. My problem in this debate was with aspects of the execution of the argument rather than with the strategy itself. It has always made me angry in debates when people have treated topicality as if it were a less important argument than other arguments in debate. Topicality is a real argument. It is a researched strategy. It is an argument that challenges many affirmatives. The fact that other arguments could be run in a debate or are run in a debate does not make topicality somehow a less important argument. In reality, for many of you that go on to In law school you will spend much of your life running topicality arguments because you will find that words in the law matter. The rest of us will experience the ways that word choices matter in contracts, in leases, in writing laws and in many aspects of our lives. Kansas ran an affirmative a few years ago about how the location of a comma in a law led a couple of districts to misinterpret the law into allowing individuals to be incarcerated in jail for two days without having any formal charges filed against them. For those individuals the location of the comma in the law had major consequences. Debates about words are not insignificant. Debates about what kinds of arguments we should or should not be making in debates are not insignificant either. The limits debate is an argument that has real pragmatic consequences. I found myself earlier this year judging Harvard’s eco-pedagogy aff and thought to myself—I could stay up tonight and put a strategy together on eco-pedagogy, but then I thought to myself—why should I have to? Yes, I could put together a strategy against any random argument somebody makes employing an energy metaphor but the reality is there are only so many nights to stay up all night researching. I would like to actually spend time playing catch with my children occasionally or maybe even read a book or go to a movie or spend some time with my wife. A world where there are an infinite number of affirmatives is a world where the demand to have a specific strategy and not run framework is a world that says this community doesn’t care whether its participants have a life or do well in school or spend time with their families. I know there is a new call abounding for interpreting this NDT as a mandate for broader more diverse topics. The reality is that will create more work to prepare for the teams that choose to debate the topic but will have little to no effect on the teams that refuse to debate the topic. Broader topics that do not require positive government action or are bidirectional will not make teams that won’t debate the topic choose to debate the topic. I think that is a con job. I am not opposed to broader topics necessarily. I tend to like the way high school topics are written more than the way college topics are written. I just think people who take the meaning of the outcome of this NDT as proof that we need to make it so people get to talk about anything they want to talk about without having to debate against topicality or framework arguments are interested in constructing a world that might make debate an unending nightmare and not a very good home in which to live. Limits, to me, are a real impact because I feel their impact in my everyday existence. 10 - 11 -Voter 12 - 13 -Competing Interps 14 -1 15 -2 16 -3 17 -Drop the debater 18 -1 19 -2 20 -3 21 -No RVIS 22 -1 23 -2 - EntryDate
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... ... @@ -1,23 +1,0 @@ 1 -The 1AC is the final chapter to a story that begins with 2008. The market crash was just the beginning – a successful attempt at downgrading home value so that Wall Street could justify gobbling up property at above-market prices to crowd out the rest of America for years to come. This strategy of “hold until sold” has increasingly pushed low-income communities into homelessness in an attempt to force the government’s hand into establishing a right to housing so that Wall Street can finally sell off the billions it’s accrued in property to the very people they bankrupted in the first place. 2 -Jones 13 (Imara Jones, MAY 30, 2013, “It's Not a Housing Boom. It's a Land Grab”, https://www.colorlines.com/articles/its-not-housing-boom-its-land-grab) 3 -As Americans took to their backyards and beaches to celebrate the unofficial start of summer this week, America's housing industry~-~-for the first time in years~-~-is celebrating right along with them. In the past two months, home sales reached a level not seen since before the financial crisis in 2008, and the price of new homes~-~-taken as a sign of the real estate market's resurgence~-~-reached their highest level in 20 years. Many in the political and financial class are holding up this relatively positive new housing data as proof that the country has reached an economic oasis. And at first blush, the situation can be construed to be positive. The value of the U.S. housing market has climbed back to $16 trillion, exactly where it was before the economic crisis. Home prices and permits for new construction are up by double digits nationwide. But rather than an oasis, these new gains might be an economic mirage. The reality of the current real estate renaissance is that the rich and those on Wall Street are raking in the cash while large segments of the population~-~-especially historically marginalized communities~-~-remain stuck in a downward, alternate housing reality. Generally, housing recoveries are fueled by millions of Americans with new jobs, higher wages, available credit from banks and overall confidence that things will get better. But the real economy that most people live in day-to-day is too weak for all of that. Jobs are in short supply, wages are at historic lows and credit for middle and working class Americans is tight. With their economic ladder into homeownership taken away, many Americans can no longer participate in the housing market. In their absence, financial firms and rich global jetsetters are snapping up hundreds of millions of dollars of property each week. Just in the last 12 months, Wall Street's Blackstone Group has raised $8 billlion to buy up homes on Main Street. Following suit, according to The New Republic, JP Morgan Chase~-~-the nation's largest bank~-~-has organized a fund to purchase 5,000 single-family homes in states with some of the most depressed real estate prices. As I wrote last year, a former Morgan Stanley housing strategist left that bank, organized a billion dollars, and is purchasing up to 10,000 homes with these new resources. Paying above market price and with cash, these firms are setting the pace for the housing market and crowding out non-wealthy Americans who would normally buy. As the Washington Post reports, seven out of 10 home sales in states like Florida are made by these institutional investors. In down-and-out markets like Atlanta, four out of 10 home purchases are made by investors. In markets like New York City, Washington, D.C., and San Francisco the construction of mega-projects for the mega-rich is skewing prices even higher and pushing more Americans to the housing margins. Some apartments in New York's still-under-construction 432 Park Ave.~-~-which is set to the be the Western Hemisphere's tallest residential building~-~-sell for almost $100 million. The CEO of one of the city's largest real estate firms told The New York Times that "there is not enough supply" of $50 million apartments. In some of the most expensive buildings, 351-square-foot studios go for $1.6 million. But as investors make money hand over fist, many others are frozen out. First time homeownership in the U.S. has fallen by 25 percent. Driven by the foreclosure crisis, homeownership for blacks and Latinos has cratered, leading to the lowest level of wealth on record for these two communities. Housing is the single largest asset for African Americans and Latinos. As The Christian Science Monitor notes, the homeownership gap between whites and blacks is the largest in over fifty years. And as a recent Alliance for a Just Society report detailed, there are now more than 13 million homes underwater and headed toward foreclosure; they are clumped disproportionately in zip codes with majority people of color. The irony of this foreclosure crisis, which was caused by Wall Street's irresponsible behavior, is that it created the massive supply in homes that those very same financial institutions are now profiting from at a record pace. Having profited first from millions of risky mortgages and eventually taken away the homes that underwrote them, institutional investors are now purchasing those same foreclosed houses at rock bottom prices. That's why there's such a gold rush in housing right now. Wall Street is flipping homes into rental properties and then leasing them to the very people they pushed and priced out of the real estate market. Billionaire investor Warren Buffet sums it up this way, "If I had a way of buying a couple-hundred thousand single-family homes, I would load up on them. I could buy them at distressed prices and find renters." Rather than a renaissance, the current state of America's real estate market is a catalog of wrongs. Instead of boasting about it, America's political class needs to find a fairer, new way forward. 4 - 5 -The plan is a neoliberal smokescreen coopted by wealthy elites to privatize housing reforms and accelerate consumerism 6 -Khare 13. (Amy T. Khare, Research Associate in the Metropolitan Housing and Communities Policy Center at the Urban Institute, “Market-Driven Public Housing Reforms: Inadequacy for Poverty Alleviation”, Cityscape, Vol. 15, No. 2, Mixed Messages on Mixed Incomes (2013), pp. 193-203, http://www.jstor.org/stable/41959119) //AD 7 -The underlying rationale of the HCVP, particularly as it relates to public housing reforms, prioritizes the private-market provision of affordable rental housing. The historical and political context is relevant in order to assess the findings and implications of these three studies, as well as the others in this symposium on mixed-income housing strategies. Since the late 1960s, the federal government's role for the provision of affordable rental housing has steadily embraced strategies that subsidize private owners of rental properties. As opposed to publically owned properties, most new affordable housing units have been built through federal initiatives - such as the Low Income Housing Tax Credit (1986) and HOME funds from the National Affordable Housing Act (1990) - that use public funding to leverage private financing (Erikson, 2009; Fraser, Oakley, and Bazuin, 2012; McCarty, 2012; Schwartz, 2010). Subsidizing private develop- ment has been argued by political opponents of large government bureaucracy as a more efficient and timely method for producing affordable rental housing. Advocates of privatization claim the U.S. government has historically failed to adequately deliver necessary quality services, in part be- cause of the inefficient state bureaucracies that are poorly managed and not properly incentivized. The reduction of government services encourages private-sector entities to enter new markets that were previously untapped. Private-sector actors, seeking to maximize their economic interests, will deliver better quality services, at lower costs. Individual citizens benefit by having an expanded market with more attractive alternatives than were previously available when the public service was the only option (Ellickson, 2010; Glaeser and Gyourko, 2008; Husock, 2003; Marcuse and Keating, 2006). The underlying rationale for reforms suggests that market investment into the built environment of places long associated with concentrated poverty is necessary because the public-sector interven- tions have failed. If urban neighborhoods are to be radically reshaped, then a significant portion of the subsidized public housing rental units (and the renters living in them) will need to be replaced with housing and other related amenities that increase the potential for economic development. These housing policy reforms reflect a broader movement of the U.S. welfare state that increasingly shifts responsibility from the public sector to the private sector for the provision of necessary goods and services, such as affordable rental housing. The trend in U.S. policymaking, which is increasing, has been to retrench government programs that meet basic needs for vulnerable citizens (such as for food, shelter, safety, and health) and to implement a private-sector model in which nongovern- mental institutions are engaged by public policies to respond to individual needs. This shift places the role of the state in a removed or hidden position, as the government contracts out the direct operations of rental housing to private actors (Dreier, 2006; Hacker, 2002; Marcuse and Keating, 2006). These alterations in housing policy became widely embraced in the 1970s with federal housing assistance models that used rental subsidies to essentially reserve existing units in the private housing market. Rather than making an investment in rehabbing the old public housing units or constructing new units, the federal government policies since the mid-1980s responded to criticisms and shortcomings of the public housing program by inducing the private market to deliver affordable rental units. A movement in the mid-1990s to reform public housing and deconcentrate poverty resulted in two major approaches that continue to dominate the policy agenda. The first focuses on dispersing public housing tenants and relocating them primarily through the use of the HCVP. Instead of living in public housing projects they would move to privately owned apartments where their rent would be subsidized by vouchers (Goetz, 2003; Varady et al., 2005). The second framework of mixed- income development focuses on redeveloping public housing sites through demolition, renovation, and the construction of new housing, primarily as embodied in the Housing Opportunities for People Everywhere (HOPE VI) Program. The new-developments would, it was argued, attract residents with higher incomes to urban low-income neighborhoods while maintaining a portion of the units for lower income residents (Fraser, Oakley, and Bazuin, 2012; Joseph, Chaskin, and Webber, 2007; Popkin et al., 2004; Smith, 2006). The policy framework of mixed-income development depends on the first strategy of dispersal because the mixed-income model necessitates the removal of tenants who live in redeveloping public housing sites, only a portion of whom are eligible and able to return the site. In contrast to the mixed-income development strategy, the dispersal strategy through housing vouchers does not aim to integrate public housing residents in close proximity to housing units that are not considered to be public or subsidized housing. Rather, voucher holders have the freedom to choose their housing and neighborhoods, although in a context of real constraints given the lack of affordable rental housing options truly available to residents who obtain vouchers. A growing body of literature critiques housing reforms centered on mixed-income development and dispersal strategies. At the core of these analyses is the value to be extracted from otherwise underdeveloped areas of a city. Critics see government policies that encourage mixed-income housing and mobility initiatives as examples of neoliberal urban redevelopment - a process aimed at generating profits for economic and political elites who reclaim centrally located neighborhoods from the poor (Arena, 2012; Chaskin and Joseph, 2013; DeFilippis and Fraser, 2010; Fraser, DeFilippis, and Bazuin, 2012; Hackworth, 2009, 2007; Hyra, 2012; Imbroscio, 2011, 2008; Lees, 2008; Lipman, 2008; Smith and Stovall, 2008; Steinberg, 2010). What these policies do not do accomplish, critics say, is addressing systemic economic inequality, expanding opportunities for low-income families, or making efforts toward equitable urban redevelopment. HOPE VI and the HCVP are illustrative of neoliberal policies that use government incentives to induce property owners to lease apartments to low-income households through the use of portable vouchers. Because these strategies are not structured to expand the availability of rental housing in tight markets, the strategies aim to address the problem of housing affordability, while leaving vague the problem of housing availability. This dilemma is the case because the policies are structured around the consumption rather than the production of new affordable rental units (Hays, 2012; Pierson, 1994; Schwartz, 2010). Since passage of the Quality Housing and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1998, public housing reforms have resulted in the reduction of approximately 200,000 units of public housing (McCarty, 2012). Furthermore, the 2008 recession affected the rental housing market in tremendous ways, primarily by increasing the numbers of households in need of rental housing. In fact, the number of households seeking rental housing rose by 1 million in 2011, representing the single largest increase in a 1-year period since the early 1980s (JŒS, 2012). As the rental housing market booms, the vacancy rates decrease and create a tighter rental market in which rents can be increased. According to the report from the National Low Income Housing Coalition, Out of Reach 2013, "for every 100 extremely low-income renter households, there are just 30 affordable and available units" (NLIHC, 2013: 1). During this same period, the federal government has continued to reduce the amount of funds for the HOME Investment Partner- ships program, the Community Development Block Grant program, the Public Housing Operating and Capital Funds, and other programs that support federal rental assistance. It is within this historical and political context that research on public housing reforms that work to rely on market mechanisms need to be interrogated, a topic to which I now turn. 8 - 9 -K outweighs the case – neolib causes extinction and massive social inequalities – the aff’s quick fix solution is exactly what allows the system to deflect criticism. 