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... ... @@ -1,92 +1,0 @@ 1 -=Structural Violence 1AC= 2 - 3 -====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.==== 4 - 5 -====The standard is minimizing oppression==== 6 - 7 -====Structural violence is based in moral exclusion which is flawed because exclusion is based on arbitrarily perceived difference.==== 8 -**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. 9 -Finally, to recognize the operation of structural violence forces us to ask questions about 10 -AND 11 -local cultures, will be our most surefooted path to building lasting peace. 12 - 13 -====Theories that can~’t create material change in the real world are counter-productive and threaten actual solutions to oppression.==== 14 -**Curry 14.** Tommy J. "The Cost of a Thing: A Kingian Reformulation of a Living Wage Argument in the 21st Century" (2014) Victory Briefs, p. 55-56 Assistant Professor, Department of Philosophy, Texas AandM 15 -Despite the pronouncement of debate as an activity and intellectual exercise pointing to the real 16 -AND 17 -used to currently justify the living wages in under our contemporary moral parameters. 18 - 19 -==Contention 1 is Police Violence== 20 - 21 -====Police brutality exacerbates racial divisions==== 22 -**Panwala 3** 23 -Asit S. Panwala (Assistant District Attorney, Felony Cases, Bronx County District Attorney~’s Office; B.A., Berkeley; J.D., NYU). "The Failure of Local and Federal Prosecutors to Curb Police Brutality." Fordham Urban Law Journal, Volume 30, Issue 2 (2003) Article 7. http://ir.lawnet.fordham.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=207926context=ulj 24 -Although police departments across the country have attempted to ameliorate the hostility between police officers 25 -AND 26 -law, especially when the racial dynamics of police brutality are considered.7 27 - 28 - 29 -====Queer bodies are also more likely to be victims of police violence. ==== 30 -**Meyer 15 **(Doug Meyer, "Violence Against Queer People: Race, Class, Gender, and the Persistence of Anti-LGBT Discrimination", Professor of Women, Gender, and Sexuality at the University of Virginia, 2015) 31 -In this sense, Kevin~’s interpretation of the officers~’ behavior seems accu¬rate, as he 32 -AND 33 -with respect" by police officers than when she was perceived as transgender. 34 - 35 -====Stronger civil liability is key to restore trust in the police force==== 36 -**De Stefan 16** 37 -Lindsey De Stefan (J.D. Candidate, 2017, Seton Hall University School of Law). ""No Man Is Above the Law and No Man Is Below It:" How Qualified Immunity Reform Could Create Accountability and Curb Widespread Police Misconduct" (2016). Law School Student Scholarship. Paper 850. JDN. http://scholarship.shu.edu/student_scholarship/850 38 - 39 -Unfortunately, while the FBI plans to improve its system for gathering information about the 40 -AND 41 -of the stringent immunity afforded to police officers could take effect relatively quickly. 42 - 43 -==Contention 2 is Misconduct== 44 - 45 -====Misconduct leads to a cycle of corruption and low trust in government==== 46 -**Panwala 3** 47 -Asit S. Panwala (Assistant District Attorney, Felony Cases, Bronx County District Attorney~’s Office; B.A., Berkeley; J.D., NYU). "The Failure of Local and Federal Prosecutors to Curb Police Brutality." Fordham Urban Law Journal, Volume 30, Issue 2 (2003) Article 7. http://ir.lawnet.fordham.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=207926context=ulj 48 - 49 -The criminal, a marginalized member of society, is in many ways the perfect 50 -AND 51 -officers~~ to abuse their authority in other ways, including corruption." 9 52 - 53 - 54 -====Limiting qualified immunity is key to hold police accountable==== 55 -**Wright 15** 56 -Sam Wright (Public Interest Lawyer). "Want to Fight Police Misconduct? Reform Qualified Immunity." Above the Law. 3 November 2015. http://abovethelaw.com/2015/11/want-to-fight-police-misconduct-reform-qualified-immunity/ 57 -In order to truly hold police accountable for bad acts, civilians must be able 58 -AND 59 -want to see justice done, we should push to make it happen. 60 - 61 -====Civil liability is the best starting point for challenging police misconduct more broadly==== 62 -**De Stefan 16** 63 -Lindsey De Stefan (J.D. Candidate, 2017, Seton Hall University School of Law). ""No Man Is Above the Law and No Man Is Below It:" How Qualified Immunity Reform Could Create Accountability and Curb Widespread Police Misconduct" (2016). Law School Student Scholarship. Paper 850. http://scholarship.shu.edu/student_scholarship/850 64 - 65 -In recent months, it has been impossible to ignore the overwhelming presence of police 66 -AND 67 -in decreasing the overall incidence of police misconduct in the United States. 68 - 69 -====Single cases can create a domino effect, justifying more serious future offenses==== 70 -**Leong 6** 71 -Nancy Leong (Research Scholar, Georgetown University Law Center; J.D., Stanford Law School, 2006). "The Saucier Qualified Immunity Experiment: An Empirical Analysis." (2009). Faculty Publications. Paper 66. http://scholarship.law.wm.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=106326context=facpubs 72 -One might expect that the Supreme Court would be less concerned about the implications of 73 -AND 74 -thus correctly held in Pearson that sequencing take place at the court~’s discretion. 75 - 76 -==Contention 3 is Police Effectiveness== 77 - 78 -====Trust in police plays a larger role in reducing crime than deterrence==== 79 -**Tyler et al. 15** 80 -Tom R. Tyler (Yale Law School and Yale University), Phillip Atiba Goff (University of California, Los Angeles), and Robert J. MacCoun (Stanford Law School). "The Impact of Psychological Science on Policing in the United States: Procedural Justice, Legitimacy, and Effective Law Enforcement." Psychological Science in the Public Interest (Volume 16, Number 3). 2 November 2015. http://www.psychologicalscience.org/index.php/publications/policing.html 81 - 82 -In the past few decades, law enforcement has primarily used a deterrence model to 83 -AND 84 -by reporting crimes, identifying criminals, and acting as witnesses during trials. 85 - 86 -====Studies show increased accountability improves police effectiveness==== 87 -**Schwartz 15** 88 -Joanna Schwartz (Law Professor at UCLA); interview with Paul Rosenberg (California-based writer/activist, senior editor for Random Lengths News, and a columnist for Al Jazeera English). "We must make the police pay: When cops go too far, they must feel the pain too." Salon. 9 May 2015. http://www.salon.com/2015/05/09/we_must_make_the_police_pay_when_cops_go_too_far_they_must_feel_the_pain_too/ 89 - 90 -But beyond that issue of strengthening police accountability, there needs to be a much 91 -AND 92 -these horrible events that have been in the media over the past year. - EntryDate
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... ... @@ -1,90 +1,0 @@ 1 -====The role of the ballot is to vote for the debater that presents the best governmental policy option – key to out of round advocacy skills.==== 2 -Nixon 2K (Themba-Nixon, Makani. Executive Director of The Praxis Project, a nonprofit organization helping communities use media and policy advocacy to advance health equity and justice~~, "Changing the Rules: What Public Policy Means for Organizing" Colorlines 3.2, 2000) 3 - 4 -Getting It in 5 -AND 6 -making it so. 7 - 8 -====I value morality, as per the evaluative term, ~’ought~’ in the resolution.==== 9 - 10 - 11 -====The standard is minimizing suffering.==== 12 - 13 - 14 -====We ground our existence through experience. Practical reason is arbitrary, meaning sentience is the only non-arbitrary source of normativity. Pain is universally bad and pleasure is universally good. ==== 15 -Thomas **Nagel ~’86** ~~"The View From Nowhere", 1986~~ //AG 16 -I shall defend 17 -AND 18 -the appearances here. 19 - 20 -==Plan== 21 - 22 -====Plan Text: Countries should prohibit the production of Floating Nuclear Power Plants in the OSPAR region. I reserve the right to clarify anything about the plan in cx.==== 23 - 24 - 25 -====Floating Nuclear Power Plants are specifically bad in the arctic – high risk of accidents and annihilation of marine ecosystems.==== 26 -**KIMO 11 **(KIMO International (Kommunenes Internasjonale Miljøorganisasjon) a local authorities international environmental organization designed to give municipalities a political voice at regional, EU and international level. Greenpeace International is an independent global campaigning organization that acts to change attitudes and behavior, to protect and conserve the environment and to promote peace. "Concerns on Floating and Submerged Nuclear Power Plants," The OSPAR Commission. Deep Sea Research Part B. Oceanographic Literature Review 31.12. 2011. http://www.nuclearpolicy.info/docs/news/KIMO_OSPAR_Sellafield_FNPP.pdf) //WW JA 8/26/16 27 -*** OSPAR is basically the Arctic region. 28 -Recent developments in 29 -AND 30 -OSPAR Maritime region. 31 - 32 -==The Advantage is Environmental Damage== 33 - 34 -===Two Internal Link Scenarios=== 35 - 36 - 37 -====1 – Warming==== 38 - 39 -====We~’re on track to solve warming in the status-quo.==== 40 -**Khomami 16.** Nadia Khomami is a news reporter at the Guardian. She also writes features on music, politics and popular culture. You can follow her on Twitter. , 9-3-2016, "G20 summit: US and China ratify Paris climate change agreement," Guardian, https://www.theguardian.com/world/live/2016/sep/03/g20-summit-obama-to-make-climate-change-announcement-as-may-heads-to-china-live //RS 41 -The US has 42 -AND 43 -later in September." 44 - 45 -====FNPPs erode the Arctic environment.==== 46 -**Nikitin 04** (Alexandr Konstantinovich Nikitin is a retired first rank captain and a former nuclear installations safety inspector for the Russian Ministry of Defense (1987-1992). He is an author of multiple publications concerning the problems of radiation safety in the northern seas. Vladimir Mikhailovich Desyatov is a trained shipbuilding engineer. He has also been a representative of the President of Russia in the Khabarovsk region Igor Victorovich Forofontov is the coordinator of the Greenpeace nuclear campaign in Russia. He graduated from the physics faculty of Leningrad State University. Yevgeney Yakovlevic Simonov is a senior engineer and chief of shift at the Obninsk Nuclear Power Plant (NPP), a nuclear operator on board the 900 series nuclear submarines and one of the heads of laboratory involved in the technical expert review of NPP project documentation. Ilya Borisovich Kolton was a scientific collaborator in the Kurchatov Institute within the technological-scientific centre of GosAtomNadzor. Alexey Vladimirovich Yablokov is a corresponding member of the Russian Academy of Science. He is a former environmental adviser to the Russian President and former chairman of the governmental commission on sea-dumping of radioactive wastes. Vladimir Mikhailovich Kuznetsov is a former head (1986-1993) of the Russian Federal Inspectorate for Nuclear and Radiation Safety~’s (GosAtomNadzor) department for supervision and inspection of nuclear and radiation safety at atomic engineering installations. "FLOATING NUCLEAR POWER PLANTS IN RUSSIA: A THREAT TO THE ARCTIC, WORLD OCEANS AND NON-PROLIFERATION TREATY," Green Cross Russia Third edition Edited and published by "Agenstwo Rakurs Production" Ltd Moscow, 2004 ISBN 2004. http://www.greencross.ch/uploads/media/gc_fnpp_book.pdf) //TruLe 47 -*** IRG – Inert Radioactive Gases*** 48 -When normal operating 49 -AND 50 -a vent pipe. 51 - 52 -====2 – Oil spills==== 53 - 54 -====FNPPs will be used to power oil rigs – the impact is major oil spills and annihilation of marine ecosystems.==== 55 -**Hunziker 15.** (Robert Hunziker. "Drilling and Nuclear Power in the Arctic", Counter Punch, 6-10-2015, http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/06/10/drilling-and-nuclear-power-in-the-arctic/)//DM Accessed 9-8-2016 56 -Not only that, 57 -AND 58 -of U.S. agencies. 59 - 60 -===Impacts=== 61 - 62 -====Arctic oil spills and warming cause planetary extinction – the Arctic is a keystone ecosystem. ==== 63 -WWF 10 (World Wildlife Fund, "Drilling for Oil in the Arctic: Too Soon, Too Risky" 12/1/10, http://assets.worldwildlife.org/publications/393/files/original/Drilling_for_Oil_in_the_Arctic_Too_Soon_Too_Risky.pdf?1345753131)//WL 64 -The Arctic and the subarctic regions surrounding it are important for many reasons. One 65 -AND 66 -of any credible and tested means of responding effectively to a major spill. 67 - 68 -====Deep sea biodiversity loss risks extinction ==== 69 -**Danovaro 8 **~~Professor Roberto Danovaro, Scitizen.Com, February 12, 2008. "Deep-Sea Biodiversity Conservation Needed to Avoid Ecosystem Collapse". http://scitizen.com/stories/Biodiversity/2008/02/Deep-Sea-Biodiversity-Conservation-Needed-to-Avoid-Ecosystem-Collapse/~~ 70 -The exploration of 71 -AND 72 -on the planet. 73 - 74 -====Biodiversity loss and warming destroy Arctic indigenous communities.==== 75 -**Stepien 14** (Adam Stepien is a researcher at the Arctic Centre, University of Lapland, Finland. "Arctic Indigenous Peoples, Climate Change Impacts, and Adaptation," E-International Relations. April 10, 2014. http://www.e-ir.info/2014/04/10/arctic-indigenous-peoples-climate-change-impacts-and-adaptation/) //WW JA 8/27/16 76 -Identified impacts are 77 -AND 78 -vector-borne diseases. 79 - 80 -====Russia is shifting to renewables in the status-quo regardless of the plan.==== 81 -**Breyer 15.** Christian Breyer, Professor, 12-30-2015, "Russia can become one of the most energy-competitive areas based on renewables," LUT, http://www.lut.fi/web/en/news/-/asset_publisher/lGh4SAywhcPu/content/russia-can-become-one-of-the-most-energy-competitive-areas-based-on-renewables //RS 82 -A fully renewable 83 -AND 84 -America and Finland. 85 - 86 -====Russian FNPPs are located in seismic hotspots. Earthquake related devastation is inevitable.==== 87 -**Andreyev 11** (Alexandr Konstantinovich Nikitin is a retired first rank captain and a former nuclear installations safety inspector for the Russian Ministry of Defense (1987-1992). He is an author of multiple publications concerning the problems of radiation safety in the northern seas. Leonid Andreyev is a Doctor of Economics and an economics expert for the Bellona Foundation. "Floating nuclear power plants," The Bellona Foundation. 2011. http://bellona.no/assets/sites/4/Floating-nuclear-power-plants.pdf) //WW JA 8/26/16 88 -In terms of 89 -AND 90 -will be unavoidable. - EntryDate
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... ... @@ -1,45 +1,0 @@ 1 -Part 1 is The Fence 2 -Qualified immunity gives the US Border Patrol a shield under which it brutally tortures and kills Mexicans. 3 -Kennis 16. (Andrew Kennis. Andrew Kennis is an international journalist, a higher education pedagogue and an academic researcher specializing in Digital Journalism Studies, Communication Policy Studies, Global Media, Political Communication, Political Economy and International Communications. Dr. Kennis was recently appointed as a Visiting Assistant Professor at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), where he will teach several courses, including a graduate seminar analyzing the news media and the drug war. He recently completed his third year as an Assistant Professor at the University of Texas, El Paso (UTEP), where he undertook research on and taught courses in journalism studies and practice, global media and the drug war. While publishing peer-reviewed, scholarly research and completing grant-funded studies, Dr. Kennis still continues to practice journalism from many corners of the globe. As a researcher, Dr. Kennis has published in peer review journals ranging across three different disciplines (communications, political science and technology studies). He has won top conference paper awards and presented his work in both the United States and abroad (London, Tokyo, Vancouver and Mexico City). University-level courses Dr. Kennis has designed and taught have included "Multimedia Writing," "Investigative and Public Affairs Reporting," "Digital Media and Globalization," “Global Media, Money and Power," "Media and the Drug War," "Media and Democracy," “Politics and the Media,” and other classes in political science, policy studies and society and technology studies. As a journalist, Dr. Kennis has practiced online-based / convergence reporting, investigative and print reporting, citizen journalism, and online-based and traditional radio throughout the last fifteen years. He has reported from locations based in four continents and over twenty countries across the globe, including on-the-scene reporting from the El Paso / Ciudad Juarez border corridor, Brazil, Colombia, Israel and the Occupied Territories, Japan, Venezuela, Taiwan, Guatemala and Mexico. Dr. Kennis served as the border correspondent for teleSUR's English division and has also published in a variety of news sources, including The Christian Science Monitor, Al Jazeera English, teleSUR English, Proceso (Mexico), Time Out, emeequis (Mexico). His work has resulted in invited on-air expert appearances on both live international television and radio broadcasts. “Supreme Court to Decide Fate of Case That Challenges Cross-Border Killings by US Agents”. 03/30/16. https://news.vice.com/article/supreme-court-cross-border-killing-patrol-agent-usa-mexico) TruLe 4 -Sergio Adrián Hernández was a slender 15-year-old boy who loved soccer and aspired to be a police officer when he was shot through his left eye by Jesus Mesa Jr., a US Border Patrol agent, on June 6, 2010 in Ciudad Juárez. Guillermo Arevalo Pedroza, a longtime construction worker, was in the midst of a family barbecue picnic and birthday celebration on September 3, 2012 when he was shot by the Border Patrol. The 37-year-old Arevalo bled to death in his 10-year-old daughter's arms in Nuevo Laredo, just across the border from Laredo, Texas. José Antonio Elena Rodríguez was taking an evening walk to pick up a hot dog at a local food stand when he was hit by at least 12 rounds from a Border Patrol agent's .40 caliber pistol. The 16-year-old died on October 10, 2012 in Nogales near the Arizona border. Juan Pablo Santillan was collecting firewood on July 7, 2012 with his brother when he was killed in Nogales. His brother said the man behind the gun responded to an appeal for help by yelling "Let the dog die." 5 -All these victims were Mexican nationals who were unarmed and, according to background checks, only one had a criminal record. All the deaths occurred in border towns in Mexico. Most importantly, they were among the seven people killed on Mexican soil since 2010 by Border Patrol agents who fired their weapons from the US side of the border. Based on more than 13,000 documents worth of data coming from Border Patrol reports, records from the Mexican foreign ministry, news accounts compiled by the Southern Border Coalition, and an investigation by the Arizona Republic, Border Patrol agents have killed at least 52 people since 2004, including 15 US citizens, with 30 of those fatalities occurring since 2010, including the seven cross-border cases. Now the families of these victims, their lawyers and advocacy groups, have joined together to force a decision with important implications for border politics, as well as their respective quest for justice. One of the cases, the shooting of the 15-year-old boy, led to a lawsuit— Hernández v. Mesa— that is now before the US Supreme Court, which is due to decide by April 1 whether to postpone the case, fully consider it, or throw it out altogether. At the same time, several other cases are moving through the courts, including another civil suit that is similar to the one being considered by the Supreme Court and the first criminal case ever to be prosecuted for a cross-border shooting. If the Supreme Court either rejects the case, or if it upholds the last appellate court ruling in the government's favor, Mexican families will not have the right to sue the government for civil rights violations of deceased relatives who have been victims of cross-border killings at the hands of Border Patrol agents. However, if Mexican families win either or both of the civil cases, they will gain Fourth and Fifth Amendment rights, including the chance to sue Border Patrol agents who kill or seriously injure their family members. This could result in compensatory damages via the constitutional and civil rights they will have gained. The Hernández v. Mesa case got to the Supreme Court after the notoriously conservative Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, which has jurisdiction over all of Texas and many border areas, ruled against the families. The government argues that this is a case where "qualified immunity" applies to the agent responsible for the shooting. This means that in order to successfully sue a government official, you have to show a violation of clearly established law. The Fifth Circuit agreed, reasoning that it is not clearly established by law that the US Constitution applies to a Mexican national killed in Mexico. Lawyers representing the families argue that this argument circumvents the obvious. "You don't need a court decision to say that it is wrong to kill an unarmed 15-year-old boy," says Steve Shadowen, one of the lawyers representing the Hernández family. "It's common sense and decency that you get judicial review when it comes to police killings of unarmed children," he added. Shadowen also stressed that at the time Hernández was shot, the officer didn't know whether the boy was a US or a Mexican national. Federal agencies — Border Patrol is part of US Customs and Border Protection (CBP), which is part of the Department of Homeland Security — have tended to justify cross-border killings on the grounds that Border Patrol agents only shot because they were in danger from the victims throwing rocks at them. Lawyers for the families of shooting victims have dismissed this argument, as have US government officials in other contexts. When Hillary Clinton was secretary of state, she criticized Egyptian security forces for using deadly force against stone-throwing protesters shortly before the fall of the US-supported Hosni Mubarak regime. At the international level, United Nations Commissions on Human Rights, civil rights groups such as the American Civil Liberties Union, and human rights groups such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have issued condemnations against fatal force being used against rock throwers. The so-called "rockers" defense was used in the case of Hernández, though now there are serious doubts about whether the teen ever even threw a stone before he was killed on the Mexican side of the Rio Grande. James Tomsheck, a former CBP internal affairs director turned whistleblower, recently wrote in a deposition for the Supreme Court case that he saw three different videotapes of the murder of Hernández, and they all confirmed that the teenager did not throw any rocks at Mesa. Related: 'It's an American Problem': Meet the Militias Patrolling the US Border Tomsheck also recalled the assessment of a senior FBI official who stated that if the Border Patrol were a municipal police agency, its excessive use of force would have resulted in it being put into "federal receivership," similar to what has happened in Ferguson, Albuquerque, and other cities with troubled police departments where the Department of Justice has intervened by launching civil rights probes. The 52 people killed by Border Patrol agents since 2004 include several unarmed men who were beaten to death, a Mexican citizen who died after he was forced to drink concentrated liquid methamphetamine, and other civilians who were shot, pepper-sprayed, or shocked with stun guns. Some frontier watchers say Border Patrol violence is linked to less stringent recruiting standards and poor training amid a push to militarize the border that goes back several administrations. The efforts first began in the mid-90s, but accelerated dramatically after George W. Bush signed the 2006 Secure Fence Act, which led to more than 600 miles of fencing and additional funding for staff and surveillance. Funding increases continued under the Obama administration, which has deported more people than in any other previous administration. "This The means by which potentially hired Border Patrol personnel have been screened has led to a significant percentage who are unfit to carry a gun and a badge," said Chris Rickerd, a staff attorney at the American Civil Liberties Union who has long monitored the lack of punishments registered against the Border Patrol. "It is the largest law enforcement agency in the country, but doesn't nearly have the commensurate oversight and accountability it needs." It is rare for CBP to even release the names of agents involved in shootings or the identities of their victims, and, until recently, there had never been a criminal charge filed against any Border Patrol agent involved in a fatal cross-border shooting. Last September, CPB agent Lonnie Swartz was charged with second-degree murder for killing 16-year-old José Antonio Elena Rodríguez. Swartz shot the teenager at least 10 times from the US side of the border while Elena Rodríguez was taking a nighttime stroll down International Avenue in Nogales, Mexico in 2012. Luis Parra, a Nogales and Tucson, Arizona-based lawyer, is representing the family of Elena Rodríguez. "There has never been a cross-border homicide case, ever," he said. "It is unique." Parra maintains that the government is contradicting itself by charging one of its officers with murder while also taking the position that "qualified immunity" applies to civil cases related to cross-border shootings. Parra added that his client's citizenship is irrelevant. "There was a boy that was shot with 10 bullets in his own country and he was not committing any crimes," he said. "What gives them the right to spray 10 bullets into a boy in his own country?" For more than a half-decade, grieving Mexican families who have lost relatives to Border Patrol shootings have had to contend with contradictory legal decisions that have given them both victories and defeats on the path to the Supreme Court. "Maybe, just maybe because of the death of my son, all of this mess will change," Araceli Rodríguez Salazar told VICE News. "I don't want any other parents to suffer in the manner in which I have." Rodríguez is the mother of José Antonio Elena Rodríguez, the 16-year-old who was shot unarmed in Nogales, and whose case is currently being considered in the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. Guillermo Arevalo Pedroza, the unarmed construction worker killed by the Border Patrol in 2012, was "a happy person, a playful father and a family man. He liked to play and watch soccer," his widow Nora Isabel Lam told VICE News. "Nobody expected it and I never thought they were going to kill my husband," she said. "I am not sure if the case will be considered but I simply pray that good news will come out this when all is said and done." Whether Border Patrol agents will ultimately be held accountable for cross-border shootings depends on the pending Supreme Court case regarding the killing of 15-year-old Sergio Adrián Hernández. Prior to their case reaching the high court, the Hernández family had a string of ups and downs in the courtroom. In 2012, a lower court judge acknowledged that the case involved the "wrongful taking of life," but ultimately ruled that it should be dismissed because "the victim was not a US citizen and incurred the injury in Mexico." A partial panel of the Fifth Circuit Court reversed the decision in 2014, resulting in an unexpected and significant victory for the Hernández family. But even that gain was short-lived — the full court reversed the decision after an appeal by the Obama administration. Now, the Hernández family awaits word on whether its own appeal will be heard from the Supreme Court. The court has until Friday to decide which direction it wants to go with a case that has seen a flurry of contradictory rulings. Robert Hilliard, a lawyer for the Hernández family based in Corpus Christi, Texas, will handle oral arguments in the case if the justices decide to hear it. He has never argued a case in front of the Supreme Court, but his colleagues told VICE News that he has been known to "bring courtrooms to tears." Shadowen, another Hernández family attorney and Hilliard's colleague, said he thinks it is unlikely to be thrown out, in large part because the justices decided late last year to send the case to Solicitor General Donald B. Verrilli, Jr., the government's legal expert and adviser, for consideration. Although Verrilli wrote in opposition to the Mexican families on behalf of the federal government, Shadowen said that it's a less important indicator than the fact that most cases sent to the solicitor general for an opinion end up being fully considered by the Supreme Court. In light of the recent death of Justice Antonin Scalia, however, some believe that the most likely decision will be a delay. Parra, the Elena Rodríguez lawyer, said that this could also give more importance to his pending case before the Ninth Circuit since it could come to trial before the Supreme Court decides anything on the Hernández case. Lower courts have ruled favorably for Elena Rodríguez, which could be significant going forward depending on the outcome of the separate Supreme Court case. Hilliard nevertheless remains optimistic about his chances. He told VICE News that, at the end of the day, "You can't have a free killing zone or a place where law enforcement agents are allowed to shoot and murder innocent Mexican nationals without civil recourse." In spite of Hilliard's optimism, the question remains: Will border immunity in terms of cross-border killings continue to survive without any legal recourse for Mexican victims? Nothing less than that question is what is at stake this week in light of the pending decision to be taken by the Supreme Court. 6 -The Border Patrol systematically uses the legal system as a tool to hide their violence and to absolve themselves of any responsibility. 