DA:

HARRIS WINS NOW

(Paul Whitney 9/27/2024, Whitney is a Professor, Department of government, University of Essex,
Harris leads Trump in the polls – here’s what they really tell us about her chances,
https://theconversation.com/harris-leads-trump-in-the-polls-heres-what-they-really-tell-us-about-her-
chances-239887) RU

Poll data shows that Kamala Harris now leads Donald Trump in the US presidential election campaign.
She has an average vote intention score of 48.2%, compared with Trump’s 45.8%, according to
FiveThirtyEight, a website that looks at a range of polls. She leads in the race, although the margins are
still tight. A poll of polls like this one is likely to be more accurate than a single one, giving a much better
indication of any trends. Many factors are at work when people decide how to vote, but four things
really matter. These are voter evaluations of the candidates; their perceptions of the major issues; identifying with the Democratic or
Republican parties, or being independents; and whether they think of themselves as liberals, conservatives or moderates. To look closely at
these factors we can examine the details of an Economist/YouGov survey of the US electorate completed on September 17. The survey puts
Harris on 49%, with Trump on 45% in voting intentions. Do experts have something to add to public debate? We think so There are significant
variations in support among different groups and as the figure below shows, there is a large gender gap with women much more likely to vote
for Harris than men. In addition, white people favour Trump, whereas Hispanic and black people lean heavily towards Harris. Harris is also
strongly supported by those under the age of 45 with Trump leading Harris by a small margin in the 45-64 group – and by a large margin among
the over 65s. Voting intentions for the upcoming US election: When it comes to judging candidates, voters use several criteria including
perceptions that they are strong, competent, honest and in touch with people like themselves. But a good overall measure is the extent to
which they like or dislike a candidate. In the Economist/YouGov poll 48% liked Harris and 47% disliked her. In Trump’s case 42% liked him and
Clearly, Harris has the edge in leadership evaluations in the race. (CHART) Existing
55% disliked him.
ideological positions are a very important factor in influencing the vote as the chart below shows. When
it comes to ideological preferences liberals overwhelmingly support Harris and conservatives do the
same with Trump. However, 57% of moderates favour Harris compared, with only 30% who favour
Trump. Trump’s problem is that his style of campaigning may energise his core supporters, but it tends
to alienate many moderates. In the case of political partisanship, again Democrats overwhelmingly
support Harris and Republicans Trump. In this case the independents are neck and neck, with Harris
ahead of Trump by only 1%. But she does get more Republicans (5%) than Trump gets
Democrats (1%). Voting intentions among independents and other groups Harris has the edge when it
comes to three of the really important factors that explain voting behaviour. However, she is weak on
some issues compared with Trump. When asked about their most important issue, respondents ranked
inflation first, immigration second, and jobs, the economy and abortion tied in third place. The problem for
Harris is illustrated by the most salient issue of inflation. Some 96% of respondents thought that this is important, but only 33% approved of the
way that Joe Biden had handled the issue, compared with 59% who disapproved. Since Kamala Harris is the vice-president, she shares
responsibility for this. That said, 56% think that Trump’s claim that Haitian immigrants are eating pet dogs is false, while 27% think it is true. So
there is a question over his credibility when it comes to issues as well. More generally, 25% approved of the general direction the country was
headed, while 58% thought that America was on the wrong track. When asked if they felt better off or worse off than a year ago, only 12% said
better off, 42% said about the same and 40% said worse off.
The US economy has been growing rapidly since Biden took
office, but clearly many voters still don’t feel the benefits. Biden stepped down as the Democratic
nominee for president following his disastrous performance in the debate with Donald Trump. But the
polling shows that discontent with the Biden administration was a lot more widespread than just
concerns about his age and ability to communicate. In relation to the recent TV debate, 56% of respondents thought that
Harris won, compared with only 27% who thought the winner was Trump. As a result, she has made a strong start to her campaign. When
asked who they thought would win the election in November, 42% said Harris and 32% Trump with 26% unsure. With that kind of momentum,
Harris can be optimistic, though not certain, about the outcome.
Kamala must stay pro-worker and economically populists
(not the techno corporate elitism of IP)

Burgis ’24 (Ben is a Jacobin columnist, an adjunct philosophy professor at Rutgers University, “Joe
Biden’s Replacement Must Embrace Economic Populism,” https://jacobin.com/2024/07/joe-biden-
stepping-down-kamala-harris-economic-populism)

Joe Biden is out of the race, and a secondTrump term would be a nightmare. To avoid it, Democrats need more than a
candidate who can complete sentences. That candidate must put pro-worker policies at the heart of their campaign.
Anyone who would rather not find out should be happy that Biden has dropped out. He almost certainly would have lost. But that
doesn’t mean that Vice President Kamala Harris — or whoever else might replace him — will win the election. The ability to complete
sentences is a good first step. But the content of those sentences still matters quite a bit. Even before the
extent of Biden’s cognitive difficulties became apparent, he may have torched his reelection prospects by backing Netanyahu’s grotesque
assault on the population of Gaza. No matter how he’d performed on the debate stage, it would have been very hard to imagine, for example,
Biden winning my home state of Michigan — which is both a crucial swing state and home to the largest concentration of Arab American voters
in the country. A different nominee who is not as closely associated with that horror might make a difference, especially if he or she made a
clear break from Biden’s policy, although it’s also possible that the damage is done at this point. On the domestic front, Biden was
desperate enough to start making some tentative steps in a positive direction in the final weeks of his candidacy. He talked
about ending medical debt, for example, and finally moving toward desperately needed reforms to the Supreme Court — an issue that
had been raised by the “Squad” of left-wing members of Congress. He unveiled a plan to effectively cap
rent increases at 5 percent, making major landlords’ tax breaks contingent on their adhering to this limit — although, in a telling
moment, he fumbled the delivery of this announcement, telling the NAACP Convention that he was going to limit rent increases to fifty-five
dollars. These moves were not only the right thing to do in themselves but evidence that some Democratic
Party power brokers correctly understand that a constituency that desperately wants reforms like these
could be crucial to winning the election. A candidate less likely than Biden to say “$55” when they mean “5 percent” might be
able to blunt the appeal of Trump and running mate J. D. Vance’s cynical reactionary populism. Kamala Harris is now the front-
runner for the nomination. As hard as this is to remember, she once claimed to support Medicare for All. Over the course of
the 2020 presidential campaign, she moved away from this in fumbling efforts at triangulation, but she could take the idea up again. Trump and
Vance are leaning hard into populist rhetoric this year. Vance’s RNC speech covered the pain of communities devastated by deindustrialization,
the housing crisis, the opioid crisis, and more. Lines like “jobs were sent overseas, and our children were sent to war,” hit home. When it comes
to supporting policies that would do anything about these problems, it’s all hot air. Trump was a ferociously anti-labor president, and Vance’s
legislative scorecard from the AFL-CIO sits at 0 percent. But the
fake populism taps into very real pain, and that appeal
can’t be countered by insisting that everything is basically fine and all we need are competent liberal
technocrats to sensibly steer the ship of state. Even if Harris or some other nominee did embrace a substantively populist
policy agenda, they might well go down to defeat. Too many voters might dismiss it as empty election-season rhetoric. Harris in particular might
not be a believable messenger. And with barely more than a hundred days until Election Day, there just might not be enough time to effectively
reframe the election. But fake
populism being countered with policies that would actually help ordinary
workers could give America — and the world — a chance to avoid whatever’s lurking on the other side
of a Trump victory this November.