10 -Farbod 15 (Faramarz Farbod , PhD Candidate @ Rutgers, Prof @ Moravian College, Monthly Review, http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/2015/farbod020615.html, 6-2) 11 -Global capitalism is the 800-pound gorilla. The twin ecological and economic crises, militarism, the rise of the surveillance state, and a dysfunctional political system can all be traced to its normal operations. We need a transformative politics from below that can challenge the fundamentals of capitalism instead of today's politics that is content to treat its symptoms. The problems we face are linked to each other and to the way a capitalist society operates. We must make an effort to understand its real character. The fundamental question of our time is whether we can go beyond a system that is ravaging the Earth and secure a future with dignity for life and respect for the planet. What has capitalism done to us lately? The best science tells us that this is a do-or-die moment. We are now in the midst of the 6th mass extinction in the planetary history with 150 to 200 species going extinct every day, a pace 1,000 times greater than the 'natural' extinction rate.1 The Earth has been warming rapidly since the 1970s with the 10 warmest years on record all occurring since 1998.2 The planet has already warmed by 0.85 degree Celsius since the industrial revolution 150 years ago. An increase of 2° Celsius is the limit of what the planet can take before major catastrophic consequences. Limiting global warming to 2°C requires reducing global emissions by 6 per year. However, global carbon emissions from fossil fuels increased by about 1.5 times between 1990 and 2008.3 Capitalism has also led to explosive social inequalities. The global economic landscape is littered with rising concentration of wealth, debt, distress, and immiseration caused by the austerity-pushing elites. Take the US. The richest 20 persons have as much wealth as the bottom 150 million.4 Since 1973, the hourly wages of workers have lagged behind worker productivity rates by more than 800.5 It now takes the average family 47 years to make what a hedge fund manager makes in one hour.6 Just about a quarter of children under the age of 5 live in poverty.7 A majority of public school students are low-income.8 85 of workers feel stress on the job.9 Soon the only thing left of the American Dream will be a culture of hustling to survive. Take the global society. The world's billionaires control $7 trillion, a sum 77 times the debt owed by Greece to the European banks.10 The richest 80 possess more than the combined wealth of the bottom 50 of the global population (3.5 billion people).11 By 2016 the richest 1 will own a greater share of the global wealth than the rest of us combined.12 The top 200 global corporations wield twice the economic power of the bottom 80 of the global population.13 Instead of a global society capitalism is creating a global apartheid. What's the nature of the beast? Firstly, the "egotistical calculation" of commerce wins the day every time. Capital seeks maximum profitability as a matter of first priority. Evermore "accumulation of capital" is the system's bill of health; it is slowdowns or reversals that usher in crises and set off panic. Cancer-like hunger for endless growth is in the system's DNA and is what has set it on a tragic collision course with Nature, a finite category. Secondly, capitalism treats human labor as a cost. It therefore opposes labor capturing a fair share of the total economic value that it creates. Since labor stands for the majority and capital for a tiny minority, it follows that classism and class warfare are built into its DNA, which explains why the "middle class" is shrinking and its gains are never secure. Thirdly, private interests determine massive investments and make key decisions at the point of production guided by maximization of profits. That's why in the US the truck freight replaced the railroad freight, chemicals were used extensively in agriculture, public transport was gutted in favor of private cars, and big cars replaced small ones. What should political action aim for today? The political class has no good ideas about how to address the crises. One may even wonder whether it has a serious understanding of the system, or at least of ways to ameliorate its consequences. The range of solutions offered tends to be of a technical, legislative, or regulatory nature, promising at best temporary management of the deepening crises. The trajectory of the system, at any rate, precludes a return to its post-WWII regulatory phase. It's left to us as a society to think about what the real character of the system is, where we are going, and how we are going to deal with the trajectory of the system ~-~- and act accordingly. The critical task ahead is to build a transformative politics capable of steering the system away from its destructive path. Given the system's DNA, such a politics from below must include efforts to challenge the system's fundamentals, namely, its private mode of decision-making about investments and about what and how to produce. Furthermore, it behooves us to heed the late environmentalist Barry Commoner's insistence on the efficacy of a strategy of prevention over a failed one of control or capture of pollutants. At a lecture in 1991, Commoner remarked: "Environmental pollution is an incurable disease; it can only be prevented"; and he proceeded to refer to "a law," namely: "if you don't put a pollutant in the environment it won't be there." What is nearly certain now is that without democratic control of wealth and social governance of the means of production, we will all be condemned to the labor of Sisyphus. Only we won't have to suffer for all eternity, as the degradation of life-enhancing natural and social systems will soon reach a point of no return. 12 - 13 -Capitalism perpetuates all other forms of oppression – we control the direction of their impacts. 14 -Bennett 12. Sara Bennett. Socialist Review is a monthly magazine covering current events, theory and history, books and arts reviews from a revolutionary socialist perspective. It is the sister publication of Socialist Worker. , May 2012, "Marxism and oppression," Socialist Review, http://socialistreview.org.uk/369/marxism-and-oppression //RS 15 -Marx recognised that oppression, far from being a natural and thus a permanent feature of human society, is a historical invention. True, the oppression of certain groups of people in society existed before capitalism. For example, Marx's collaborator Engels traced the origins of women's oppression to the formation of the family with the rise of class society. Despite the many changes to the family over the centuries, it persists to this day because it plays a crucial role in the continuation of the system, by bearing the brunt of the cost for caring for present and past generations of workers and the rearing of the next - all at our own expense. So, despite the fact that the majority of women in this country who can work do work, their role in the family means they still accept lower wages and fewer career opportunities. Other forms of oppression have arisen with the emergence of capitalism. So racism was created to justify the slave trade and imperialism and is perpetuated by the need to keep workers divided. Towards the end of the 19th century a new sexual identity, the "homosexual", was invented and portrayed as a threat to society and the maintenance of the family. What is common to all forms of oppression, however, is that they have a material basis and arise from the structures and dynamics of class society. Oppression serves to reinforce the interests of capitalism. But while Marx understood that some forms of oppression existed before capitalism, he also grasped the way the nature of oppression under capitalism was different to what had gone before. Under feudalism or slavery the mass of the population were either slaves, the property of masters, or serfs tied to particular pieces of land and bound to a lord. Such societies were rigidly hierarchical and were based on the idea that everyone had their "rightful place". Notions of freedom for those other than the rulers in society were rare and subordination in society was widely accepted. When new societies emerge so too do new ideas. The bourgeois revolutions that overthrew feudalism and paved the way for capitalism did so under the banner of "liberty, equality and fraternity", as the French Revolution put it. This was a huge step forward for humanity compared to previous societies. Under capitalism production takes the form of creating commodities to be sold in the market. Everything becomes a commodity, including our ability to labour. Workers are no longer tied to individual lords and masters. The new ideas of individual freedom and equality under capitalism reflect this new way of organising production. But in reality freedom for the vast majority of the human race is simply this ability to sell their labour power to one or another capitalist (provided, of course, that there is sufficient demand). Capitalism holds out the promise of liberation, but then denies it to the majority of society. Capitalist production increasingly comes to depend on the mass cooperation of workers, but as capitalism brings workers together so too it divides them from each other. Workers are forced to continually compete against each other - for jobs, overtime, housing, even access to decent healthcare provision. Oppression helps to create and reinforce divisions between workers. For example, the mass media and mainstream government encourage us to see immigrant workers as inferior to native-born workers. While it may be acceptable for immigrants to participate in our workforce when there are plenty of jobs, as soon as jobs become more scarce, immigrants are portrayed as less deserving of work, and therefore a threat. Alienation These divisions are underpinned by the alienation of workers under capitalism from control over their labour. This results in a sense of powerlessness, especially when workers do not fight back collectively. In this situation, some workers may gain a feeling of empowerment by looking down on others and feeling superior. So a white person may look down on a black person or a man on a woman. And it is not just non-oppressed groups who feel superior to oppressed groups - it cuts across oppressed groups too. For example, a "second-generation immigrant" can feel superior to a recently arrived immigrant, or a gay man can feel superior to a disabled person. As a result, some people argue that sections of workers have an interest in sustaining oppression, rather than seeing that all oppression works to allow the continuation of capitalism by providing it with material benefits. So we hear arguments that men benefit from women's oppression, or that all whites benefit from the oppression of black people. While it's true that non-oppressed groups do not suffer in the way that oppressed people may, it is wrong to think they therefore have some interest in the continuation of oppression. For example, the fact that women in full-time work still earn around 15 percent less than their male counterparts does not allow men's wages to increase further - it simply means it's easier for the bosses to keep all wages down. The best solution to this would be for male and female workers to fight together for decent wages for all. This may be easier said than done for a woman at work being sexually harassed by a male colleague, however. After all, she experiences her oppression through his sexist commetns and gestures. But while he may be the immediate culprit, the causes of oppression run much deeper - they are rooted in capitalism. Socialists have to fight all forms of oppression through the struggle for class unity. Alienation and distorted notions of freedom and equality also mean that people are not necessarily conscious of their oppression and can lead them to actively embrace some of the worst aspects of it. With the emphasis under capitalism on the individual rather than the social whole, we are made to feel that the worst symptoms of our oppression must be through some fault of our own. Here capitalism steps in to sell us the very "solutions" we need. So we have a whole industry of self-help books in the UK which is estimated to have earned publishers some £60?million in the past five years. In a similar vein, the answer to women not feeling "sexy enough" is to attend pole dancing "fitness classes", or undergo cosmetic surgery. There are even skin-lightening techniques for black people. A divisive system Capitalism works quite hard to ensure we keep believing our main enemy is some other group of ordinary people in society rather than the nature of our distorted relationships under capitalist society. The mass media have to continuously pump out horrific anti-immigrant, anti-traveller, anti single mum propaganda. Capitalism maintains its hold by dividing those workers who collectively could overturn it, and ideology plays a significant role. And this means it has to work to undermine the reality of our lives that actually brings us into constant contact and cooperation with all types of people, whether Muslim, gay, disabled and so on. While many non-Marxists fight with us against oppression, there is often disagreement about our emphasis on the working class as the key agent of change. After all, oppression affects all classes, not just the working class. This means some people believe that the oppressed group itself is the key to overcoming its own oppression. At a recent demonstration at Cambridge University over the visit of former IMF chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn, one of the chants was "The women united will never be defeated." It's not hard to see why this might seem like common sense to some; after all, every woman can be a victim of sexual assault. But which women are we uniting with? Christine Lagarde, Strauss-Kahn's replacement, is central to the imposition of draconian austerity measures across Europe, driving the living standards of millions of women and men down - something that in turn will increase the pressures on people's lives and place more women at the risk of violence. 16 - 17 -Our alternative is to vote negative to refuse to participate in activities that support capitalism – key to hollowing out capitalist structures. 18 -Herod 4. Herod, Columbia University Graduate and Political Activist, 2004 (James, Getting Free, http://site.www.umb.edu/faculty/salzman_g/Strate/GetFre/06.htm, JC) 19 -It is time to try to describe, at first abstractly and later concretely, a strategy for destroying capitalism. This strategy, at its most basic, calls for pulling time, energy, and resources out of capitalist civilization and putting them into building a new civilization. The image then is one of emptying out capitalist structures, hollowing them out, by draining wealth, power, and meaning out of them until there is nothing left but shells. This is definitely an aggressive strategy. It requires great militancy, and constitutes an attack on the existing order. The strategy clearly recognizes that capitalism is the enemy and must be destroyed, but it is not a frontal attack aimed at overthrowing the system, but an inside attack aimed at gutting it, while simultaneously replacing it with something better, something we want. Thus capitalist structures (corporations, governments, banks, schools, etc.) are not seized so much as simply abandoned. Capitalist relations are not fought so much as they are simply rejected. We stop participating in activities that support (finance, condone) the capitalist world and start participating in activities that build a new world while simultaneously undermining the old. We create a new pattern of social relations alongside capitalist relations and then we continually build and strengthen our new pattern while doing every thing we can to weaken capitalist relations. In this way our new democratic, non-hierarchical, non-commodified relations can eventually overwhelm the capitalist relations and force them out of existence. This is how it has to be done. This is a plausible, realistic strategy. To think that we could create a whole new world of decent social arrangements overnight, in the midst of a crisis, during a so-called revolution, or during the collapse of capitalism, is foolhardy. Our new social world must grow within the old, and in opposition to it, until it is strong enough to dismantle and abolish capitalist relations. Such a revolution will never happen automatically, blindly, determinably, because of the inexorable, materialist laws of history. It will happen, and only happen, because we want it to, and because we know what we’re doing and know how we want to live, and know what obstacles have to be overcome before we can live that way, and know how to distinguish between our social patterns and theirs. But we must not think that the capitalist world can simply be ignored, in a live and let live attitude, while we try to build new lives elsewhere. (There is no elsewhere.) There is at least one thing, wage-slavery, that we can’t simply stop participating in (but even here there are ways we can chip away at it). Capitalism must be explicitly refused and replaced by something else. This constitutes War, but it is not a war in the traditional sense of armies and tanks, but a war fought on a daily basis, on the level of everyday life, by millions of people. It is a war nevertheless because the accumulators of capital will use coercion, brutality, and murder, as they have always done in the past, to try to block any rejection of the system. They have always had to force compliance; they will not hesitate to continue doing so. Nevertheless, there are many concrete ways that individuals, groups, and neighborhoods can gut capitalism, which I will enumerate shortly. We must always keep in mind how we became slaves; then we can see more clearly how we can cease being slaves. We were forced into wage-slavery because the ruling class slowly, systematically, and brutally destroyed our ability to live autonomously. By driving us off the land, changing the property laws, destroying community rights, destroying our tools, imposing taxes, destroying our local markets, and so forth, we were forced onto the labor market in order to survive, our only remaining option being to sell, for a wage, our ability to work. It’s quite clear then how we can overthrow slavery. We must reverse this process. We must begin to reacquire the ability to live without working for a wage or buying the products made by wage-slaves (that is, we must get free from the labor market and the way of living based on it), and embed ourselves instead in cooperative labor and cooperatively produced goods. Another clarification is needed. This strategy does not call for reforming capitalism, for changing capitalism into something else. It calls for replacing capitalism, totally, with a new civilization. This is an important distinction, because capitalism has proved impervious to reforms, as a system. We can sometimes in some places win certain concessions from it (usually only temporary ones) and win some (usually short-lived) improvements in our lives as its victims, but we cannot reform it piecemeal, as a system.