7 -Bennett 15. Brian Bennett, 6-15-2015, "Border Patrol absolves itself in dozens of cases of lethal force," La Times, http://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-border-patrol-shootings-20150615-story.html//AD 8 -A U.S. Border Patrol agent who killed an unarmed 15-year-old Mexican boy by shooting him in the face after a rock-throwing incident on a border bridge to El Paso in 2010 was recently cleared of wrongdoing by the agency's internal affairs office. So was a Border Patrol agent who shot and killed a 17-year-old Mexican who threw rocks from the Mexican side of the border fence near Nogales, Ariz., in 2011. Internal affairs also cleared an agent who shot and killed a 19-year-old U.S. citizen as he climbed over a border fence into Mexico near Douglas, Ariz., in 2011. Agents said the man was seeking to flee after driving a narcotics-laden truck into a Border Patrol vehicle. In all, an internal investigation of 67 shooting incidents, which left 19 people dead, absolved agents of criminal misconduct in all but three cases, which are still pending. The review was completed last month. None of the agents involved has been charged with a crime, said Anthony Triplett, who helped direct the review at the office of internal affairs for U.S. Customs and Border Protection, the parent agency of the Border Patrol. Only two agents faced disciplinary action. Both received oral reprimands. Criminal charges are still possible in the three pending cases, officials said. Prosecutors in the Justice Department's civil rights division have been investigating those lethal shootings, all from 2012, since they occurred. The agents in those three cases are still conducting armed patrols on the border, officials said. Critics along the Southwest border and in Mexico long have argued that the Border Patrol, the federal government's largest law enforcement force, operates with little transparency or accountability in cases involving purported abuses. The agency's broad approval of its own record in scores of shooting cases, despite vows by the Obama administration to crack down on agents who use excessive force, is unlikely to change that perception. "We are deeply disappointed" with the lack of action, said Juanita Molina, executive director of Border Action Network, a human rights organization based in Tucson. "When you have someone throwing rocks and someone responding with lethal force, it is just not proportional." "Turning the page doesn't mean burying the past," said Chris Rickerd, a border security expert at the American Civil Liberties Union in Washington. "There is no assurance to border residents that agents who have used excessive, improper lethal force aren't on the job in their communities." Administration officials say they are determined to restore public trust in the Border Patrol despite its tradition of closing ranks around its paramilitary culture. Last month, Customs and Border Protection made it possible for people to file written complaints against officers in Spanish for the first time. The move came after pressure from activists who said the Border Patrol deliberately made it difficult to file complaints. Unlike domestic police departments, the 21,000-member Border Patrol released almost no public information about shootings, including the outcome of its investigations, until recently. That practice has started to ease slightly as supervisors have been granted more latitude from headquarters to describe individual incidents. The internal affairs review was started in July after an earlier study of the same 67 shooting cases by an independent group of law enforcement experts found a pattern of agents firing in frustration at people throwing rocks from across the border, as well as agents deliberately stepping in front of cars apparently to justify shooting at the drivers. That study by the Police Executive Research Forum, a nonprofit research and policy organization in Washington, criticized the Border Patrol for a "lack of diligence" in investigating its deadly incidents. The Border Patrol did not give a copy to Congress until the Los Angeles Times Washington Bureau disclosed its contents in February 2014. In response, R. Gil Kerlikowske, commissioner of Customs and Border Protection, ordered new limits on when Border Patrol agents were permitted to fire their weapons and revamped weapons training. He also removed the longtime head of internal affairs and created an internal panel to review incidents of deadly force. He also tapped an FBI agent, Mark Morgan, to temporarily lead the office of internal affairs and to review the 67 cases, which date from January 2010 to October 2012. Before he returned to the FBI in December, Morgan had helped identify cases with gaps, a lack of witness statements or other discrepancies. Sixty-three cases were subsequently cleared. Three others are with the Justice Department. Disciplinary action is still possible in the final case. Last Monday, Kerlikowske named a new head of internal affairs. Matthew Klein spent 26 years in the police department that serves Washington, D.C., and he oversaw deadly force investigations when the department was following a federal mandate to improve its treatment of citizens. In an interview, Klein said he wanted the Justice Department to decide more quickly whether to bring charges in border shootings. "We would prefer a faster resolution," Klein said. He said he would bring up the three pending cases with Justice Department lawyers. Until recently, internal affairs officers were not permitted to begin criminal investigations of Customs and Border Protection officers and agents. Jeh Johnson, secretary of Homeland Security, expanded their authority last year, and Klein said the new powers should allow them to investigate "more completely." Janet Napolitano, who headed Homeland Security from 2009 to 2013, said Friday that she sought to take on the spate of border shootings during her tenure. She expressed frustration that some of the cases were still pending. "I think part of it was just the civil rights division is only so big and it can take that long," said Napolitano, who now heads the University of California system. "I would say that ideally, yes, those cases would move more quickly." Napolitano would not discuss specific lethal-force cases because she is a defendant in multiple lawsuits brought by families of people killed by Border Patrol agents. The three cases still under investigation at the Justice Department involve three Mexican men who were shot and killed from across the border. In one, Border Patrol agents repeatedly shot at Juan Pablo Perez Santillan, 30, as he stood watch for a group of migrants crossing the Rio Grande illegally near Brownsville, Texas, in July 2012. According to a lawsuit his family filed in U.S. District Court in Texas, an agent used a high-power scope on his rifle to aim at Perez Santillan and fired at least five times, hitting him in the chest. After Perez Santillan's brother Damien pleaded for help, one agent shouted back, "Que se muera el perro," meaning "Let the dog die," the lawsuit states. He died at a hospital. Two months later, a Border Patrol agent in an airboat shot and killed Guillermo are valo Pedraza, 37, in a park across the Rio Grande from L are do, Texas. The agent later said he had been pelted with rocks from shore. Witnesses told the Los Angeles Times last year that are valo was at a family barbecue. That October, an agent in Nogales, Ariz., shot through a border fence after a rock-throwing incident and killed Jose Antonio Elena Rodriguez, 16. The official incident report says the agent fired 15 times. The official autopsy says Rodriguez was hit eight times in the back. 9 -Qualified Immunity is used to commit racialized genocide at the border. 10 -Dunn 01. Dunn, Timothy J. “Border Militarization Via Drug And Immigration enforcement: Human Rights Implications.” Social Justice, vol. 28, no. 2 (84), 2001, pp. 7–30. www.jstor.org/stable/29768073.AD 11 -Military collaboration with the Border Patrol in the U.S.-Mexico border region on drug and immigration enforcement has been extensive and enduring. The military's geographic focus extends beyond the border and it now works with a plethora of police bodies throughout the U.S. on drug enforcement. Such ongoing military involvement in domestic police matters is unique in post-Reconstruction U.S. history. The more militaristic elements of that collaboration and support, however, have focused primarily on the border. Such support gave rise to the tragic killing in 1997 of a U.S. citizen by a Marine during a border-area ground surveillance mission conducted for the Border Patrol. Since then, military collabo? ration has lessened somewhat in practice, but has changed little at the level of formal policy. The door remains open to a return to the use of armed ground troops. Moreover, military support for border policing may expand in the future. Despite the significant human rights implications, neither the military, the Border Patrol, nor policymakers appear to have given them much consideration. What are the human rights implications of military involvement in policing, at the border and beyond? Among the theoretical principles guiding such a discussion is the significance of human rights for nation-state conduct. For Turner (1993: 178, 182), "the point about the concept of human rights is that they are extra governmental and have traditionally been used to counteract the repressive capacity of states...." He proposes that institutions are often responsible for human rights violations, an outcome attributable in part to the bureaucratization process. Dunn Sjoberg and Vaughan (1993:145-146) argue that bureaucracy tends to undermine the human rights of the "truly disadvantaged" through a process of "social triage" that includes the sacrifice of their general well-being and dignity, as well as the occasional use of repression. It becomes more "efficient" to write off the rights and well-being of the most subordinated groups, because to really address their needs would entail profound societal reforms and "sacrifices" on the part of elites (Sjoberg, 1996). Thus, institutions and bureaucratic power structures threaten the rights, dignity, and well-being of people, especially subordinated groups. The military and Border Patrol are bureaucratic entities, and their law enforcement efforts target subordinated groups: working-poor undocumented immigrants, and poor, low-level drug couriers ("mules"). In the borderlands, this generally means people with a Latino/a appearance, especially Mexicans and Mexican Americans. Consequently, increased border enforcement efforts tend to "sacrifice" the human rights of members of those groups (at least more so than those of other groups). The Border Patrol's troubled human rights record in the region reflects this pattern (e.g., Human Rights Watch, 1995; DLEMP, 1992; Dunn, 1996: 83-91; 1999a: Chapter 6; 1999b). The military is responsible for the most severe human rights abuse related to border enforcement to date, the killing of a Mexican American teenager in Redford, Texas. In this instance of (probably unintentional) repression, military conduct was replete with gross misunderstandings by soldiers and their unwarranted escalation of the use of force. The inappropriate matching of military troops against nonmilitary threats (more properly, social problems) illustrates the danger bound up in border enforcement, because they are trained to respond with deadly force to perceived threats, regardless of the objective situation. As Lawrence Korb, a former assistant secretary of defense in the Reagan administration, stated shortly after the Redford incident, "the military, to put it bluntly, is trained to vaporize, not Mirandize" (Holt, 1997c). The institutional forces involved had as little regard for respecting human rights as they did with reading one's rights. Even the less severe forms of military collaboration in border policing have negative implications for the status of human rights. For instance, much of the military training and intelligence support offered by JTF-6 seems inappropriate for civilian police bodies. This is because military interrogation techniques, raids, and intelligence activities are typically not designed or conducted with a concern for the U.S. legal system's requirements for safeguarding suspects' rights, but rather aim to eliminate or neutralize an enemy threat. Even elements of the military recognize this. Part of the fallout from the 1993 Waco tragedy is that the Special Forces Command has since 1996 refused to provide police with training in some of the most extreme military tactics. Another danger is the spread of militarization related to antidrug enforcement from the Southwest border to interior areas. My "spectrum of border militarization" could be used to examine interior areas, for the border experience appears to be a vanguard of a larger process of military/police collaboration. Ground troops have been restricted mainly to border areas, but elsewhere other types of military support for police agencies, such as training in military operational and intelligence tactics, could lead police to adopt ever-more military tactics. (Kraska, 1997, has documented this with regard to the flourishing of police paramilitary units.) The blurring of lines between the police and the military has long been associated with human rights problems, especially in developing countries. Moreover, once military collaboration has developed with the Border Patrol and other police bodies, limiting it to features on the less militaristic end of the continuum has proved difficult, apart from the few actions explicitly prohibited by law (i.e., military troops conducting arrests, searches, or seizures). The tendency seems to be gradual escalation, one quite removed from public consciousness, let alone debate. The Redford tragedy, an illustration of the human rights danger of that evolution, spurred a relatively brief period of public debate and a partial inhibition of the escalation in the militarization of border enforcement. Human rights concerns are by default "sacrificed" in favor of ever-greater drug and immigration enforcement, and perhaps a future "homeland defense" mission for the military that exceeds physical threats. When illegal immigration and drugs are cast principally as security matters, human rights become a secondary concern. Debate could bring to light that the drug issue would be better viewed as a public health problem than a security threat. Scholars have yet to theorize the human rights implications and significance of the trend toward enhanced military collaboration with police border enforcement. The border is a contemporary proving ground for the militarization of law enforcement. Largely out of public view, subordinate groups have been targeted in this peripheral region on a broader scale than anywhere else in contemporary U.S. history. An insidious form of "mission creep," this expansion of militarism is consistent with the state's intensified and punitive wars against crime and drugs. Collaboration between the state's main corporal bureaucratic power structures does not auger well for the vulnerable human rights of subordinated groups, mainly those of Hispanic appearance in the borderlands. Given the importance of human rights as a building block for a decent, democratic society, it would be a grave error if policymakers were to continue to neglect them; their security may even hang in the balance. Beyond making human rights a central consideration in all law enforcement measures, several reforms could address this ominous development. Democratic accountability for JTF-6 and other military bodies engaged in domestic policing could be fostered by requiring regular, detailed, public reporting on their activities and the establishment of a mechanism for public, external oversight and investigation. Another positive step would be to prohibit the most coercive and severe forms of military support for police bodies. An example would be the U.S. Special Forces Command's refusal to allow its troops to provide training to police in several extremely coercive military tactics; such restrictions could be generalized to all U.S. military units. Ultimately, the best course would be to abolish JTF-6 and to sever most or all military ties to domestic police agencies. Recent history in Latin America and other developing regions demonstrates that such collaboration invariably imperils human rights and democracy itself. Beyond these reforms, serious policy attention is needed to address the larger underlying economic, social, political, and cultural dimensions on both sides of the border that drive so much of the cross-border flow of immigrants and drugs. Failure to do so will likely fan the mania for border enforcement and endanger human rights. 12 -Part 2 is The Resistance 13 -Plan text: The Supreme Court of the United States should limit qualified immunity for Border Patrol Agents. To clarify the Supreme Court should rule in favor of Hernandez in the ongoing Hernandez V. Mesa court case. I reserve the right to clarify in cx. 14 - 15 -The plan sets a precedent that holds Border Patrol agents accountable. 16 -TNAP 10/21 (The Tucson News Associated Press frequently writes articles on local and national news related to the Tucson area. “Appeals court considers claim against agent in fatal cross-border shooting,” Tucson.com. October 21, 2016. http://tucson.com/news/local/border/appeals-court-considers-claim-against-agent-in-fatal-cross-border/article_fe6f3ae8-97bc-11e6-9d7f-bb001c158b16.html) WW JA 11/4/16 17 -Allowing a Border Patrol agent to escape trial for shooting a Mexican teen through the border fence in Nogales would expose area residents to the same danger, an attorney for the teen's mother told federal judges Friday. Lee Gelernt, of the American Civil Liberties Union, contends Lonnie Swartz should be forced to answer the wrongful death claim filed by the mother of 16-year-old Jose Antonio Elena Rodriguez. He acknowledged that the boy was not in the United States when shot, nor had he just fled over the fence. In fact, there was no evidence the boy had ever even been in this country or that he wanted to live in this country. But Gelernt told the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals that's legally irrelevant. “We don't think that you need to want to live in the U.S. to not be shot across the border,” he said. Potentially more significant, Gelernt warned the three-judge panel that allowing Swartz — and anyone else who fires shots across the border — to escape civil liability in a cross-border shooting is bad policy. He pointed out that the boy was walking along Calle Internacional, a major street in Nogales, Son., which runs parallel and adjacent to the border fence. “This is a community that has to walk along this street all the time,” Gelernt said. He said they should not have to have some contact with the United States, like asking for health care benefits, to have legal standing and legal protections. “They're just saying that they don't want to be shot when they walk to the store or go to the doctor along the border which it's inescapable that they have to do,” Gelernt said. “They cannot be asked to have to assume the risk of being shot every time they walk along the main thoroughfare.” Swartz has separately been charged with second degree murder, with that case pending before a federal judge in Tucson. But Swartz, who is on administrative leave, is trying to get the indictment dismissed. And Gelernt said even if Swartz is convicted, that is not the same as giving civil relief to the boy's family. The judges are not expected to rule any time soon. The U.S. Supreme Court earlier this month agreed to hear a similar case out of Texas where a Border Patrol agent in 2010 shot and killed a Mexican teen playing in a culvert that separates El Paso from Juarez. The 5th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled last year the parents cannot pursue their claim against Jesus Mesa Jr. because the boy, Sergio Hernandez, was a Mexican citizen “who was on Mexican soil at the time he was shot.” Appellate Judge Milan Smith Jr. said his court will be bound by whatever the Supreme Court rules. But Smith pointed out that there are still only eight justices on the high court. The U.S. Senate has refused to consider the nomination of Merrick Garland by President Obama. And Smith said if the high court splits 4-4 on that Texas case, there will be no precedent set, freeing the 9th Circuit to reach its own conclusion. 18 -The plan is key to accountability and spills over – we catalyze institutional reform. 19 -De Stefan 16. (Lindsey De Stefan is a former lawyer for Maceri and da Costa LLC and currently works for Seton Hall Law Review, 2017, " “No Man Is Above the Law and No Man Is Below It:” How Qualified Immunity Reform Could Create Accountability and Curb Widespread Police Misconduct," Law School Student Scholarship, http://scholarship.shu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1861andamp;context=student_scholarship) RS 20 -Irrespective of whether there has been an increase in the incidence of brutality or whether the nation is merely recognizing what has been an ongoing reality for many U.S. citizens, the existence of a problem is now inescapably obvious. The solution, however, is decidedly less clear. Perhaps none of the aforementioned proposals are the right answer. Alternatively, and more likely, maybe they are all the answer—at least partially and in combination with a number of other considerations. It is improbable that a single factor can be deemed the sole cause of widespread police misconduct. Of course, an elaborate problem with multiple dimensions will require an equally multifaceted solution. In fact, any adequate resolution will likely require the cooperation of many individuals and entities across various disciplines and industries.13 But no matter how winding, every path to change must begin with a single step. And the most logical place to begin is by reforming the stringent protection from civil liability enjoyed by law enforcement officers alleged to have violated individual constitutional rights. This Comment will explore how judicial amendment of the qualified immunity doctrine— specifically as it is applied to law enforcement officers—could serve as a catalyst to begin to rein in police misconduct. Part II will describe the general history of the most significant statutory provision in this context, Section 1983, and the expansion of constitutional torts that occurred in the mid-twentieth century. Part III focuses on the judicial development of qualified immunity in the Supreme Court and explains the status of the doctrine today. Part IV discusses some of the most significant practical problems with the modern qualified immunity jurisprudence and its application. Part V goes on to analyze the recent spotlight on police use of force. Finally, Part VI proposes that judicial amendment of qualified immunity application will serve as an effective first step in decreasing the overall incidence of police misconduct in the United States. 21 -They continue: 22 -By beginning to mend the qualified immunity doctrine in these ways, the Court will allow more civil suits for the vindication of constitutional rights to succeed. This will help to reduce the public mentality—strengthened by recent events—that cops get away with everything, in every regard. Civil suits avoid subjecting law enforcement to any criminal liability that, because of recent events, many laypersons believe is warranted. While this may be true in select circumstances, reality demonstrates that criminal charges are highly unlikely to stick against a police officer. But allowing more civil suits to go forward will serve as an important reminder to both civilians and law enforcement that the police are not above the law, and that they are held accountable for their wrongdoings. In turn, this accountability will begin to heal the relationship between law enforcement and communities by serving as the first step on what will surely be a long path to rebuilding the trust that is so crucial. 23 -Action must be grounded in anti-militarist epistemology – our literal reading of this aff is key to rupture dominant nationalist framing of the border. 24 -Chávez 12 (Karma R. Chávez is an associate professor of rhetoric, politics, and culture at University of Wisconsin-Madison. Ph.D. Arizona State University, 2007. M.A. University of Alabama, 2003. M.A. University of Alabama, 2002. “Border Interventions: The need to Shift from a Rhetoric of Security to a Rhetoric of Militarization,” 2012) JA 11/24/15 25 -Scholars of rhetoric and performance have opened important terrains in the study of immigration and borders pertaining to subjects such as citizenship, media representation, and migrant identity (Cisneros, “(Re)Bordering the Civic imaginary”; DeChaine, “Bordering the Civic imaginary”; McKinnon; o no and Sloop; Shi). Though a number of scholars in other academic disciplines within the humanities and social sciences have written about border militarization (e.g., Andreas, “Redrawing the Line”; Dunn, Militarization of the US Mexico Border; nevins), in reviewing rhetoric and communication scholarship pertaining to immigration and borders, with the exception of a few passing mentions (Demo, “Afterimage” and “Sovereignty Discourse; Carrillo Rowe; DeChaine, “Bordering the Civic imaginary”; o no and Sloop), an engagement with the rhetoric of border militarization is virtually nonexistent. instead, in post–September 11, 2001, US America, where the dominant border rhetorics emerge from the so- called War on Terror, discourses of “border security” and “national security” are the parlance of the day for rhetoric scholars (e.g., Dunmire, “9/11 Changed Everything” and “Preempting the future”; Gales; i vie; i vie and Giner; Mirrlees; o no; Rojecki; Ross). Though many of these analyses offer rigorous critiques of the way security discourses manifest and perpetuate troubling imaginaries of safety and privacy, the problem with the emphasis scholars place on analyses of the rhetoric of security is that it enables state apparatuses and conservative ideology to dictate the framing of discussion and debate. Ono and Sloop argue that discourses construct borders, and I would extend this to say that discourse constitutes the way immigration, generally, is understood. If scholars use the state’s conservative ideographs— their ideological building blocks—to talk about matters of public interest (McGee, “‘ ideograph’”), conservative ideology continues to frame the broader debate in people’s minds. This in turn suggests that the public may be more willing to support problematic state policy and action, for no other terms exist by which to understand important issues. The issue of framing is especially dire in relation to the US- Mexico border, which has, in the eyes of many politicians, pundits, and citizens alike become the greatest source for insecurity in the national imaginary. The discourse of national security intertwines with the War on Terror, the threat of drug smuggling, and the invasion of “illegal aliens” so that militarization of regions of the US- Mexico border seems natural and warranted in order to protect citizens from these supposed threats. Moreover, as scholars increasingly note, “everyday militarization” aptly describes the ways in which “ordinary people” accept the beliefs of militarism and militarization in such a way that upholds state military and militarization policy (Bernazzoli and f lint). Caren Kaplan quips in an essay on how the popularity of technology like Global Positioning Satellites (GPS) can lead to militarized consumers and citizens: “ for most people in the United States, war is almost always everywhere” (693). feminist scholars such as Cynthia Enloe have long called attention to the way that militarization seeps into ordinary lives as a regular part of public discourse (Enloe, Does Khaki Become You?, Globalization and Militarism, Maneuvers ). Because military discourse pervades the everyday, its further expansion in myriad forms proves for many to be commonplace instead of worrisome. Importantly, militarization of the US- Mexico border has not occurred in response to the War on Terror; instead, it has been in the US government’s plan at least since the Reagan administration, and has virtually nothing to do with the events of September 11, 2001 (Dunn, Militarization of the US Mexico Border ). As one example, the immigration and naturalization Services’ ( in S’s) four- phase “Southwest Border Strategy,” implemented post- NAFTA in 1994, strategically planned to militarize the US- Mexico border in order to allegedly deter clandestine crossings (Stana and Rezmovic). The events of September 11, 2001, provided a convenient rationale to heighten these strategies, which had been in motion for decades; yet, a context of “everyday militarization” coupled with the rhetoric of security has obfuscated an urgent need to focus on the devastation of border militarization on border crossers and communities specifically, and privacy and civil liberties more generally. Gordon Mitchell suggests that rhetoric scholars who study social movements should also enable movement with their work. This chapter will demonstrate the need for border rhetoric scholars to turn the discourse of security toward a discourse of militarization in the hopes of making a civic intervention into the broader national debate. If more people understood how militarization works and the careful way that the rhetoric of security disguises its material impacts, it is likely that the US government would be forced to be more accountable to its people, and rhetoric scholars should lead this charge. I begin this argument by first defining militarization and briefly tracing the increase in border militarization, specifically on the US-Mexico border since the mid- to late 1 980s. Next, I outline the severity of the consequences such militarization has had for border communities and border crossers, and what this means for residents of the United States more broadly. I then argue why the language of militarization is so crucial through a brief analysis of Secure Border Initiative Monthly, or SBI Monthly, produced by the Secure Border initiative (SB i ) Program Management o ff ice (PM o ) and designed to provide news and information on the SB i and the now- defunct SB i net, two major programs of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to augment “border security.” These newsletters evidence the ease with which undocumented migration and terrorism are conflated, similarly to how undocumented migration and drug trafficking were conflated. 26 -Anti-militarist knowledge production precedes T/Theory: 27 -1 Militarism controls education – it has seeped into the debate space and corrupted our epistemology. 28 -2 The 1AC appeals to social fairness i.e. the inclusion of minorities in political discourse – outweighs any trivial versions of fairness in the game of debate. 29 -3 No impact to theory – people won’t stop being abusive after this round, but the classroom should be a focal point of resistance – militarism manifests itself in the debate space by silencing deviant viewpoints and rigorously conditioning students to accept the culture of war. 30 -Part 3 is The Mechanism 31 -The role of the ballot is to vote for the debater that best ruptures the ideology of militarization that has infected the public sphere. Resistance to the police state is a prior question. 