Trademarks deck votership

Kyle Jahner and Robert Iafolla 7-31-2023, Kyle Jahner covers intellectual property for Bloomberg
Law, copyright and trademark law in particular. Robert Ialfolla is a senior legal reporter at Bloomberg
Law. “Trader Joe’s Launches Trademark Fight Amid Wider Union Battles” [Bloomberg Law]
https://news.bloomberglaw.com/ip-law/trader-joes-launches-trademark-fight-amid-wider-union-battles
/MDC
Trader Joe’s Co.'s recent trademark
lawsuit against a union treads into the murky intersection of intellectual
property and labor law, potentially testing the strength of the company’s infringement claims and the workers’
argument that the litigation amounts to retribution.

Trader Joe’s United, which formed last year and represents some of the grocery chain’s employees in three states, faces trademark claims over
merchandise graphically bearing the company’s trademarks that go beyond identifying the union. The grocer’s complaint, filed in California
federal court earlier this month, says the “purely commercial” sales “to the public is irreparably harming.”

The union called the lawsuit “retaliation” and “simply one more act of union-busting.”

The dispute comes amid a continued wave of labor organizing, with several newer unions incorporating company names in their monikers, such
as the Amazon Labor Union, Starbucks Workers United, and Apple Retail Union. Medieval Times USA last year brought trademark infringement
accusations against a union.

The Trader Joe’s dispute will turn on how a union-company relationship will affect a consumer confusion analysis—used to determine
infringement—and whether First Amendment free speech rights will offer the union a defense. Shifting interpretations of labor law and
whether employees can use a company’s marks add further wrinkles.

Those questions aren’t particularly well-trodden legal areas in the specific context of company-versus-union trademark
disputes, attorneys and academics said.

“You would think there’d be a straightforward answer, but there’s not,” said intellectual property law professor William McGeveran of the
University of Minnesota.

That uncertainty and the fact-specific nature of trademark disputes makes venturing into that territory an expensive proposition, which can
disadvantage the union, McGeveran said.

The facts in the Trader Joe’s case appear to leave both sides enough arguments to get past summary judgment and to trial, IP attorney Kenneth
G. Parker of Haynes and Boone LLP said of the “once in a lifetime case.” But that’s assuming the parties locked in a labor dispute wanted to
litigate the merits of the trademark claims to the finish, he said.

“There’s a larger battlefield associated with this case. And I think what’s going on in that larger battlefield is going to dictate
what happens in this case,” Parker said.

Consumers United in Confusion?

The doctrine of nominative fair use, which protects referential use of trademarks, lets unions like Trader Joe’s United use the company name to
identify themselves, lawyers say. But the union has also sold reusable tote bags, apparel, mugs, and buttons that include the font from Trader
Joe’s trademark as well as other design elements.

“It gets trickier when they start selling merchandise that appears to bear a logo, the trade dress, that circle with the stylized font,” IP professor
Elizabeth A. Rowe of the University of Virginia said. “It’s sort of in the eye of the beholder and eye of the fact finder how similar they are.”

“The fact that it’s a union, it’s significant. But it’s an entity, and it’s selling stuff like a retail store,” said IP attorney Rod S. Berman of Jeffer
Mangels Butler & Mitchell LLP. “I think it’s infringing, not 100% clear.”

The confusion question that emerges includes whether the average consumer would see union merchandise and automatically realize the
company had no association with it. That could hinge on how the query is framed for the particular relevant consumers. Rowe also said
“context is often very important,” including how prominent the company’s name is relative to the union aspect.

One thing that may hurt the union’s confusion argument may be its choice to use “United” rather than “Union,” Parker said.

“If it said ‘Union,’ there probably wouldn’t be a confusion case,” Parker said. “United is the name of the union, but united is also an adjective. It
creates an impression that Trader Joe’s is united by something, about some cause.”

But McGeveran said selling the goods at a union website or at union event makes consumer confusion extremely unlikely. In addition, he said
the First Amendment should factor in strongly.

Whether it’s selling gear or giving it away, the union is clearly voicing criticism of the company even if it’s not so obvious as saying “Trader Joe’s
Sucks,” he said.

“There shouldn’t be a requirement for how you refer to a mark-holder, that you have to be extremely blatant or get silenced,” he said.

Trader Joe’s didn’t respond to a request for comment.

Court-Ordered Blocks

While mere confusion is enough to establish infringement, if the store wants to block Trader Joe’s United’s merchandise sales, it would have to
establish irreparable harm to secure a court injunction, Parker said. If Trader Joe’s claims the bags cause false association with the union, it
would undercut its consumer confusion argument for its infringement claim.

Multiple attorneys said Trader Joe’s would likely argue post-sale confusion, which the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit has recognized.
While initial purchasers of a product may know that a company had nothing to do with the items because of the circumstances of the sale, it’s
possible that others see the product being used and wrongly assume a link.

But McGeveran called post-sale confusion “incoherent” and said cases have cast doubt on the entire premise.

Parker added that such confusion would essentially have to be demonstrated outside of the store context, where most would know what the
merchandise signifies—plus where employees displaying union gear would be heavily protected by the First Amendment and labor law.