¶ Thus our strategy of gutting and eventually destroying capitalism requires at a minimum a totalizing image, an awareness that we are attacking an entire way of life and replacing it with another, and not merely reforming one way of life into something else. Many people may not be accustomed to thinking about entire systems and social orders, but everyone knows what a lifestyle is, or a way of life, and that is the way we should approach it. The thing is this: in order for capitalism to be destroyed millions and millions of people must be dissatisfied with their way of life. They must want something else and see certain existing things as obstacles to getting what they want. It is not useful to think of this as a new ideology. It is not merely a belief-system that is needed, like a religion, or like Marxism, or Anarchism. Rather it is a new prevailing vision, a dominant desire, an overriding need. What must exist is a pressing desire to live a certain way, and not to live another way. If this pressing desire were a desire to live free, to be autonomous, to live in democratically controlled communities, to participate in the self-regulating activities of a mature people, then capitalism could be destroyed. Otherwise we are doomed to perpetual slavery and possibly even to extinction. 20 - 21 -The role of the judge is to be a critical analyst testing whether the underlying assumptions of the AFF are valid. This is a question of the whether the AFF scholarship is good – not the passage of the plan. 22 -Casey 13 (Zachary A. Casey is an Assistant Professor of Educational Studies in the Department of Psychology. His research interests include multicultural education, critical whiteness studies, teacher education, and critical pedagogy. “Toward an Anti-Capitalist Teacher Education,” Journal of Educational Thought Vol. 46, No. 2. 2013. p. 123-143. Jstor.) //WW JA 3/1/17 23 -Despite the overwhelming magnitude of neoliberal educational policies and the detrimental impacts of these policies on the lives of teachers, we are at a critical moment where those of us who stand in solidarity with anti-oppressive teachers and in opposition to treating students as commodities must reclaim education and educational policy as domains that cannot be reduced to market fundamentalism. The might of the other side, however, and the unbridled power of global capitalism, will not relinquish education and maintain control over every other aspect of political economy. Our work then, as teacher educators and those who reject neoliberal educational policies as dehumanizing to both teachers and students, must be to work within and outside our classrooms to create sites of resistance (Freire, 2000). We must find space in our over- prescribed curriculums to critically interrogate the content of lessons to ask questions of who is being privileged and who is being left out (Apple, 2000). We must vocally reject the Rightist media's claims that teachers are to blame for the ongoing legacies of white supremacy (the achievement/opportunity gap) and capitalist exploitation (the Great Recession). And we cannot do so as if it is only P-12 educators who have been forced into neoliberal policies that do not support the interests of their students nor the vast majority of humanity. - EntryDate
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... ... @@ -1,34 +1,0 @@ 1 -Interpretation: A right to housing entails these components. 2 -Hartman 06 Chester Hartman, The Case for a Right to Housing, NHI Shelterforce Online ISSUE #148 Winter 2006, http://nhi.org/online/issues/148/righttohousing.html//roman 3 -What would be the first step in creating a Right to Housing? Were we to accept, politically, the need to establish a Right to Housing, we then would have to fill in the details as to the content of that right. While we're not at that point, and all our energies should focus on achieving the principle and acceptance that there should be a Right to Housing, it is useful at least to list what elements need to be considered. o Affordability standards. Rather than the usual percentage-of-income rule, Michael Stone, the late Cushing Dolbeare and others have put forward an approach that should be the operating principle - ensuring that all non-shelter needs, in addition to housing costs, can be met, thus producing a percentage figure that is not a fixed number but a variable according to household size and income level. o Physical condition and space standards. The best local housing code standards (following a detailed examination of these ordinances) might be posited, or possibly HUD's Housing Quality Standards. Overcrowding standards must guard, on the one hand, against cultural bias and, on the other hand, against accepting dramatically lower standards for the poor. o A suitable living environment. With regard to the super-important issue of neighborhood quality, there are few, if any, usable standards at present, and so serious work must be undertaken to develop these. And security of tenure should be a key element, too, while xallowing for reasonable land-use changes. 4 - 5 -To clarify: The affirmative advocacy must entail the implementation of a governmental policy and the construction of houses. 6 - 7 -Violation: They don’t defend an increase in literal houses. 8 - 9 -Standards: 10 -1. Ground 11 - 12 -2. Limits 13 - 14 -3. Advocacy skills 15 - 16 -TVA: 17 - 18 -D Voter 19 - 20 -Prefer competing interpretations: 21 -1. 22 -2. 23 - 24 -Drop the debater: 25 -1. 26 -2. 27 -3. 28 - 29 -No RVI’s: 30 -1. 31 -2. 32 -3. 33 -4. 34 -5. - EntryDate
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... ... @@ -1,11 +1,0 @@ 1 -The right to housing is situated within the context of biopolitical control 2 -Zeiderman 13 (Austin Zeiderman, Anthropologist and Assistant Professor in the Department of Geography and Environment at the London School of Economics and Political Science, “Living dangerously: biopolitics and urban citizenship in Bogotá, Colombia.”, American Ethnologist, 2013, http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/48524/1/Zeiderman_Living_dangerously_2013.pdf) //AD 3 -Having shown how cities become the stage for the reconfigurations of citizenship, anthropologists are attuned to situations in which residents make demands on state agencies according to their rights as members of an urban community. Situations like these are widespread throughout Latin America. My ethnographic material makes sense, however, only once we acknowledge other frames of social inclusion and political recog- nition. For, as Chatterjee argues, urban populations in most of the world “are only tenu- ously, and even then ambiguously and contextually, rights-bearing citizens in the sense imagined by the constitution” (2004:38).3 They are not “outside the reach of the state or even excluded from the domain of politics,” he clarifies, but as “populations within the territorial jurisdiction of the state, they have to be both looked after and controlled by various governmental agencies” (Chatterjee 2004:38). It is often their classification as targets of governmental intervention, Chatterjee shows, that brings the urban poor “into a certain political relationship with the state” (2004:38). Thus, he directs our atten- tion to “political society,” or the “site of negotiation and contestation opened up by the activities of governmental agencies aimed at population groups” (Chatterjee 2004:74). Although the dichotomy between “civil” and “political” society may be reductive (Holston 2011b), it nevertheless forces us to ask why citizens with rights appeal as population groups to governmental agencies for recognition, inclusion, and protection. Following a liberal democratic paradigm, which is not the approach favored here, we could see Liliana’s petition as prefiguring an expansion of rights to the urban poor and a progres- sion toward equal citizenship. We might acknowledge that most settlers on the urban periphery are not rights-bearing citizens in the fullest, most substantive sense but then mistake her case for an example of the process by which members of this population struggle to be recognized as such. Once we shift our gaze to the politics of the gov- erned, however, and examine the terrain of engagement on which claims are made, we recognize that the politics of rights is subordinated to a politics of life. Indeed, the reset- tlement program does not set out to provide “decent housing” to everyone but, rather, to those living in “zones of high risk.” And, while this constitutional right is shared formally by all citizens, it is dependent on the degree to which their lives are in danger. The right to housing is thus a privilege bestowed on members of a collectivity whose en- titlements are grounded not only in shared membership within a political community but also in their common condition of vulnerability. It is within this biopolitical domain that the poor in Bogotá must define and execute their citizenship claims. 4 - 5 -Biopower renders life calculable; the state’s regulation of life strips individuals of their worth 6 -Inda 02, (Jonathan Xavier Inda, Department of Chicano Studies at University of California “Biopower, Reproduction, and the Migrant Woman’s Body”, 2002. 100-101) 7 -“For a long time ,” Foucault notes, “one of the characteristics privileges of sovereign power was the right to decide life and death” (History: 135). For instance, If an external enemy sought to overthrow him, the sovereign could justly wage war, requiring his subjects to fight in defense of the state. So, without directly proffering their death, the sovereign was sanctioned to risk their life. In this case, he exercised “an indirect power over them of life and death”(135). However, if someone hazarded to rebel against him and violate his laws, the sovereign could exert a direct power over the transgressor’s life, such that, as penalty, the latter could be put to death. The right to life and death, then, was somewhat dissymmetrical, falling on the side of death: “The sovereign exercised his right to life only by exercising his right to kill, or by refraining from killing; he evidenced his power over life only through the death he was capable of requiring. The right which was formulated as the ‘power of life and death’ was in reality the right to take life or let live” (136). As such, this type of power, Foucault observes, was wielded mainly as a mechanism of deduction, making it “essentially a right of seizure: of things, time, bodies, and ultimately life itself” (136). That is, power was fundamentally a right of appropriation—the appropriation of a portion of the wealth, labor, services, and blood of the sovereign’s subjects~-~--one that culminated in the right to seize hold of life in order to subdue it. The power of appropriation or of deduction, Foucault suggests, is no longer the principal form of power in the West. Since the classical age, the mechanisms of power here have undergone a radical transformation. Power now works “to incite, reinforce, control, monitor, optimize, and organize the forces under it”; it is “a power bent on generating forces, making them grow, and ordering them, rather than one dedicated to impeding them, making them submit, or destroying them” (History: 136). Thus, in contrast to a power organized around the sovereign, modern “power would no longer be dealing simply with legal subjects over whom the ultimate dominion was death, but with living beings, and the mastery if would be able to exercise over them would be applied at the level of life itself; it was the taking charge of life, more that the threat of death, that gave power its access even to the body” (142-143). In short, political power has assigned itself the duty of managing life.It is now over life that power establishes its hold and on which it seeks to have a positive influence. This power over life, which Foucault calls biopower, is most apparent in the emergence of “population” as an economic and political problem in the eighteenth century. This “population” is not simply a collection of individual citizens. We are not dealing , as Foucault notes, with subjects, or even with a “people,” but with a composite body “with its specific phenomena and its peculiar variables: birth and death rates, life expectancy, fertility, state of health, frequency of illness, patterns of diet and habitation” (History: 25). The “population,” in other words, has its own form of order, its own energy, traits, and dispositions. The management of this “population,” principally of its health, Foucault suggests, has become the primary commitement as well as the main source of legitimacy of modern forms of government: it’s the body of society which becomes the new principle of political organizations in the nineteenth century. It is this social body which needs to be protected, in a quasi-medical sense. In place of the rituals that served to restore the corporeal integrity of the monarch, remedies and therapeutic devices are employed such as the segregation of the sick, the monitoring of contagions, the exclusion of delinquents. (“Body/Power”: 55) The concern of government, then, is to produce a healthy and productive citizenry. Its commitment is to the protection and enhancement of the health of particular bodies in order to foster the health of the composite body of the population. This means, according to Foucault, that “biological existence” has now come to be “reflected in political existence” (history: 142). As such, biopower ultimately designates “what brought life and its mechanisms into the realm of explicit calculations”(143), its main overall concern being the life of the population, that is, of the species body—the body that functions as the foothold of biological processes pertaining to birth, death, health, and longevity. Simply put, the species body and the individual as a simple living being have become what are at stake in a state’s political tactics, marking the politicization of life, turning politics into biopolitics and the state into a biopolitical state. 8 - 9 -The rejection of biopolitical discourses sets the stage for fundamentally transforming the dynamics of utopianism regarding social organization. 10 -Brent Pickett, Associate professor of Political Science at Chaldron State College, On the Use and Abuse of Foucault For Politics, 2005 (pp. 40-41) 11 -The ultimate goal of these various tactics and techniques, such as genealogy or learning from those most affected by power, is the incitement of local struggles against the modern power system. These actions must be led by those most subject to their constraints. Students must fight a "revolutionary battle" against schools; prison inmates should revolt and thereby be integrated into the larger political struggles.41 Only those directly involved in the battle can determine the methods used. Three institutions are most important to Foucault in this period. The revolt against these institutions must simultaneously involve concrete agitation and ideological critique. First, schools are important primarily because they transmit a conservative ideology masked as knowledge. Second, psychiatry is important precisely because it extends beyond the asylum into schools, prisons, and medicine: in short, "all the psychiatric components of everyday life which form something like a third order of repression and policing."42 Finally, and probably most importantly to Foucault, there is the judicial system since it relies upon the fundamental moral distinction of guilt/innocence. This allows "the most frenzied manifestation of power imaginable" to masquerade as "the serene domination of Good over Evil, of order over disorder."43 The judiciary actually blocks direct action through the construction of an allegedly neutral structure that stops real struggle in the here and now and instead arbitrates in the realm of the ideal. Moreover, the judicial system performs a number of functions which prevent revolution, such as controlling the most volatile people who might spearhead a revolt and introducing internal divisions within the masses so that one group will see the other as "dangerous" or "trash." For these reasons it is vital that the judiciary be attacked. Foucault gives examples of the "thousands of possibilities" for "anti-judicial guerilla operations," including escaping from the police and heckling in the courts.44 Ultimately, Foucault calls for "the radical elimination of the judicial apparatus."45 Yet agitation cannot be limited to prisons, schools, and asylums; it must extend into factories and streets. This raises an essential point. Totalizing theory is rejected, but Foucault does support total revolution. If theory is to be local and discontinuous, how is revolutionary action to gain its larger coherence? "The generality of the struggle specifically derives from the system of power itself, from all the forms in which power is exercised and applied."46 The diffuse yet unitary nature of power allows for these various agitations across society to finally achieve coherence, thereby eliminating the need for imagining a new system. - EntryDate