32 -Giroux 04. (Henry A. Giroux is an American and Canadian scholar and cultural critic. One of the founding theorists of critical pedagogy in the United States, he is best known for his pioneering work in public pedagogy, cultural studies, youth studies, higher education, media studies, and critical theory. “War on Terror The Militarising of Public Space and Culture in the United States”, Third Text, Vol. 18, Issue 4, 2004. http://www.henryagiroux.com/online_articles/Third20Text202004-war20on20terror.pdf) JA 11/26/15 33 -As militarisation spreads its influence both at home and abroad, a culture of fear is mobilised in order to put into place a massive police state intent on controlling and manipulating public speech while making each individual a terrorist suspect subject to surveillance, fingerprinting, and other forms of ‘electronic tattooing’. But the increasing danger of militarisation is also evident in the attempt by the corporate/military/ media complex to create those ideological and pedagogical conditions in which people either become convinced that the power of the commanding institutions of the state should no longer held accountable or believe that they are powerless to challenge the new reign of state terrorism. And as militarisation spreads its values and power throughout American society and the globe, it works to eliminate those public spaces necessary for imagining an inclusive democratic global society. Militarisation and the culture of fear that legitimises it have redefined the very nature of the political, and in so doing have devalued speech and agency as central categories of democratic public life. And it is precisely as a particular ideology and cultural politics that militarisation has to be opposed. As the forces of militarisation are ratcheted up within multiple spaces in the body politic, they increasingly begin to produce the political currency of what begins to look like proto-fascism in the United States. To expose and resist such an ideology should be one of the primary responsibilityies of intellectuals, activists, parents, youth, community members, and others concerned about the fate of democracy on a global scale. Working both within and outside traditional public spheres, artists, community activists, writers, and educators can expose the ideology of militarisation in all its diversity and how it risks turning the United States into a military state while at the same time undermining crucial social programmes, constitutional liberties, and valuable public spaces. According to Arundhati Roy, this new politics of resistance demands: Fighting to win back the minds and hearts of people. . . . It means keeping an eagle eye on public institutions and demanding accountability. It means putting your ear to the ground and listening to the whispering of the truly powerless. It means giving a forum to the myriad voices from the hundreds of resistance movements across the country which are speaking about real things – about bonded labor, marital rape, sexual preferences, women’s wages, uranium dumping, unsustainable mining, weavers’ woes, farmers’ suicides. It means fighting displacement and dispossession and the relentless, everyday violence of abject poverty. Fighting it also means not allowing your newspaper columns and prime-time TV spots to be hijacked by their spurious passions and their staged theatrics, which are designed to divert attention from everything else.42Progressives everywhere have to reinvent the possibility of an engaged politics and real strategies of resistance. This suggests not only working through traditional spheres of political contestation, such as elections or union struggles or various means of education. Collective struggle must combine the tasks of a radical public pedagogy with massive acts of nonviolent, collective disobedience. Such acts can serve to educate, mobilise, and remind people of the importance of struggles that change both ideas and relations of power. By making militarisation visible through the force of words and peaceful resistance, politics can become both meaningful and possible as a contested site through which people can challenge both locally and through international alliances the obscene accumulation of power symptomatic of the increasing militarisation of public space that is spreading both throughout the US and across the globe. Arundhati Roy is right in her incessant and courageous call to globalise dissent but if dissent is to work it must have a focus that cuts across empires, nation states, and local spaces, to the heart of a clear and present danger posed to democracy and social justice. Challenging militarisation in all of its expressions is a direct strike at the heart of a policy that has exceeded democracy and now formed a dreadful pact with a creeping and dangerous authoritarianism. We find ourselves in the midst of a war globally, not simply a war against terrorism but also a war against democratic solidarity in which a democratic future both at home and abroad stands in the balance. 34 -Debates over qualified immunity require a focus on consequences. 35 -Chen 97. Alan Chen is a leading national expert in free speech doctrine and theory, 1997, " THE BURDENS OF QUALIFIED IMMUNITY: SUMMARY JUDGMENT AND THE ROLE OF FACTS IN CONSTITUTIONAL TORT LAW," The American University Law Review, http://www.americanuniversitylawreview.org/pdfs/47/47-1/chen.pdf RS 36 -In the modem constitutional era, the Court defines the scope of substantive constitutional law by articulating balancing tests-broad, open-ended standards that define the scope of most individual constitutional rights. 267 Rather than providing a set of bright-line rules divining predetermined results for particular types of government conduct or regulation, balancing tests identify general criteria for constitutional decisionmaking, but leave great discretion to the decisionmaker to apply these criteria to the individual circumstances of each case.' When it creates balancing tests, the Court instructs lower courts to explicitly "weigh" individual rights (e.g., privacy, equality, speech) against governmental interests (e.g., public health, social welfare, social order) .26 The balancing metaphor symbolizes the evaluation of the relative substantive importance of these often competing values. Balancing tests, like all legal standards, necessitate individualized, context-specific determinations of constitutional rights because the quantum of interests may vary substantially from case to case, even under the same constitutional provision. In each case, the decisionmaker determines the outcome by evaluating which interest or value is "weightier.” 37 -Pure critique is useless without concrete solutions and moving away from the state dooms the left’s critique to failure – must work within the state without being statist 38 -Connolly 08. (William, Professor of Political Science at John Hopkins, Capitalism and Christianity, American Style, page numbers are at the bottom of the card.) 39 -Before turning to possible strategies to promote these objectives, we need to face an objection posed by one segment of the left: "Don't you depend a lot upon the state, when it must be viewed as the enemy?" My response is threefold. First, there is no way to take on global warming without engaging the state in the effort as well as international agencies, and global warming is a key danger of this epoch. Second, it is less the state itself and more its existing subsidies and priorities that are at issue. If you were to oppose both the market and the state you might reduce the democratic left to pure critique, with no presentation of positive possibilities and strategies. But critique is always important and never enough, as the left has begun to rediscover and as the American right has known for forty years. Third, although one must acknowledge the issues of cumbersome state bureaucracy, corporate cronyism, and state corruption, all three increased radically when the evangelical-capitalist resonance machine achieved hegemony, and they will get worse unless eco-egalitarians and still enter the fray at the interceded levels of micropolitics, microeconomic experiments, and the state. It is unwise to act as if the state must always be what it has become. Challenging the media is critical in this respect, making it become a watchdog of corporations, the state, religious movements, and the multiple imbrications between them. My view, as becomes clear in the next few pages, is that no interim agenda on the left can proceed far without finding expression in state policy, and state policy must draw inspiration from microeconomic experiments initially launched outside its canopy: microeconomic experiments and creative state policies must inform each other. We thus seek to include the state without becoming statist. Those who invest hope in revolutionary overthrow may oppose such a combination. I suspect that revolution, were it to occur, would undermine rather than vitalize democratic culture.29 40 -Inequality creates flawed epistemic conclusions, making normative decision making impossible. 41 -Medina 11. Medina, J. (2011). Toward a Foucaultian Epistemology of Resistance: Counter-Memory, Epistemic Friction, and Guerrilla Pluralism. Foucault Studies, 1(12), 9–35 42 -Foucault invites us to pay attention to the past and ongoing epistemic battles among competing power/knowledge frameworks that try to control a given field. Different fields—or domains of discursive interaction—contain particular discursive regimes with their particular ways of producing knowledge. In the battle among power/ knowledge frameworks, some come on top and become dominant while others are displaced and become subjugated. Foucault’s methodology offers a way of exploiting that vibrant plurality of epistemic perspectives which always contains some bodies of experiences and memories that are erased or hidden in the hegemonic mainstream frameworks that become hegemonic after prevailing in sustained epistemic battles. What Foucault calls subjugated knowledges3 are forms of experiencing and remembering that are pushed to the margins and rendered unqualified and unworthy of epistemic respect by prevailing and hegemonic discourses. Subjugated knowledges remain invisible to mainstream perspectives; they have a precarious subterranean existence that renders them unnoticed by most people and impossible to detect by those whose perspective has already internalized certain epistemic exclusions. And with the invisibility of subjugated knowledges, certain possibilities for resistance and subversion go unnoticed. The critical and emancipatory potential of Foucaultian genealogy resides in challenging established practices of remembering and forgetting by excavating subjugated bodies of experiences and memories, bringing to the fore the perspectives that culturally hegemonic practices have foreclosed. The critical task of the scholar and the activist is to resurrect subjugated knowledges—that is, to revive hidden or forgotten bodies of experiences and memories—and to help produce insurrections of subjugated knowledges.4 In order to be critical and to have transformative effects, genealogical investigations should aim at these insurrections, which are critical interventions that disrupt and interrogate epistemic hegemonies and mainstream perspectives (e.g. official histories, standard interpretations, ossified exclusionary meanings, etc). Such insurrections involve the difficult labor of mobilizing scattered, marginalized publics and of tapping into the critical potential of their dejected experiences and memories. An epistemic insurrection requires a collaborative relation between genealogical scholars/activists and the subjects whose experiences and memories have been subjugated: those subjects by themselves may not be able to destabilize the epistemic status quo until they are given a voice at the epistemic table (i.e. in the production of knowledge), that is, until room is made for their marginalized perspective to exert resistance, until past epistemic battles are reopened and established frameworks become open to contestation. 43 -Particularism is good—root cause claims and focus on overarching structures ignore application to material injustice. 44 -Gregory Fernando Pappas 16 Texas AandM University “The Pragmatists’ Approach to Injustice”, The Pluralist Volume 11, Number 1, Spring 2016, BE 45 -The pragmatists’ approach should be distinguished from nonideal theories whose starting point seems to be the injustices of society at large that have a history and persist through time, where the task of political philosophy is to detect and diagnose the presence of these historical injustices in particular situations of injustice. For example, critical theory today has inherited an approach to social philosophy characteristic of the European tradition that goes back to Rousseau, Marx, Weber, Freud, Marcuse, and others. Accord- ing to Roberto Frega, this tradition takes society to be “intrinsically sick” with a malaise that requires adopting a critical historical stance in order to understand how the systematic sickness affects present social situations. In other words, this approach assumes that¶ a philosophical critique of specific social situations can be accomplished only under the assumption of a broader and full blown critique of soci- ety in its entirety: as a critique of capitalism, of modernity, of western civilization, of rationality itself. The idea of social pathology becomes intelligible only against the background of a philosophy of history or of an anthropology of decline, according to which the distortions of actual social life are but the inevitable consequence of longstanding historical processes. (“Between Pragmatism and Critical Theory” 63)¶ However, this particular approach to injustice is not limited to critical theory. It is present in those Latin American and African American political philosophies that have used and transformed the critical intellectual tools of ¶ critical theory to deal with the problems of injustice in the Americas. For instance, Charles W. Mills claims that the starting point and alternative to the abstractions of ideal theory that masked injustices is to diagnose and rectify a history of an illness—the legacy of white supremacy in our actual society.11 The critical task of revealing this illness is achieved by adopting a historical perspective where the injustices of today are part of a larger historical narrative about the development of modern societies that goes back to how Europeans have progressively dehumanized or subordinated others. Similary, radical feminists as well as Third World scholars, as reaction to the hege- monic Eurocentric paradigms that disguise injustices under the assumption of a universal or objective point of view, have stressed how our knowledge is always situated. This may seem congenial with pragmatism except the locus of the knower and of injustices is often described as power structures located in “global hierarchies” and a “world-system” and not situations.12¶ Pragmatism only questions that we live in History or a “World-System” (as a totality or abstract context) but not that we are in history (lowercase): in a present situation continuous with others where the past weighs heavily in our memories, bodies, habits, structures, and communities. It also does not deny the importance of power structures and seeing the connections be- tween injustices through time, but there is a difference between (a) inquiring into present situations of injustice in order to detect, diagnose, and cure an injustice (a social pathology) across history, and (b) inquiring into the his- tory of a systematic injustice in order to facilitate inquiry into the present unique, context-bound injustice. To capture the legacy of the past on present injustices, we must study history but also seek present evidence of the weight of the past on the present injustice.¶ If injustice is an illness, then the pragmatists’ approach takes as its main focus diagnosing and treating the particular present illness, that is, the particular situation-bound injustice and not a global “social pathology” or some single transhistorical source of injustice. The diagnosis of a particular injustice is not always dependent on adopting a broader critical standpoint of society in its entirety, but even when it is, we must be careful to not forget that such standpoints are useful only for understanding the present evil. The concepts and categories “white supremacy” and “colonialism” can be great tools that can be of planetary significance. One could even argue that they pick out much larger areas of people’s lives and injustices than the categories of class and gender, but in spite of their reach and explanatory theoretical value, they are nothing more than tools to make reference to and ameliorate particular injustices experienced (suffered) in the midst of a particular and unique re- lationship in a situation. No doubt many, but not all, problems of injustice are a consequence of being a member of a group in history, but even in these cases, we cannot a priori assume that injustices are homogeneously equal for all members of that group. Why is this important? The possible pluralism and therefore complexity of a problem of injustice does not always stop at the level of being a member of a historical group or even a member of many groups, as insisted on by intersectional analysis. There may be unique cir- cumstances to particular countries, towns, neighborhoods, institutions, and ultimately situations that we must be open to in a context-sensitive inquiry. If an empirical inquiry is committed to capturing and ameliorating all of the harms in situations of injustice in their raw pretheoretical complexity, then this requires that we try to begin with and return to the concrete, particular, and unique experiences of injustice.¶ Pragmatism agrees with Sally Haslanger’s concern about Charles Mills’s view. She writes: “The goal is not just a theory that is historical (v. ahistori- cal), but is sensitive to historical particularity, i.e., that resists grand causal narratives purporting to give an account of how domination has come about and is perpetuated everywhere and at all times” (1). For “the forces that cause and sustain domination vary tremendously context by context, and there isn’t necessarily a single causal explanation; a theoretical framework that is useful as a basis for political intervention must be highly sensitive to the details of the particular social context” (1).13¶ Although each situation is unique, there are commonalities among the cases that permit inquiry about common causes. We can “formulate tentative general principles from investigation of similar individual cases, and then . . . check the generalizations by applying them to still further cases” (Dewey, Lectures in China 53). But Dewey insists that the focus should be on the indi- vidual case, and was critical of how so many sociopolitical theories are prone to starting and remaining at the level of “sweeping generalizations.” He states that they “fail to focus on the concrete problems which arise in experience, allowing such problems to be buried under their sweeping generalizations” (Lectures in China 53).¶ The lesson pragmatism provides for nonideal theory today is that it must be careful to not reify any injustice as some single historical force for which particular injustice problems are its manifestation or evidence for its exis- tence. Pragmatism welcomes the wisdom and resources of nonideal theories that are historically grounded on actual injustices, but it issues a warning about how they should be understood and implemented. It is, for example, sympathetic to the critical resources found in critical race theory, but with an important qualification. It understands Derrick Bell’s valuable criticism as context-specific to patterns in the practice of American law. Through his inquiry into particular cases and civil rights policies at a particular time and place, Bell learned and proposed certain general principles such as the one of “interest convergence,” that is, “whites will promote racial advantages for blacks only when they also promote white self-interest.”14 But, for pragma- tism, these principles are nothing more than historically grounded tools to use in present problematic situations that call for our analysis, such as deliberation in establishing public policies or making sense of some concrete injustice. The principles are falsifiable and open to revision as we face situation-specific injustices. In testing their adequacy, we need to consider their function in making us see aspects of injustices we would not otherwise appreciate.15 - EntryDate
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... ... @@ -1,62 +1,0 @@ 1 -1AC – The Flood 2 -Framework 3 -The role of the ballot is to vote for the debater that presents the best policy option – key to out of round advocacy skills. 4 -Nixon 2K (Themba-Nixon, Makani. Executive Director of The Praxis Project, a nonprofit organization helping communities use media and policy advocacy to advance health equity and justice, “Changing the Rules: What Public Policy Means for Organizing” Colorlines 3.2, 2000) WW JA 1/15/16 5 -“This is all about policy," a woman complained to me in a recent conversation. "I'm an organizer." The flourish and passion with which she made the distinction said everything. Policy is for wonks, sell-out politicians, and ivory-tower eggheads. Organizing is what real, grassroots people do. Common as it may be, this distinction doesn't bear out in the real world. Policy is more than law. It is any written agreement (formal or informal) that specifies how an institution, governing body, or community will address shared problems or attain shared goals. It spells out the terms and the consequences of these agreements and is the codification of the body's values-as represented by those present in the policymaking process. Given who's usually present, most policies reflect the political agenda of powerful elites. Yet, policy can be a force for change-especially when we bring our base and community organizing into the process. In essence, policies are the codification of power relationships and resource allocation. Policies are the rules of the world we live in. Changing the world means changing the rules. So, if organizing is about changing the rules and building power, how can organizing be separated from policies? Can we really speak truth to power, fight the right, stop corporate abuses, or win racial justice without contesting the rules and the rulers, the policies and the policymakers? The answer is no-and double no for people of color. Today, racism subtly dominates nearly every aspect of policymaking. From ballot propositions to city funding priorities, policy is increasingly about the control, de-funding, and disfranchisement of communities of color. Take the public conversation about welfare reform, for example. Most of us know it isn't really about putting people to work. The right's message was framed around racial stereotypes of lazy, cheating "welfare queens" whose poverty was "cultural." But the new welfare policy was about moving billions of dollars in individual cash payments and direct services from welfare recipients to other, more powerful, social actors. Many of us were too busy to tune into the welfare policy drama in Washington, only to find it washed up right on our doorsteps. Our members are suffering from workfare policies, new regulations, and cutoffs. Families who were barely getting by under the old rules are being pushed over the edge by the new policies. Policy doesn't get more relevant than this. And so we got involved in policy-as defense. Yet we have to do more than block their punches. We have to start the fight with initiatives of our own. Those who do are finding offense a bit more fun than defense alone. Living wage ordinances, youth development initiatives, even gun control and alcohol and tobacco policies are finding their way onto the public agenda, thanks to focused community organizing that leverages power for community-driven initiatives. - Over 600 local policies have been passed to regulate the tobacco industry. Local coalitions have taken the lead by writing ordinances that address local problems and organizing broad support for them. - Nearly 100 gun control and violence prevention policies have been enacted since 1991. - Milwaukee, Boston, and Oakland are among the cities that have passed living wage ordinances: local laws that guarantee higher than minimum wages for workers, usually set as the minimum needed to keep a family of four above poverty. These are just a few of the examples that demonstrate how organizing for local policy advocacy has made inroads in areas where positive national policy had been stalled by conservatives. Increasingly, the local policy arena is where the action is and where activists are finding success. Of course, corporate interests-which are usually the target of these policies-are gearing up in defense. Tactics include front groups, economic pressure, and the tried and true: cold, hard cash. Despite these barriers, grassroots organizing can be very effective at the smaller scale of local politics. At the local level, we have greater access to elected officials and officials have a greater reliance on their constituents for reelection. For example, getting 400 people to show up at city hall in just about any city in the U.S. is quite impressive. On the other hand, 400 people at the state house or the Congress would have a less significant impact. Add to that the fact that all 400 people at city hall are usually constituents, and the impact is even greater. Recent trends in government underscore the importance of local policy. Congress has enacted a series of measures devolving significant power to state and local government. Welfare, health care, and the regulation of food and drinking water safety are among the areas where states and localities now have greater rule. Devolution has some negative consequences to be sure. History has taught us that, for social services and civil rights in particular, the lack of clear federal standards and mechanisms for accountability lead to uneven enforcement and even discriminatory implementation of policies. Still, there are real opportunities for advancing progressive initiatives in this more localized environment. Greater local control can mean greater community power to shape and implement important social policies that were heretofore out of reach. To do so will require careful attention to the mechanics of local policymaking and a clear blueprint of what we stand for. Much of the work of framing what we stand for takes place in the shaping of demands Getting It in Writing Much of the work of framing what we stand for takes place in the shaping of demands. By getting into the policy arena in a proactive manner, we can take our demands to the next level. Our demands can become law, with real consequences if the agreement is broken. After all the organizing, press work, and effort, a group should leave a decisionmaker with more than a handshake and his or her word. Of course, this work requires a certain amount of interaction with "the suits," as well as struggles with the bureaucracy, the technical language, and the all-too-common resistance by decisionmakers. Still, if it's worth demanding, it's worth having in writing-whether as law, regulation, or internal policy. From ballot initiatives on rent control to laws requiring worker protections, organizers are leveraging their power into written policies that are making a real difference in their communities. Of course, policy work is just one tool in our organizing arsenal, but it is a tool we simply can't afford to ignore. Making policy work an integral part of organizing will require a certain amount of retrofitting. We will need to develop the capacity to translate our information, data, stories that are designed to affect the public conversation. Perhaps most important, we will need to move beyond fighting problems and on to framing solutions that bring us closer to our vision of how things should be. And then we must be committed to making it so. 6 - 7 -The standard is combatting structural violence – epistemologically precedes normative ethics. 8 -Young 74. Iris Marion Young, Professor in Political Science at the University of Chicago since 2000, masters and doctorate in philosophy in 1974 from Pennsylvania State University. “Justice and the Politics of Difference”. Princeton University Press, 1990, Digital Copy. 9 -Group representation, third, encourages the expression of individual and group needs and interests in terms that appeal to justice, that transform an "I want" into an "I am entitled to," in Hannah Pitkin's words. In Chapter 4 I argued that publicity itself encourages this transformation because a condition of the public is that people call one another to account. Group representation adds to such accountability because it serves as an antidote to self-deceiving self-interest masked as an impartial or general interest. Unless confronted with different perspectives on social relations and events, different values and language, most people tend to assert their perspective as universal. When social privilege allows some group perspectives to dominate a public while others are silent, such universalizing of the particular will be reaffirmed by many others. Thus the test of whether a claim upon the public is just or merely an expression of self interest is best made when those making it must confront the opinion of others who have explicitly with different, though not necessarily conflicting, experiences, priorities, and needs (cf. Sunstein, 1988, p. 1588). As a person of social privilege, I am more likely to go outside myself and have regard for social justice when I must listen to the voice of those my privilege otherwise tends to silence. 10 - 11 -Prefer consequence-based frameworks: 12 -1 Intent and means-based frameworks reflect privilege and decenter oppressed voices 13 -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 14 -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. 15 - 16 -2 Experience is epistemic – it is how we empirically ground our existence. Pain is universally bad and pleasure is universally good. 17 -Nagel 86 (Thomas “The View From Nowhere”, 1986) 18 -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. 19 - 20 -3 Intentions and states of being are non-falsifiable and can only be informed by hypothetical consequences 21 - 22 -4 Life is a prerequisite to moral agency and freedom – justifies exceptions to their hyperindividualistic ethics. 23 - 24 -Advantage 1 – Resiliency 25 -Climate change is here – sea level rise and superstorms threaten coastal cities across the US. It’s too late to mitigate. 26 -Gillis 16 (Justin Gillis covers the science of global climate change and the policy implications of that science. He grew up in Georgia, graduated from the University of Georgia, and joined The Times after an award-winning career as a reporter and editor at The Miami Herald and The Washington Post. “Flooding of Coast, Caused by Global Warming, Has Already Begun,” The New York Times. September 3, 2016. https://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/04/science/flooding-of-coast-caused-by-global-warming-has-already-begun.html) WW JA 3/7/17 27 -For decades, as the global warming created by human emissions caused land ice to melt and ocean water to expand, scientists warned that the accelerating rise of the sea would eventually imperil the United States’ coastline. Now, those warnings are no longer theoretical: The inundation of the coast has begun. The sea has crept up to the point that a high tide and a brisk wind are all it takes to send water pouring into streets and homes. Federal scientists have documented a sharp jump in this nuisance flooding — often called “sunny-day flooding” — along both the East Coast and the Gulf Coast in recent years. The sea is now so near the brim in many places that they believe the problem is likely to worsen quickly. Shifts in the Pacific Ocean mean that the West Coast, partly spared over the past two decades, may be hit hard, too. These tidal floods are often just a foot or two deep, but they can stop traffic, swamp basements, damage cars, kill lawns and forests, and poison wells with salt. Moreover, the high seas interfere with the drainage of storm water. In coastal regions, that compounds the damage from the increasingly heavy rains plaguing the country, like those that recently caused extensive flooding in Louisiana. Scientists say these rains are also a consequence of human greenhouse emissions. “Once impacts become noticeable, they’re going to be upon you quickly,” said William V. Sweet, a scientist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in Silver Spring, Md., who is among the leaders in research on coastal inundation. “It’s not a hundred years off — it’s now.” Local governments, under pressure from annoyed citizens, are beginning to act. Elections are being won on promises to invest money to protect against flooding. Miami Beach is leading the way, increasing local fees to finance a $400 million plan that includes raising streets, installing pumps and elevating sea walls. In many of the worst-hit cities, mayors of both parties are sounding an alarm. “I’m a Republican, but I also realize, by any objective analysis, the sea level is rising,” said Jason Buelterman, the mayor of tiny Tybee Island, one of the first Georgia communities to adopt a detailed climate plan. But the local leaders say they cannot tackle this problem alone. They are pleading with state and federal governments for guidance and help, including billions to pay for flood walls, pumps and road improvements that would buy them time. 28 - 29 -Coastal disasters hurt minority communities the hardest – they can’t afford to relocate or rebuild. 