“The survey is going to have to be very precise and nuanced,” Parker said of an effort to find evidence of post-sale confusion.

Labor Landscape

As with Medieval Times’ October trademark lawsuit against a union, the Trader Joe’s IP dispute falls within broader labor fights.

Trader Joe’s employees have scored mixed results in their organizing bids nationwide. Some have staged walkouts this summer, and their union
has filed dozens of unfair labor practice charges against the company with the National Labor Relations Board. Meanwhile, some Medieval
Times workers in California have gone on strike.

The Medieval Times trademark case—which has a motion to dismiss pending as the company pushes for immediate discovery—also involves
allegedly infringing use of company trademarks and imagery on Medieval Times Performers United merchandise. It also invokes use on a
website, social media, and a fundraising performance by members at a brewery.

The Medieval Times union’s motion to dismiss accused the company of “weaponizing” the courts “in retaliation” for union activities, adding
that such suits are routinely dismissed.

Medieval Times responded that the union was engaging in activity that isn’t protected by labor law and is “what trademark laws are meant to
prevent.”

Employers and unions have wrestled in the past over trademark use. While unions invoke trademarks in their
activities, employers sometimes endeavor to restrict use of their marks and other IP through workplace
rules, which can lead to disputes over whether such rules pass legal muster.
NLRB’s Stance

The NLRB, which administers federal labor law, assesses employer policies under the legal framework from its 2017 ruling in Boeing. That
standard turns on whether the policy in question could interfere with labor law rights, based on a balancing of the potential impact on those
rights against an employer’s justification for the rule.

The labor board’s top lawyer during the Trump administration told his deputies in the field that rules prohibiting workers from using the
company logo for any reason are presumptively lawful under Boeing. He reasoned in a guidance memo that “usually employees will understand
this type of rule as protecting the employer’s intellectual property from commercial and other” uses unrelated to worker activism.

But President Joe Biden fired NLRB General Counsel Peter Robb on Inauguration Day. Robb’s temporary replacement then rescinded Robb’s
guidance memo on Boeing.

The NLRB has a fully briefed case pending in which the agency’s current GC, Jennifer Abruzzo, calls for replacing the Boeing framework with the
more worker-friendly standard that was previously in place. That test focuses on whether a worker would reasonably interpret the rule to bar
exercising labor law rights.

Employer rules prohibiting the use of their trademarks are unlikely to survive NLRB review under that standard if it’s revived, said Steven Suflas,
a management-side attorney with Holland & Hart LLP.

“Disney sues mom and pop bakeries who use Mickey Mouse on cakes, but all of a sudden, unions will be able to,” said Suflas, who litigated a
trademark case at the NLRB. “It leaves you in a Wild West landscape.”

Circuit courts have limited precedent regarding union use of company trademarks. A decades-old Ninth Circuit case protected a union’s right to
enforce its own mark against a company that used it without permission, but said the union’s use of the business’s mark in an illegal secondary
boycott wasn’t privileged under labor law.
Parker said Trader Joe’s could flip that premise and say it should be able to enforce its mark too.

In the backdrop, too, are public relations concerns. While

a union may feel pressure from the monetary costs of
litigation, the company may see its image damaged by the perception that it’s filing meritless or trivial litigation to punish the union or gain
leverage.

Berman added that even if Trader Joe’s won an injunction, it’d be automatically appealable, lengthening the window between the suit and any
effect.

“We’re talking about a year before a ruling from the Ninth Circuit,” Berman said. “It seems to me that there are bigger and better things to fight
about.”

The plan saps political capital. Independently, legalization is too slow.

Yakowicz 23 [Will Yakowicz (Senior writer, BA in Journalism and English Literature @ NYU), “Why
National Cannabis Legalization Is Still A Decade Away,” Forbes,
https://www.forbes.com/sites/willyakowicz/2023/06/30/why-national-cannabis-legalization-is-still-a-
decade-away/] selina

Kim Rivers, CEO of Florida-based Trulieve, now believes that federal legalization will be “incremental” and will take
years. She contends that the SAFE Banking Act, which would make it easier for cannabis companies to access the financial system, is the most
likely reform to be passed at the federal level during Biden’s remaining term. Rivers, like many other CEOs, does not believe
there is enough political capital to usher in de-scheduling or federal legalization right now. “We’re still stuck
on first base,” she says.

The same buzzkill mentality is pervasive among investors. Jason Wild, a former pharmacist who launched cannabis hedge
fund JW Asset Management ($600 million AUM) and is currently the chair of Canada-based cannabis operator TerrAscend, which has 35
dispensaries across California, Canada, Maryland, Michigan, New Jersey and Pennsylvania, laughs when asked if he incorporates federal reform
in his business strategy. “Wecertainly do not model for federal legalization,” says Wild. “And, for that matter, we don’t
model for incremental change. It’s a dangerous strategy. From a balance sheet perspective, you need to act like it’s not going to
happen.”

Marijuana is still illegal federally for a very simple reason. “Politicians just don't really care,” says Paul
Armentano, the deputy director of nonprofit legalization advocacy group NORML. “ It's just not on their priority list. If it were, they
would address it. They don't because it isn't. It’s simple stuff.”

Over the last 30 years, 23 states have legalized recreational use and 38 now allow some form of medical marijuana, but the
Senate has
never held a single vote on legislation to decriminalize—or legalize—cannabis, despite the fact that
some 88% of the American public believe it should be legal.

Marijuana protections are unpopular with all parties.

Elbein ’24 [Saul; 3-30-2024; Journalist covering land, energy, and resources. Co-writer on The Hill's
Sustainability newsletter; The Hill, “In 2018, Republicans accidentally legalized cannabis. Now 22 AGs
want them to undo it”, https://thehill.com/homenews/4564181-2018-farm-bill-hemp-cannabis-
attorneys-general/]

A coalition of 22 state attorneys general is calling on Congress to address “the glaring vagueness” that
has led to legal cannabis products being sold over the counter across the country — including sometimes from
vending machines or online.