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... ... @@ -1,28 +1,0 @@ 1 -Interpretation: At the 2017 Texas Forensics Association State tournament, the affirmative debater must only defend the entirety of the resolution. 2 - 3 -Violation: they specify a subset of the right to housing. 4 - 5 -Standards 6 -1. Limits 7 -a. Predictability 8 - 9 -2. Neg Ground 10 - 11 -TVA: 12 - 13 -D Voter 14 - 15 -Competing Interpretations: 16 -1. 17 -2. 18 - 19 -Drop the debater: 20 -1. 21 -2. 22 - 23 -No RVI’s 24 -1. 25 -2. 26 -3. 27 -4. 28 -5. - EntryDate
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... ... @@ -1,11 +1,0 @@ 1 -PLAN FLAW – USFG refers to the United States Faceters Guild but the USFG won’t pass the plan. Their corporate bylaws prevent plan passage. 2 -USFG in 2014 writes. USFG; United States Faceteres Guild; 2014; “BY-LAWS OF THE UNITED STATES FACETERS GUILD”; http://www.usfacetersguild.org/docs/USFGbylaws.pdf 3 -ARTICLE I - NAME The name of the corporation is the United States Faceters Guild, hereinafter referred to as the "USFG" or "Corporation". The principal office of the Corporation shall be located at Mesa, Maricopa County, Arizona. The Corporation is governed by the State of Arizona and the US Internal Revenue Service laws as a nonprofit corporation under IRS Section 501(c)3. Throughout this document, anytime the masculine or feminine form is used, it is intended it shall also mean the other and at any time the singular form is used, it is intended to also mean the plural form and vice versa, as may be required. ARTICLE II - PURPOSE 1. To promote the art and skill of faceting. 2. To help our members and the public achieve their goals through education. 3. To sponsor or assist in managing faceting competitions and educational events. 4. To develop and promote uniform rules for faceting competitions within the U.S.A. and among other countries. 5. To expand the knowledge of natural and man-made crystals. 6. To serve as a national repository and clearing house for faceting designs, published materials, and educational information for faceters worldwide. 4 - 5 -They continue: 6 - 7 -No part of the net earnings of this corporation shall inure to the benefit of, or be distributable to, its members, directors, officers, or other private persons, except that this corporation shall be authorized and empowered to pay reasonable compensation for services rendered and to make payments and distributions in furtherance of the purposes set forth in the Articles of Incorporation. No substantial part of the activities of this corporation shall consist of carrying on propaganda, or otherwise to influence legislation (except as otherwise provided by Section 501(h) of the IRS Code, and this corporation shall not participate in, or intervene in (including the publishing or distribution of statements), any political campaign on behalf of, or in opposition to, any candidate for public office. Notwithstanding any other provision of these by-laws or Articles, this corporation shall not carry on any other activities not permitted to be carried on: (1) by a corporation exempt from federal income tax under Section 501(c)3 of the IRS Code, or (2) by a corporation, contributions to which are deductible under Section 170(c)(2) of the IRS Code (or the corresponding provision of any future United States Internal Revenue Law). 8 - 9 -This is a reason to vote neg—plan vagueness ensures bad policy—bad for education—it’s a voter—precludes role of the ballot because there’s no way to know the effect that the plan would have in the real world. 90 of policymaking is deciding on implementation. 10 -Elmore 80. Prof. Public Affairs at University of Washington; 1980 PolySci Quarterly 79-80; Pg. 605 11 -The emergence of implementation as a subject for policy analysis coincides closely with the discovery by policy analysts that decisions are not self-executing. Analysis of policy choices matter very little if the mechanism for implementing those choices is poorly understood in answering the question, "What percentage of the work of achieving a desired governmental action is done when the preferred analytic alternative has been identified?" Allison estimated that in the normal case, it was about 10 percent, leaving the remaining 90 percent in the realm of implementation. - EntryDate
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... ... @@ -1,11 +1,0 @@ 1 -CP text: The United States should guarantee the right to housing to all native animals based on geographic region. 2 - 3 -Solves the aff – the release of a majority of animals resolves their impacts 4 - 5 -The aff results in the release of BILLIONS of exotic animals – they either die immediately or are invasive and destroy ecosystems. 6 -Henn 15 (Corrinne Henn is a graduate of Delaware Valley College with a degree in Conservation and Wildlife management. “What Happens When People Release Exotic Animals Into the Wild,” One Green Planet. April 8, 2015. http://www.onegreenplanet.org/animalsandnature/what-happens-when-people-release-exotic-animals-into-the-wild/) //WW JA 3/10/17 7 -The exotic pet epidemic in the United States is overwhelming. There have been hundreds of tragic and often fatal incidents between owners and their exotic pets. Whether these animals reside in homes or in backyard menageries, the dream of owning a wild animal and raising it is short lived for many. No matter how hard a person tries to replicate a wild animal’s natural environment, they will always fall short. Owners realize fairly quickly that the animal they’ve purchased (usually through the illegal wildlife trade) isn’t manageable. Sadly, this often leads people to abandon, release, euthanize or – in the best case scenario – surrender their exotic animals to sanctuaries. For some, releasing their pets into the wild seems the most “viable” option. Although some owners who take this course may have good intentions, releasing exotic animals into the wild is cruel, not to mention illegal. Having been raised by humans, these animals have little to no survival skills and succumb to the harsh elements that are foreign to them. They often wind up dying from exhaustion and starvation while others get hit by vehicles or killed by predators. In rare cases, the animal survives; when these exotic pets establish themselves in non-native ecosystems, they become known as an invasive species. According to the National Invasive Species Information Center (NISIC), an invasive species can be any non-native plant, animal or pathogen that establishes itself in the surrounding ecosystem. While this may seem like a “good” alternative to the other unfortunate fates former-exotic pets might meet, it can have serious implications for the greater ecosystem. What Happens When Exotic Pets Become Part of the Ecosystem Exotic pets that do survive release and establish themselves will inevitably interfere with or disrupt the surrounding ecosystem. Many non-native species that begin to colonize an area compete for resources with native species and depending on their size, prey on them. In many cases, invasive species that establish their dominance in an area can have irreversible effects on the local habitat. In addition to damaging balanced ecosystems, invasive species also harbor foreign disease and can become public safety hazards. 8 - 9 -Invasive species cause the extinction of millions of native species – also another independent link to the aff – farm animals suck. The aff results in serial policy failure by failing to diagnose the real problems with the Anthropocene and making it worse. 10 -Ridley 15 (Matt Ridley is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and of the Academy of Medical Sciences, and a foreign honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is honorary president of the International Centre for Life in Newcastle. “INVASIVE SPECIES ARE THE GREATEST CAUSE OF EXTINCTION,” Rational Optimist. June 28, 2015. http://www.rationaloptimist.com/blog/invasive-species-are-the-greatest-cause-of-extinction/) //WW JA 3/10/17 11 -It is true that there was a surge in extinctions of mammals in the American continent about 12,000 years ago, but that was caused by hunter-gatherers with stone-tipped spears, not modern people with cars. Indeed, there is a pretty spectacular revival of wildlife today in rich continents like North America and Europe. Modern prosperity is plainly not the cause of animal extinctions. So what is? By far the greatest cause is invasive species, especially on islands. Hawaii has lost about 70 species of bird since contact with Captain Cook: ten times as many as all the world’s continents combined. The cause is man-made, all right, but it’s not because we killed them or destroyed their habitat. It’s the rats, cats, goats, pigs, mosquitoes and avian malaria we brought with us that did the damage on Hawaii and throughout the Caribbean, the south Atlantic, the Indian ocean and the rest of the Pacific. The dodo disappeared from Mauritius not because sailors ate them (though they did) but because of predation by monkeys, pigs, rats and the like. The Tristan albatross is in trouble on Gough Island because its chicks are eaten alive by introduced mice. Closer to home, it’s invasive species that are the main cause of conservation problems and local extinctions: grey squirrels, mink and signal crayfish have recently all but extinguished red squirrels, water voles and native crayfish respectively near where I live. Ash dieback, zebra mussels, harlequin ladybirds, Chinese mitten crabs, New Zealand flatworms and muntjac are all causing declines in native British animals. Misdiagnosing the cause of extinction leads to mistaken policies. Here’s an example. Two decades ago, scientists began to notice alarming declines and disappearances among frogs and toads all over the world but especially in central America. At the time, the hole in the ozone layer was topical, so environmentalists blamed the amphibian declines on ultraviolet rays getting through the supposedly thinner ozone layer. When sceptics pointed out that the ozone was not thinning over the tropics, many environmentalists fell back on blaming climate change, and for a while the extinction of the golden toad in Costa Rica’s cloud forest was confidently blamed on a changing climate: the first of many extinctions brought about by climate change. This too proved wrong, and scientists are now agreed that the golden toad’s demise, and that of up to 30 other amphibians in central America, was caused by a chytrid fungus, originating in Africa, to which frogs on other continents are especially vulnerable. How did the fungus reach the Americas? Through the use by scientists of the African clawed toad as a popular laboratory animal. The clawed toad carries the fungus but does not die from it, and has escaped into the wild in many places. Conservation efforts had been misdirected. - EntryDate
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... ... @@ -1,1 +1,0 @@ 1 -13 - EntryDate
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... ... @@ -1,1 +1,0 @@ 1 -2017-01-07 15:46:06.0 - Judge
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... ... @@ -1,1 +1,0 @@ 1 -14 - EntryDate
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... ... @@ -1,1 +1,0 @@ 1 -2017-01-07 15:46:31.0 - Judge
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... ... @@ -1,1 +1,0 @@ 1 -2017-01-08 22:07:31.0 - Judge
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... ... @@ -1,1 +1,0 @@ 1 -2017-02-04 07:15:41.0 - Judge
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... ... @@ -1,0 +1,19 @@ 1 +Municipal budgets are on the brink in the status-quo. 2 +LILP 16. The Lincoln Institute of Land Policy is an independent, nonpartisan organization whose mission is to help solve global economic, social, and environmental challenges to improve the quality of life through creative approaches to the use, taxation, and stewardship of land. As a private operating foundation whose origins date to 1946, the Lincoln Institute seeks to inform public dialogue and decisions about land policy through research, training, and effective communication. By bringing together scholars, practitioners, public officials, policy makers, journalists, and involved citizens, the Lincoln Institute integrates theory and practice and provides a forum for multidisciplinary perspectives on public policy concerning land, both in the United States and internationally. The Lincoln Institute's work is organized in five major areas: Planning and Urban Form, Valuation and Taxation, International and Institute-Wide Initiatives, the People's Republic of China, and Latin America and the Caribbean., 1-15-2016, "Cities on the brink: monitoring municipal fiscal health," LILP, http://www.lincolninst.edu/news/lincoln-house-blog/cities-brink-monitoring-municipal-fiscal-health //RS 3 + 4 +Northeastern University political science professor Benedict S. Jimenez shared the results of an ambitious customized survey of cities on their strategies for dealing with fiscal stress, at Lincoln House just before the holidays. Results show an emphasis on cutting expenditures over revenue-raising approaches – and that most cities say they are on the brink of crisis. Research on fiscal retrenchment at the local government level has been severely hampered by limited data on city finances after the Great Recession of 2007-09, he said. Comprehensive Annual Financial Reports (CAFRs) require a Freedom of Information Act request, and one third of states do not require local governments to file them. Census of Governments and the Annual Survey of State and Local Government Finances provide limited information. The Lincoln Institute database Fiscally Standardized Cities allows the comparison of budgets for 112 municipalities. Jimenez thus started his own survey, targeting appointed managers and budget or finance directors in cities with a population of 50,000 or more, and got 268 of the 674 queried cities to respond. The results provide a new window into the state of local public finance, and showed that most cities were relying on piecemeal strategies to stay away from insolvency year after year. The conditions are harsh: 42 reported that spending is growing faster than revenues; 36 reported increasing spending for current benefits; 35 cited dependence on fewer resources; 34 noted the further constraint of tax limits; and 29 were dealing with increased spending on post-employment benefits. In the area of personnel, almost two-thirds of respondents said they were leaving vacant positions unfilled, freezing hiring or salaries, and cutting professional development. Fewer were engaged in layoffs, moving employees part-time, revising union contracts, or reducing salaries for current employees. In services, almost one-third reported deferring capital projects and maintenance projects, rather than eliminating services outright, closing facilities, or cutting key services such as public safety. In striving for efficiency, many cities were asking more state aid or changes in aid formulas, or shifting the responsibility of functions and services to another level of government. More than half reported making better use of technology. On the revenue side, cities are relying on increased user fees – something the Lincoln Institute researchers have also found. Much less common was trying to increase the property tax rate and expand the property tax base, or increase the sales tax. While economic cycles, and the Great Recession in particular, have great impact, cities report long-term structural issues that make fiscal stress the “new normal” for most. Overall, 7 out of 10 cities reported that they are on the precipice of another budget crisis – and don’t expect that feeling to change in the next five years. This lecture was the first in the 2015-2016 series as part of the campaign of the Lincoln Institute to promote municipal fiscal health. The video can be viewed in its entirety here. 5 + 6 +Indemnification tanks municipal budgets and wrecks accountability – turns case, Ferguson proves. 