30 -Worth 15 (Pamela Worth is a journalist for the Huffington Post and writer for the Union of Concerned Scientists. She specializes writing on climate change, sustainable agriculture and transportation, nuclear weaponry and power, and public health and safety. “Where Climate Change Hits First and Worst,” Union of Concerned Scientists. Fall 2015. http://www.ucsusa.org/publications/catalyst/fa15-where-climate-change-hits-first-and-worst) WW JA 3/7/17 31 -Turcios describes Opa-locka as a residential community whose population is largely African-American and Latino, with a few small businesses, a lot of families, and homes for low-income seniors. It is also a community changing because of climate change. These days, he says, it’s hotter, more humid, and it rains more. “Flooding is happening more often, there’s more floodwater than usual, and there’s more damage to houses than ever before.” Turcios knows a lot could be done to help prevent flooding damage to homes like his. But even with his job as a bank security guard, he’s not sure he can afford those measures—such as elevating his home by putting it on stilts. He doesn’t know what Opa-locka is doing to prepare for climate-related impacts, but he does know this: while South Florida has experienced relatively few storms over the last 10 years, it is only a matter of time before the next big one hits. In Florida, like the rest of the United States, poor populations often bear the brunt of climate impacts, living on the front lines of rising seas, catastrophic storms, and drought. These frontline communities are disproportionally communities of color: according to 2011 data, wealth inequality along racial lines has burgeoned dramatically in the United States in recent years. The typical black household has just 6 percent of the wealth of the typical white household; the typical Latino household has 8 percent. Low-income communities cope with chronically low investment in their neighborhoods, poorly built and maintained infrastructure, and the legacy of housing policies that have effectively segregated towns and cities—in some cases, forcing poorer populations to live closer to power plants, airports, waste sites, and otherwise undesirable land that is often affected “first and worst” by natural disasters. And when those natural disasters strike, efforts to help communities recover often fail those most in need—as when the promise to rebuild Opa-locka’s roofs only resulted in the distribution of blue tarps. Studies show that low-income and communities of color in the New York-New Jersey area were among the hardest hit by Hurricane Sandy, and continue to struggle to find housing. One study of an African-American community in Maryland affected by Sandy found that residents there experienced flooding in their streets for days longer than other communities, and had more difficulty accessing food and housing. In New Orleans, where Hurricane Katrina and the subsequent levee failure and flood killed hundreds, the majority of people who were trapped in the city and left waiting for rescue and aid were overwhelmingly African-American and poor. Poor populations, and elderly nursing home residents, are more likely to lack transportation during disasters. And the fact that these populations may also have a high prevalence of chronic health problems increases their vulnerability to other storm-related hazards. In Opa-locka during Hurricanes Katrina and Wilma, for example, Turcios says the news and other media kept locals informed about evacuation locations and procedures, but people without cars and/or driver’s licenses—predominantly the poor and elderly—had little choice but to stay home and weather the storms. 32 - 33 -Advantage 2 – Housing market 34 -Coastal flooding results in billions of dollars of damage and will collapse the housing market – adaptation is key now. 35 -Urbina 16 (Ian Urbina s an investigative reporter for The New York Times based in the Washington Bureau. His investigations most often focus on worker safety and the environment. He has received a Pulitzer, a Polk, and various other journalism awards. “Perils of Climate Change Could Swamp Coastal Real Estate,” New York Times. November 24, 2016. https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/24/science/global-warming-coastal-real-estate.html) WW JA 3/6/17 36 -Rising sea levels are changing the way people think about waterfront real estate. Though demand remains strong and developers continue to build near the water in many coastal cities, homeowners across the nation are slowly growing wary of buying property in areas most vulnerable to the effects of climate change. A warming planet has already forced a number of industries — coal, oil, agriculture and utilities among them — to account for potential future costs of a changed climate. The real estate industry, particularly along the vulnerable coastlines, is slowly awakening to the need to factor in the risks of catastrophic damage from climate change, including that wrought by rising seas and storm-driven flooding. But many economists say that this reckoning needs to happen much faster and that home buyers urgently need to be better informed. Some analysts say the economic impact of a collapse in the waterfront property market could surpass that of the bursting dot-com and real estate bubbles of 2000 and 2008. The fallout would be felt by property owners, developers, real estate lenders and the financial institutions that bundle and resell mortgages. Over the past five years, home sales in flood-prone areas grew about 25 percent less quickly than in counties that do not typically flood, according to county-by-county data from Attom Data Solutions, the parent company of RealtyTrac. Many coastal residents are rethinking their investments and heading for safer ground. “I don’t see how this town is going to defeat the water,” said Brent Dixon, a resident of Miami Beach who plans to move north and away from the coast in anticipation of worsening king tides, the highest predicted tide of the year. “The water always wins.” These concerns have taken on a new urgency since the presidential election of Donald J. Trump, who has long been a skeptic of global warming, claiming in 2012 that it was a concept “created by and for the Chinese in order to make U.S. manufacturing noncompetitive.” A real estate developer, Mr. Trump is also the owner of several South Florida properties, including Mar-a-Lago, a 20-acre site that stretches between the Atlantic Ocean and the Intracoastal Waterway in Palm Beach. Mr. Trump’s recent selection of Myron Ebell to lead his Environmental Protection Agency transition team intensified these worries in Florida and among many climate scientists. Mr. Ebell has helped lead the charge against the scientific consensus that global warming exists and is caused by people. State lawmakers in Massachusetts and New Jersey are pushing to impose new rules on real estate agents and others, obligating them to disclose climate-related damage like previous flooding. Banks and insurers need to protect their collateral and investors more by improving their methods for estimating climate-change risks and creating more standardized rules for reporting them publicly, economists warn. In April, Sean Becketti, the chief economist for Freddie Mac, the government-backed mortgage giant, issued a dire prediction. It is only a matter of time, he wrote, before sea level rise and storm surges become so unbearable along the coast that people will leave, ditching their mortgages and potentially triggering another housing meltdown — except this time, it would be unlikely that these housing prices would ever recover. 37 - 38 -The coastal housing bubble will pop in the next decade – federal legal frameworks are key to avoid the crash. 39 -Baptiste 16 (Nathalie Baptiste is a journalist based in Washington, DC, who writes about criminal justice, policing reform, and politics. Her work has appeared in The American Prospect and Mother Jones. “That Sinking Feeling,” American Prospect. February 19, 2016. http://prospect.org/article/sinking-feeling-politics-sea-level-rise-and-miamis-building-boom) WW JA 3/7/17 40 -Stoddard’s goal is to explain to people what’s happening so that instead of a market crash, there’s a slow slide. “A lot of people ask me, ‘How much time do I have?’” he says. He tells them they don’t have to sell this year, but if it’s their intention to sell, they shouldn’t wait ten more. He also considers the homeowner’s financial situation. “It depends on if your financial well-being is dependent on your home equity. If so, your time horizon should be short—I would suggest you sell.” “As the reality of seawater rise sinks in, mortgage companies may conclude that 30 years is too long of a time to gamble on,” says Stoddard. “Maybe they’ll only issue 15-year mortgages.” If that were to cause people planning to sell later to change their minds and try to sell now, the result would be a run on the market. Stoddard offers a scenario in which an event leads to an overnight crash. “If you owe $250,000 on your house, but you can only get $50,000, what do you do then?” When properties lose value, underwater homeowners end up with no resources to relocate, essentially becoming refugees. “After a storm,” Stoddard explains, “it’s harder to sell your house.” If a devastating storm comes through and decimates South Florida and people move out, the city ends up with a lot of vacancies. A drop in the property taxes would erode city and county coffers. The first thing to go would be municipal services, Stoddard adds. With limited sanitation and maintenance services, cities and towns begin falling apart. Despite this threat looming on the horizon, there doesn’t seem to be enough planning for how to handle the impending crash. “We know it’s coming—but nobody is taking preparations,” says Stoddard. “The federal government hasn’t developed a legal framework on how to help people deal with it.” Stoddard’s goal is to try to explain to people that the crash is coming. “My goal is to make it a slow slide, rather than a crash. … The slower the change happens, the more people are able to adapt to it. It can be bad or it can be really, really, really bad—take your choice.” 41 - 42 -The collapse of the housing market would initiate a recession worse than ever before – damning millions into a life of poverty. 43 -Street 11.(Paul L. Street, Paul Street (www.paulstreet.org) is the author of many books and studies, including Empire and Inequality: America and the World Since 9/11 (Paradigm, 2004), The Empire’s New Clothes: Barack Obama in the Real World of Power (Paradigm, 2010), Still Separate, Unequal: Race, Place, Policy and the State of Black Chicago (Chicago, IL: Chicago Urban League, 2005), and (co-authored with Anthony DiMaggio) Crashing the Tea Party: Mass Media and the Campaign to Remake American Politics (Paradigm, 2011)., “Public Health Concerns? Urban Neoliberal Racism, Mass Poverty, and the Repression of Occupy”, The Official Website of Paul L. Street, 02-12-11, http://www.paulstreet.org/?p=560) AD 44 -Nothing is more consistently and positively correlated with poor health, crime, illness, educational failure – with threats to public health and safety – than poverty, a great destroyer of lives and opportunity. At the same time, poverty’s negative impact on its most immediate victims and the broader society is magnified and intensified by the extreme spatial concentration of the poor in high poverty neighborhoods. As the Brookings researchers note in their report The Re-Emergence of Concentrated Poverty: Metropolitan Trends in the 2000s: “Rather than spread evenly, the poor tend to cluster and concentrate in certain neighborhoods or groups of neighborhoods within a community. Very poor neighborhoods face a whole host of challenges that come from concentrated disadvantage—from higher crime rates and poorer health outcomes to lower-quality educational opportunities and weaker job networks. A poor person or family in a very poor neighborhood must then deal not only with the challenges of individual poverty, but also with the added burdens that stem from the place in which they live.” 9 Enduring poverty in a very poor neighborhood subjects poor residents to obstacles and difficulties reaching beyond the costs of individual poverty. It is one thing to be technically poor but live in a safe “middle class” neighborhood with well-maintained homes, good schools, green space, thriving shops, accessible quality health care, regular public transportation, full-service grocery stores, and other amenities. It is another thing to be poor in a dangerous, crime-ridden, high-poverty neighborhood with boarded up and dilapidated homes, where: the schools feel like jails; intact families are rare; nutrition is purchased under bullet-proofed plastic windows at inflated prices from combination food-liquor stores that lack fresh vegetables and specialize in starchy high sugar and salt items; gangs are prevalent; diabetes, hepatitis, and HIV are near epidemic; prison histories are more common than jobs; more than 40 percent of the men have been saddled with the lifelong mark of a criminal record; incarceration is an almost routine experience for young males; parks are scarce and/or too precarious to visit; doctors and dentists are absent and small shops are rare; taxies never go and public transit is irregular and hard to reach.10 As sociologist Douglas Massey noted in 1994, “housing markets…distribute much more than a place to live; they also distribute any good or resource that is correlated with where one lives. Housing markets don’t just distribute dwellings, they also distribute education, employment, safety, insurance rates, services, and wealth in the form of home equity; they also determine the level of exposure to crime and drugs, and the peer groups that one’s children experience.”11 Massey’s observation notwithstanding, U.S poverty remains highly and (by the Brookings researchers’ finding) increasingly concentrated. After declining somewhat during the long economic boom of the 1990s, Brookings reports, the number of Americans living in “extreme poverty neighborhoods” – where 40 percent of the residents live below the poverty line – rose by one third between 2000 and 2009. Currently in the U.S., 10.5 percent of poor people live in such neighborhoods, up from 9.1 percent in 2000. New York City, where the financial titan turned Mayor recently spent $7 million repressing and finally evicting Occupy from the city’s affluent financial district, is home to 1,575, 032 officially poor people and to 174 extreme poverty census tracts that house 697,375 people, including 375,876 poor. Chicago, where the rugged hippie-punching corporate mayor Rahm Emmanuel (Barack Obama’s former White House chief-of-staff) has consistently denied Occupiers a campsite, is home to 593,000 poor people and to 124 extreme poverty tracts that together house 304,139 people including 140,574 poor. Los Angeles, where Antonio Villaraigosa recently evicted his city’s Occupy Movement over mass public protest, is home to 844,712 poor people and to 65 extreme poverty tracts that house more than a quarter million (264,888) residents. Philadelphia, where Occupy was recently evicted, is home to 352,265 poor people and 58 extreme poverty census tracts that house 222,434 people.12 The recently increased concentration of poverty reflects among other things the disastrous impact of two recessions (the most recent one constituting the biggest economic downturn since the 1930s). Unfolding due to the capitalist profits addiction 13 of the Occupation Movement’s official enemy the One Percent, the crises have taken a terrible toll on the employment prospects, net worth, and geographic mobility opportunities for the nation’s disproportionately nonwhite poverty population. Racial oppression is critical here, beneath the movement’s sometimes simplistic division between the super-rich and “the rest of us” (the 1 Percent and the 99 Percent). The Brookings study’s online version includes a link to maps showing the location of the extreme poverty tracts dozens of American cities.14 As is obvious to anyone familiar with the racialized geography of these highly segregated metropolises, the maps demonstrate that America’s zones of concentrated urban misery are very disproportionately black and Latino. And indeed, while blacks make up 12.6 percent of overall U.S. population, the Brookings reports that blacks comprise 45 percent of the population (by far and away the largest share) that lives in the nation’s extreme poverty neighborhoods. 15 The mortgage crisis created by the financial elite and the collapse of the housing market has been particularly devastating in Black and Latino neighborhoods. This is because those households’ net worth is more proportionately tied up in home equity, thanks to the broad absence of financial wealth in the Black and Latino communities. As the leading wealth and power analyst G. William Domhoff explains on his Web site Who Rules America?: “In 2007, the average white household had 15 times as much total wealth as the average African-American or Latino household. If we exclude home equity from the calculations and consider only financial wealth, the ratios are in the neighborhood of 100:1. Extrapolating from these figures, we see that 70 of white families’ wealth is in the form of their principal residence; for Blacks and Hispanics, the figures are 95 and 96, respectively.”16 To make matters worse, the predatory home lending practices (carried out by the leading financial institutions owned and run by the One Percent) that did do much to precipitate the mortgage and financial collapse of 2007 and 2008 particularly targeted people of color. As David McNally notes: “By 1998…subprime mortgages composed one-third of all home loans made to African-Americans and a fifth of those made to Latinos. And the numbers just kept rising. By 2005, 70 percent of all subprime loans made in Washington, D.C. went to African-Americans. A year later, African-Americans received 41 percent of all sub-prime mortgages in New York, while 29 percent went to Latinos. Women of color were especially vulnerable to subprime extortion Inevitably, as the mortgage rates kicked higher it became increasingly difficult for the borrowers to make payments, especially as job loss soared, especially among workers of color, reducing peoples’ capacity to pay.”17 Incredibly enough but consistent with longstanding racial patterns in U.S. labor markets, four of every ten black Americans experienced unemployment during the 2008-09 Great Recession. As McNally elaborates: “Throughout the first half of 2010, official unemployment among blacks was over 16 percent, while among Latinos, it hovered around 13 percent. In thirty-five of America’s largest cities, official jobless rates for blacks were between 30 and 35 percent- levels equal to the worst days of the Great Depression emphasis added….Not surprisingly, blacks and Latinos are almost three times more likely to live in poverty than whites.”18 In today’s New York Times (I am writing on the morning of Thursday, December 1, 2011), liberal columnist Nicholas Kristof reflects on the recollections of former Chase Home Finance regional vice president James Theckston, who told Kristof how he won company accolades for high sales in 2006 and 2007. Theckston “says that some account executives earned a commission seven times higher from subprime loans, rather than prime mortgages. So they looked for less savvy borrowers — those with less education, without previous mortgage experience, or without fluent English — and nudged them toward subprime loans…These less savvy borrowers were disproportionately blacks and Latinos, he said, and they ended up paying a higher rate so that they were more likely to lose their homes. Senior executives seemed aware of this racial mismatch, he recalled, and frantically tried to cover it up,” Kristof writes. “If you want to understand why the Occupy movement has found such traction,” Kristof comments, “it helps to listen to a former banker like Theckston. He fully acknowledges that he and other bankers are mostly responsible for the country’s housing mess.”19 45 - 46 -Plan 47 -Plan Text: The United States should guarantee a right to housing for coastal communities at risk of natural disasters. 48 -A right to housing is SPECIFICALLY key – the plan ensures equitable disaster relief by conducting pre-disaster research and streamlining disaster response and recovery efforts. 49 -IHRC 16 (Written by International Human Rights Committee members: E. Michelle Andrews, Cristine Delaney Goldman, Katherine Hughes, Jocelyn Getgen Kestenbaum, Jean McCarroll, Matthew Putorti, and Laura Steven. The report was overseen by past chairs Elisabeth Wickeri and Stephen Kass. “ADVANCING THE RIGHT TO HOUSING IN THE UNITED STATES: Using International Law as a Foundation,” THE INTERNATIONAL HUMAN RIGHTS COMMITTEE OF THE NEW YORK CITY BAR ASSOCIATION. February 2016. http://www2.nycbar.org/pdf/report/uploads/20072632-AdvancingtheRighttoHousingIHR2122016final.pdf) WW JA 3/6/17 50 -The United States’ failure to recognize a right to adequate housing further complicates its response to an increasing number of devastating natural disasters.187 A response to such disasters based on international human rights law would require an assessment of both the extent of the disaster and the ongoing implementation of the right to adequate housing.188 Were the federal government to recognize such a right, a number of key items to be assessed could be incorporated into its disaster recovery plans, including information the ratio of housing damage to overall damage, (ii) damage to rental units versus owner-occupied units, (iii) degree of habitability, (iv) cost to rebuild, (v) measurement of damage concentration, and (vi) pre-disaster local conditions such as housing costs and other social and economic data. During post-disaster recovery periods, authorities could then measure annually, for example, the number of houses rebuilt, the profile of the returned population, and community participation, all as marked against this pre-disaster and pre-recovery information.190 As a result, these measurements could be used to ensure access to affordable, decent housing by all populations impacted during the disaster by streamlining disaster relief efforts, exposing discriminatory practices, appropriately allocating federal, state, and local relief funds, and otherwise. Hurricane Katrina looms large in recent memory with respect to concerns about a lack of adequate housing in a post-disaster context. In the third year following the storm, 72 of New Orleans’s population had returned to the city; however, approximately 70 of affordable rental housing was decommissioned or demolished due to the storm.191 As a result, rents skyrocketed.192 Furthermore, in the post-disaster period, HUD opted to demolish 4,500 severely damaged rental units and declined to renovate others, thus further exacerbating the situation.193 In fact, although New Orleans’s rate of returning residents is impressive, there is a disparity in the rates of return between those who were able to rebuild with their own funds and those who were reliant on government aid.194 As has been well documented, the Lower Ninth Ward, home to a substantial low-income African-American population, has experienced “minimal levels of return,” while the Lakeview district, home to a white, middle-class population, has experienced “significant” recovery.195 Recognition of a right to adequate housing, as defined under international human rights law, would go a long way toward curing the shortfalls in housing that were experienced by the most vulnerable populations in post-Katrina New Orleans. The criticisms and shortcomings of the response to Hurricane Katrina have certainly informed federal, state, and local governments’ response to the housing crisis that arose in New York and New Jersey following Superstorm Sandy.196 Moreover, the scale of the housing shortage in post-Sandy New York and New Jersey is far eclipsed by that experienced in the wake of Hurricane Katrina.197 However, a human rights-based housing framework, which recognizes the right to adequate housing and incorporates clearly-defined measurements of achievement, would be indispensable in crafting both preparation and post-disaster response plans that ensure that information the needs of the most vulnerable are met and (ii) housing-related discrimination— whether intentional or inadvertent—does not come into play.198 Undoubtedly, government officials have gained valuable experience in dealing with these issues during recent disasters, but a human rights approach would ensure ongoing monitoring in the weeks, months, and years following the initial response. 51 - 52 -The inevitable impacts of climate change mandate an adaptational strategy to ensure even human rights applications – the plan is key. 53 -Stillings 14 (Zackary L. Stillings is a graduate from the University of Michigan Law School and B.A., French Language and Literature and International Studies, University of Alabama. “Human Rights and the New Reality of Climate Change: Adaptation's Limitations in Achieving Climate Justice,” Michigan Journal of International Law. Vol. 35 Issue 3. 2014. http://repository.law.umich.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1066andcontext=mjil) WW JA 3/4/17 54 -The UNHRC’s Resolution concerned itself with several specific rights.19 In particular, it found that climate change could impact the right to food, the right to health, the right to housing, and, by implication, the right to self-determination.20 It is these rights, as well as the right to life mentioned in the Inuit petition, that the majority of scholars have focused on during subsequent discussions regarding climate change and human rights.21 Specifically, in the months following the UNHRC’s Resolution, scholars largely focused on human rights law as it related to climate change mitigation—that is, how to hold large emitting nations for human rights violations arising from failures to mitigate climate harms.22 In many ways, this was a logical starting point: why not attempt to hold those actually responsible for climate change accountable for their past emissions, or for failing to curb future emissions? Due in large part to the weakness of the international human rights regime,23 however, scholars soon realized that holding large emitters responsible for extraterritorial harms due to climate change would be nearly impossible.24 Accordingly, scholars began to turn their attention elsewhere, with several more recent papers specifically examining the applicability of the human rights regime to climate change adaptation. 25 In some ways, this approach has proven more successful. In certain situations, for instance, it might well be possible to use human rights law to hold nations responsible for failing to adequately adapt to climate change.26 Specifically, a nation might—by improperly adapting to future climate change-related disasters—be held responsible for failing to guard its citizens’ human rights. This Note uses the unique lens of environmental justice, a theory largely concerned with basic fairness for all communities, to examine this adaptation-focused body of scholarship and to evaluate its likely implications for the world’s most vulnerable nations. Environmental justice is a particularly salient means of evaluating the efficacy of the adaptation-focused approach to climate change, because the theory’s central premise is that environmental benefits and burdens should be distributed evenly across communities and populations. Using the principles of environmental justice on an international level, then, is a way to elucidate the differences in environmental benefits and burdens across national boundaries. 55 - 56 -The plan works from the bottom up to develop effective policies to provide essential housing needed to adapt. 57 -Worth 2 (Pamela Worth is a journalist for the Huffington Post and writer for the Union of Concerned Scientists. She specializes writing on climate change, sustainable agriculture and transportation, nuclear weaponry and power, and public health and safety. “Where Climate Change Hits First and Worst,” Union of Concerned Scientists. Fall 2015. http://www.ucsusa.org/publications/catalyst/fa15-where-climate-change-hits-first-and-worst) WW JA 3/7/17 58 -“Our priority is working to help ensure that our nation’s transition to cleaner energy and more resilient communities is equitable,” says Rachel Cleetus, lead economist and climate policy manager at the Union of Concerned Scientists. “These changes have to include opportunities, especially jobs and infrastructure investments, for underrepresented communities.” (See our related interview with Van Jones) The first step in building equitable climate resilience, Cleetus says, is to identify particularly vulnerable communities. Efforts to cut emissions nationwide will benefit people everywhere, but resilience to climate impacts must be built up in specific locations. The disproportionate burden of climate change faced by African-Americans, Latinos, and other people of color requires greater policy attention and resources. To aid in this effort, Cleetus and her team have developed a screening tool to help identify “hot spot” communities in the United States by measuring both socioeconomic factors and vulnerability to sea level rise. Drawing attention to these communities’ special planning needs can inform decisions about the resources required to adequately protect their residents. For example, the UCS tool identified Orleans Parish in Louisiana as a high-risk area when taking into consideration both climate impacts and socioeconomic factors such as poverty rates and per capita income. Within 15 years, the parish faces a projected sea level rise of 6 to 10 inches and a threefold increase in tidal flooding events, but many parish residents cannot afford to adequately prepare for these events, and are already struggling with storm surge flooding and land loss today. UCS is recommending the creation of a National Climate Resilience Fund to help protect the residents of Orleans Parish and similar communities with federal funds targeted specifically to such hot spots (see “How to Make Climate Resilience Effective and Fair,” below). Although UCS is calling on national leaders to work toward climate equity, it is just as important to listen to the residents of communities who are learning to cope with climate change about what their towns and cities need, and how they have managed to keep their neighborhoods together through worsening conditions. Members of these communities are keenly aware of the gaps in current resources and policies that need to be closed, and they must have a voice in the process of building community resilience. “Any successful effort has to start by including local leaders in the decision-making process and listening to their needs and concerns,” Cleetus points out. 59 - 60 -The plan works – empirically proven 61 -Chaplin 16 (Tracey S. Chaplin is a Ph.D. student at the University of Washington Jackson School of International Studies. “The U.S. Strategy for Flood Resilience Is Underwater,” NextCity. August 24, 2016. https://nextcity.org/daily/entry/us-strategy-flood-resilience-coastal-cities-competitions) WW JA 3/6/17 62 -Intense storms produced over 20 inches of rain in the Baton Rouge area. The resulting flood crisis claimed the lives of 13 people, and over 20,000 people had to be rescued by the Coast Guard and other first responders. Over 40,000 homes are damaged, many irreparably. President Barack Obama’s administration has granted an emergency disaster declaration expected to apply to more than 30 parishes — nearly half of all parishes in the state. As the impacts of climate change continue to accelerate, water is projected to be one of the most impacted resources, increasingly experienced in extremes: rising sea levels, superstorms and drought. This is not the first time that Louisiana has experienced these extremes. Hurricane Katrina is still a painful wound in New Orleans, both in local memory and in the physical destruction left in her wake. On the Louisiana coast, indigenous communities have been losing a hard-fought battle against rising sea levels as the Gulf of Mexico swallows their homes, contaminating drinking water and bleaching agricultural lands. Unfortunately, experts predict that this flood crisis will not be the last. Rising sea levels associated with impacts of climate change are predicted to ravage the Louisiana coastline, where 1.29 million people are at risk. Facing rising waters, residents in one Alaska town voted in August to move their entire village. National displacement as a result of sea level rise is projected to reach 13 million people by the end of this century. Researchers at MIT and Princeton University have found that the types of superstorms that used to make landfall once a century could now arrive every three to 20 years, and that so-called “500-year floods” might arrive as often as every 25 years, according to findings published in Nature Climate Change. These impacts of climate change wreak havoc on infrastructure, livelihoods and access to potable water. How is the government responding? To be sure, federal disaster relief, such as that issued for the flood crisis of southern Louisiana, is an appropriate short-term response. However, long-term solutions are imperative. And because the United States does not recognize the human right to water, proposed solutions must, unfortunately, strike a delicate balance between providing access and denying that access is due to citizens. - EntryDate