A letter dated March 20 addresses the consequences of Republican lawmakers’ choice to legalize hemp production in the 2018 omnibus Farm
Bill — a decision that perhaps inadvertently led to a multibillion-dollar market in intoxicating cannabis products that are arguably federally
legal.
Now, the
attorneys general want Congress to shutter the market it helped create. In the new Farm Bill,
they want the legislature to enshrine in statute the idea that intoxicating cannabis is not federally legal
— contrary to what the law currently states.
In other words, they want Congress to say that, by definition, hemp can’t get you high.

The rise of the legal (and intoxicating) hemp market runs counter to the development over the past
decade of the highly-regulated recreational and medicinal cannabis industries that voters have
approved across the country — a wild west of exotic cannabinoids sold without any of the strict controls of the formal legal market.

“Because of the ambiguity created by the 2018 Farm Bill, a massive gray market worth an estimated
$28 billion has exploded, forcing cannabis-equivalent products into our economies regardless of states’
intentions to legalize cannabis use,” the attorneys general wrote.

The bipartisan coalition brings together representatives of a diverse group of states — not just red and
blue, but those where recreational marijuana is legal (California, Hawaii), those where it is only legal for
medical use (Pennsylvania) and those where it is fully illegal (Georgia).

The plan is not bipartisan.

Learner ’23 [Sam; 11-24-2023; Graphics journalist @ the Financial Times; The Financial Times,
“Cannabis redraws US’s 2024 electoral map”, https://www.ft.com/content/43e20ea8-4467-4823-9e39-
686fd45c4306]

The growing popularity of legalisation measures suggests that the battleground for the issue will
continue to extend beyond typically left-leaning states. In deep red North Dakota, for example, a 2022 ballot measure
received the support of 45 per cent of voters in a state where just 32 per cent backed Joe Biden for president in 2020. Legislatively,
support from Republican officeholders at any level has been sparse, with many openly hostile to
reforms. A Financial Times analysis of nine successful state-level legislative efforts to legalise
recreational cannabis since 2021 showed those bills were supported by just 4 per cent of Republican
legislators who voted on them. In Pennsylvania and New Hampshire, two moderate swing states where polls show broad support
for cannabis legalisation, legislative measures have been gridlocked for years. Despite a rare Republican sponsor, Pennsylvania’s bill has been
unable to attract enough GOP support to pass the state senate.

Strong IP regimes are the opposite of economic populism – the aff would be perceived
as a favor to corporations, driving up costs and ensuring monopolies.
Qureshi 18 [Zia Qureshi, Senior Fellow - Global Economy and Development at the Brookings Institute.
“Intellectual property, not intellectual monopoly,” July 11, 2018.
https://www.brookings.edu/articles/intellectual-property-not-intellectual-monopoly/]

“The copyright and patent laws we have today look more like intellectual monopoly than intellectual
property,” wrote Brink Lindsey and Steven Teles in their recent book about the U.S. economy. Concerns about overprotection
of intellectual property acting as a barrier to innovation and its diffusion are not new. But they have
gained greater salience now that knowledge has emerged as a dominant driver of economic activity and
competitive advantage.

Digital technologies have enabled the emergence of an “intangible economy,” based on soft assets like
algorithms and lines of code, rather than physical assets like buildings and machinery. In this environment, intellectual-
property rules can now make or break business models and reshape societies, as they determine how
economic gains are shared.

Yet the main features of today’s IP regime were established for a very different economy. Patent rules,
for example, reflect the long-held assumption that strong protection provides an essential incentive for
businesses to pursue innovation. In fact, recent studies by Petra Moser and Heidi Williams, among others, find little
evidence that patents boost innovation. On the contrary, because they lock in incumbents’ advantages
and drive up the costs of new technology, such protections are associated with less new or follow-on
innovation, weaker diffusion, and increased market concentration. This has contributed to growing
monopoly power, slowing productivity growth, and rising inequality in many economies over the past couple of
decades.

Patents also invite considerable lobbying and rent-seeking. A majority of patents are used not to
produce commercial value, but to create defensive legal thickets that can keep potential competitors at
bay. As the system expands, patent trolling and litigation soar. Lawsuits by patent trolls comprise more
than three-fifths of all lawsuits for IP infringement in the U.S. and cost the economy an estimated $500 billion in 1990-
2010.

Some argue that the patent system should simply be dismantled. But that would be too radical an approach. What
is really needed is
a top-to-bottom reexamination of the system, with an eye to changing excessively broad or stringent
protections, aligning the rules with current realities, and enabling competition to drive innovation and
technological diffusion.

Trump 2 causes great-power war: Iran, NATO, LIO, Taiwan, and trade.
Feaver 24, PhD, Professor of Political Science @ Duke. (Peter, “The Real Challenge of Trump 2.0,”
Foreign Affairs, https://www.foreignaffairs.com/united-states/real-challenge-trump-20)
Former U.S. President Donald Trump’s comments about NATO in early February provoked an unusually quick rebuke from leaders around the
world. Speaking at a campaign rally in South Carolina, Trump said that, as president, he would encourage Russia to “do whatever the hell they
want” to any member of the alliance that did not spend two percent of GDP on defense, a goal all NATO members agreed to in 2014. Charles
Michel, president of the European Council, called the remark “reckless.” NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg said it “undermines all of our
security.” U.S. President Joe Biden called it “un-American.”

The apparent invitation to war was shocking, but the underlying disdain for NATO was not particularly surprising: Trump has long made known
his dissatisfaction with other NATO members. He also has a history of cozying up to authoritarian leaders—perhaps none more ardently than
Russian President Vladimir Putin. Rather than marking some new outrage, then, Trump’s loose talk about NATO seemed to
underscore a larger point about his possible second term in office: having gone through Trump 1.0, everyone has a
pretty good idea of what could happen in 2.0, but since the conditions around Trump have changed, 2.0 will be a far more
tumultuous experience.
 K:
Intellectual property is rooted in a biopolitical and capitalistic mission to appropriate
knowledge and life---the power of IP extends capitalist power over life by enhancing
monopolistic power in service of Western modernity---strengthening IPR perpetuates
existential structural crises, colonialism, and imperialism through endless exploitation
João Romeiro Hermeto 2024, Visiting Scholar at The University of Pavia (Italy) in the Department of
Humanistic Studies, PhD in philosophy from the Witten/Herdecke University, Germany, 2024, The
Paradox of Intellectual Property in Capitalism, Palgrave Macmillan, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-
49967-8, pp. 173-180
4.1.1 Monopoly