7 +Prall 14. Derek Prall is a professional journalist who has held numerous positions with a variety of print and online publications including the New Jersey Herald. He is a 2008 graduate of Furman University holding bachelor's degrees in both English Literature and Communications Studies., 12-10-2014, "Who pays for police misconduct?," No Publication, http://americancityandcounty.com/law-enforcement/who-pays-police-misconduct //RS 8 + 9 +Cases like those of Michael Brown and Eric Garner have communities abuzz about police misconduct and possible punitive damages, but, when the police are convicted of misconduct, more often than not, it's taxpayers – not the offending officers or agencies – who foot the bill. In a recent paper published in the New York University Law Review, Joanna Schwartz, an assistant law professor at UCLA and expert in police misconduct cases, says that “taxpayers almost always satisfy both compensatory and punitive damages awards entered against their sworn servants.” Meaning: It’s the city’s taxpayers – not the offending officer or the department – that pays when officers are found to be at fault. “My study reveals that police officers are virtually always indemnified: During the study period, governments paid approximately 99.98 percent of the dollars that plaintiffs recovered in lawsuits alleging civil rights violations by law enforcement,” Schwartz wrote. “Law enforcement officers in my study never satisfied a punitive damages award entered against them and almost never contributed anything to settlements or judgments — even when indemnification was prohibited by law or policy, and even when officers were disciplined, terminated or prosecuted for their conduct.” To reach these conclusions, Schwartz looked at misconduct cases in 44 large and 37 small or mid-sized police departments from 2006 to 2011. City Lab reports that together, these departments made up about 20 percent of the nation’s police officers. The data showed officers rarely pay out of their own pockets for civil-rights violations. In 9,225 cases from large cities that were settled or judged for the victim, $735 million in damages was awarded, with officers paying .02 percent of that figure - $171,300. In small to mid-sized cities, officers paid no part of the $9.4 million awarded. Schwartz told City Lab there is no reason to expect suits in Ferguson, Mo., or New York City will play out any differently. According to the Associated Press, Eric Garner’s family has filed suit against the city, the NYPD and the six officers involved for $75 million dollars. ThinkProgress reports six protesters in Ferguson are suing for $40 million in the first of many federal lawsuits expected to be filed. It is unclear how Ferguson will handle the financial burden – the figure dwarfs the city’s revenues for the fiscal year, and ThinkProgress reports the city is already budgeting for the fallout. Solutions for the problem are unclear. Schwartz told City Lab municipalities don’t necessarily need to eliminate indemnification, but suggests that holding more officers financially accountable for their actions would be a step in the right direction. 10 + 11 +Cities make police more aggressive, they’re forced to issue more tickets to make up for budget deficits – turns case. 12 +Vibes 14. John Vibes is an author, researcher and investigative journalist who takes a special interest in the counter culture and the drug war. In addition to his writing and activist work he is also the owner of a successful music promotion company. In 2013, he became one of the organizers of the Free Your Mind Conference, which features top caliber speakers and whistle-blowers from all over the world. You can contact him and stay connected to his work at his Facebook page. You can find his 65 chapter Book entitled “Alchemy of the Timeless Renaissance” at bookpatch.com. , 12-15-2014, "Ferguson to Solve Budget Crisis by Ordering Their Police to be More Aggressive," Free Thought Project, http://thefreethoughtproject.com/ferguson-police-ordered-start-writing-tickets-solve-citys-budget-crisis/#D9HXDXvtpXzikWDF.99. //RS 13 + 14 +While controversy about the police killing of teenager Michael Brown has been the primary focus in Ferguson this year, the city’s government is also facing a massive budget crisis, which they are hoping to solve by ordering their police officers to write more tickets. Many residents in Ferguson have already pointed out that once this policy is implemented, it will strain the already high tensions between the community and the police. In a telephone interview with Bloomberg News this week, Ferguson’s finance director, Jeffrey Blume explained that in order for the city’s government to stay above their budget, the police would have to write millions of dollars in tickets for small, non-violent infractions. “There are a number of things going on in 2014 and one is a revenue shortfall that we anticipate making up in 2015. There’s about a million-dollar increase in public-safety fines to make up the difference,” Blume said. Police generated revenue from writing tickets is already the city’s second larges source of revenue after sales taxes, and the money brought in through the police departments is expected to grow with these new guidelines. “They said they weren’t going to go after poor people, so to speak, to fund their budget, but I guess that’s changed,” Tim Fischesser, executive director of the St. Louis Municipal League told Bloomberg. Some state politicians are worried that this could contribute to further unrest so they are seeking to limit how much money the local government can draw from police generated revenue. A number of state senators have filed two bills that would put these types of limits on the local government in Ferguson. “For Ferguson to respond to all of this and say that increasing ticketing was a good idea is outrageous,” one of the bill’s sponsors, Scott Sifton said. According to Sifton, the bills will be voted on sometime after January 7th, and if approved the limits would not go into effect until at least August. Missouri State Treasurer Clint Zweifel, also spoke in opposition of the new policies, saying that a strong focus on revenue generating does not make communities any safer. “Increasing reliance on such fines is the wrong way to go, period. Residents and neighborhoods are safer when police can focus on public safety, not a municipality’s need to protect a revenue stream,” Zweifel said. 15 + 16 +Tickets perpetuate structural inequalities – turns case. 17 +Solon 14. Sarah Solon: Communications Strategist, ACLU, 6-18-2014, "Preying on the Poor: For-Profit Probation Edition," American Civil Liberties Union, https://www.aclu.org/blog/preying-poor-profit-probation-edition //RS 18 + 19 +Welcome to Alabama, the state of the never-ending seat belt ticket. Hali Wood is 17. She's applied to work at several grocery stores in her home town of Columbiana, but none are hiring. A few months back, cops ticketed Hali for not wearing a seat belt. The fine: $41. Hali has paid $41 and then some, but she's still hundreds of dollars in debt. Why? Because the court contracts with JCS, a for-profit probation company that forces Hali to choose between paying their exorbitant fees and going to jail. Here's how the scheme works: Privacy statement. This embed will serve content from youtube.com Borrowing from the payday lender playbook, companies like JCS often sign contracts in cities and counties strapped for cash. For the county, the deal seems like a sweet one: The company will collect outstanding court debts for free and make all their profits from charging probationers fees. But the problem is that many of these people were put on probation because they were too poor to pay their fine in the first place and for them, the additional fees are huge. People find themselves scrambling for money they don't have and forgoing basic necessities to avoid being thrown behind bars for missing a payment. The impact on communities, especially low-income communities of color, is devastating. Sadly, the for-profit probation business is booming. Every year, hundreds of thousands of people are sentenced to probation, often for misdemeanors including unpaid parking tickets. Instead of being able to just pay those fines and move on with their lives, many get sucked into spiraling debt traps they cannot escape. There are hundreds of thousands of people like Hali out there, for whom small court fines have ballooned into hundreds of dollars of debt. The for-profit probation racket isn't benefiting society; it's only benefiting these companies' bottom line. We need to remember two things: 1) If probationers miss a payment and end up behind bars, taxpayers foot the bill for this imprisonment; and 2) Our communities are not better off when we force people in poverty to choose between their liberty and putting food on their table —and needlessly lining the pockets of for-profit probation companies in the process. Counties and courts do not need to contract with these debt collectors on steroids. Publicly run probation exists, and it works while doing much less damage to communities. It's time to urge courts to cut their ties with the for-profit probation industry. - EntryDate
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... ... @@ -1,0 +1,29 @@ 1 +The 1AC’s form of justice is dependent on money, re-entrenching capitalism. The cost of civil suits means only the rich can afford their liberation strategy. 2 +Higdon 10. Woodrow L. Higdon – Investigative Photo Journalist, March 2010, "PUBLIC-CORRUPTION-COVER-UP-THRU-CIVIL-LITIAGTION-ABUSE," No Publication, http://www.gtinewsphoto.com/PUBLIC-CORRUPTION-COVER-UP-THRU-CIVIL-LITIAGTION.html //RS 3 + 4 +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. 5 + 6 +The 1AC’s belief in reforming the police is flawed – they ignore that capitalism is the foundation of police violence. 7 +Mitrani 14. Sam Mitrani Is An Associate Professor Of History At The College Of Dupage. He Earned His Phd From The University Of Illinois At Chicago In 2009 and His Book The Rise Of The Chicago Police Department: Class And Conflict, 1850-1894 Is Available From The University Of Illinois Press., 12-29-2014, "Stop Kidding Yourself: The Police Were Created to Control Working Class and Poor People," LAWCHA, http://lawcha.org/wordpress/2014/12/29/stop-kidding-police-created-control-working-class-poor-people/ //RS 8 + 9 +In most of the liberal discussions of the recent police killings of unarmed black men, there is an underlying assumption that the police are supposed to protect and serve the population. That is, after all, what they were created to do. If only the normal, decent relations between the police and the community could be re-established, this problem could be resolved. Poor people in general are more likely to be the victims of crime than anyone else, this reasoning goes, and in that way, they are in more need than anyone else of police protection. Maybe there are a few bad apples, but if only the police weren’t so racist, or didn’t carry out policies like stop-and-frisk, or weren’t so afraid of black people, or shot fewer unarmed men, they could function as a useful service that we all need. This liberal way of viewing the problem rests on a misunderstanding of the origins of the police and what they were created to do. The police were not created to protect and serve the population. They were not created to stop crime, at least not as most people understand it. And they were certainly not created to promote justice. They were created to protect the new form of wage-labor capitalism that emerged in the mid- to late-19th century from the threat posed by that system’s offspring, the working class. This is a blunt way of stating a nuanced truth, but sometimes nuance just serves to obfuscate. Before the 19th century, there were no police forces that we would recognize as such anywhere in the world. In the Northern United States, there was a system of elected constables and sheriffs, much more responsible to the population in a very direct way than the police are today. In the South, the closest thing to a police force was the slave patrols. Then, as Northern cities grew and filled with mostly immigrant wage workers who were physically and socially separated from the ruling class, the wealthy elite who ran the various municipal governments hired hundreds and then thousands of armed men to impose order on the new working class neighborhoods. Class conflict roiled late-19th century American cities like Chicago, which experienced major strikes and riots in 1867, 1877, 1886, and 1894. In each of these upheavals, the police attacked strikers with extreme violence, even if in 1877 and 1894 the U.S. Army played a bigger role in ultimately repressing the working class. In the aftermath of these movements, the police increasingly presented themselves as a thin blue line protecting civilization (by which they meant bourgeois civilization) from the disorder of the working class. This ideology of order that developed in the late 19th century echoes down to today—except that today, poor black and Latino people are the main threat, rather than immigrant workers. Of course, the ruling class did not get everything it wanted, and had to yield on many points to the immigrant workers it sought to control. This is why, for instance, municipal governments backed away from trying to stop Sunday drinking, and why they hired so many immigrant police officers, especially the Irish. But despite these concessions, businessmen organized themselves to make sure the police were increasingly isolated from democratic control, and established their own hierarchies, systems of governance, and rules of behavior. The police increasingly set themselves off from the population by donning uniforms; establishing their own rules for hiring, promotion and firing; working to build a unique esprit des corps and identifying themselves with order. And despite complaints about corruption and inefficiency, they gained more and more support from the ruling class, to the extent that in Chicago, for instance, businessmen donated money to buy the police rifles, artillery, Gatling guns, buildings, and money to establish a police pension out of their own pockets. There was a never a time when the big city police neutrally enforced “the law,” or came anywhere close to that ideal. (For that matter, the law itself has never been neutral.) In the North, they mostly arrested people for the vaguely defined “crimes” of disorderly conduct and vagrancy throughout the nineteenth century. This meant that the police could arrest anyone they saw as a threat to “order.” In the post-bellum South, they enforced white supremacy and largely arrested black people on trumped-up charges in order to feed them into convict labor systems. The violence the police carried out and their moral separation from those they patrolled were not the consequences of the brutality of individual officers, but were the consequences of careful policies designed to mold the police into a force that could use violence to deal with the social problems that accompanied the development of a wage-labor economy. For instance, in the short, sharp depression of the mid-1880s, Chicago was filled with prostitutes who worked the streets. Many policemen recognized that these prostitutes were generally impoverished women seeking a way to survive, and initially tolerated their behavior. But the police hierarchy insisted that the patrolmen do their duty whatever their feelings, and arrest these women, impose fines, and drive them off the streets and into brothels, where they could be ignored by some members of the elite and controlled by others. Similarly, in 1885, when Chicago began to experience a wave of strikes, some policemen sympathized with strikers. But once the police hierarchy and the mayor decided to break the strikes, policemen who refused to comply were fired. In these and a thousand similar ways, the police were molded into a force that would impose order on working class and poor people, whatever the individual feelings of the officers involved. Though some patrolmen tried to be kind and others were openly brutal, police violence in the 1880s was not a case of a few bad apples—and neither is it today. Much has changed since the creation of the police—most importantly the influx of black people into the Northern cities, the mid-twentieth century black movement, and the creation of the current system of mass incarceration in part as a response to that movement. But these changes did not lead to a fundamental shift in policing. They led to new policies designed to preserve fundamental continuities. The police were created to use violence to reconcile electoral democracy with industrial capitalism. Today, they are just one part of the “criminal justice” system which continues to play the same role. Their basic job is to enforce order among those with the most reason to resent the system—who in our society today are disproportionately poor black people. A democratic police system is imaginable—one in which police are elected by and accountable to the people they patrol. But that is not what we have. And it’s not what the current system of policing was created to be. If there is one positive lesson from the history of policing’s origins, it is that when workers organized, refused to submit or cooperate and caused problems for the city governments, they could back the police off from the most galling of their activities. Murdering individual police officers, as happened in in Chicago on May 3, 1886 and more recently in New York on December 20, 2014, only reinforced those calling for harsh repression—a reaction we are beginning to see already. But resistance on a mass scale could force the police to hesitate. This happened in Chicago during the early 1880s, when the police pulled back from breaking strikes, hired immigrant officers, and tried to re-establish some credibility among the working class after their role in brutally crushing the 1877 upheaval. The police might be backed off again if the reaction against the killings of Eric Garner, Michael Brown, Tamir Rice and countless others continues. If they are, it will be a victory for those mobilizing today, and will save lives—though as long as this system that requires police violence to control a big share of its population survives, any change in police policy will be aimed at keeping the poor in line more effectively. We shouldn’t expect the police to be something they’re not. We ought to know that origins matter, and the police were created by the ruling class to control working class and poor people, not help them. They’ve continued to play that role ever since. 10 + 11 +Capitalism propagates the need for surveillance – turns case. 12 +Foster 14. (John Bellamy, prof of sociology @ univ of Oregon, Robert W.