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... ... @@ -1,55 +1,0 @@ 1 -1AC – Chronically Homeless 2 -1AC 3 -Framework 4 -Mitigating structural violence precludes all other ethics – it has seeped in and structured educational spaces to exclude marginalized bodies. 5 -Trifonas 3. Peter Trifonas, 01-23-2003, " Pedagogies of Difference: Rethinking Education for Social Change ," RoutledgeFarmer, https://books.google.com/books?hl=enandlr=andid=ti_IDPOjC10Candoi=fndandpg=PP9anddq=Pedagogies+of+Difference+Rethinking+Education+for+Social+Change+Trifonasandots=9B1s4XCdafandsig=ArUOV8y7EQ-lEkUgTSe77eYPvRY#v=onepageandq=Pedagogies20of20Difference20Rethinking20Education20for20Social20Change20Trifonasandf=false RS 6 -Domination and subordination, I imply that they are relations of power. In an educational context, the exercise of power is accomplished in interactions (i.e., in a social organization), manifesting itself as acts of exclusion, marginalization, silencing, and so forth. Thus, paying attention to how power operates along axes of gender, race, class, and ability (that is, recognizing that social differences are not given, but are accomplished in and through educational settings) is a step toward educational equity. What does the above discussion mean in the educational context? It means that in the interactions of teachers with students in the classroom, or in other contexts, attention needs to be directed toward how dominant and subordinate relations (be they based on race, gender, class, or ability) permeate these contexts and intersect in complicated ways to produce inequality and marginalization. The frequently used and well-meaning phrase, “I treat everyone the same, ” often used by teachers and administrators to indicate their lack of bias in a diverse educational setting, in fact masks unequal power relations. Similarly, educational policies that assume that people are the same or equal may serve to entrench existing inequality precisely because people enter into the educational process with different and unequal experiences. These attempts, well meaning though they may be, tend to render inequality invisible, and thus work against equity in education. In her exploration of white privilege in higher education in the United States, Frances Rains (1998), an aboriginal-Japanese American woman, states emphatically that these benign acts are disempowering for the minority person because they erase his or her racial identity. The denial of racism in this case is in fact a form of racism. Thus, in moving toward equity in education that allows us to address multiple and intersecting axes of difference and inequality, I recommend that we try to think and act “against the grain” in developing educational policies and handling various kinds of pedagogical situations. 5 To work against the grain is to recognize that education is not neutral; it is contested. Mohanty puts it as such: … Education represents both a struggle for meaning and a struggle over power relations. It is a central terrain where power and politics operate out of the lived culture of individuals and groups situated in asymmetrical social and political positions. (Mohanty 1990:184) We need to develop a critical awareness of the power dynamics operative in institutional relations-and of the fact that people participate in institutions as unequal subjects. Working against the grain is to take a proactive approach to understanding and acting upon institutional relations, whether in the classroom, in other interactions with students, or in policy development. Rather than overlooking the embeddedness of gender, race, class, ability, and other forms of inequality that shape our interactions, working against the grain makes explicit the political nature of education and how power operates to privilege, silence, and marginalize individuals who are differently located in the educational process. In her exploration of feminist pedagogy, Linda Briskin (1990) makes a clear distinction between nonsexist and antisexist education critical to our understanding here. She asserts that nonsexism is an approach that attempts to neutralize sexual inequality by pretending that gender can be made irrelevant in the classroom. Thus, for instance, merely asserting that male and female students should have equal time to speak-and indeed giving them equal time-cannot adequately rectify the endemic problem of sexism in the classroom. One of Briskin's students reported that in her political science tutorials that when the male students spoke, everyone paid attention. When a female student spoke, however, the class acted as if no one was speaking (13). Neutrality is an attempt to conceal the unequal distribution of power. An against the grain approach would acknowledge explicitly that we are all gendered, racialized, and differently constructed subjects who do not participate in interactional relations as equals. This goes beyond formulating sexism, racism, abilism, and class privilege in individualist terms and treating them as if they were personal attitudes. Terry Wolverton (1983) discovered the difference between nonracism and antiracism in her consciousness-raising attempt: I had confused the act of trying to appear not to be racist with actively working to eliminate racism. Trying to appear not racist had made me deny my racism, and therefore exclude the possibility of change. (191) Being against the grain means seeing inequality as systemic and interpersonal (rather than individual), and combatting oppression as a collective responsibility, not just as a personal attribute (so that somehow a person can cleanse herself or himself of sexism, racism, abilism, or class bias). It is to pay attention to oppression as an interactional property that can be altered (see Manners 1998). Roger Simon (1993) suggests, in his development of a philosophical basis for teaching against the grain, which shares many commonalities in how I think about an integrative approach to equity in education, that teaching against the grain is fundamentally a moral practice. By this he does not mean that teachers simply fulfill the mandate and guidelines of school authorities. He believes that teachers must expose the partial and imperfect nature of existing knowledge, which is constructed on the basis of asymmetrical power relations (for instance, who has the power to speak and whose voices are suppressed?). It is the responsibility of the teacher or educator to show how dominant forms of knowledge and ways of knowing constrict human capacities. In exposing the power relations integral to the knowledge construction process, the educator, by extension, must treat teaching and learning as a mutual and collaborative act between teachers and students. What may this ideal look like in practice? Marilyn Cochran-Smith (1991) also explores the notion of teaching against the grain in her research on how teachers and students worked together in a preservice program in the Philadelphia area. Borrowing from Gramsci's formulation that action is everyone's responsibility, she asserts that teaching is fundamentally a political activity. In practical terms, she outlines what it may mean to teach against the grain in an actual teaching and learning situation. Her succinct articulation is worth quoting at length: To teach against the grain, teachers have to understand and work both within and around the culture of teaching and the politics of schooling at their particular schools and within their larger school system and communities. They cannot simply announce better ways of doing things, as outsiders are likely to do. They have to teach differently without judging the ways other teach or dismissing the ideas others espouse…. They are not at liberty to publicly announce brilliant but excoriating critiques of their colleagues and the bureaucracies in which they labor. Their ultimate commitment is to the school lives and futures of the children with whom they live and work. Without condescension or defensiveness, they have to work with parents and other teachers on different ways of seeing and measuring development, connecting and dividing knowledge, and knowing about teaching and schooling. They have to be astute observers of individual learners with the ability to pose and explore questions that transcend cultural attribution, institutional habit, and the alleged certainty of outside experts. They have to see beyond and through the conventional labels and practices that sustain the status quo by raising unanswerable and often uncomfortable questions. Perhaps most importantly, teachers who work against the grain must name and wrestle with their own doubts, must fend off the fatigue of reform and depend on the strength of their individual and collaborative convictions that their work ultimately makes a difference in the fabric of social responsibility. (Cochran-Smith 1991:284-85) For me, to be against the grain is therefore to recognize that the routinized courses of action and interactions in all educational contexts are imbued with unequal distribution of power that produce and reinforce various forms of marginalization and exclusion. Thus, a commitment to redress these power relations (i.e., equity in education) involves interventions and actions that may appear “counter-intuitive.” 6 Undoing inequality and achieving equity in education is a risky and uncomfortable act because we need to disrupt the ways things are “normally” done. This involves a serious (and frequently threatening) effort to interrogate our privilege as well as our powerlessness. It obliges us to examine our own privilege relative though it may be, to move out of our internalized positions as victims, to take control over our lives, and to take responsibilities for change. It requires us to question what we take for granted, and a commitment to a vision of society built on reflection, reform, mutuality, and respect in theory and in practice. Teaching and learning against the grain is not easy, comfortable, or safe. It is protracted, difficult, uncomfortable, painful, and risky. It involves struggles with our colleagues, our students, as well as struggles within ourselves against our internalized beliefs and normalized behaviors. In other words, it is a lifelong challenge. However, as Simon (1993) puts it, teaching against the grain is also a project of hope. We engage in it with the knowledge and conviction that we are in a long-term collaborative project with like-minded people whose goal is to make the world a better place for us and for our children. 7 -The Role of Ballot is to resist institutional ableism. The specter of the disabled body permeates our cultural imaginary and foundationally informs our epistemology, makes the aff a prior question 8 -Snyder and Mitchell 1 (Sharon L. Snyder (assistant professor in the Department of Disability and Human Development at the University of Illinois at Chicago), and David T. Mitchell (associate professor and director of graduate studies in the Ph.D. in Disability Studies Program at the University of Illinois at Chicago), “Re-engaging the Body: Disability Studies and the Resistance to Embodiment”, Public Culture 13(3): 367–389, 2001, http://publicculture.dukejournals.org/content/13/3/367.full.pdf 9 -Consequently, disability studies has formulated the problem of the medicalized body in a manner similar to that undertaken earlier in body studies, taking up medical institutions (and the ancillary administering of diagnosis, sequestration, and case study) as the primary locus of its critique. The pathologization of human differences is theorized as an imposition on the body—a regulatory effort to standardize inherent dynamism. But while body studies provided a foundation for a more general model of critique around the categories of illness, health, pathology, and even bioethics, disability studies moves beneath these terms to encounter disability directly in the experiences of human populations which were merely referenced euphemistically by those more general terms. Disability studies narrows the focus of its investigation to the social implications for bodies deemed excessively aberrant. In doing so, scholars have expanded the domain of cultural understandings about disability beyond the walls of its scientific management. For disability studies, the disabled body is neither a matter of individual malfunction—as cast by medicine—nor an effect of the abstraction of the body within the health professions. Instead, disability translates into a common denominator of cultural fascination (if not downright obsession)—one that infiltrates thinking across discursive registers as a shared reference point in deciding matters of human value and communal belonging. In this emergent field, the able body is no longer characterized as merely a false quantitative ideal, as it had been in body studies, but rather as an aesthetic product of cultural forces that oppress those categorized as disabled. This subtle shift in emphasis allows humanities scholars in disability studies to extend the discussion of bodily deviance from the context of rehabilitative institutions to that of wider ranging cultural locations. For instance, Lennard J. Davis (1995) analyzes the role of institutions for the Deaf in the historical development of disability activism and community in eighteenth-century Europe. Martin Pernick (1996) analyzes the influential role of public health films in the promotion of eugenics in Chicago prior to World War II. Through readings of nineteenth- and twentieth-century U.S. literary texts and cultural spectacles such as the freak show, Rosemarie Garland Thomson (1997) argues that disabled people’s bodies have been represented as unassimilable within a normalizing biological ideology that marks the disabled body as the inferior contrast to an able-bodied, white, masculine citizenry. Paul K. Longmore (1997) assesses television genres, such as disease-of-the-week movies and telethons, to dissect mainstream representations of disability as tragedies in need of eradication or overcoming. In our own Narrative Prosthesis (Mitchell and Snyder 2000), we theorize the pervasive utility of disability to literature in Europe and the United States by discussing the longstanding artistic recourse to disability as a staple feature of characterization. Disability studies scholars have also analyzed the opportunistic use of corporeal metaphors to emblematize societal weaknesses in literary and philosophical figurations of disability. Ultimately, these analyses of the pervasive dependency upon textual and visual representations of disability in various cultural media have forced a reformulation of a theory of marginality itself within disability studies. This is one site at which disability studies diverges from the approach established by other civil rights–based programs. While many minority movements have argued that their social devaluation occurs as a result of their marginal presence in representational media, disability studies has formulated an analysis of social depreciation targeting the perpetual recourse to images of disability in narrative and visual mediums. As a result, disability studies follows a figuration of marginality as the expression of an “overheated symbolic organism” that conveys potent meanings as a result of its palimpsest-like discursive history (cf. Stewart 1993). Theaters of Repression The work of disability studies scholars consolidated the argument that bodily and cognitive differences were integral to various registers of meaning-making within culture. While the earliest research in the field kept returning to a denunciation of three prominent literary figures—Shakespeare’s Richard III, Melville’s Captain Ahab, and Dickens’s Tiny Tim—the growing body of historical research called for wider ranging methodologies. As with later developments in race and gender studies, disability studies outgrew its denunciations of stereotypes; instead, theorists began to argue that disability represented a deep-seated, yet uninterrogated, cultural conflict. If the able body proved a utopian fiction of abstract bodily norms, disabled bodies occupied the phantasmic recesses of the cultural imaginary. The different body was more than a site for public scapegoating—cognitive and physical aberrancies acted as reminders of Others in our midst who challenged beliefs in a homogeneous bodily order. Out of these efforts to elucidate the constructed nature of disabled bodies in history, disability studies set out to diagnose the investments of an ableist society in disability’s various incarnations. Cultural efforts to medicalize or domesticate disability effectively repressed the power of aberrancy to unmoor notions of the body as a matter of norms, averages, and deviations. Locating disabled bodies as rare examples of extraordinary deviance essentially cordoned off disability from the differences that characterize typical biological diversity. For disability studies, the impersonal was the political. Such a sequestration evidenced the mainstream desire to reduce the different body’s (or mind’s) ability to destabilize normative models of health. 10 - 11 -Advantage – Ableism 12 -The current US housing system is grossly inefficient 13 -Foscarinis et al 04 (Maria Foscarinis, Executive Director, National Law Center on Homelessness and Policy, “The Human Right to Housing: Making the Case in U.S. Advocacy,” Clearing- house Review Journal of Poverty Law and Policy, July-August 2004.)JA 14 -Legislation, policies, and programs related to development of adequate housing to ensure universal housing access is a significant concern of the draft Bangkok guidelines. This area addresses planning, the regulation of building construction, the housing finance system, and freedom of movement to choose one’s residence. In the United States, on both the federal and state levels, governmental commitment to financing and subsidizing affordable housing for low-income people has declined precipitously in recent years. Between 1976 and 2002 budget authority for federal housing assistance dropped by $28.1 billion. In January 1977 the Ford administration submitted to Congress a budget request for the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) that would have funded 506,000 additional low-income housing units. Subsidized housing commitments dropped to 60,590 in 1982, to 33,491 in 1995, and to 8,493 in 1996. HUD has been increasing funding for housing units since 1996 but to nowhere near the level of the late 1970s. Average time on waiting lists for public housing has grown steeply.28 While the commitment to create new subsidized units has tapered off to nearly zero, the stock of federally subsidized housing is being rapidly depleted as owners of privately owned but publicly subsidized housing stock prepay government-insured mortgages or opt out of government contracts. Since 1996, an estimated 120,000 affordable units have been lost in this manner, and 1.4 million HUD-subsidized units are in jeopardy.29 This retreat from government commitment to develop affordable housing has led to a precipitous decrease in the availability of affordable housing. In central cities almost five very-low-income households are vying for every three unsubsidized units that they can afford; in the suburbs two very-low-income households are vying for every afford- able unit on the market.30 Even amidst the prosperity of the 1990s the stock of housing available to the poorest decreased. Units affordable to renters of very low income (below 50 percent of area median income) fell by almost 900,000 from 1993 to 1995, and over 300,000 affordable units were lost for low income (below 80 percent of area median) renters between 1997 and 1999. 15 - 16 -People with disabilities are often denied access to adequate housing and more likely to be forcibly evicted 17 -UHCHR 09 (UHCHR, November 2009, Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, “The Right to Adequate Housing”, http://www.ohchr.org/Documents/Publications/FS21_rev_1_Housing_en.pdf) SN 18 -Accessibility remains a key issue. Housing, housing-related facilities and neighbourhoods are traditionally designed for people without disabilities. The frequent exclusion and marginalization of persons with disabilities often mean that they are rarely consulted when new housing structures or neighbourhoods are developed or slums upgraded. They are also vulnerable to associated violations of their rights. For instance, the lack of adequate sanitation facilities in informal settlements can pose severe challenges to them. Security of tenure is another challenge for persons with disabilities, in particular those with an intellectual or psychosocial disability. The frequent lack of recognition of their legal capacity, often coupled with requirements for applications in person, means that persons with such disabilities are rarely able to enter into any type of formal housing contract (lease, ownership, etc.) and, therefore, have to rely on less formal avenues to secure housing. Those arrangements, in turn, make them more vulnerable to forced evictions. In general, where stigmatization remains unaddressed and social or community services are unavailable—including social housing—persons with disabilities continue to face discrimination when seeking housing, or more general challenges in securing the resources necessary for obtaining adequate housing. Such challenges inevitably make them more vulnerable to forced evictions, homelessness and inadequate housing conditions. General comment No. 4 provides that persons with disabilities must be accorded full and sustainable access to adequate housing resources, and that housing law and policy should take into account their special needs. In its general comment No. 5 (1994), the Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights reaffirmed that the right to adequate housing includes accessibility for persons with disabilities. The Special Rapporteur on adequate housing has also underlined not only that housing should be physically and economically accessible to persons with disabilities, but that they should be able to effectively participate in the life of the community where they live. 19 - 20 -Ableism operates as the fundamental tactic of oppression—the naturalization of social inferiority as a biological difference 21 -Siebers 9 (Siebers, University of Michigan, Professor of Literary and Cultural Criticism, Tobin, “The Aesthetics of Human Disqualification”, Oct 28, 2009, Lecture, Google Books.) 22 - 23 -Oppression is the systematic victimization of one group by another. It is a form of intergroup violence. That oppression involves “groups,” and not “individuals,” means that it concerns identities, and this means, furthermore, that oppression always focuses on how the body appears, both on how it appears as a public and physical presence and on its specific and various appearances. Oppression is justified most often by the attribution of natural inferiority—what some call “in-built” or “biological” inferiority. Natural inferiority is always somatic, focusing on the mental and physical features of the group, and it figures as disability. The prototype of biological inferiority is disability. The representation of inferiority always comes back to the appearance of the body and the way the body makes other bodies feel. This is why the study of oppression requires an understanding of aesthetics—not only because oppression uses aesthetic judgments for its violence but also because the signposts of how oppression works are visible in the history of art, where aesthetic judgments about the creation and appreciation of bodies are openly discussed. One additional thought must be noted before I treat some analytic examples from the historical record. First, despite my statement that disability now serves as the master trope of human disqualification, it is not a matter of reducing other minority identities to disability identity. Rather, it is a matter of understanding the work done by disability in oppressive systems. In disability oppression, the physical and mental properties of the body are socially constructed as disqualifying defects, but this specific type of social construction happens to be integral at the present moment to the symbolic requirements of oppression in general. In every oppressive system of our day, I want to claim, the oppressed identity is represented in some way as disabled, and although it is hard to understand, the same process obtains when disability is the oppressed identity. “Racism” disqualifies on the basis of race, providing justification for the inferiority of certain skin colors, bloodlines, and physical features. “Sexism” disqualifies on the basis of sex/gender as a direct representation of mental and physical inferiority. “Classism” disqualifies on the basis of family lineage and socioeconomic power as proof of inferior genealogical status. “Ableism” disqualifies on the basis of mental and physical differences, first selecting and then stigmatizing them as disabilities. The oppressive system occults in each case the fact that the disqualified identity is socially constructed, a mere convention, representing signs of incompetence, weakness, or inferiority as undeniable facts of nature. As racism, sexism, and classism fall away slowly as justifications for human inferiority—and the critiques of these prejudices prove powerful examples of how to fight oppression—the prejudice against disability remains in full force, providing seemingly credible reasons for the belief in human inferiority and the oppressive systems built upon it. This usage will continue, I expect, until we reach a historical moment when we know as much about the social construction of disability as we now know about the social construction of race, class, gender, and sexuality. Disability represents at this moment in time the final frontier of justifiable human inferiority 24 - 25 -Plan 26 - 27 -Plan Text: The United States federal government should ensure the right to housing for the chronically homeless via the Housing First model 28 -Semuels 16 (Alana Semuels is a staff writer at The Atlantic. She was previously a national correspondent for the Los Angeles Times. April 25, 2016. How can the US End Homelessness? https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/04/end-homelessness-us/479115/)//JA 29 - 30 -On any given night in the United States, half a million people are homeless. Some of them sleep in shelters, others on the streets; roughly one-quarter are children. About 15 percent are so-called chronically homeless, which means they haven’t had a permanent home in years, and often cycle through jails, hospitals and homeless shelters in search of a place to lay their heads. The government has tried to tackle the problem of homelessness on nearly every level, but comprehensive solutions have proven elusive, despite billions spent over time. The federal government has set a series of goals of ending homelessness for veterans by 2015, chronic homelessness by 2017, and homelessness for families with children and youth by 2020. But reaching these benchmarks appears to be much further off. Can we count on that as a long-term solution? Shelters are certainly useful in that they provide beds and roofs to people who don’t have them, especially on cold and rainy nights where sleeping outside could be fatal for some. But shelters are incredibly expensive to operate. Nationally, the average monthly cost of serving a family in an emergency shelter is $4,819. Providing them with a voucher for housing, on the other hand, is just $1,162. Shelters might be good for emergencies, but does having a bed to sleep in mean that someone has a home? And quality can be an issue for these shelters: Many homeless people have told advocates trying to get them off the streets that they avoid shelters if they possibly can. They’ve heard about bad experiences there, or have themselves suffered through violence, theft, or other trauma in these ostensibly safer spaces. There were 826 “violent incidents” in New York City homeless shelters last year, including sexual assault and domestic violence, according to the New York Daily News. People often have to leave food and other belongings behind when they check into a shelter, making it hard to accumulate anything of sentimental or material value. Plus, shelters don’t allow residents to develop a sense of permanency—and it’s permanency that helps people get a job or stay sober, as numerous studies have indicated. Affordable housing would be a longer-term solution. Let’s just increase the number of these units overall. If more people can afford housing, they won’t be homeless. If it were that easy to add more affordable housing, cities like New York and San Francisco would be very different than they are now, and far less expensive. It’s costly to build new apartments and homes in cities where land is pricey, and developers want to recoup their investment as soon as possible, which means they have to charge a lot for rent. That’s not to say cities, states, and the federal government haven’t tried out a few strategies for hastening the construction of affordable housing. Have any of them been effective? There are federal Low Income Housing Tax Credits that help certain developers build 100 percent affordable housing. But developers compete for those tax credits, and there aren’t enough to held build affordable housing for all the people who need it, much less for those who don’t have homes in the first place. Inclusionary zoning policies can help create more affordable housing; in places such as Montgomery County, Maryland, for instance, all new apartment buildings with more than a certain number of units have to set aside a few of them to be designated as affordable housing, priced much lower than market rent. But then developers usually have to pass the costs of that lost rent onto the other tenants, which increases market-rate rent. In most municipalities, inclusionary zoning is voluntary, which means that developers who include affordable units can skirt some regulations, allowing them to build higher, for instance, or make their buildings denser. Making this kind of zoning mandatory can be tricky, though, because developers argue that they can’t charge enough for market-rate units in low- and middle-income neighborhoods to subsidize the affordable units. In March, New York City made inclusionary zoning mandatory in some