The apologetic theodicy and the philosophical justifications of intellectual property(private) lack , for the
most part, a political-economic material basis; they are essentially metaphysical approaches . With the advent of
the digital sphere, copyright has become ubiquitous and hence even more powerful because “nearly all
engagement in a digital culture involves making a copy of something, even if only to display it on a
screen to read it” (Hull, 2019, p. 62). Over ten years ago, when Alexandra George published her notable study on intellectual property,
already 85% of the world’s population had to comply with intellectual property rights because “national intellectual property laws that, due
mainly to the requirement to harmonise domestic laws to comply with the WTO’s TRIPS Agreement, are now reasonably uniform worldwide”
(George, 2012, p. 77). A comparison may be called for to put this figure into perspective; in 1914, European capitalist powers had yielded a
virtually omnipresent colonial power, stretching to circa 84% of the planet (Hoffman, 2015, p. 2; Patel & Moore, 2017, p. 5). Therefore, in 2012,
the subsumption of knowledge under intellectual property(private) was already more extensive than
the peak of colonial subsumption under imperialist capitalism. Needless to say, this causes a series of problems
because it mutes entire cultures. This all-encompassing subsumption of knowledge under intellectual
property(private) homogenises a multitude of cultures with little to no regard to the different contexts
of cultural and material development or to the different needs, wants, goals, and local conditions. The
international system of intellectual property therefore asserts capitalist monopolistic power and
control based on Western models, conferring homogenisation to the production of knowledge. “Rights
over intellectual property objects tend to include monopoly privileges to obtain, use, make, provide to
others, and authorise others to do these things with respect to the intellectual property object” (George,
2012, p. 238). In short, it is a right to exclude others.

The capitalist structural crisis, which has persisted since the 1970s, has posed the existential necessity for a
paradigmatic shift away from its previous mode of accumulation. In this context, neoliberalism, its institutions
and policies gained traction. William I. Robinson has shown the empirical side of what Marx (famously) called “the law of the tendentious
fall of the rate of profit”, departing from 15% during the so-called Golden Age and plunging to 6% in 2017; furthermore, in 2020, the major non-
financial capitalist corporations were sitting on over a staggering 14 trillion dollars, which means a massive amount of capital (re)converted into
money, or money in a non-capitalist form, money not being reinvested into capital, capital that is no longer capital (Marx, 1964, p. 221ff;
Robinson, 2022). In this sense, the
system of intellectual property(private) in place is a means to secure the
extraction of surplus-value, as one of the many attempts to overcome structural limitations.1 Furthermore,
data collection engenders a novel field of asserting the so-called primitive accumulation by means of data mining and total surveillance
(Mueller, 2019, p. 51f) (see more infra). Despite
the illusion of competition in the digital sphere, a massive system
of monopoly capitalism has taken hold of it. According to Mariana Mazzucato, most of the planetary data are owned by five US-
American capitalist companies, namely, Amazon, Facebook, Google, IBM, and Microsoft (Mazzucato, 2018).

As shown, by no means was digital creation and growth, until its monopolisation, an organic process. Besides the joint venture of multiple
capitalist giants and the US-American state to bring TRIPS into reality, Mazzucato also emphasises the role of the financial system and the US-
American state in creating innovation and concentrating the underlying technologies of the so-called digital revolution. Social resources,
channelled through the state, worked as a form of public venture capital, playing a crucial role in the
R&D of new technologies. Thus, despite the myth of being a product of geniuses or private enterprises, most technologies—not only
modern ones—were and are, in fact, products of collective endeavours. The greater the complexity of knowledge creation, the smaller the role
of individual contribution. Public venture capital takes almost all risk and no reward, while private venture capital is left with modest risk and all
the reward. It was, therefore, not the “free market” but extra-economic relations, namely, the so-called primitive
accumulation, which enabled, for instance, Apple and Microsoft to rise and become capitalist tech giants.

Not only big tech but also big pharma was mostly erected on public funds. The changes in the patent
system represented a qualitative break in the real subsumption of knowledge under the capitalist
mode of production, from being allegedly a means of knowledge stimulation to becoming a means of
controlling and blocking knowledge. Basic research was consequently engulfed by the proprietary
model of knowledge. While Mazzucato unveils how this affects hepatitis, cancer, and HIV treatments,
Fabienne Orsi, Christine Sevilla, and Benjamin Coriat have shown how this model affects health on a
broad scale, as it also hinders testing. Patents have enabled “monopoly over the diagnostic and
therapeutic activities based on genes” (Orsi et al., 2006, p. 327). The notion that privileges were conferred to
inventions and not discoveries was once again blurred, making it theoretically possible for “gene
sequences per se” to be patented (Nicol, 2021, p. 111). The arbitrary power over the privatisation of life has thus far
attained many forms. One could argue that owning and controlling plants and animals, and even human beings
in the multiple forms of slavery and servitude, have kicked off a long process of naturalisation and
normalisation which culminates in the privatisation of genes. Additionally, intellectual privatisation in
relation to life was already taking place at least since the nineteenth century , continuing throughout the twentieth
century before the famous Diamond v. Chakrabarty case in the late twentieth century. For instance, microorganisms in the form of
yeast received patents as early as in 1873. From that point on, seeds and plants were also subjected to
privatisation in the form of intellectual property.
The mediation which the Internet offers contains an essential dimension within social relations. On the one hand, it provides a venue for social
interaction, in which a simulation of real-life gains digital actualisation; on the other, this social interaction is deprived of actively real human
sensual capacities. Of course, one could say that this is a preposterous statement because one can perceive the Digital through human sight
and hearing. Nevertheless, this mediation is foremost a simulacrum. Within the digital sphere, human senses are factually shut down, for one
perceives what he is allowed to perceive. One does not truly see nor hear but experiences a simulation of what one ought to see or hear. With
television or radio this is much more obvious; nevertheless, the human reciprocity that the Internet enables gives the impression that one is
actively asserting his agency. One does not interact with the other person but rather with the other person’s simulacrum. One does not see or
hear the other person but simply a simulation. It goes without saying that this assessment contains no value-judgement. It merely appreciates
the limits of the Digital. This limitation, however obvious, is turned upside down and presented as actual freedom and potential to assert the
individuality of the person. What remains hidden is the fact that after the real subsumption of the Internet under capitalism, it ceases to be a
locus of simulated possibilities and becomes a simulacrum of the simulation, becoming the quintessence of publicity, propaganda, and control.