**, prof @ univ of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, July-August 2014, “Surveillance Capitalism: Monopoly-Finance Capital, the Military-Industrial Complex, and the Digital Age”, http://monthlyreview.org/2014/07/01/surveillance-capitalism/, aps) 13 + 14 +Financialization—or the long-term growth of speculation on financial assets relative to GDP—meant the intrusion of finance into all aspects of life, requiring new extensions of surveillance and information control as forms of financial risk management. As the economy became more financialized, it became increasingly vulnerable to financial meltdowns, increasing risk perceptions on the part of investors and the perceived need for risk management, encryption of data, and security.¶ Today the fears of cyberwar aimed at financial institutions, the entire financial system, and the military system, is at the top of national security concerns. McConnell, who had left his job at Booz Allen to become director of national intelligence in 2007 under George W. Bush, informed the president that, “If the 9/11 perpetrators had focused on a single U.S. bank through cyberattack, and it had been successful, it would have had an order of magnitude greater impact on the U.S. economy than the physical attack.” Secretary of the Treasury Henry Paulson, former CEO of Goldman Sachs, agreed. Bush was so alarmed that within a short time the Comprehensive National Cybersecurity Initiative (2008) was in place, which greatly expanded the NSA’s authority to carry out surveillance on the Internet domestically, leading to the construction of its $1.5 billion data center in Utah.53 Leon Panetta, U.S. defense secretary under Obama, warned that a cyberattack on the U.S. financial system might be the “next Pearl Harbor.” In July 2011 Barack Obama signed an executive order declaring that the infiltration of financial markets by transnational criminal organizations constituted a national emergency. Symantec, a cybersecurity firm, estimated in 2010 that three-quarters of “phishing” attacks designed to get people to give up financial data were not aimed at individuals but were directed at the financial sector.54¶ In addition to hackers breaking into databases, large scale attacks on entire security systems are feared. The sudden drop in the stock market on May 6, 2010, attributed to high speed algorithmic trading, was thought to prefigure a new possible form of cyberwar aimed at dragging reeling markets down further using short-selling, options, and swaps—a kind of “force multiplier” in military-speak. Hackers using malicious codes to crash or jam whole networks can mobilize Botnets or robotic networks of hundreds of thousands of machines. According to Mortimer Zuckerman, chairman and editor-in-chief of U.S. News and World Report, writing in the Wall Street Journal, digitalized systems are extraordinarily vulnerable to attack: “the average offensive malware has about 175 lines of code, which can attack defense software using between 5 million and 10 million lines of code.” The U.S./Israeli-developed “Stutnex” worm aimed at Iran, which reportedly infiltrated the computers controlling Iranian nuclear centrifuge facilities, is seen as an indication of the scale and precision with which cyberattacks can now demobilize whole systems.55¶ The Internet and Monopoly Capital¶ ARPANET was connected only to those universities and their computer science departments that had Department of Defense funding and security clearances. With the success of the system, computer science departments at universities and private industry were all eager to be connected to the network. This resulted in the creation by the National Science Foundation of the Computer Science Research Network (CSNET), which consisted of ARPANET, a Telenet system, and PhoneNet for email. Soon other, private internets were created. In 1985 the National Science Foundation constructed five supercomputers across the country to be the backbone of a larger NSFNET, which brought universities in general and private corporations into what had merged into a much wider Internet with a common protocol, resulting in a massive growth of users who could access it through personal computers, via Internet Service Providers.¶ ARPANET ceased operations in 1989. In the early 1990s the World Wide Web was developed, leading to an astronomical increase in users, and the rapid commercialization of the Internet. Three key developments followed: (1) In 1995 NSFNET was privatized, and NSFNET itself decommissioned, with the backbone of the system being controlled by private Internet Service Providers;56 (2) the Telecommunications Act of 1996 introduced a massive deregulation of telecommunications and media, setting the stage for further concentration and cenoentralization of capital in these industries;57 (3) the Financial Services Modernization Act of 1999, promoted by Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin, and Deputy Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers under the Clinton administration, deregulated the financial sector in an attempt to feed the financial bubble that was developing.58 These three elements coalesced into one of the biggest merger waves in history, known as the dot-com or New Economy bubble. The ongoing concentration of capital was thus given a huge boost in the technology and finance sectors, leading to ever greater levels of monopoly power.¶ The dot-com bubble burst in 2000. But by that time a virtual Internet cartel had emerged, despite all the rhetoric of “friction-free capitalism” by Bill Gates and others.59 By the end of the decade the Internet had come to play a central role in capital accumulation, and the firms that ruled the Internet were almost all “monopolies,” by the way economists use the term. This did not mean that these firms sold 100 percent of an industry’s output, but rather that they sold a sufficient amount to control the price of the product and how much competition they would have. (Even John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil monopoly at its peak controlled just over 80 percent of the market.) By 2014, three of the four largest U.S. corporations in market valuation—Apple, Microsoft, and Google—were Internet monopolies. Twelve of the thirty most valuable U.S. corporations were media giants and/or Internet monopolies, including Verizon, Amazon, Disney, Comcast, Intel, Facebook, Qualcomm, and Oracle. These firms used network effects, technical standards, patent law, and good old-fashioned barriers-to-entry to lock in their market power, and they used their monopoly gushers to broaden their digital empires. With this economic power comes immense political power, such that these firms face no threat from regulators in Washington. To the contrary, the U.S. government is little short of a private army for the Internet giants as they pursue their global ambitions.60¶ The major means of wealth generation on the Internet and through proprietary platforms such as apps is the surveillance of the population, allowing for a handful of firms to reap the lion’s share of the gains from the enormous sales effort in the U.S. economy. The digitalization of surveillance has radically changed the nature of advertising. The old system of advertisers purchasing ad space or time in media with the hope of getting the media user to notice the advertisement while she sought out news or entertainment is becoming passé. Advertisers no longer need to subsidize journalism or media content production to reach their target audiences. Instead, they can pinpoint their desired audience to a person and locate them wherever they are online (and often where they are in physical space) due to ubiquitous surveillance. The premise of the system is that there is no effective privacy. The consequences are that the commercial system of media content production, especially journalism, is in collapse, with nothing in the wings to replace it.¶ These monopolistic corporate entities readily cooperate with the repressive arm of the state in the form of its military, intelligence, and police functions. The result is to enhance enormously the secret national security state, relative to the government as a whole. Edward Snowden’s revelations of the NSA’s Prism program, together with other leaks, have shown a pattern of a tight interweaving of the military with giant computer-Internet corporations, creating what has been called a “military-digital complex.”61 Indeed, Beatrice Edwards, the executive director of the Government Accountability Project, argues that what has emerged is a “government-corporate surveillance complex.”62¶ This extends beyond the vast private contractor network to “secret collaboration” with the main Internet and telecom companies.63 Notable examples of partly cooperative, partly legally coerced sharing of data include:¶ A 2009 report by the NSA’s inspector general leaked by Snowden stated that the NSA has built collaborative relationships with over “100 companies.”64¶ Microsoft provided the NSA with pre-encryption “back door” access to its popular Outlook.com email portal, to its Skype Internet phone calls and chat (with its 663 million global users), and to SkyDrive, Microsoft’s cloud storage system (which has 250 million users). The Snowden files show that Microsoft actively collaborated with the NSA. Glenn Greenwald writes: “Microsoft spent ‘many months’ working to provide the government easy access to that the SkyDrive data.” The same was the case for Skype, while in the case of Outlook.com it took only a few months for the Microsoft and the NSA working together to ensure the NSA’s complete access.65¶ The NSA paid $10 million to the computer security company RSA to promote a back door to encryption products. The NSA devised a flawed formula for generating random numbers for encryption with RSA inserting it into its software tool Bsafe, which had been designed to enhance security in personal computers and other digital products.66¶ ATandT voluntarily sold metadata on phone calls to the CIA for over $10 million a year in connection with the latter’s counterterrorism investigations.67¶ Verizon (and likely ATandT and Sprint as well) provided the NSA with metadata on all calls in its (their) systems, both within the United States and between the United States and other countries. Such metadata has been supplied to the NSA under both the Bush and Obama administrations.68¶ Microsoft, Google, Yahoo, and Facebook turned over the data from tens of thousands of their accounts on individuals every six months to the NSA and other intelligence agencies, with a rapid rise in the number of accounts turned over to the secret government.69¶ In 2012 DARPA Director Regina Dugan left her position to join Google. During her period as director, DARPA had been at the forefront of drone research, presenting the first prototype demonstrations in the early 1990s. However, the outgrowth of this in the deployment of General Atomic Aeronautical System’s Predator drones in warfare did not occur until the late 1990s in the Kosovo War, with Clark as the Supreme Allied Commander. The first use of such drones for global, extra-territorial assassination, outside a field of war—now a staple of Obama’s “anti-terrorism” strategy—took place in 2002.70 In the opening years of this century DARPA extended its research to developing drones that could be used for mobile wi-fi capabilities. Dugan’s switch to Google in the private sector—at a time when she was under governmental investigation for giving hefty DARPA contracts to RedX, a bomb-detection corporation that she had co-founded and partly owned—was connected to Google’s interest in developing high-altitude drones with wi-fi delivering capabilities. In 2014 Google announced that it was buying Titan Aerospace, a U.S.-based start-up company for building drones which cruise at the very edge of the atmosphere. Facebook meanwhile bought the UK corporation, Ascenta, which specializes in making high-altitude solar drones. Such drones would allow the spread of the Internet to new areas. The goal was to capitalize on a new military technology and create larger global Internet monopolies, while expanding the military-digital complex.71¶ By 2005–2007 broad estimates suggested that U.S. marketing expenditures (defined fairly narrowly) were running at about $1 trillion a year; real (both acknowledged and unacknowledged) military expenditures at about $1 trillion annually; and FIRE (finance, insurance, and real estate) expenditures at approximately $2.5 trillion.72 In the digital age, these three sectors of the political economy, each of which arose parasitically on the production base of the economy, were increasingly connected in a web of technology and data sharing. As the most advanced technologies (usually military developed) went private, many of those involved in the warfare economy, such as DARPA’s Dugan, were in a position to exploit the knowledge and connections that they had accumulated by shifting to the private sector, crossing fairly easily from one system of security and surveillance to another.¶ A kind of linguistic convergence mirrored the centralized structure of monopoly-finance capital in the age of digital surveillance with “securitization” increasingly standing simultaneously for a world dominated by: (1) financial derivatives trading, (2) a network of public and private surveillance, (3) the militarization of security-control systems, and (4) the removal of judicial processes from effective civilian control. 15 + 16 +Capitalism and slavery produced anti-blackness, not the reverse. A shift in economic conditions made African slavery more cost-effective than white indentured servitude, producing the Atlantic slave trade. Only our approach can decipher the way violence functions. 17 +Selfa 2010 Lance, Lance Selfa is a frequent contributor to the International Socialist Review, and writes a column on U.S. politics in Socialist Worker newspaper. “The Roots of Racism.” http://socialistworker.org/2010/10/21/the-roots-of-racism//MM 18 + 19 +Although it is a commonplace for academics and opponents of socialism to claim that Karl Marx ignored racism, Marx in fact described the processes that created modern racism. His explanation of the rise of capitalism placed the African slave trade, the European extermination of indigenous people in the Americas and colonialism at its heart. In Capital, Marx writes: The discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement and entombment in mines of the indigenous population of the continent, the beginnings of the conquest and plunder of India, and the conversion of Africa into a preserve for the commercial hunting of black skins are all things that characterize the dawn of the era of capitalist production. Marx connected his explanation of the role of the slave trade in the rise of capitalism to the social relations that produced racism against Africans. In Wage Labor and Capital, written 12 years before the American Civil War, he explains: What is a Negro slave? A man of the black race. The one explanation is as good as the other. A Negro is a Negro. He only becomes a slave in certain relations. A cotton spinning jenny is a machine for spinning cotton. It only becomes capital in certain relations. Torn away from these conditions, it is as little capital as gold by itself is money, or as sugar is the price of sugar. In this passage, Marx shows no prejudice to Blacks ("a man of the black race," "a Negro is a Negro"), but he mocks society's equation of "Black" and "slave" ("one explanation is as good as another"). He shows how the economic and social relations of emerging capitalism thrust Blacks into slavery ("he only becomes a slave in certain relations"), which produce the dominant ideology that equates being African with being a slave. These fragments of Marx's writing give us a good start in understanding the Marxist explanation of the origins of racism. As the Trinidadian historian of slavery Eric Williams put it: "Slavery was not born of racism: rather, racism was the consequence of slavery." And, one should add, the consequence of modern slavery at the dawn of capitalism. While slavery existed as an economic system for thousands of years before the conquest of America, racism as we understand it today did not exist. From time immemorial? The classical empires of Greece and Rome were based on slave labor. But ancient slavery was not viewed in racial terms. Slaves were most often captives in wars or conquered peoples. If we understand white people as originating in what is today Europe, then most slaves in ancient Greece and Rome were white. Roman law made slaves the property of their owners, while maintaining a "formal lack of interest in the slave's ethnic or racial provenance," wrote Robin Blackburn in The Making of New World Slavery. Over the years, slave manumission produced a mixed population of slave and free in Roman-ruled areas, in which all came to be seen as "Romans." The Greeks drew a sharper line between Greeks and "barbarians," those subject to slavery. Again, this was not viewed in racial or ethnic terms, as the socialist historian of the Haitian Revolution, C.L.R. James, explained: Historically, it is pretty well proved now that the ancient Greeks and Romans knew nothing about race. They had another standard~-~-civilized and barbarian~-~-and you could have white skin and be a barbarian, and you could be black and civilized. More importantly, encounters in the ancient world between the Mediterranean world and Black Africans did not produce an upsurge of racism against Africans. In Before Color Prejudice, Howard University classics professor Frank Snowden documented innumerable accounts of interaction between the Greco-Roman and Egyptian civilizations and the Kush, Nubian, and Ethiopian kingdoms of Africa. He found substantial evidence of integration of Black Africans in the occupational hierarchies of the ancient Mediterranean