neighborhoods, and developers are already complaining that it’s become harder to build affordable housing in the city. Okay, so if we can’t rely on affordable housing units alone, it sounds like we should find other methods to give homeless people special access to permanent homes. That would be better in terms of lasting success, boosting their chances of landing and keeping a job, and maybe helping those who struggle with addiction to stay sober. This is what’s called a housing-first approach, and numerous studies have found it’s much more effective than relying on shelters. Housing-first places homeless people in long-term housing without asking them to get sober or hang onto a job first. After they’re settled in a stable home, they gain access to services such as drug and alcohol treatment, an assigned social worker, or job training. They don’t have to take advantage of those services, but most people chose to do so. Through housing-first, Utah reduced its chronically-homeless population 72 percent between 2005 and 2014. And housing-first isn’t cheap—though tenants pay a small portion of their rent, the state or city usually picks up much of the tab. A voucher for a housing program, like Section 8, can cost $1,162 a month, and spending that money means fewer people get rental assistance overall. When long-term housing is hard to come by, people desperate for help often get abused. As The New York Times pointed out in a heartbreaking story last year, cities such as New York with a large homeless population have seen the growth of three-quarters houses, which cram multiple people into one bedroom while purporting to help them. Often, they’re just collecting these peoples’ money without giving them any services or even a clean place to live. Not every homeless person will thrive just because they have a place to live. Some have mental or physical problems that make it difficult for them to stay off the streets after getting a home. Others may never be able to support themselves completely without a community to keep them afloat. Jeffrey Nemetsky, who runs Brooklyn Community Housing and Services, says having a social worker knock on the door once a day to say hello can mean the difference between a tenant staying or heading back out onto the streets. So that’s the answer: provide the homeless with permanent, affordable housing, and wraparound services. Permanent supportive housing might solve this for us. True, permanent supportive housing can be very effective at helping the chronically homeless get off the streets and stay stable. But is it legal? Many people who need permanent supportive housing are battling mental problems or drug and alcohol abuse, and would have once ended up in institutions. But since the deinstitutionalization movement began in the 1960s and ’70s, the number of in-patient beds at state or county mental health facilities has declined from more than 400,000 to fewer than 100,000. Though some institutions still exist, the practice of putting the mentally ill into segregated buildings falls into a gray area. In 1999, the Supreme Court ruled that the segregation of people with disabilities violated the Americans with Disabilities Act. Though the case was about people on Medicaid, homeless advocates interpreted it to apply to some chronically homeless with disabilities. Isolating those homeless people from the rest of society is akin to institutionalizing them, advocates say, and it violates the law. That’s why some housing developments provide both permanent supportive housing and low-income housing, so that homes can be made available to a larger swath of the population. This kind of mixed-use housing helps create communities; in one building in Harlem, single moms living in affordable housing helped out the ex-cons living in supportive housing, and vice versa. Though the building’s developers worried that low-income moms wouldn’t want to live with the mentally ill, some 2,000 people applied for just a few dozen units when the building opened. This and other experiences suggest that integrating supportive and low-income housing can be successful. But still, agencies and advocates all over the country are struggling to serve the homeless people with mental illness and addiction. It often takes years for case workers to get people to try out permanent supportive housing and abandon the lives they’ve known on the streets. Some cities and states have started allowing judges to order people who cycle through the system to receive treatment for their illnesses, an approach that’s controversial. Across the country, experts on homelessness have solutions they think will work best. The problem is, housing in many cities is getting more expensive every month, and as prices rise, so do the costs of programs to combat homelessness. Meanwhile, federal funds for affordable housing have stayed at the same levels for years. So as housing costs go up, those funds are spread more thinly and help fewer people. But if homelessness is really a problem the country wants to solve by 2020, why not increase the amount of money overall that the government spends on programs to help the homeless? Where could that money come from? Why not stimulate the creation of affordable housing so to assist both the chronically homeless and those who are homeless temporarily? Such housing could be available to people below certain income levels, and they could qualify whether they are on the streets or are in an apartment they can’t afford. For some, it’s hard to imagine carving out more money from the country’s budget to address these issues. But solving homelessness can help fix a lot of other problems too, including truancy from schools, food insecurity, drug and alcohol abuse, unemployment. Is it possible that directing more resources toward solving homelessness could actually save society money by helping to fix its other ills at the same time? 31 - 32 -Multiple studies confirm – Housing First model reduces municipal costs 33 -Snyder 15 (Kaitlyn Snyder. Study Data Shows that Housing Chronically Homeless Saves Money, Lives. June 30, 2015. http://www.endhomelessness.org/blog/entry/study-data-show-that-housing-chronically-homeless-people-saves-money-lives)//JA 34 -Homelessness costs taxpayers a lot of money. Take, for example, the infamous case of Murray Barr, aka “Million Dollar Murray,” a chronically homeless man in Reno, Nevada who accrued more than a million dollars in emergency room, substance abuse treatment, police, jail, ambulance, shelter and other costs. Despite all these costly interventions, Barr ultimately died homeless on the streets. His tragic case highlights the need for a cost-effective solution to chronic homelessness. Cost studies demonstrate that Permanent Supportive Housing (PSH) is that solution. Based on the Housing First philosophy, PSH reduces the need for costly public services by providing chronically homeless people with permanent housing at a subsided rate, along with supportive services to help them maintain their housing. Research has shown that it’s more effective than shelters and transitional housing systems at housing the ‘hardest to serve’ individuals, who often struggle with complex and overlapping health, mental health, and substance abuse disorders. In Denver, PSH saved $15,733 per year, per person in public costs for shelter, criminal justice, health care, emergency room, and behavioral health costs. The savings were enough to completely offset the cost of housing ($13,400) and still save taxpayers $2,373. Researchers have already conducted cost studies like this one in communities across the country. The map below shows the PSH cost studies that we at the Alliance are currently aware of. The majority of these studies show significant savings that completely or nearly offset the cost of housing. Has your community conducted a cost study? If so, the Alliance wants to hear from you. We advocate for increased investment in PSH, because we know it ends chronic homelessness. By demonstrating how this intervention saves taxpayers money, we can convince lawmakers that such investment will benefit their communities and constituencies. Spending millions of dollars on emergency costs does little, if anything, to solve the problem of homelessness. Instead, we could be using those same millions to fund PSH and prevent premature deaths, like those of Murray Barr and countless others. 35 - 36 -Housing first paradigm specifically key to solving chronic homelessness 37 -Kunkle 15 (Frederick Kunkle runs the Tripping blog, writing about the experience of travel. Freddy's also covered politics, courts, police, and local government. Before coming to The Washington Post, he worked for the Star-Ledger and The Bergen Record. “Housing first” approach works for homeless, study says. March 4, 2015)JA 38 -A new Canadian study lends backing for a commonsense approach to moving people off the street that has been used in the District and other U.S. cities since the 1990s: Ensure that the homeless receive permanent shelter first, and their chances of achieving stability will increase. Known as the “housing first” approach, the program offers social support as well. But it emphasizes finding secure shelter in the community first, in contrast to homeless programs that insist on preconditions such as sobriety or psychiatric care and moving through transitional housing. The study, carried out by researchers at the Centre for Research on Inner City Health of St. Michael’s Hospital in Toronto, found that giving mentally ill homeless people financial help to secure free-market rental housing and mental health support services enhanced their chances of achieving stability. Over a 24-month period, those with both supports had stable housing nearly 63 to 77 percent of the time, compared with about 24 to 39 percent of those who received “usual care” or even “housing first” programs that also require more assertive social service help. “Housing first is not housing only. It is housing with support,” lead author Vicky Stergiopoulos, who is psychiatrist in chief at St. Michael’s, said in a telephone interview late Tuesday. “And a lot of the individuals, or most of them, would not be able to keep their housing without support.” The study appeared Tuesday in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA). 39 -Methodology: The study involved about 2,000 people enrolled in a program called At Home/Chez Soi, a research program that takes a “housing first” approach in five Canadian cities. (The study drew data involving people recruited to the program between October 2009 and July 2011 in four cities: Vancouver, Winnipeg, Toronto and Montreal.) Participants were randomly assigned to one group where they received independent rental housing that cost up to 30 percent of their income. A rental supplement of up to $600 was also provided. The participants had some choice over the neighborhood and type of housing they desired. Participants also were required to meet once a week or more with a case manager. The case managers could help them locate employment, mend family relationships, seek medical care or plan for other goals. Those in the group who received “usual care” were not without assistance, but it was less intensive, Stergiopoulos said. They received no financial help to find adequate housing in the community, and their housing and social services care were not coordinated. “They didn’t have rent supplements. They couldn’t access housing in the community,” she said, adding that as a result they had fewer housing options. Other studies have demonstrated the benefit of the “housing first” approach, she said. But this study also shows that the program is effective even when the social services offered are less intense than those in similar programs. Those more intensive programs – what the authors call Assertive Community Treatment – involve an interdisciplinary team that includes a psychiatrist and others, and small caseloads. The approach taken by Chez Soi is also less expensive than the more intensive approach, costing about $14,177 per participant per year, compared with $22,257. “Our findings thus highlight that scattered-site housing with intensive case management is effective in reducing homelessness among a broader spectrum of the homeless population who may have a severe mental illness but do not require Assertive Community Treatment support, best reserved for a smaller group of homeless adults with high needs for mental health and other support services,” the study says. There are about 150,000 homeless people in Canada and about 1.5 million in the United States. 40 - 41 -Increased construction is unnecessary; oversufficiency of units in the status quo 42 -Olsen 16 (Edgar Olsen. We Don’t Need More Housing Projects. Edgar Olsen is a professor of economics and public policy at the University of Virginia. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/in-theory/wp/2016/10/11/we-dont-need-more-housing-projects/?utm_term=.ed94bd2ed348)//JA 43 -Many poor households are not offered low-income housing assistance in the form of a voucher or a spot in a housing project, and many of these households spend high portions of their modest incomes on housing because they value more desirable neighborhoods, convenient locations and higher-quality homes more than other goods that must be sacrificed to live where they choose. These households already have housing. We don’t need to build new housing for them. If we think that their housing is unaffordable, the cheapest solution is for the government to pay a part of the rent, and the housing voucher program — the system’s most cost-effective tool — does that. This program also ensures that its participants live in units that meet minimum standards. Building new units is a much more expensive solution to the affordability problem. The best study of the Department of Housing and Urban Development’s largest program subsidizing the construction of privately owned housing projects indicated an excess taxpayer cost of at least 72 percent compared with housing vouchers that provide equally good housing at the same cost to tenants. Publicly owned housing projects have an even larger excess cost. Furthermore, it is not necessary or desirable to construct new units to house the homeless. In the entire country, there are only about 600,000 homeless people on a single night and more than 3 million vacant units available for rent. All homeless people could be easily accommodated in vacant existing units, which would be much less expensive than building new units for them. The reason that people are homeless is not a shortage of units but lack of money to pay the rent for existing units. A housing voucher would solve that problem. A major HUD-funded random assignment experiment called the Family Options Study compared the cost and effectiveness of housing vouchers and subsidized housing projects for serving the homeless. Subsidized housing projects were far less effective and more than twice as expensive. People who want to provide housing assistance to more of the poorest households should support expansion of the housing voucher program rather than subsidizing the construction of additional housing projects. 44 - 45 -Pre-Fiat 46 - 47 -Underview 48 - 49 -Ask if I will meet your interp in cx; this avoids unnecessary theory- we can work something out; this allows for greater substantive debate which is the only form of education which is unique to debate. Grant me an auto I meet on T/theory if the interp isn’t checked to discourage nonchecking. 50 -2. Fairness isn’t a voter – portable education is the only impact 51 -Branson 07 Josh, NDT/TOC winner from Northwestern and St. Marks, Harvard Law school Graduate, Current lawyer; http://osdir.com/ml/education.region.usa.edebate/2007-11/msg00295.html 52 -There is no such thing as unfairness. If you respond to this and don’t make an argument about the terminal value of debate, then you have not thought about this enough. Overlooking the issue of big/small school and coaching resources (another topic for another time), I think all teams start at the same point. Everyone has access to the resolution, everyone has access to the same literature base, and everyone has the same speech time to fill. Whenever one side makes a move, it closes some doors strategically and opens others. Your job is to find it. I think whining about unfairness is almost always lame and untruthful. Think about the classic unfairness arguments: insert K team is unfair because they don’t have a plan we’re ready for. You know, it?s funny, but thinking back over my college debate career, I spent more time agonizing about and arguing with coaches over these far-left teams than I did the other top-5 quality teams. And, while I’ve said this before, I’ll say it again: I think that exact process is one of the main benefits of debate. Forcing yourself to adapt to circumstances in which you’re not comfortable, being made to alter your thinking on the run when you don’t have your same old stale blocks, when you have to make new cognitive connections and investigate literature bases which you are not familiar? I think THAT is the value-added of debate. I’ve written about this extensively before, but debate does not train people to be policy experts. Hell, if I’d wanted to have a sweet career in the policy world, I would have been better served quitting debate and learning Chinese. I’m not going to repeat everything I’ve said previously, but, at least for me, debate taught me to be more intellectually versatile and flexible than almost anyone outside of debate that I know. That is something I think is extremely valuable both intellectually (to the debater) and socially.And, you see, it’s things that are 'unfair' that encourage this type of adaptation. Take yourselves off your theory clitche-ridden blocks for a while, and actually think about it: how many things make it IMPOSSIBLE to win. None. How many things make it harder? A lot. But again, almost any time someone makes a good argument, it becomes harder for the other side to win. That’s what debate is. It’s about making things hard on the other side and not letting them make it hard for you. That’s what learning is. Fairness claims are bad because they contravene the idea of debate. If I’m right that fairness impacts really just conceal an assumption about what the value of debate is, then I think just directly making counter-arguments about the role of debate and cutting out the rhetoric of fairness is profoundly beneficial. I barely even need to point out that life isn’t fair. I think it's way more helpful to conceive of theory arguments in terms of routing debate towards productive ends than it is to maintain some pedantic obsession with fairness. I think the rhetorical message kids should be getting is that they should react to what they perceive of as ‘unfair’ practices by adapting, not whining. Because, when we are honest with ourselves and take ourselves off our oft-repeated theory cliches, is anything really THAT unfair I can’t really think of a single time in debate that would meet that test. I will tell you something though; right along with the shitty quality of evidence, theory arguments are at the top of the list of things that marginalize debate as a good training device. It's something that people outside debate don't really understand, and it's by far the most boring thing to judge, and, just as a matter of empirical observation, the people that do it a lot tend to be the laziest ones. 53 -3. The state is inevitable – their departure from the state cedes hegemony to the Right. 54 -Mouffe 9 (Chantal Mouffe, Professor of Political Theory at the Centre for the Study of Democracy, University of Westminster, “The Importance of Engaging the State”, What is Radical Politics Today?, Edited by Jonathan Pugh, pp. 233-7) 55 -In both Hardt and Negri, and Virno, there is therefore emphasis upon ‘critique as withdrawal’. They all call for the development of a non-state public sphere. They call for self-organisation, experimentation, non-representative and extra-parliamentary politics. They see forms of traditional representative politics as inherently oppressive. So they do not seek to engage with them, in order to challenge them. They seek to get rid of them altogether. This disengagement is, for such influential personalities in radical politics today, the key to every political position in the world. The Multitude must recognise imperial sovereignty itself as the enemy and discover adequate means of subverting its power. Whereas in the disciplinary era I spoke about earlier, sabotage was the fundamental form of political resistance, these authors claim that, today, it should be desertion. It is indeed through desertion, through the evacuation of the places of power, that they think that battles against Empire might be won. Desertion and exodus are, for these important thinkers, a powerful form of class struggle against imperial postmodernity. According to Hardt and Negri, and Virno, radical politics in the past was dominated by the notion of ‘the people’. This was, according to them, a unity, acting with one will. And this unity is linked to the existence of the state. The Multitude, on the contrary, shuns political unity. It is not representable because it is an active self-organising agent that can never achieve the status of a juridical personage. It can never converge in a general will, because the present globalisation of capital and workers’ struggles will not permit this. It is anti-state and anti-popular. Hardt and Negri claim that the Multitude cannot be conceived any more in terms of a sovereign authority that is representative of the people. They therefore argue that new forms of politics, which are non-representative, are needed. They advocate a withdrawal from existing institutions. This is something which characterises much of radical politics today. The emphasis is not upon challenging the state. Radical politics today is often characterised by a mood, a sense and a feeling, that the state itself is inherently the problem. Critique as engagement I will now turn to presenting the way I envisage the form of social criticism best suited to radical politics today. I agree with Hardt and Negri that it is important to understand the transition from Fordism to post-Fordism. But I consider that the dynamics of this transition is better apprehended within the framework of the approach outlined in the book Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics (Laclau and Mouffe, 2001). What I want to stress is that many factors have contributed to this transition from Fordism to post-Fordism, and that it is necessary to recognise its complex nature. My problem with Hardt and Negri’s view is that, by putting so much emphasis on the workers’ struggles, they tend to see this transition as if it was driven by one single logic: the workers’ resistance to the forces of capitalism in the post-Fordist era. They put too much emphasis upon immaterial labour. In their view, capitalism can only be reactive and they refuse to accept the creative role played both by capital and by labour. To put it another way, they deny the positive role of political struggle. In Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics we use the word ‘hegemony’ to describe the way in which meaning is given to institutions or practices: for example, the way in which a given institution or practice is defined as ‘oppressive to women’, ‘racist’ or ‘environmentally destructive’. We also point out that every hegemonic order is therefore susceptible to being challenged by counter-hegemonic practices – feminist, anti-racist, environmentalist, for example. This is illustrated by the plethora of new social movements which presently exist in radical politics today (Christian, anti-war, counter-globalisation, Muslim, and so on). Clearly not all of these are workers’ struggles. In their various ways they have nevertheless attempted to influence and have influenced a new hegemonic order. This means that when we talk about ‘the political’, we do not lose sight of the ever present possibility of heterogeneity and antagonism within society. There are many different ways of being antagonistic to a dominant order in a heterogeneous society – it need not only refer to the workers’ struggles. I submit that it is necessary to introduce this hegemonic dimension when one envisages the transition from Fordism to post-Fordism. This means abandoning the view that a single logic (workers’ struggles) is at work in the evolution of the work process; as well as acknowledging the pro-active role played by capital. In order to do this we can find interesting insights in the work of Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello who, in their book The New Spirit of Capitalism (2005), bring to light the way in which capitalists manage to use the demands for autonomy of the new movements that developed in the 1960s, harnessing them in the development of the post-Fordist networked economy and transforming them into new forms of control. They use the term ‘artistic critique’ to refer to how the strategies of the counter-culture (the search for authenticity, the ideal of selfmanagement and the anti-hierarchical exigency) were used to promote the conditions required by the new mode of capitalist regulation, replacing the disciplinary framework characteristic of the Fordist period. From my point of view, what is interesting in this approach is that it shows how an important dimension of the transition from Fordism to post- Fordism involves rearticulating existing discourses and practices in new ways. It allows us to visualise the transition from Fordism to post- Fordism in terms of a hegemonic intervention. To be sure, Boltanski and Chiapello never use this vocabulary, but their analysis is a clear example of what Gramsci called ‘hegemony through neutralisation’ or ‘passive revolution’. This refers to a situation where demands which challenge the hegemonic order are recuperated by the existing system, which is achieved by satisfying them in a way that neutralises their subversive potential. When we apprehend the transition from Fordism to post- Fordism within such a framework, we can understand it as a hegemonic move by capital to re-establish its leading role and restore its challenged legitimacy. We did not witness a revolution, in Marx’s sense of the term. Rather, there have been many different interventions, challenging dominant hegemonic practices. It is clear that, once we envisage social reality in terms of ‘hegemonic’ and ‘counter-hegemonic’ practices, radical politics is not about withdrawing completely from existing institutions. Rather, we have no other choice but to engage with hegemonic practices, in order to challenge them. This is crucial; otherwise we will be faced with a chaotic situation. Moreover, if we do not engage with and challenge the existing order, if we instead choose to simply escape the state completely, we leave the door open for others to take control of systems of authority and regulation. Indeed there are many historical (and not so historical) examples of this. When the Left shows little interest, Right-wing and authoritarian groups are only too happy to take over the state. The strategy of exodus could be seen as the reformulation of the idea of communism, as it was found in Marx. There are many points in common between the two perspectives. To be sure, for Hardt and Negri it is no longer the proletariat, but the Multitude which is the privileged political subject. But in both cases the state is seen as a monolithic apparatus of domination that cannot be transformed. It has to ‘wither away’ in order to leave room for a reconciled society beyond law, power and sovereignty. In reality, as I’ve already noted, others are often perfectly willing to take control. If my approach – supporting new social movements and counterhegemonic practices – has been called ‘post-Marxist’ by many, it is precisely because I have challenged the very possibility of such a reconciled society. To acknowledge the ever present possibility of antagonism to the existing order implies recognising that heterogeneity cannot be eliminated. As far as politics is concerned, this means the need to envisage it in terms of a hegemonic struggle between conflicting hegemonic projects attempting to incarnate the universal and to define the symbolic parameters of social life. A successful hegemony fixes the meaning of institutions and social practices and defines the ‘common sense’ through which a given conception of reality is established. However, such a result is always contingent, precarious and susceptible to being challenged by counter-hegemonic interventions. Politics always takes place in a field criss-crossed by antagonisms. A properly political intervention is always one that engages with a certain aspect of the existing hegemony. It can never be merely oppositional or conceived as desertion, because it aims to challenge the existing order, so that it may reidentify and feel more comfortable with that order. Another important aspect of a hegemonic politics lies in establishing linkages between various demands (such as environmentalists, feminists, anti-racist groups), so as to transform them into claims that will challenge the existing structure of power relations. This is a further reason why critique involves engagement, rather than disengagement. It is clear that the different demands that exist in our societies are often in conflict with each other. This is why they need to be articulated politically, which obviously involves the creation of a collective will, a ‘we’. This, in turn, requires the determination of a ‘them’. This obvious and simple point is missed by the various advocates of the Multitude. For they seem to believe that the Multitude possesses a natural unity which does not need political articulation. Hardt and Negri see ‘the People’ as homogeneous and expressed in a unitary general will, rather than divided by different political conflicts. Counter-hegemonic practices, by contrast, do not eliminate differences. Rather, they are what could be called an ‘ensemble of differences’, all coming together, only at a given moment, against a common adversary. Such as when different groups from many backgrounds come together to protest against a war perpetuated by a state, or when environmentalists, feminists, anti-racists and others come together to challenge dominant models of development and progress. In these cases, the adversary cannot be defined in broad general terms like ‘Empire’, or for that matter ‘Capitalism’. It is instead contingent upon the particular circumstances in question – the specific states, international institutions or governmental practices that are to be challenged. Put another way, the construction of political demands is dependent upon the specific relations of power that need to be targeted and transformed, in order to create the conditions for a new hegemony. This is clearly not an exodus from politics. It is not ‘critique as withdrawal’, but ‘critique as engagement’. It is a ‘war of position’ that needs to be launched, often across a range of sites, involving the coming together of a range of interests. This can only be done by establishing links between social movements, political parties and trade unions, for example. The aim is to create a common bond and collective will, engaging with a wide range of sites, and often institutions, with the aim of transforming them. This, in my view, is how we should conceive the nature of radical politics. - EntryDate