Often presented as a place of gift economy (contemporarily conceived as sharing economy), the illusion of free services and freedom likewise
entails a double veil of simulation. Although it was initially unclear to many that free service was simply a deception, its disclosure reveals the
considerable subordination of Internet users to capitalist power. While you and I—connected to any digital device with Internet access—
become the commodities being bought and sold, legislators, regulators, citizens, etc. have internalised this process as part of the new normal
and shown pronounced passivity vis-à-vis capitalist power. Private capital mediates not only the economic sphere of production and
distribution, now, with the commodification of the user—the constant appropriation of personal data—such flexibilisation does not relate to
the realm of possibilities to unfold novel social relations but rather the consolidation of precarisation beyond the mere sphere of immediate
labour towards all social life (see infra).

Not only the big techs are deeply invested in this modus operandi. The relationship between big pharma, big tech, and the government has
become so intertwined that one cannot differentiate where one begins and the other ends. The immense amount of data being produced and
processed by the Digital invades the spheres of biology, which is being dissected at a molecular level and being standardised as mechanical
pieces and consequently transformed into a branch of engineering. The so-called BioBricks aim “at creating artificial cells and life forms
functionally indistinguishable from naturally occurring ones and interoperable with them. At its most extreme it seeks to add completely new
functions” (Dutfield, 2012, p. 176). Capitalist power over life is thus surpassing the dimension of production of
plants, drugs, and animals, that is, what we put in our bodies; its control now reaches the genetic and
molecular compositions of the body.

Control of the biological body has not been randomly achieved. Instead, it reflects the neoliberal shaping of human
behaviour and perception of concrete reality. Despite having been proven ineffective in the unconstrained creation and
spreading of knowledge, intellectual property(private) actualises the neoliberal method of securing new
venues of primitive accumulation to capitalism. The advancement of technology in biology does not constitute an exception.
“Biotechnology patents thus expand the proprietary character of knowledge to the detriment of the
intellectual commons”, in other words, an “ontological commodification” (Pellizzoni & Ylönen, 2012, pp. 55, 57f).
This commodification process necessarily presupposes a process of appropriation, which must thus be
drawn from collective knowledge. The creation and appropriation of data banks involve surveillance and
audience commodity. “Biobanks raise issues of privacy, confidentiality, consent, trust, citizen rights,
civil participation and so on” (Pellizzoni & Ylönen, 2012, p. 58). Therefore, a surveillance system becomes paramount
to enable the creation and actualisation of such data banks (see infra). This biopolitical power asserting
control is not only externally imposed but also internally assimilated (Gramsci, 1971).
4.1.2 Privatisation of Life and Bio-colonialism

Gavin Mueller criticises that the category of labour is often neglected despite its centrality also in the digital space (Mueller, 2019, p. 28).
Needless to say, computers enable a new qualitative dimension to labour and other social activities; nevertheless, they are still copy machines.
From the side of software production, the process of rendering them more capable as tools was an activity that belonged to the sharing culture
in which software was not commodified. It was only when a second generation arose, led by players such as Bill Gates, that software
commodification started to gain traction and be promoted. Opposing this practice, another subculture emerged, namely, that of hackers. A
1978 court decision made sharing illegal, catalysing a process of primitive accumulation of software. Any written code became automatically
copyrighted following US-American legislation. A chief achievement of the free software movement was the creation of Linux, representing the
culmination of a counterattack against this privatisation process. However successful and good the intentions of the free software movement,
today, even Linux has become part of capitalist production, which engulfed it for free in another “enclosure” movement while embedding it
within its private productive processes.

While piracy has been attacked by legislation and practices involving intellectual property, the latter has however been complemented by
biopiracy. In the United States, the
Seeds Law of 2004 criminalised an ancient human tradition of saving and
exchanging seeds, guaranteeing an open venue for profit extraction by capitalist giants such as
Monsanto. Despite lobbying for similar legislation, India initially stood firm against it. In a second moment, however, the
World Bank’s lobby pressured India to dismantle its programme. The consequences were devastating.
Prices skyrocketed, and livelihoods were destroyed. The Lockean mechanism of appropriation of “Terra
Nullius”, in which indigenous labour is completely disregarded, now became “ Bio Nullius”, enabling
(intellectual) private appropriation of indigenous knowledge . Legitimating this practice, intellectual
property(private) became an instrument of biopiracy. In 1996, knowledge exchange was further
criminalised by the US-American legislation under the Espionage Act. Knowledge production and
socialisation faced a double attack: piratical appropriation overseas and criminalisation at home. The
Western notion of science is exceptionally narrow and arbitrary, excluding everything external that does
not fit its own standard; within Western boundaries, publicly developed knowledge is then transformed
into private property, forcing society to bear the cost while few private capitalist players take the spoils .
For Vandana Shiva, this represents the continuity of an over 500-year-old colonial system. The fact that 75% of the
compounds extracted from plants are known and used by indigenous culture is yet another great evidence of this arbitrary power control
system (Shiva, 2016). Alexandra George’s comparison between the Aboriginal dreaming, which protects the lore—communities’ traditional
knowledge—and the intellectual property(private) system further reinforces Shiva’s arguments. The latter does not recognise or allow the
former to actualise a social dimension despite the similarities. George considers that an incompatibility exists not because of capitalism but
because they are two different bodies of law—as if the law were a thing in-itself (George, 2012, p. 267ff). The modus operandi actualising a
double standard becomes unambiguous. This means that an act of piracy is regarded as unlawful only within a particular frame. Insofar as
piracy is committed outside a self-asserted frame, it is not considered as such.
Capitalist exploitation comprises not only indigenous people but also Africans. Among mining, cheap
labour, extraction of raw materials, and others, the intellectual property system is yet another way to
ensure appropriation of surplus-value. Although colonial juridical systems were formally substituted by
national ones, their substance, nonetheless, remained unaltered. According to Adebambo Adewopo, intellectual
property(private) completely opposes African culture. However, his critique of the intellectual property system leaves
capitalist relations untouched. Intellectual property(private) appears to be only part of neo-colonialism but not capitalism; TRIPS is, therefore, a
possibility for action (Adewopo, 2016). Samuel Oddi has a very different view, in which TRIPS
appears as a mechanism of
imperialism. Before TRIPS, it was difficult to assert Western hegemony in intellectual property(private).
International trade was placed above national interests, benefiting imperialistic capitalism (Oddi, 2016).
The separation between the private and the public accentuated by neoliberalism is the object of Keith Aoki’s critique. One could say that this is
not a neoliberal but a capitalist or even bourgeois feature, as Marx had already pointed out when criticising human estrangement, which
enables one to be conceived as two antagonistic dimensions of citoyen and bourgeois (Marx, 1981). Aoki, however, emphasises an essential
aspect of neoliberalism in which abstraction takes a qualitative leap due to the destruction of quantitative differences; for instance, “individual
contracting parties or nations” are “formally equal” (Aoki, 2016, p. 197). Alternatively, as Michel Foucault points out, neoliberal Alexander
Rüstow’s conception of politics ignores the metabolism between human(s) and nature and in its place conceives the capitalist enterprise as the
basis of life and the main constitutive element of society; that is, the individuum itself cannot be differentiated from the capitalist company,
they are one and the same (Foucault, 2004, p. 153f).