empires and Black-white intermarriage. Black and mixed race gods appeared in Mediterranean art, and at least one Roman emperor, Septimius Severus, was an African. Between the 10th and 16th centuries, the chief source of slaves in Western Europe was Eastern Europe. In fact, the word "slave" comes from the word "Slav," the people of Eastern Europe. This outline doesn't mean to suggest a "pre-capitalist" Golden Age of racial tolerance, least of all in the slave societies of antiquity. Empires viewed themselves as centers of the universe and looked on foreigners as inferiors. Ancient Greece and Rome fought wars of conquest against peoples they presumed to be less advanced. Religious scholars interpreted the Hebrew Bible's "curse of Ham" from the story of Noah to condemn Africans to slavery. Cultural and religious associations of the color white with light and angels and the color black with darkness and evil persisted. But none of these cultural or ideological factors explain the rise of New World slavery or the "modern" notions of racism that developed from it. The African slave trade The slave trade lasted for a little more than 400 years, from the mid-1400s, when the Portuguese made their first voyages down the African coast, to the abolition of slavery in Brazil in 1888. Slave traders took as many as 12 million Africans by force to work on the plantations in South America, the Caribbean and North America. About 13 percent of slaves (1.5 million) died during the Middle Passage~-~-the trip by boat from Africa to the New World. The African slave trade~-~-involving African slave merchants, European slavers and New World planters in the traffic in human cargo~-~-represented the greatest forced population transfer ever. The charge that Africans "sold their own people" into slavery has become a standard canard against "politically correct" history that condemns the European role in the African slave trade. The first encounters of the Spanish and Portuguese, and later the English, with African kingdoms revolved around trade in goods. Only after the Europeans established New World plantations requiring huge labor gangs did the slave trade begin. African kings and chiefs did indeed sell into slavery captives in wars or members of other communities. Sometimes, they concluded alliances with Europeans to support them in wars, with captives from their enemies being handed over to the Europeans as booty. The demands of the plantation economies pushed "demand" for slaves. Supply did not create its own demand. In any event, it remains unseemly to attempt to absolve the European slavers by reference to their African partners in crime. As historian Basil Davidson rightly argues about African chiefs' complicity in the slave trade: "In this, they were no less 'moral' than the Europeans who had instigated the trade and bought the captives." Onboard, Africans were restricted in their movements so that they wouldn't combine to mutiny on the ship. In many slave ships, slaves were chained down, stacked like firewood with less than a foot between them. On the plantations, slaves were subjected to a regimen of 18-hour workdays. All members of slave families were set to work. Since the New World tobacco and sugar plantations operated nearly like factories, men, women and children were assigned tasks, from the fields to the processing mills. Slaves were denied any rights. Throughout the colonies in the Caribbean to North America, laws were passed establishing a variety of common practices: Slaves were forbidden to carry weapons, they could marry only with the owner's permission, and their families could be broken up. They were forbidden to own property. Masters allowed slaves to cultivate vegetables and chickens, so the master wouldn't have to attend to their food needs. But they were forbidden even to sell for profit the products of their own gardens. Some colonies encouraged religious instruction among slaves, but all of them made clear that a slave's conversion to Christianity didn't change their status as slaves. Other colonies discouraged religious instruction, especially when it became clear to the planters that church meetings were one of the chief ways that slaves planned conspiracies and revolts. It goes without saying that slaves had no political or civil rights, with no right to an education, to serve on juries, to vote or to run for public office. The planters instituted barbaric regimes of repression to prevent any slave revolts. Slave catchers using tracker dogs would hunt down any slaves who tried to escape the plantation. The penalties for any form of slave resistance were extreme and deadly. One description of the penalties slaves faced in Barbados reports that rebellious slaves would be punished by "nailing them down on the ground with crooked sticks on every Limb, and then applying the Fire by degrees from Feet and Hands, burning them gradually up to the Head, whereby their pains are extravagant." Barbados planters could claim a reimbursement from the government of 25 pounds per slave executed. The African slave trade helped to shape a wide variety of societies from modern Argentina to Canada. These differed in their use of slaves, the harshness of the regime imposed on slaves, and the degree of mixing of the races that custom and law permitted. But none of these became as virulently racist~-~-insisting on racial separation and a strict color bar~-~-as the English North American colonies that became the United States. Unfree labor in the North American colonies Notwithstanding the horrible conditions that African slaves endured, it is important to underscore that when European powers began carving up the New World between them, African slaves were not part of their calculations. When we think of slavery today, we think of it primarily from the point of view of its relationship to racism. But planters in the 17th and 18th centuries looked at it primarily as a means to produce profits. Slavery was a method of organizing labor to produce sugar, tobacco and cotton. It was not, first and foremost, a system for producing white supremacy. How did slavery in the U.S. (and the rest of the New World) become the breeding ground for racism? For much of the first century of colonization in what became the United States, the majority of slaves and other "unfree laborers" were white. The term "unfree" draws the distinction between slavery and servitude and "free wage labor" that is the norm in capitalism. One of the historic gains of capitalism for workers is that workers are "free" to sell their ability to labor to whatever employer will give them the best deal. Of course, this kind of freedom is limited at best. Unless they are independently wealthy, workers aren't free to decide not to work. They're free to work or starve. Once they do work, they can quit one employer and go to work for another. But the hallmark of systems like slavery and indentured servitude was that slaves or servants were "bound over" to a particular employer for a period of time, or for life in the case of slaves. The decision to work for another master wasn't the slave's or the servant's. It was the master's, who could sell slaves for money or other commodities like livestock, lumber or machinery. The North American colonies started predominantly as private business enterprises in the early 1600s. Unlike the Spanish, whose conquests of Mexico and Peru in the 1500s produced fabulous gold and silver riches for Spain, settlers in places like the colonies that became Maryland, Rhode Island, and Virginia made money through agriculture. In addition to sheer survival, the settlers' chief aim was to obtain a labor force that could produce the large amounts of indigo, tobacco, sugar and other crops that would be sold back to England. From 1607, when Jamestown was founded in Virginia to about 1685, the primary source of agricultural labor in English North America came from white indentured servants. The colonists first attempted to press the indigenous population into labor. But the Indians refused to be become servants to the English. Indians resisted being forced to work, and they escaped into the surrounding area, which, after all, they knew far better than the English. One after another, the English colonies turned to a policy of driving out the Indians. The colonists then turned to white servants. Indentured servants were predominantly young white men~-~-usually English or Irish~-~-who were required to work for a planter master for some fixed term of four to seven years. The servants received room and board on the plantation but no pay. And they could not quit and work for another planter. They had to serve their term, after which they might be able to acquire some land and to start a farm for themselves. They became servants in several ways. Some were prisoners, convicted of petty crimes in Britain, or convicted of being troublemakers in Britain's first colony, Ireland. Many were kidnapped off the streets of Liverpool or Manchester, and put on ships to the New World. Some voluntarily became servants, hoping to start farms after they fulfilled their obligations to their masters. For most of the 1600s, the planters tried to get by with a predominantly white, but multiracial workforce. But as the 17th century wore on, colonial leaders became increasingly frustrated with white servant labor. For one thing, they faced the problem of constantly having to recruit labor as servants' terms expired. Second, after servants finished their contracts and decided to set up their farms, they could become competitors to their former masters. And finally, the planters didn't like the servants' "insolence." The mid-1600s were a time of revolution in England, when ideas of individual freedom were challenging the old hierarchies based on royalty. The colonial planters tended to be royalists, but their servants tended to assert their "rights as Englishmen" to better food, clothing and time off. Most laborers in the colonies supported the servants. As the century progressed, the costs of servant labor increased. Planters started to petition the colonial boards and assemblies to allow the large-scale importation of African slaves. Black slaves worked on plantations in small numbers throughout the 1600s. But until the end of the 1600s, it cost planters more to buy slaves than to buy white servants. Blacks lived in the colonies in a variety of statuses~-~-some were free, some were slaves, some were servants. The law in Virginia didn't establish the condition of lifetime, perpetual slavery or even recognize African servants as a group different from white servants until 1661. Blacks could serve on juries, own property and exercise other rights. Northampton County, Virginia, recognized interracial marriages and, in one case, assigned a free Black couple to act as foster parents for an abandoned white child. There were even a few examples of Black freemen who owned white servants. Free Blacks in North Carolina had voting rights. In the 1600s, the Chesapeake society of eastern Virginia had a multiracial character, according to historian Betty Wood: There is persuasive evidence dating from the 1620s through the 1680s that there were those of European descent in the Chesapeake who were prepared to identify and cooperate with people of African descent. These affinities were forged in the world of plantation work. On many plantations, Europeans and West Africans labored side by side in the tobacco fields, performing exactly the same types and amounts of work; they lived and ate together in shared housing; they socialized together; and sometimes they slept together. The planters' economic calculations played a part in the colonies' decision to move toward full-scale slave labor. By the end of the 17th century, the price of white indentured servants outstripped the price of African slaves. A planter could buy an African slave for life for the same price that he could purchase a white servant for 10 years. As Eric Williams explained: Here, then, is the origin of Negro slavery. The reason was economic, not racial; it had to do not with the color of the laborer, but the cheapness of the labor. The planter would have gone to the moon, if necessary, for labor. Africa was nearer than the moon, nearer too than the more populous countries of India and China. But their turn would soon come. Planters' fear of a multiracial uprising also pushed them towards racial slavery. Because a rigid racial division of labor didn't exist in the 17th century colonies, many conspiracies involving Black slaves and white indentured servants were hatched and foiled. We know about them today because of court proceedings that punished the runaways after their capture. As historians T.H. Breen and Stephen Innes point out, "These cases reveal only extreme actions, desperate attempts to escape, but for every group of runaways who came before the courts, there were doubtless many more poor whites and blacks who cooperated in smaller, less daring ways on the plantation." The largest of these conspiracies developed into Bacon's Rebellion, an uprising that threw terror into the hearts of the Virginia Tidewater planters in 1676. Several hundred farmers, servants and slaves initiated a protest to press the colonial government to seize Indian land for distribution. The conflict spilled over into demands for tax relief and resentment of the Jamestown establishment. Planter Nathaniel Bacon helped organize an army of whites and Blacks that sacked Jamestown and forced the governor to flee. The rebel army held out for eight months before the Crown managed to defeat and disarm it. Bacon's Rebellion was a turning point. After it ended, the Tidewater planters moved in two directions: first, they offered concessions to the white freemen, lifting taxes and extending to them the vote; and second, they moved to full-scale racial slavery. Fifteen years earlier, the Burgesses had recognized the condition of slavery for life and placed Africans in a different category as white servants. But the law had little practical effect. "Until slavery became systematic, there was no need for a systematic slave code. And slavery could not become systematic so long as an African slave for life cost twice as much as an English servant for a five-year term," wrote historian Barbara Jeanne Fields. Both of those circumstances changed in the immediate aftermath of Bacon's Rebellion. In the entire 17th century, the planters imported about 20,000 African slaves. The majority of them were brought to North American colonies in the 24 years after Bacon's Rebellion. In 1664, the Maryland legislature passed a law determining who would be considered slaves on the basis of the condition of their father~-~-whether their father was slave or free. It soon became clear, however, that establishing paternity was difficult, but that establishing who was a person's mother was definite. So the planters changed the law to establish slave status on the basis of the mother's condition. Now white slaveholders who fathered children by slave women would be guaranteed their offspring as slaves. And the law included penalties for "free" women who slept with slaves. But what's most interesting about this law is that it doesn't really speak in racial terms. It attempts to preserve the property rights of slaveholders and establish barriers between slave and free which were to become hardened into racial divisions over the next few years. Taking the Maryland law as an example, Fields made this important point: Historians can actually observe colonial Americans in the act of preparing the ground for race without foreknowledge of what would later arise on the foundation they were laying. The purpose of the experiment is clear: to prevent the erosion of slaveowners' property rights that would result if the offspring of free white women impregnated by slave men were entitled to freedom. The language of the preamble to the law makes clear that the point was not yet race. Race does not explain the law. Rather, the law shows society in the act of inventing race. After establishing that African slaves would cultivate major cash crops of the North American colonies, the planters then moved to establish the institutions and ideas that would uphold white supremacy. Most unfree labor became Black labor. Laws and ideas intended to underscore the subhuman status of Black people~-~-in a word, the ideology of racism and white supremacy~-~-emerged full-blown over the next generation. "All men are created equal" Within a few decades, the ideology of white supremacy was fully developed. Some of the greatest minds of the day~-~-such as Scottish philosopher David Hume and Thomas Jefferson, the man who wrote the Declaration of Independence~-~-wrote treatises alleging Black inferiority. The ideology of white supremacy based on the natural inferiority of Blacks, even allegations that Blacks were subhuman, strengthened throughout the 18th century. This was the way that the leading intellectual figures of the time reconciled the ideals of the 1776 American Revolution with slavery. The American Revolution of 1776 and later the French Revolution of 1789 popularized the ideas of liberty and the rights of all human beings. The Declaration of Independence asserts that "all men are created equal" and possess certain "unalienable rights"~-~-rights that can't be taken away~-~-of "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." As the first major bourgeois revolution, the American Revolution sought to establish the rights of the new capitalist class against the old feudal monarchy. It started with the resentment of the American merchant class that wanted to break free from British restrictions on its trade. But its challenge to British tyranny also gave expression to a whole range of ideas that expanded the concept of "liberty" from being just about trade to include ideas of human rights, democracy, and civil liberties. It legitimized an assault on slavery as an offense to liberty. Some of the leading American revolutionaries, such as Thomas Paine and Benjamin Franklin, endorsed abolition. Slaves and free Blacks also pointed to the ideals of the revolution to call for abolishing slavery. But because the revolution aimed to establish the rule of capital in America, and because a lot of capitalists and planters made a lot of money from slavery, the revolution compromised with slavery. The Declaration initially contained a condemnation of King George for allowing the slave trade, but Jefferson dropped it following protests from representatives from Georgia and the Carolinas. How could the founding fathers of the U.S.