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... ... @@ -1,83 +1,0 @@ 1 -We object to the use of the words “human rights” due to the neocolonial paternalism it propagates 2 -Instances of “women/an” have been replaced with “womxn” 3 -Framework 4 -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. 5 - 6 -To evaluate ethical judgements we must first discard our pre-disposed ontologies via inclusion of the subject at hand. 7 -Butler 09. Judith Butler, “Frames of War: When is Life Grievable?” Jan 1st 2009, Pg.138, http://books.google.com/books/about/Frames_of_War.html?id=ga7hAAAAMAAJ 8 -We ask such normative questions as if we know what we mean by the subjects even as we do not always know how best to represent or recognize various subjects. Indeed, the “we” who asks such questions for the most part assumes that the problem is a normative one, namely, how best to arrange political life so that recognition and representation can take place. And though surely this is a crucial, if not the most crucial, normative question to ask, we cannot possibly approach an answer if we do not consider the ontology of the subject whose recognition and representation is at issue. Moreover, any inquiry into that ontology requires that we consider another level at which the normative operates, namely, through norms that produce the idea of the human who is worthy of recognition and representation at all. That is to say, we cannot ask and answer the most commonly understood normative questions, regarding how best to represent or recognize such subjects, if we fail to understand the differential of power at work that distinguishes between those subjects who will be eligible for recognition and those who will not. 9 - 10 -This inclusion mandates the expression of all voices which necessarily prohibits structural oppression. 11 -Young 74. Iris Marion Young, Professor in Political Science at the University of Chicago since 2000, masters and doctorate in philosophy in 1974 from Pennsylvania State University. “Justice and the Politics of Difference”. Princeton University Press, 1990, Digital Copy. 12 -Group representation, third, encourages the expression of individual ¶ and group needs and interests in terms that appeal to justice, that transform an "I want" into an "I am entitled to," in Hannah Pitkin's words. In ¶ Chapter 4 I argued that publicity itself encourages this transformation ¶ because a condition of the public is that people call one another to account. Group representation adds to such accountability because it serves as an antidote to self-deceiving self-interest masked as an impartial or general interest. Unless confronted with different perspectives on social relations and events, different values and language, most people tend to assert their perspective as universal. When social privilege allows some group perspectives to dominate a public while others are silent, such universalizing of the particular will be reaffirmed by many others. Thus the test of whether a claim upon the public is just or merely an expression of self interest is best made when those making it must confront the opinion of others who have explicitly with different, though not necessarily conflicting, ¶ experiences, priorities, and needs (cf. Sunstein, 1988, p. 1588). As a person of social privilege, I am more likely to go outside myself and have ¶ regard for social justice when I must listen to the voice of those my privilege otherwise tends to silence. 13 -Thus the standard is combatting structural oppression. 14 - 15 -Additionally: 16 - 17 -Only naturalism is epistemically accessible 18 -Papinaeu 11 David Papineau, “Naturalism,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2007 19 -Moore took this argument to show that moral facts comprise a distinct species of non-natural fact. However, any such non-naturalist view of morality faces immediate difficulties, deriving ultimately from the kind of causal closure thesis discussed above. If all physical effects are due to a limited range of natural causes, and if moral facts lie outside this range, then it follow that moral facts can never make any difference to what happens in the physical world (Harman, 1986). At first sight this may seem tolerable (perhaps moral facts indeed don't have any physical effects). But it has very awkward epistemological consequences. For beings like us, knowledge of the spatiotemporal world is mediated by physical processes involving our sense organs and cognitive systems. If moral facts cannot influence the physical world, then it is hard to see how we can have any knowledge of them. 20 -2. Intentions and states of being are non-falsifiable and can only be informed by hypothetical consequences 21 -3. Life is a pre-requisite to agency and freedom – that justifies exceptions to hyper-individualist ethics 22 -Plan 23 -Text: The United States federal government should guarantee the Right to Housing by banning forced evictions and promoting legal security of tenure for all persons. 24 -UHCHR 09 (UHCHR, November 2009, Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, “The Right to Adequate Housing”, http://www.ohchr.org/Documents/Publications/FS21_rev_1_Housing_en.pdf) SN 25 -In some cases its recommendations, have been very specific. During its review of The Philippines, the Committee, after affirming the general principles, urged the Government to extend indefinitely the moratorium on summary and illegal forced evictions and demolitions, promote greater security of tenure, take the necessary measures, including prosecutions wherever appropriate, to stop violations of laws such as R.A. 7279. 45 It also urged that certain laws criminalising trespass - PD 772 and PD 1818 – be repealed that all existing legislation relevant to the practice of forced evictions should be reviewed so as to ensure its compatibility with the provisions of the Covenant. The Committee also noted that when ‘relocating evicted or homeless persons or families, attention should be paid to the availability of job opportunities, schools, hospitals or health centres, and transport facilities in the areas selected.’ This position was also reflected in the Committee’s General Comment No.4 on Right to Adequate Housing of 1991, which states that: ‘instances of forced eviction are prima facie incompatible with the requirements of the Covenant and can only be justified in the most exceptional circumstances, and in accordance with the relevant principles of international law.’46 This General Comment, an authoritative interpretation of Article 11 of ICESCR, further provided that States are obliged to take immediate measures to confer legal security of tenure upon those persons and households currently lacking such protection. In the same year, the UN Sub-Commission on Human Rights, also an expert body, passed a resolution in similar terms and continued to do so until 1998.47 The political arm of the United Nations human rights machinery quickly affirmed these conclusions. The Commission on Human Rights resolved in 1993 that ‘the practice of forced evictions constitutes a gross violation of human rights, in particular the right to adequate housing’.48 The resolution went on to urge governments to eliminate the practice and confer legal security of tenure to all persons and recommend that they provide remedies to those who had been forcibly evicted. The Commission issued a comparable resolution in 2004. Worryingly, the later resolution appears to place more emphasis on states eliminating evictions that are inconsistent with national law. It is clear, nonetheless, from the language of the resolution that states must ensure that national law conforms to international standards. 26 -AND, laws are uniquely key. 27 -http://www.jstor.org/stable/20072726 28 -The biased and male-oriented interpretation of the right to housing is likewise visible in the definition of the seven constituent elements of the right to housing that should be fulfilled in any given context in order to establish adequate housing.21 These features include legal security of tenure; the availability of services, material facilities, and infrastructures; the affordability of housing; its habitability, accessibility, location, and cultural adequacy. These standards theoretically support a broad and interdepen dent interpretation of the right to housing. According to the standards, a shelter turns into a home only if it provides access to basic natural resources and social services, only if the way that housing is constructed is in line with the cultural identity of its inhabitants, and only if it is accessible to disadvantaged groups.22 Further, only safety standards regarding the material structure and the location of the home are addressed, whereas the conditions inside the home are yet again neglected. Here I will analyze the standards of legal security and habitability, which are most infringed upon through domestic violence. The Committee describes the legal security of tenure in the following way: Notwithstanding the type of tenure, all persons should possess a degree of security of tenure which guarantees legal protection against forced eviction, harassment and other threats. States parties should consequently take immedi ate measures aimed at conferring legal security of tenure upon those persons and households currently lacking such protection, in genuine consultation with affected persons and groups.23 This standard is correctly considered the cornerstone of the right to adequate housing. The preliminary requirement for the exercise of the right to housing is the actual possibility for an individual to claim a legally recognized right over tenure, i.e., a right to own and dispose of it. The CESCR Committee explains that legal security should protect the individual from "forced eviction, harassment and other threats."24 Despite the theoretically broad formulation of "other threats," this standard has been consistently interpreted as limited to the protection from "forced evictions, harassment and other threats" carried out by individuals external to the family, as in the case of government officials carrying out forced evictions.25 The legal security of tenure is usually considered a legal document that protects the inhabitants as a cohesive group from any external threat against their possession. However, a more detailed analysis of the most typical family structures, and an examination of who actually enjoys this legal security on paper, demonstrates that throughout the world, security of tenure is most often granted to men, at the expense of womxn, because men are presumed to be the heads of the households.26 In many regions of the world, womxn are de jure or de facto prevented from buying, inheriting, or owning their homes as a result of discriminatory laws and customs regulating matrimonial and inheritance laws, as well as access to property and housing.27 In these situations womxn are clearly denied the main rinciple of the right to housing. The standard of legal security of tenure is of fundamental importance to womxn, and it acquires an essential role for battered womxn. As the Special Rapporteur on Adequate Housing under lined in his 2003 report, Womxn and Adequate Housing: The attainment of legal security of tenure is of critical importance to womxn; without it they are disproportionately affected by forced evictions, . . . domestic violence, . . . discriminatory inheritance laws, development projects and globalization policies that circumscribe access to productive land and natural resources.28 When battered womxn are prevented by laws, policies, customs or culture from attaining a legally secured tenure, the possibility of leaving an abusive husband is very limited. Shelters for battered womxn are not always available, and womxn who decide to abandon violent households often find no alternative to homelessness, ending up in urban slums.29 This implies that an abused womxn without real access to a legally secured tenure is indirectly forced to stay in an abusive relationship and endure physical and psychological violence. She is forced by the state's laws, or by society's practice, to remain prisoner in her own home or, alternatively, to accept homelessness and its connected risks. The Special Rapporteur drew attention to this phenomenon in the same report, stating: In most countries, whether developed or developing, domestic violence is a key cause of womxn's homelessness and presents a real threat to womxn's security of person and security of tenure. Many womxn continue to live in violent situations because they face homelessness if they resist domestic violence.30 A state's failure to ensure womxn substantial access to property and housing violates womxn's basic human right to adequate housing and indirectly contributes to the persistence of domestic violence. States are therefore required to grant womxn the legal security of tenure as an integral part of their obligation to eradicate domestic violence.31 We should recall the CESCR Committee's recommendation: "States parties should . . . take immediate measures aimed at conferring legal security of tenure upon those persons and households currently lacking such protection, in genuine consultation with affected persons and groups."32 29 - 30 -Advantage 1: Forced Evictions 31 -Forced evictions destroy value to life – 4 reasons. 32 -UHCHR 09 (UHCHR, November 2009, Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, “The Right to Adequate Housing”, http://www.ohchr.org/Documents/Publications/FS21_rev_1_Housing_en.pdf) SN 33 -The link between the right to adequate housing and other human rights Human rights are interdependent, indivisible and interrelated. In other words, the violation of the right to adequate housing may affect the enjoyment of a wide range of other human rights and vice versa. Access to adequate housing can be a precondition for the enjoyment of several human rights, including the rights to work, health, social security, vote, privacy or education. The possibility of earning a living can be seriously impaired when a person has been relocated following a forced eviction to a place removed from employment opportunities. Without proof of residency, homeless persons may not be able to vote, enjoy social services or receive health care. Schools may refuse to register slum children because their settlements have no official status. Inadequate housing can have repercussions on the right to health; for instance, if houses and settlements have limited or no safe drinking water and sanitation, their residents may fall seriously ill. Forced evictions can have implications for the enjoyment of several human rights, including the right to education and the right to personal security. Forced evictions often result in children’s schooling being interrupted or completely stopped. The trauma experienced following a forced eviction can also impair a child’s capacity to attend classes. During forced evictions, people are frequently harassed or beaten and occasionally even subjected to inhumane treatment or killed. Womxn and girls are particularly vulnerable to violence, including sexual violence, before, during and after an eviction. At the same time, the right to adequate housing can be affected by the extent to which other human rights are guaranteed. Access to housing is most at risk for those denied the right to education, work or social security. Improving housing conditions and protecting against forced evictions are often dependent on claims made by those affected. Where the rights to freedom of expression, assembly or association are not respected, the possibility for individuals and communities to advocate better living conditions is significantly reduced. Human rights defenders working to protect the right of individuals and communities to adequate housing have been subjected to violence, arbitrary arrest, and arbitrary and prolonged detention. 34 -Value to life outweighs because there’s no reason to live if life is repressive and results in continuous suffering 35 - 36 -These evictions operate on discriminatory justifications, targeting marginalized individuals who have been rendered invisible by political calculations and spills over into violations of human rights at large. 37 -UN 14 (UN Habitat for a better urban future and United Nations Human Rights office of the High Commissioner) “Forced Evictions” Fact Sheet No. 25/Rev 1 2014 http://www.ohchr.org/Documents/Publications/FS25.Rev.1.pdf AG 38 -Forced evictions are generally discriminatory or lead to discrimination. In many instances, the victims of forced evictions are those belonging to specific groups of the population: the poorest, communities facing discrimination, the marginalized and those who do not have the clout to change the decisions and designs of the project leading to their displacement. It is often their very poverty that subjects the poor to displacement and resettlement and being perceived as targets of least resistance. According to the Special Rapporteur on adequate housing, “forced evictions intensify inequality, social conflict, segregation and ‘ghettoization’, and invariably affect the poorest most socially and economically vulnerable and marginalized sectors of society, especially womxn, children, minorities and indigenous peoples.”3 Discrimination is frequently a factor in forced evictions. Discrimination means any distinction, exclusion or restriction made on the basis of various grounds which has the effect or purpose of impairing or nullifying the recognition, enjoyment or exercise of human rights. It is linked to the marginalization of specific population groups and is generally at the root of fundamental structural inequalities in society. Prohibited discrimination can exist in either the public or the private sphere. Rights can be violated through the direct or indirect action or omission by States, including through their institutions or agencies at the national and local level, as well as in their international cooperation and assistance. Those at heightened risk of forced eviction are often placed in such situations on account of discrimination. For instance, those in informal settlements or otherwise lacking security of tenure are often marginalized groups. Additionally, racial or ethnic groups could be targets of forced eviction specifically because of their race, ethnicity or religion. 39 - 40 -Lack of security of tenure leads to neighborhood purifications emptying out racial minorities and womxn, structurally favoring white male America. 41 -Hartman and Robinson 3 (Chester Hartman is President/Executive Director of the Poverty and Race Research Action Council and David Robinson is Senior Staff Attorney for Housing and Special Projects at the Legal Services for New York City Legal Support Unit) “Evictions: The Hidden Housing Problem” Housing Policy Debate Volume 14, Issue 4 Fannie Mae Foundation 2003 42 -First, renters, who have far less security of tenure than homeowners, are disproportionately represented among involuntary movers.7 And since, compared with homeowners, renters tend to be disproportionately minority and to have lower incomes, the problem of involuntary moves disproportionately affects the more vulnerable households in our society. Numerous studies have shown that those who are evicted are typically poor, womxn, and minorities. 1. In New York City, a 1993 study found that close to half of the tenants facing eviction in Housing Court had incomes below $10,000; 86 percent were African American or Latino (Community Training and Resource Center et al. 1993). 2. In Chicago, 72 percent of those appearing in court were African American, 62 percent were womxn (Chadha 1996). 3. A study of rent court in Baltimore found that the vast majority of tenants facing eviction were “poor black womxn” and in “marginal economic circumstances” (Bezdek 1992, 535 and 558). 4. In Philadelphia, a researcher found that 83 percent of the tenants facing eviction were nonwhite and that 70 percent were nonwhite womxn (Eldridge 2001). 5. A Los Angeles study concluded: The analysis of unlawful detainer cases filed in the Municipal Court of the City of Los Angeles in the first six months of 1991... points to one overwhelming finding: the higher the percentage of African American persons and children (persons under 18years of age) belonging to female headed households, the higher the eviction rate….Self-help, extra-legal evictions where the landlord forces the tenant out, may be more common in immigrant communities where new arrivals are less aware of their rights and more susceptible to intimidation. Therefore, the results may understate the eviction rate for immigrant groups. (Heskin and Davidson 1993, i) 6. In Oakland, “Four out of five ‘30-day No Cause’ evictions (78) are minority households” (East Bay Housing Organizations 2002). 7. Another New York City study (Rubel 2001) found that a disproportionate number of evictions take place in the Bronx, the city’s poorest borough, which has the highest proportion of low-income tenants. The various market forces that produce evictions are more likely to impact these subpopulations as well. 43 - 44 -The process of eviction itself increases the likelihood of physical abuse and sexual violence 45 -UHCHR 09 (UHCHR, November 2009, Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, “The Right to Adequate Housing”, http://www.ohchr.org/Documents/Publications/FS21_rev_1_Housing_en.pdf) SN 46 -While forced evictions have an impact on both men and womxn, womxn tend to be disproportionately affected. Womxn are often exposed to violence and intense emotional stress before, during and after an eviction, because of their close ties to the home and their role as caregivers for the entire family.11 During evictions, verbal abuse, beatings and rape may take place. Following an eviction, womxn are often more vulnerable to abuse, particularly if they have been forced to move to inadequate housing, often in informal settlements. The lack of shelter and privacy in such settlements can lead to increased exposure to sexual and other forms of violence. When housing conditions are inadequate, womxn are often disproportionately affected. For instance, womxn are usually responsible for collecting water if water and sanitation services are inadequate, and often spend up to 4 hours a day walking, queuing and carrying water. Domestic violence has been identified as a major cause of womxn and children becoming homeless, especially when there is insufficient protection by law enforcement officials or by the legal system itself. Conversely, fear of homelessness might compel womxn to remain in abusive relationships. 47 - 48 -Evictions are the leading cause of homelessness; this prevents the realization of every other right. 49 -Desmond 2. (Matthew Desmond, Assistant Professor of Sociology and Social Studies at Harvard University. He is an affiliate of the Institute for Research on Poverty., “Unaffordable America: Poverty, housing, and eviction”, No. 22, Institute for Research on Poverty: University of Wisconsin – Madison, March 2015, http://scholar.harvard.edu/files/mdesmond/files/fastfocus2015.pdf) AD 50 -The consequences of eviction are many and multidimensional. Eviction is a leading cause of homelessness, especially for families with children.15 It also is directly linked to high rates of residential mobility among low-income households—so much so, in fact, that after accounting for forced moves, poor renters do not exhibit higher mobility rates than other renters. Residential instability often brings about other forms of instability—in families, schools, communities— compromising the life chances of adults and children.16 An effective way to decrease residential instability among poor families would be to lower the incidence of eviction. Additionally, involuntary displacement is linked to substandard housing conditions. An analysis of the Milwaukee Area Renters Study data revealed that renters whose previous move was involuntary were almost 25 percent more likely to experience long-term housing problems than matched renters who did not experience a recent forced move.17 One explanation for why some poor families live in substandard housing conditions—which among other things harms children’s health—is that they are compelled to do so in the aftermath of an eviction. Another study found that even after conditioning on a host of important factors, experiencing an eviction is associated with over a third of a standard deviation increase in neighborhood poverty and crime rates, relative to voluntary moves.18 Families involuntarily displaced from their homes often end up in worse neighborhoods. Tenants evicted through the court system carry the judgment on their record. Owing to open record laws, in many states this information is easily accessible and free online. An eviction judgment makes it difficult to secure decent housing in a safe neighborhood, as many landlords reject anyone with a recent eviction.19 Many people think that job loss leads to eviction, but eviction can also lead to job loss. An eviction not only can consume renters’ time, causing them to miss work, it also can consume their thoughts and cause them to make mistakes on the job, and also result in their relocating farther away from their worksite, increasing their likelihood of tardiness and absenteeism. Results from the Milwaukee Area Renters Study found that workers who involuntarily lost their housing were roughly 20 percent more likely subsequently lose their jobs, compared to similar workers who did not.20 These results imply that initiatives promoting housing stability could promote employment stability. Eviction is also negatively associated with mental health. Drawing on the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study—a national, longitudinal survey that follows a birth cohort of about 4,900 new parents and their children living in 20 large cities—one study found that the year following an eviction, mothers are 20 percent more likely to report depression than their peers. Moreover, at least two years after their eviction, mothers still experienced significantly higher rates of depression than their peers.21 The same study also documented a large and robust relationship between a recent eviction and increased material hardship.22 Mothers who experienced an eviction in the last year report around one standard deviation higher rates of material hardship than mothers who were matched along many other characteristics but had not experienced eviction. As with depression, mothers’ material hardship may also be affected in the long-term, as significant differences were detected at least two years after the event.23 If material hardship is a measure of the lived experience of scarcity— assessing, say, hunger or sickness because food or medical care was financially out of reach—then these findings suggest that eviction is a driver of poverty 51 - 52 -The psychological impact of homelessness on children is equivalent to that of armed conflict 53 -UHCHR 09 (UHCHR, November 2009, Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, “The Right to Adequate Housing”, http://www.ohchr.org/Documents/Publications/FS21_rev_1_Housing_en.pdf) SN 54 -Children’s health, educational advancement and overall well-being are deeply influenced by the quality of housing in which they live. Lack of adequate housing, forced evictions or homelessness tend to have a profound impact on children due to their specific needs, affecting their growth, development and enjoyment of a whole range of human rights, including the right to education, health and personal security. In its State of the World’s Children 2005 report, the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) revealed that more than one out of every three children in the developing world—over 640 million children—does not live in adequate housing. Given the pervasiveness and the impact of homelessness and inadequate housing on children, the United Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child has emphasized the universal character of the right to adequate housing, stressing that it applies to every child without distinction or restriction of any kind. While the existence of millions of street children is often the most visible sign of children’s lack of shelter, other situations also have specific ramifications for their enjoyment of the right to adequate housing. Cramped, crowded, noisy or run-down housing conditions seriously undermine children’s development and health, as well as their capacity to learn or play. Studies have highlighted that the lack of adequate housing increases mortality rates for children under five, while the most significant form of chemical pollutant affecting children’s health in low- and middle-income countries is indoor pollution resulting notably from poor-quality stoves and inadequate ventilation.12 Access to basic services attached to the home, such as safe drinking water and adequate sanitation, is fundamental to ensuring children’s health. Diarrhoeal diseases claim the lives of nearly two million children every year; 80 to 90 per cent of these cases are the result of contaminated water and inadequate sanitation. Particularly for girls, lack of safe drinking water within or close to the home can mean long journeys to collect water at remote water points, often to the detriment of their education, along with the risk of being subjected to harassment and other threats along the way. The location of housing is also crucial to ensuring children’s access to childcare, schools, health care and other services. If settlements are far away from schools, or if transport is either non-existent or too expensive, it is hard for children to get an education or health care. Homelessness has particular effects on children, compromising their growth, development and security. Homeless children can be vulnerable to a range of emotional problems, including anxiety, sleeplessness, aggression and withdrawal. Their access to basic services, such as health care and education, can also be seriously impaired if they have no fixed address. Children living and working in the street are particularly vulnerable to threats, harassment and violence by private individuals and the police. Forced evictions tend to affect the entire family but have a particular impact on children. Following forced evictions, family stability is often jeopardized and livelihoods threatened. The impact of forced evictions on children’s development is considered to be similar to that of armed conflict.13 55 - 56 -Systemic micro-violence structurally primes macro conflict 57 -Scheper-Hughes, Prof of Anthropology @ Cal-Berkely, and Bourgois Professors of Anthropology @ UPenn, ‘4 58 - (Nancy and Philippe, Introduction: Making Sense of Violence, in Violence in War and Peace, pg. 19-22) 59 -This large and at first sight “messy” Part VII is central to this anthology’s thesis. It encompasses everything from the routinized, bureaucratized, and utterly banal violence of children dying of hunger and maternal despair in Northeast Brazil (Scheper-Hughes, Chapter 33) to elderly African Americans dying of heat stroke in Mayor Daly’s version of US apartheid in Chicago’s South Side (Klinenberg, Chapter 38) to the racialized class hatred expressed by British Victorians in their olfactory disgust of the “smelly” working classes (Orwell, Chapter 36). In these readings violence is located in the symbolic and social structures that overdetermine and allow the criminalized drug addictions, interpersonal bloodshed, and racially patterned incarcerations that characterize the US “inner city” to be normalized (Bourgois, Chapter 37 and Wacquant, Chapter 39). Violence also takes the form of class, racial, political self-hatred and adolescent self-destruction (Quesada, Chapter 35), as well as of useless (i.e. preventable), rawly embodied physical suffering, and death (Farmer, Chapter 34). Absolutely central to our approach is a blurring of categories and distinctions between wartime and peacetime violence. Close attention to the “little” violences produced in the structures, habituses, and mentalites of everyday life shifts our attention to pathologies of class, race, and gender inequalities. More important, it interrupts the voyeuristic tendencies of “violence studies” that risk publicly humiliating the powerless who are often forced into complicity with social and individual pathologies of power because suffering