This atomisation gains further accent with the implementation of the international property system, ignoring the real ontological dimension of
intellectual property, that is, “new intellectual creations are formed from preexisting thoughts and ideas in a long chain stretching back into
antiquity” (Aoki, 2016, p. 219). Thepower imposed by and derived from intellectual property(private) means
controlling knowledge production and political participation. Also here, the Global North and Global South
relations are shaped to benefit the Global North. TRIPS was a US-American blackmail in which trade was
weaponised against weaker countries, causing erosion of national sovereignty in the Global South.
According to Keith E. Markus and Jerome H. Reichman, this relationship suggests a paradoxical form: neoliberal
deregulation is imposed only to assert a neoliberal regulatory body of social control (Maskus & Reichman,
2016, p. 347f).

Capitalism is not sustainable- it degrades ecosystems and has a laundry list of impacts
Foster '19 [John Bellamy; 2/1/19; Professor of Sociology at the University of Oregon, PhD in Political
Science from York University, President and Board Member of the Monthly Review; "Capitalism Has
Failed—What Next?" https://monthlyreview.org/2019/02/01/capitalism-has-failed-what-next/ smarx,
HHW]

Indications of this failure of capitalism are everywhere. Stagnation of investment punctuated by bubbles
of financial expansion, which then inevitably burst, now characterizes the so-called free market.4 Soaring inequality
in income and wealth has its counterpart in the declining material circumstances of a majority of the
population. Real wages for most workers in the United States have barely budged in forty years despite
steadily rising productivity.5 Work intensity has increased, while work and safety protections on the job have
been systematically jettisoned. Unemployment data has become more and more meaningless due to a new institutionalized
underemployment in the form of contract labor in the gig economy.6 Unions have been reduced to mere shadows of their former glory as
capitalism has asserted totalitarian control over workplaces. With the demise of Soviet-type societies, social democracy in Europe has perished
in the new atmosphere of “liberated capitalism.”7

The capture of the surplus value produced by overexploited populations in the poorest regions of the world,
via the global labor arbitrage instituted by multinational corporations, is leading to an unprecedented amassing of financial
wealth at the center of the world economy and relative poverty in the periphery .8 Around $21 trillion of offshore
funds are currently lodged in tax havens on islands mostly in the Caribbean, constituting “the fortified refuge of Big Finance.”9 Technologically
driven monopolies resulting from the global-communications revolution, together with the rise to dominance of Wall Street-based financial
capital geared to speculative asset creation, have further contributed to the riches of today’s “1 percent.” Forty-two billionaires now
enjoy as much wealth as half the world’s population, while the three richest men in the United States—Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates,
and Warren Buffett—have more wealth than half the U.S. population.10 In every region of the world, inequality has increased sharply in recent
decades.11 The gap in per capita income and wealth between the richest and poorest nations , which has been
the dominant trend for centuries, is rapidly widening once again.12 More than 60 percent of the world’s
employed population, some two billion people, now work in the impoverished informal sector, forming
a massive global proletariat. The global reserve army of labor is some 70 percent larger than the active labor army of formally
employed workers.13

Adequate health care, housing, education, and clean water and air are increasingly out of reach for
large sections of the population, even in wealthy countries in North America and Europe, while transportation is
becoming more difficult in the United States and many other countries due to irrationally high levels of dependency
on the automobile and disinvestment in public transportation. Urban structures are more and more characterized by
gentrification and segregation, with cities becoming the playthings of the well-to-do while marginalized
populations are shunted aside. About half a million people, most of them children, are homeless on any
given night in the United States.14 New York City is experiencing a major rat infestation, attributed to warming temperatures, mirroring
trends around the world.15

In the United States and other high-income countries, life expectancy is in decline, with a remarkable
resurgence of Victorian illnesses related to poverty and exploitation. In Britain, gout, scarlet fever, whooping cough,
and even scurvy are now resurgent, along with tuberculosis. With inadequate enforcement of work health and safety
regulations, black lung disease has returned with a vengeance in U.S. coal country. 16 Overuse of
antibiotics, particularly by capitalist agribusiness, is leading to an antibiotic-resistance crisis, with the
dangerous growth of superbugs generating increasing numbers of deaths, which by mid–century could surpass annual cancer
deaths, prompting the World Health Organization to declare a “global health emergency.”17 These dire conditions, arising
from the workings of the system, are consistent with what Frederick Engels, in the Condition of the
Working Class in England, called “social murder.”18
At the instigation of giant corporations, philanthrocapitalist foundations, and neoliberal governments, public education has been restructured
around corporate-designed testing based on the implementation of robotic common-core standards. This is generating massive databases on
the student population, much of which are now being surreptitiously marketed and sold.19 The corporatization and privatization of education is
feeding the progressive subordination of children’s needs to the cash nexus of the commodity market. We are thus seeing a dramatic return of
Thomas Gradgrind’s and Mr. M’Choakumchild’s crass utilitarian philosophy dramatized in Charles Dickens’s Hard Times: “Facts are alone
wanted in life” and “You are never to fancy.”20 Having been reduced to intellectual dungeons, many of the poorest, most racially segregated
schools in the United States are mere pipelines for prisons or the military.21

More than two million people in the United States are behind bars, a higher rate of incarceration than any
other country in the world, constituting a new Jim Crow. The total population in prison is nearly equal to the number of
people in Houston, Texas, the fourth largest U.S. city. African Americans and Latinos make up 56 percent of those
incarcerated, while constituting only about 32 percent of the U.S. population . Nearly 50 percent of American
adults, and a much higher percentage among African Americans and Native Americans, have an immediate family member who has spent or is
currently spending time behind bars. Both
black men and Native American men in the United States are nearly
three times, Hispanic men nearly two times, more likely to die of police shootings than white men.22
Racial divides are now widening across the entire planet.