~-~-most of whom owned slaves themselves~-~-reconcile the ideals of liberty for which they were fighting with the existence of a system that represented the exact negation of liberty? The ideology of white supremacy fit the bill. We know today that "all men" didn't include women, Indians or most whites. But to rule Black slaves out of the blessings of liberty, the leading head-fixers of the time argued that Blacks weren't really "men," they were a lower order of being. Jefferson's Notes from Virginia, meant to be a scientific catalogue of the flora and fauna of Virginia, uses arguments that anticipate the "scientific racism" of the 1800s and 1900s. With few exceptions, no major institution~-~-such as the universities, the churches or the newspapers of the time~-~-raised criticisms of white supremacy or of slavery. In fact, they helped pioneer religious and academic justifications for slavery and Black inferiority. As C.L.R. James put it, "The conception of dividing people by race begins with the slave trade. This thing was so shocking, so opposed to all the conceptions of society which religion and philosophers had, that the only justification by which humanity could face it was to divide people into races and decide that the Africans were an inferior race." White supremacy wasn't only used to justify slavery. It was also used to keep in line the two-thirds of Southern whites who weren't slaveholders. Unlike the French colony of St. Domingue or the British colony of Barbados, where Blacks vastly outnumbered whites, Blacks were a minority in the slave South. A tiny minority of slave-holding whites, who controlled the governments and economies of the Deep South states, ruled over a population that was roughly two-thirds white farmers and workers and one-third Black slaves. The slaveholders' ideology of racism and white supremacy helped to divide the working population, tying poor whites to the slaveholders. Slavery afforded poor white farmers what Fields called a "social space" whereby they preserved an illusory "independence" based on debt and subsistence farming, while the rich planters continued to dominate Southern politics and society. "A caste system as well as a form of labor," historian James M. McPherson wrote, "slavery elevated all whites to the ruling caste and thereby reduced the potential for class conflict." The great abolitionist Frederick Douglass understood this dynamic: The hostility between the whites and blacks of the South is easily explained. It has its root and sap in the relation of slavery, and was incited on both sides by the cunning of the slave masters. Those masters secured their ascendancy over both the poor whites and the Blacks by putting enmity between them. They divided both to conquer each. Slaveholders denounced emancipation as tending to put the white working man on an equality with Blacks, and by this means, they succeed in drawing off the minds of the poor whites from the real fact, that by the rich slave-master, they are already regarded as but a single remove from equality with the slave. Slavery and capitalism Slavery in the colonies helped produce a boom in the 18th century economy that provided the launching pad for the industrial revolution in Europe. From the start, colonial slavery and capitalism were linked. While it is not correct to say that slavery created capitalism, it is correct to say that slavery provided one of the chief sources for the initial accumulations of wealth that helped to propel capitalism forward in Europe and North America. The clearest example of the connection between plantation slavery and the rise of industrial capitalism was the connection between the cotton South, Britain and, to a lesser extent, the Northern industrial states. Here, we can see the direct link between slavery in the U.S. and the development of the most advanced capitalist production methods in the world. Cotton textiles accounted for 75 percent of British industrial employment in 1840, and, at its height, three-fourths of that cotton came from the slave plantations of the Deep South. And Northern ships and ports transported the cotton. To meet the boom in the 1840s and 1850s, the planters became even more vicious. On the one hand, they tried to expand slavery into the West and Central America. The fight over the extension of slavery into the territories eventually precipitated the Civil War in 1861. On the other hand, they drove slaves harder~-~-selling more cotton to buy more slaves just to keep up. On the eve of the Civil War, the South was petitioning to lift the ban on the importation of slaves that had existed officially since 1808. Karl Marx clearly understood the connection between plantation slavery in the cotton South and the development of capitalism in England. He wrote in Capital: While the cotton industry introduced child-slavery into England, in the United States, it gave the impulse for the transformation of the more or less patriarchal slavery into a system of commercial exploitation. In fact, the veiled slavery of the wage-laborers in Europe needed the unqualified slavery of the New World as its pedestal. Capital comes dripping from head to toe, from every pore, with blood and dirt. The close connection between slavery and capitalism, and thus, between racism and capitalism, gives the lie to those who insist that slavery would have just died out. In fact, the South was more dependent on slavery right before the Civil War than it was 50 or 100 years earlier. Slavery lasted as long as it did because it was profitable. And it was profitable to the richest and most "well-bred" people in the world. The Civil War abolished slavery and struck a great blow against racism. But racism itself wasn't abolished. On the contrary, just as racism was created to justify colonial slavery, racism as an ideology was refashioned. It now no longer justified the enslavement of Blacks, but it justified second-class status for Blacks as wage laborers and sharecroppers. Racist ideology was also refashioned to justify imperialist conquest at the turn of the last century. As a handful of competing world powers vied to carve up the globe into colonial preserves for cheap raw materials and labor, racism served as a convenient justification. The vast majority of the world's people were now portrayed as inferior races, incapable of determining their own future. Slavery disappeared, but racism remained as a means to justify the domination of millions of people by the U.S., various European powers, and later by Japan. Because racism is woven right into the fabric of capitalism, new forms of racism arose with changes in capitalism. As the U.S. economy expanded and underpinned U.S. imperial expansion, imperialist racism~-~-which asserted that the U.S. had a right to dominate other peoples, such as Mexicans and Filipinos~-~-developed. As the U.S. economy grew and sucked in millions of immigrant laborers, anti-immigrant racism developed. But these are both different forms of the same ideology~-~-of white supremacy and division of the world into "superior" and "inferior" races~-~-that had their origins in slavery. Racism and capitalism have been intertwined since the beginning of capitalism. You can't have capitalism without racism. Therefore, the final triumph over racism will only come when we abolish racism's chief source~-~-capitalism~-~-and build a new socialist society. 20 + 21 +Our alternative is to vote negative to refuse to participate in activities that support capitalism – key to hollowing out capitalist structures. 22 +Herod 4. Herod, Columbia University Graduate and Political Activist, 2004 (James, Getting Free, http://site.www.umb.edu/faculty/salzman_g/Strate/GetFre/06.htm, JC) 23 + 24 +It is time to try to describe, at first abstractly and later concretely, a strategy for destroying capitalism. This strategy, at its most basic, calls for pulling time, energy, and resources out of capitalist civilization and putting them into building a new civilization. The image then is one of emptying out capitalist structures, hollowing them out, by draining wealth, power, and meaning out of them until there is nothing left but shells. This is definitely an aggressive strategy. It requires great militancy, and constitutes an attack on the existing order. The strategy clearly recognizes that capitalism is the enemy and must be destroyed, but it is not a frontal attack aimed at overthrowing the system, but an inside attack aimed at gutting it, while simultaneously replacing it with something better, something we want. Thus capitalist structures (corporations, governments, banks, schools, etc.) are not seized so much as simply abandoned. Capitalist relations are not fought so much as they are simply rejected. We stop participating in activities that support (finance, condone) the capitalist world and start participating in activities that build a new world while simultaneously undermining the old. We create a new pattern of social relations alongside capitalist relations and then we continually build and strengthen our new pattern while doing every thing we can to weaken capitalist relations. In this way our new democratic, non-hierarchical, non-commodified relations can eventually overwhelm the capitalist relations and force them out of existence. This is how it has to be done. This is a plausible, realistic strategy. To think that we could create a whole new world of decent social arrangements overnight, in the midst of a crisis, during a so-called revolution, or during the collapse of capitalism, is foolhardy. Our new social world must grow within the old, and in opposition to it, until it is strong enough to dismantle and abolish capitalist relations. Such a revolution will never happen automatically, blindly, determinably, because of the inexorable, materialist laws of history. It will happen, and only happen, because we want it to, and because we know what we’re doing and know how we want to live, and know what obstacles have to be overcome before we can live that way, and know how to distinguish between our social patterns and theirs. But we must not think that the capitalist world can simply be ignored, in a live and let live attitude, while we try to build new lives elsewhere. (There is no elsewhere.) There is at least one thing, wage-slavery, that we can’t simply stop participating in (but even here there are ways we can chip away at it). Capitalism must be explicitly refused and replaced by something else. This constitutes War, but it is not a war in the traditional sense of armies and tanks, but a war fought on a daily basis, on the level of everyday life, by millions of people. It is a war nevertheless because the accumulators of capital will use coercion, brutality, and murder, as they have always done in the past, to try to block any rejection of the system. They have always had to force compliance; they will not hesitate to continue doing so. Nevertheless, there are many concrete ways that individuals, groups, and neighborhoods can gut capitalism, which I will enumerate shortly. We must always keep in mind how we became slaves; then we can see more clearly how we can cease being slaves. We were forced into wage-slavery because the ruling class slowly, systematically, and brutally destroyed our ability to live autonomously. By driving us off the land, changing the property laws, destroying community rights, destroying our tools, imposing taxes, destroying our local markets, and so forth, we were forced onto the labor market in order to survive, our only remaining option being to sell, for a wage, our ability to work. It’s quite clear then how we can overthrow slavery. We must reverse this process. We must begin to reacquire the ability to live without working for a wage or buying the products made by wage-slaves (that is, we must get free from the labor market and the way of living based on it), and embed ourselves instead in cooperative labor and cooperatively produced goods. Another clarification is needed. This strategy does not call for reforming capitalism, for changing capitalism into something else. It calls for replacing capitalism, totally, with a new civilization. This is an important distinction, because capitalism has proved impervious to reforms, as a system. We can sometimes in some places win certain concessions from it (usually only temporary ones) and win some (usually short-lived) improvements in our lives as its victims, but we cannot reform it piecemeal, as a system.¶ Thus our strategy of gutting and eventually destroying capitalism requires at a minimum a totalizing image, an awareness that we are attacking an entire way of life and replacing it with another, and not merely reforming one way of life into something else. Many people may not be accustomed to thinking about entire systems and social orders, but everyone knows what a lifestyle is, or a way of life, and that is the way we should approach it. The thing is this: in order for capitalism to be destroyed millions and millions of people must be dissatisfied with their way of life. They must want something else and see certain existing things as obstacles to getting what they want. It is not useful to think of this as a new ideology. It is not merely a belief-system that is needed, like a religion, or like Marxism, or Anarchism. Rather it is a new prevailing vision, a dominant desire, an overriding need. What must exist is a pressing desire to live a certain way, and not to live another way. If this pressing desire were a desire to live free, to be autonomous, to live in democratically controlled communities, to participate in the self-regulating activities of a mature people, then capitalism could be destroyed. Otherwise we are doomed to perpetual slavery and possibly even to extinction. 25 + 26 +The role of the ballot is challenging capitalism in educational spaces – it has seeped into educational sites and has corrupted our epistemology, means K is a prior question. 27 +Giroux ’08. (Henry A, Global Network Television Chair in English and Cultural Studies at McMaster University, and Susan S, Associate Professor of English and Cultural Studies at McMaster University, “Education After Neoliberalism”, December 31 2008, http://www.truth-out.org/archive/component/k2/item/81781:education-after-neoliberalism, 28 + 29 +In spite of the crucial connection between various modes of domination and pedagogy, there is little input from progressive social theorists of what it might mean to theorize how education as a form of cultural politics actually constructs particular modes of address, identification, affective investments and social relations that produce consent and complicity with the ethos and practice of neoliberalism. Hence, while the current economic crisis has called into question the economic viability of neoliberal values and policies, it often does so by implying that neoliberal rationality can be explained through an economic optic alone, and consequently gives the relationship of politics, culture and inequality scant analysis. Neoliberal rationality is lived and legitimated in relation to the intertwining of culture, politics and meaning. Any viable challenge to the culture of neoliberalism as well as the current economic crisis it has generated must address not merely the diffuse operations of power throughout civil society and the globe, but also what it means to engage those diverse educational sites producing and legitimating neoliberal common sense, whether they be newspapers, advertising, the Internet, television or more recent spheres developed as part of the new information revolution. In addition, it is crucial to examine what role public intellectuals, think tanks, the media and universities actually play pedagogically in constructing and legitimating neoliberal world views, and how the latter works pedagogically in producing neoliberal subjects and securing consent. - EntryDate
-
... ... @@ -1,0 +1,1 @@ 1 +2016-12-03 21:15:41.0 - Judge
-
... ... @@ -1,0 +1,1 @@ 1 +Nikunj Patel - Opponent
-
... ... @@ -1,0 +1,1 @@ 1 +Winston Churchill BW - ParentRound
-
... ... @@ -1,0 +1,1 @@ 1 +2 - Round
-
... ... @@ -1,0 +1,1 @@ 1 +5 - Team
-
... ... @@ -1,0 +1,1 @@ 1 +Westwood Dambal Neg - Title
-
... ... @@ -1,0 +1,1 @@ 1 +NOVDEC - Cap K - Tournament
-
... ... @@ -1,0 +1,1 @@ 1 +UT
- Caselist.RoundClass[1]
-
- Cites
-
... ... @@ -1,0 +1,1 @@ 1 +2 - EntryDate
-
... ... @@ -1,0 +1,1 @@ 1 +2016-12-03 21:05:02.0 - Judge
-
... ... @@ -1,0 +1,1 @@ 1 +Alexander Chase - Opponent
-
... ... @@ -1,0 +1,1 @@ 1 +Southlake Carroll RP - Round
-
... ... @@ -1,0 +1,1 @@ 1 +3 - RoundReport
-
... ... @@ -1,0 +1,5 @@ 1 +1ac - stock 2 +1nc - Dem Auth CP Indemn DA case 3 +1ar - all 4 +2nr - all 5 +2ar - all - Tournament
-
... ... @@ -1,0 +1,1 @@ 1 +UT
- Caselist.RoundClass[2]
-
- Cites
-
... ... @@ -1,0 +1,1 @@ 1 +3 - EntryDate
-
... ... @@ -1,0 +1,1 @@ 1 +2016-12-03 21:15:38.0 - Judge
-
... ... @@ -1,0 +1,1 @@ 1 +Nikunj Patel - Opponent
-
... ... @@ -1,0 +1,1 @@ 1 +Winston Churchill BW - Round
-
... ... @@ -1,0 +1,1 @@ 1 +5 - RoundReport
-
... ... @@ -1,0 +1,5 @@ 1 +1ac - sousveillance 2 +1nc - cap k case 3 +1ar - all 4 +2nr - all 5 +2ar - all - Tournament
-
... ... @@ -1,0 +1,1 @@ 1 +UT