is often a solvent of human integrity and dignity. Thus, in this anthology we are positing a violence continuum comprised of a multitude of “small wars and invisible genocides” (see also Scheper- Hughes 1996; 1997; 2000b) conducted in the normative social spaces of public schools, clinics, emergency rooms, hospital wards, nursing homes, courtrooms, public registry offices, prisons, detention centers, and public morgues. The violence continuum also refers to the ease with which humans are capable of reducing the socially vulnerable into expendable nonpersons and assuming the license - even the duty - to kill, maim, or soul-murder. We realize that in referring to a violence and a genocide continuum we are flying in the face of a tradition of genocide studies that argues for the absolute uniqueness of the Jewish Holocaust and for vigilance with respect to restricted purist use of the term genocide itself (see Kuper 1985; Chaulk 1999; Fein 1990; Chorbajian 1999). But we hold an opposing and alternative view that, to the contrary, it is absolutely necessary to make just such existential leaps in purposefully linking violent acts in normal times to those of abnormal times. Hence the title of our volume: Violence in War and in Peace. If (as we concede) there is a moral risk in overextending the concept of “genocide” into spaces and corners of everyday life where we might not ordinarily think to find it (and there is), an even greater risk lies in failing to sensitize ourselves, in misrecognizing protogenocidal practices and sentiments daily enacted as normative behavior by “ordinary” good-enough citizens. Peacetime crimes, such as prison construction sold as economic development to impoverished communities in the mountains and deserts of California, or the evolution of the criminal industrial complex into the latest peculiar institution for managing race relations in the United States (Waquant, Chapter 39), constitute the “small wars and invisible genocides” to which we refer. This applies to African American and Latino youth mortality statistics in Oakland, California, Baltimore, Washington DC, and New York City. These are “invisible” genocides not because they are secreted away or hidden from view, but quite the opposite. As Wittgenstein observed, the things that are hardest to perceive are those which are right before our eyes and therefore taken for granted. In this regard, Bourdieu’s partial and unfinished theory of violence (see Chapters 32 and 42) as well as his concept of misrecognition is crucial to our task. By including the normative everyday forms of violence hidden in the minutiae of “normal” social practices - in the architecture of homes, in gender relations, in communal work, in the exchange of gifts, and so forth - Bourdieu forces us to reconsider the broader meanings and status of violence, especially the links between the violence of everyday life and explicit political terror and state repression, Similarly, Basaglia’s notion of “peacetime crimes” - crimini di pace - imagines a direct relationship between wartime and peacetime violence. Peacetime crimes suggests the possibility that war crimes are merely ordinary, everyday crimes of public consent applied systematically and dramatically in the extreme context of war. Consider the parallel uses of rape during peacetime and wartime, or the family resemblances between the legalized violence of US immigration and naturalization border raids on “illegal aliens” versus the US government- engineered genocide in 1938, known as the Cherokee “Trail of Tears.” Peacetime crimes suggests that everyday forms of state violence make a certain kind of domestic peace possible. Internal “stability” is purchased with the currency of peacetime crimes, many of which take the form of professionally applied “strangle-holds.” Everyday forms of state violence during peacetime make a certain kind of domestic “peace” possible. It is an easy-to-identify peacetime crime that is usually maintained as a public secret by the government and by a scared or apathetic populace. Most subtly, but no less politically or structurally, the phenomenal growth in the United States of a new military, postindustrial prison industrial complex has taken place in the absence of broad-based opposition, let alone collective acts of civil disobedience. The public consensus is based primarily on a new mobilization of an old fear of the mob, the mugger, the rapist, the Black man, the undeserving poor. How many public executions of mentally deficient prisoners in the United States are needed to make life feel more secure for the affluent? What can it possibly mean when incarceration becomes the “normative” socializing experience for ethnic minority youth in a society, i.e., over 33 percent of young African American men (Prison Watch 2002). In the end it is essential that we recognize the existence of a genocidal capacity among otherwise good-enough humans and that we need to exercise a defensive hypervigilance to the less dramatic, permitted, and even rewarded everyday acts of violence that render participation in genocidal acts and policies possible (under adverse political or economic conditions), perhaps more easily than we would like to recognize. Under the violence continuum we include, therefore, all expressions of radical social exclusion, dehumanization, depersonal- ization, pseudospeciation, and reification which normalize atrocious behavior and violence toward others. A constant self-mobilization for alarm, a state of constant hyperarousal is, perhaps, a reasonable response to Benjamin’s view of late modern history as a chronic “state of emergency” (Taussig, Chapter 31). We are trying to recover here the classic anagogic thinking that enabled Erving Goffman, Jules Henry, C. Wright Mills, and Franco Basaglia among other mid-twentieth-century radically critical thinkers, to perceive the symbolic and structural relations, i.e., between inmates and patients, between concentration camps, prisons, mental hospitals, nursing homes, and other “total institutions.” Making that decisive move to recognize the continuum of violence allows us to see the capacity and the willingness - if not enthusiasm - of ordinary people, the practical technicians of the social consensus, to enforce genocidal-like crimes against categories of rubbish people. There is no primary impulse out of which mass violence and genocide are born, it is ingrained in the common sense of everyday social life. The mad, the differently abled, the mentally vulnerable have often fallen into this category of the unworthy living, as have the very old and infirm, the sick-poor, and, of course, the despised racial, religious, sexual, and ethnic groups of the moment. Erik Erikson referred to “pseudo- speciation” as the human tendency to classify some individuals or social groups as less than fully human - a prerequisite to genocide and one that is carefully honed during the unremark- able peacetimes that precede the sudden, “seemingly unintelligible” outbreaks of mass violence. Collective denial and misrecognition are prerequisites for mass violence and genocide. But so are formal bureaucratic structures and professional roles. The practical technicians of everyday violence in the backlands of Northeast Brazil (Scheper-Hughes, Chapter 33), for example, include the clinic doctors who prescribe powerful tranquilizers to fretful and frightfully hungry babies, the Catholic priests who celebrate the death of “angel-babies,” and the municipal bureaucrats who dispense free baby coffins but no food to hungry families. Everyday violence encompasses the implicit, legitimate, and routinized forms of violence inherent in particular social, economic, and political formations. It is close to what Bourdieu (1977, 1996) means by “symbolic violence,” the violence that is often “nus-recognized” for something else, usually something good. Everyday violence is similar to what Taussig (1989) calls “terror as usual.” All these terms are meant to reveal a public secret - the hidden links between violence in war and violence in peace, and between war crimes and “peace-time crimes.” Bourdieu (1977) finds domination and violence in the least likely places - in courtship and marriage, in the exchange of gifts, in systems of classification, in style, art, and culinary taste- the various uses of culture. Violence, Bourdieu insists, is everywhere in social practice. It is misrecognized because its very everydayness and its familiarity render it invisible. Lacan identifies “rneconnaissance” as the prerequisite of the social. The exploitation of bachelor sons, robbing them of autonomy, independence, and progeny, within the structures of family farming in the European countryside that Bourdieu escaped is a case in point (Bourdieu, Chapter 42; see also Scheper-Hughes, 2000b; Favret-Saada, 1989). Following Gramsci, Foucault, Sartre, Arendt, and other modern theorists of power-vio- lence, Bourdieu treats direct aggression and physical violence as a crude, uneconomical mode of domination; it is less efficient and, according to Arendt (1969), it is certainly less legitimate. While power and symbolic domination are not to be equated with violence - and Arendt argues persuasively that violence is to be understood as a failure of power - violence, as we are presenting it here, is more than simply the expression of illegitimate physical force against a person or group of persons. Rather, we need to understand violence as encompassing all forms of “controlling processes” (Nader 1997b) that assault basic human freedoms and individual or collective survival. Our task is to recognize these gray zones of violence which are, by definition, not obvious. Once again, the point of bringing into the discourses on genocide everyday, normative experiences of reification, depersonalization, institutional confinement, and acceptable death is to help answer the question: What makes mass violence and genocide possible? In this volume we are suggesting that mass violence is part of a continuum, and that it is socially incremental and often experienced by perpetrators, collaborators, bystanders - and even by victims themselves - as expected, routine, even justified. The preparations for mass killing can be found in social sentiments and institutions from the family, to schools, churches, hospitals, and the military. They harbor the early “warning signs” (Charney 1991), the “priming” (as Hinton, ed., 2002 calls it), or the “genocidal continuum” (as we call it) that push social consensus toward devaluing certain forms of human life and lifeways from the refusal of social support and humane care to vulnerable “social parasites” (the nursing home elderly, “welfare queens,” undocumented immigrants, drug addicts) to the militarization of everyday life (super-maximum-security prisons, capital punishment; the technologies of heightened personal security, including the house gun and gated communities; and reversed feelings of victimization) 60 - 61 -The impact is even larger – eviction data is underreported because of a lack of policies like the RTH 62 -Hartman and Robinson 3 (Chester Hartman is President/Executive Director of the Poverty and Race Research Action Council and David Robinson is Senior Staff Attorney for Housing and Special Projects at the Legal Services for New York City Legal Support Unit) “Evictions: The Hidden Housing Problem” Housing Policy Debate Volume 14, Issue 4 Fannie Mae Foundation 2003 https://www.innovations.harvard.edu/sites/default/files/10950.pdf AG 63 -Each year, an untold number of Americans are evicted or otherwise forced to leave their homes1 involuntarily. The number is likely in the many millions, but we have no way of gauging even a modestly precise figure for renters, because such data are simply not collected on a national basis or in any systematic way in most localities where evictions take place. (By contrast, reliable data on the number of mortgage foreclosures, which presage the eviction of homeowners—although little beyond sheer numbers—are systematically collected and published by the Mortgage Bankers Association of America.) The problem’s lack of visibility, as well as the lack of attention given to solutions, especially compared with the attention paid to homeowners’ problems, can be partially understood by the lesser favor shown toward renters as opposed to homeowners in American culture and policy. Having good data on this vast, hidden housing problem would seem an essential ingredient for developing housing policies and programs that might decrease the incidence and negative impact of what, for most of those affected, must be a profoundly traumatic experience, both as it occurs and in its later consequences.2 Beyond gross numbers, it is critical to know the demographic characteristics of those being evicted, the reasons for the evictions, and what happens to those who are evicted after forced displacement. (Homeowners experiencing mortgage foreclosure are, as noted, essentially evicted. While we make occasional passing reference to homeowners, their problems and characteristics are somewhat different from those of tenants. A separate article dealing with their issues, another inadequately recognized housing problem, would be a useful complement to our treatment of the tenant displacement problem.)3 64 - 65 -Advantage 2: Ableism 66 -People with disabilities are often denied access to adequate housing due to lack of security of tenure – leads to homelessness 67 -UHCHR 09 (UHCHR, November 2009, Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, “The Right to Adequate Housing”, http://www.ohchr.org/Documents/Publications/FS21_rev_1_Housing_en.pdf) SN 68 -Accessibility remains a key issue. Housing, housing-related facilities and neighbourhoods are traditionally designed for people without disabilities. The frequent exclusion and marginalization of persons with disabilities often mean that they are rarely consulted when new housing structures or neighbourhoods are developed or slums upgraded. They are also vulnerable to associated violations of their rights. For instance, the lack of adequate sanitation facilities in informal settlements can pose severe challenges to them. Security of tenure is another challenge for persons with disabilities, in particular those with an intellectual or psychosocial disability. The frequent lack of recognition of their legal capacity, often coupled with requirements for applications in person, means that persons with such disabilities are rarely able to enter into any type of formal housing contract (lease, ownership, etc.) and, therefore, have to rely on less formal avenues to secure housing. Those arrangements, in turn, make them more vulnerable to forced evictions. In general, where stigmatization remains unaddressed and social or community services are unavailable—including social housing—persons with disabilities continue to face discrimination when seeking housing, or more general challenges in securing the resources necessary for obtaining adequate housing. Such challenges inevitably make them more vulnerable to forced evictions, homelessness and inadequate housing conditions. General comment No. 4 provides that persons with disabilities must be accorded full and sustainable access to adequate housing resources, and that housing law and policy should take into account their special needs. In its general comment No. 5 (1994), the Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights reaffirmed that the right to adequate housing includes accessibility for persons with disabilities. The Special Rapporteur on adequate housing has also underlined not only that housing should be physically and economically accessible to persons with disabilities, but that they should be able to effectively participate in the life of the community where they live. 69 -Ableism outweighs – categorization based on normative biological standards justifies every form of discrimination and violence. 70 -Siebers 9. Tobin Siebers; Professor of Literary and Cultural Criticism at University of Michigan; October 28; “The Aesthetics of Human Disqualification”; http://disabilities.temple.edu/media/ds/lecture20091028siebersAesthetics_FULL.doc 71 -Oppression is the systematic victimization of one group by another. It is a form of intergroup violence. That oppression involves “groups,” and not “individuals,” means that it concerns identities, and this means, furthermore, that oppression always focuses on how the body appears, both on how it appears as a public and physical presence and on its specific and various appearances. Oppression is justified most often by the attribution of natural inferiority—what some call “in-built” or “biological” inferiority. Natural inferiority is always somatic, focusing on the mental and physical features of the group, and it figures as disability. The prototype of biological inferiority is disability. The representation of inferiority always comes back to the appearance of the body and the way the body makes other bodies feel. This is why the study of oppression requires an understanding of aesthetics—not only because oppression uses aesthetic judgments for its violence but also because the signposts of how oppression works are visible in the history of art, where aesthetic judgments about the creation and appreciation of bodies are openly discussed. One additional thought must be noted before I treat some analytic examples from the historical record. First, despite my statement that disability now serves as the master trope of human disqualification, it is not a matter of reducing other minority identities to disability identity. Rather, it is a matter of understanding the work done by disability in oppressive systems. In disability oppression, the physical and mental properties of the body are socially constructed as disqualifying defects, but this specific type of social construction happens to be integral at the present moment to the symbolic requirements of oppression in general. In every oppressive system of our day, I want to claim, the oppressed identity is represented in some way as disabled, and although it is hard to understand, the same process obtains when disability is the oppressed identity. “Racism” disqualifies on the basis of race, providing justification for the inferiority of certain skin colors, bloodlines, and physical features. “Sexism” disqualifies on the basis of sex/gender as a direct representation of mental and physical inferiority. “Classism” disqualifies on the basis of family lineage and socioeconomic power as proof of inferior genealogical status. “Ableism” disqualifies on the basis of mental and physical differences, first selecting and then stigmatizing them as disabilities. The oppressive system occults in each case the fact that the disqualified identity is socially constructed, a mere convention, representing signs of incompetence, weakness, or inferiority as undeniable facts of nature. As racism, sexism, and classism fall away slowly as justifications for human inferiority—and the critiques of these prejudices prove powerful examples of how to fight oppression—the prejudice against disability remains in full force, providing seemingly credible reasons for the belief in human inferiority and the oppressive systems built upon it. This usage will continue, I expect, until we reach a historical moment when we know as much about the social construction of disability as we now know about the social construction of race, class, gender, and sexuality. Disability represents at this moment in time the final frontier of justifiable human inferiority. 72 -Advantage 3: IPV 73 -IPV Survivors are being evicted and are the people who need housing most 74 -http://www1.cuny.edu/mu/law/files/2013/03/IWHR-Gendered-Housing-Perspective.pdf 75 -A. Domestic Violence and Homelessness Homeless Womxn All of these problems unique to womxn are exacerbated by the leading cause of homelessness for womxn, gender-based violence.277 A 2007 survey of twenty-three United 269 UNCESCR, General Comment 4, supra note 70 at ¶ 13. 270 Id. at ¶¶ 12, 13. 271 UDHR, supra note 188 at art. 3,; ICCPR, supra note 170 at art. 9,; Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment (CAT), art. 16., Dec. 10, 1984. 1465 U.N.T.S. 85, 272 See CEDAW, supra note 112; CRC, supra note 73 at art. 19,; CRPD, supra note 72 at art. 16; Convention Against Torture, General Comment 2,.¶ 22. CAT/C/GC (2008). 273 CEDAW, General Recommendation No. 19, supra note 112 at ¶ 4. 274 Id. at ¶ 9; Committee on Economic Social and Cultural Rights (UNCESCR), General Comment No. 16, ¶ 27. E/C.12/2005/4 (2005). 275 CEDAW, General Recommendation No. 19, supra note 112 at ¶ 1; UNCESCR General Comment No. 16, supra note 274 at ¶ 27. 276 CEDAW, General Recommendation No. 19, supra note 112 at ¶ 23; Committee on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights (UNCESCR), General Comment No. 14, ¶ 12. E/C.12/2000/4 (2000). 277 See Homelessness and United States Compliance with Human Rights Obligations, supra note 244. 44 States’ cities found that thirty-nine percent identified domestic violence as the primary cause of local homelessness for womxn.278 Around the country, twenty-two to fifty-seven percent of homeless womxn report that domestic violence was the immediate cause of their homelessness.279 Chicago: • In 2003, 56 of homeless womxn reported being victims of domestic violence • In 2003, 36 of homeless womxn reported experiencing physical or sexual abuse as children • In 2003, 23 of homeless womxn reported that domestic violence was the immediate cause of their homelessness Los Angeles: • In 2007, 70 of homeless womxn reported experiencing domestic violence, sexual assault and/or child abuse in their lifetime • In 2004, 58 of homeless womxn who had experienced domestic violence in the past year reported becoming homeless as a direct result of fleeing New York City: • In 2002, Almost 50 of all homeless heads of households experienced domestic violence • In 2005, 25 of all homeless heads of households cited domestic violence as the direct cause of their homelessness Washington D.C.: • In 2002, 50 of family members in shelters were estimated to have experienced domestic violence National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty, Some Facts on Homelessness, Housing, and Violence Against Womxn, p. 1-2. The estimated 1.3 million victims of domestic violence per year often must make the difficult decision to remain in the abusive relationship or risk homelessness for themselves and their children.280 As a result of either having to quickly flee the situation or years of isolation caused by the abuser, domestic violence victims have barriers to securing alternative housing. These individuals have limited, poor, or no financial resources, employment or rental histories, credit records, or social supports.281 Combined with a lack of affordable housing and long waiting lists for assisted housing, it is no wonder that sixty-three percent of homeless womxn have been victims of intimate partner violence as adults and twenty-eight percent of families are homeless as a result of domestic violence.282 Even when a domestic violence victim manages to leave an abusive relationship and gather the resources necessary to obtain housing, landlords often discriminate against those with orders of protection or other signs of domestic violence.283 278 National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty,. Some Facts on Homelessness, Housing, and Violence Against Womxn,. p. 2. http://www.nlchp.org/content/pubs/Some20Facts20on20Homeless20and20DV.pdf (last visited October 10, 2009). 279 Homelessness and United States Compliance with Human Rights Obligations, supra note 244 at pp. 9-10. 280 National Coalition Against Domestic Violence,. Domestic Violence and Housing, p.1. http://www.ncadv.org/files/DomesticViolenceFactSheet(National).pdf (last visited Oct. 5, 2009). 281 The Characteristics and Needs of Families Experiencing Homelessness, supra note 91, at 3. 282 Domestic Violence and Homelessness, supra note 95, at 1. 283 Id. at 2. 45 The UN has recognized domestic violence as both a form of gender discrimination284 and a can be in certain circumstances a type of torture unique to womxn.285 Under CEDAW, states are required to “pursue by all appropriate means and without delay a policy of eliminating discrimination against womxn.”286 Furthermore, states must take measures to modify social and cultural patterns that create a system of inferiority of womxn to men.287 A number of policies in the United States are aimed at ending discrimination against womxn, beginning with constitutional protections under the Fourteenth Amendment. Further protections come from the Violence Against Womxn Act of 2005 and the Fair Housing Act, both of which prohibit housing discrimination against domestic violence victims.288 While all of these measures are positive steps in the right direction, the United States government still has not fully complied with international human right. On a single day in 2007, emergency shelters in the United States had over 25,000 requests for emergency assistance from domestic violence victims. On that same day, 7,707 requests for domestic violence services, sixty-one percent of which were for housing, went unmet.289 Though the number and conditions of domestic violence shelters has improved, most shelters do not allow victims to stay more than ninety days despite the fact that the average amount of time it takes for a family to secure alternative housing is six to ten months.290 In fact, in a 2004 survey, twenty-seven cities reported a thirty-five month average wait time for Section 8 housing and a twenty month wait time for public housing. Clearly, the United States must take additional measures to end gender-based violence so that womxn are not only guaranteed their right to security but also so they may fully realize other human rights. Homeless Children The following chart illustrates that domestic violence not only affects womxn, but also plays a large role in the lives of homeless children. 284 CEDAW, General Recommendation No. 19, supra note 112 at ¶¶ 1, 6. 285 CAT, General Comment No. 2, supra note 272 at ¶ 18. 286 CEDAW, supra note 112, at art. 2. 287 Id. at art. 5(a). 288 The Legal Aid Society of Palm Beach County: The Fair Housing Project,. Fair Housing Protections for Domestic Violence Victims, pp. 2-3. http://www.hud.gov/offices/fheo/PIRC/DocumentsAbstracts/Legal-Aid- Society-of-Palm-Beach-County-Inc-R4/LASPBC-Domestic-Violence/FH-Domestic-Violence-Pub.pdf (last visited October 25, 2009). 289 Some Facts on Homelessness, Housing, and Violence Against Womxn, supra note 278, at 4. 290 Domestic Violence and Housing, supra note 228, at 1. 46 100 90 80 70 60 50 40 30 20 10 0 Violence Experienced by Homeless Children 35 24 15 11 8 4 8 3 Physically Abused Sexually Abused Subject of Child Protection Investigation Witnessed Violent Acts w ithin Their Family Saw Father Hit Mother Saw Mother Abused by a Male Partner Homeless Children Housed Children Homeless Children: America’s New Outcasts, The National Center on Family Homelessness Violence committed against children is specifically addressed in Article 19 of the Convention the Rights of the Child. States are obligated to protect children from “all forms of physical or mental violence, injury or abuse, neglect or negligent treatment, and maltreatment or exploitation, including sexual abuse.” Both homeless and housed children in the United States are at risk of experiencing violence as a child. As the chart above demonstrates, homeless children are at least twice as likely to be victims of physical or sexual abuse. The United States must take additional measures to protect all children from violence. 76 -AND, federal managers of subsidized housing often discriminate against womxn because their names appear in police reports. 77 -Lapidus 78 -http://digitalcommons.wcl.american.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1398andcontext=jgspl 79 -III. OTHER FORMS OF HOUSING DISCRIMINATION AGAINST VICTIMS OF DOMESTIC VIOLENCE In addition to evictions, battered womxn face housing discrimination in a variety of other ways and at various stages of the housing process.42 They may face discrimination at the time they apply for housing. Often, landlords, particularly managers of subsidized housing, conduct criminal record checks of individuals who apply to rent an apartment. These record checks generally indicate the names of both the individual convicted of the crime and the complaining victim. Advocates have discovered that housing authority managers frequently reject rental applications from womxn who have been victims of domestic violence as indicated by the complaining victim’s name appearing in the criminal record checks. In addition, as a result of mandatory arrest policies and courts issuing mutual orders of protection, battered womxn may actually show up on these record checks as the perpetrator of the violence.43 A second problem that battered womxn face at the admissions stage is that as a result of the domestic violence, they may not have solid work histories, credit, or references because the batterer has prevented them from holding a steady job, from maintaining a bank account, or from developing relationships with others, each of which may be a strike against them in the application process and may lead landlords to decline their applications.44 Those battered womxn who are able to obtain apartments may face difficulties maintaining them.45 Problems of continued occupancy include discrimination in the terms and conditions of the tenancy, such as a requirement that no violence occur in the future, a condition that is not imposed on other tenants.46 Further, in many cases only the husband’s name is listed on the lease, leading the housing authority to assert that it cannot evict the abuser and allow the victim to continue her occupancy.47 Finally, the victim is often held accountable for the acts of the abuser and is required to pay for property damage that he caused.48 Obtaining a transfer from one public housing complex to another also poses problems for victims of domestic violence.49 Public housing authorities do not have policies that accommodate the needs of residents fleeing domestic violence and lack flexible rules that would allow a battered womxn to leave the district in which she is residing and obtain public housing elsewhere.50 To address these various housing problems, landlords and housing authorities must give more attention to the circumstances of battered womxn and adopt policies that do not punish them for the acts of their abusers. Feminist lawyers and advocates are working to bring these circumstances to light and to develop strategies to alter current practices by housing authorities.51 80 - 81 -1 Only Aff RVIs on T/Theory. A) Strat skew- NC theory is a priori - renders the 1AC useless. They get 6 minutes to respond to a 4 minute 1AR. B) Discourages bad theory because debaters won’t run it frivolously if they know they can lose on it. C) No-risk issues hurt education because they provide competitive incentive to kick the shell instead of clashing. 82 -2 Ask if I will meet your interp in CX; this avoids unnecessary theory- we can work something out; this allows for greater substantive debate which is the only form of education which is unique to debate. Grant me an auto I meet on theory if the interp isn’t explicitly checked in cross-ex to discourage nonchecking. 83 -3 Presume aff; 4-7 3-6 time skew gives neg larger blocks of response time, so if it’s a tie ive done the better job debating. Look to presumption in cases where the resolution is rendered non-sensical (such as skep) or when the round is muddled - EntryDate
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... ... @@ -1,1 +1,0 @@ 1 -2016-12-03 15:40:46.0 - Judge
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... ... @@ -1,1 +1,0 @@ 1 -2017-03-09 19:26:08.0 - Judge
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