Violence against women and the expropriation of their unpaid labor, as well as the higher level of
exploitation of their paid labor, are integral to the way in which power is organized in capitalist society —
and how it seeks to divide rather than unify the population. More than a third of women worldwide have experienced physical/sexual violence.
Women’s bodies, in particular, are objectified, reified, and commodified as part of the normal workings
of monopoly-capitalist marketing.23
The mass media-propaganda system, part of the larger corporate matrix, is now merging into a social
media-based propaganda system that is more porous and seemingly anarchic, but more universal and
more than ever favoring money and power. Utilizing modern marketing and surveillance techniques, which now dominate all
digital interactions, vested interests are able to tailor their messages, largely unchecked, to individuals and
their social networks, creating concerns about “fake news” on all sides.24 Numerous business entities promising
technological manipulation of voters in countries across the world have now surfaced, auctioning off their services to the highest
bidders.25 The elimination of net neutrality in the United States means further concentration, centralization, and control over the entire
Internet by monopolistic service providers.

Elections are increasingly prey to unregulated “dark money” emanating from the coffers of corporations and the billionaire class. Although
presenting itself as the world’s leading democracy, the United States, as Paul Baran and Paul Sweezy stated in Monopoly Capital in 1966, “is
democratic in form and plutocratic in content.”26 In the Trump administration, following a long-established tradition, 72 percent of those
appointed to the cabinet have come from the higher corporate echelons, while others have been drawn from the military.27

War, engineered by the United States and other major powers at the apex of the system, has become
perpetual in strategic oil regions such as the Middle East, and threatens to escalate into a global
thermonuclear exchange. During the Obama administration, the United States was engaged in wars/bombings in
seven different countries—Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Yemen, Somalia, and Pakistan.28 Torture and assassinations have
been reinstituted by Washington as acceptable instruments of war against those now innumerable individuals, group
networks, and whole societies that are branded as terrorist. A new Cold War and nuclear arms race is in the making between

the United States and Russia, while Washington is seeking to place road blocks to the continued rise of China. The Trump administration has created
a new space force as a separate branch of the military in an attempt to ensure U.S. dominance in the militarization of space. Sounding the alarm on the increasing
dangers of a nuclear war and of climate destabilization, the distinguished Bulletin of Atomic Scientists
moved its doomsday clock in 2018
to two minutes to midnight, the closest since 1953, when it marked the advent of thermonuclear
weapons.29

Increasingly severe economic sanctions are being imposed by the United States on countries like
Venezuela and Nicaragua, despite their democratic elections—or because of them. Trade and currency wars are being
actively promoted by core states, while racist barriers against immigration continue to be erected in Europe and the United States
as some 60 million refugees and internally displaced peoples flee devastated environments . Migrant populations
worldwide have risen to 250 million, with those residing in high-income countries constituting more than 14 percent of the populations of those
countries, up from less than 10 percent in 2000. Meanwhile, ruling
circles and wealthy countries seek to wall off islands
of power and privilege from the mass of humanity, who are to be left to their fate .30

More than three-quarters of a billion people, over 10 percent of the world population, are chronically
malnourished.31 Food stress in the United States keeps climbing, leading to the rapid growth of cheap
dollar stores selling poor quality and toxic food. Around forty million Americans, representing one out of eight households,
including nearly thirteen million children, are food insecure.32 Subsistence farmers are being pushed off their lands by
agribusiness, private capital, and sovereign wealth funds in a global depeasantization process that constitutes the greatest movement of
people in history.33 Urban overcrowding and poverty across much of the globe is so severe that one can now
reasonably refer to a “planet of slums.”34 Meanwhile, the world housing market is estimated to be worth up to $163 trillion (as
compared to the value of gold mined over all recorded history, estimated at $7.5 trillion).35

The Anthropocene epoch, first ushered in by the Great Acceleration of the world economy immediately
after the Second World War, has generated enormous rifts in planetary boundaries,
extending from climate change to ocean acidification, to the sixth extinction,
to disruption of the global nitrogen and phosphorus cycles, to the loss of
freshwater, to the disappearance of forests, to widespread toxic-chemical and
radioactive pollution.36 It is now estimated that 60 percent of the world’s wildlife
vertebrate population (including mammals, reptiles, amphibians, birds, and fish)
have been wiped out since 1970, while the worldwide abundance of invertebrates has declined by 45
percent in recent decades.37 What climatologist James Hansen calls the “species exterminations”
resulting from accelerating climate change and rapidly shifting climate zones are only
compounding this general process of biodiversity loss. Biologists expect that half of all
species will be facing extinction by the end of the century.38
If present climate-change trends continue, the “global carbon budget” associated with a
2°C increase in average global temperature will be broken in sixteen years (while a 1.5°C increase in
global average temperature—staying beneath which is the key to long-term stabilization of the climate—will be
Earth System scientists warn that the world is now perilously
reached in a decade).
close to a Hothouse Earth, in which catastrophic climate change will be locked in
and irreversible.39 The ecological, social, and economic costs to humanity of
continuing to increase carbon emissions by 2.0 percent a year as in recent decades (rising in 2018 by 2.7 percent—
3.4 percent in the United States), and failing to meet the minimal 3.0 percent annual reductions in emissions
to avoid a catastrophic destabilization of the earth’s energy
currently needed
balance, are simply incalculable.40
major energy corporations continue to lie about climate change,
Nevertheless,
promoting and bankrolling climate denialism—while admitting the truth in their
internal documents. These corporations are working to accelerate the extraction
and production of fossil fuels, including the dirtiest, most greenhouse gas-generating varieties,
reaping enormous profits in the process. The melting of the Arctic ice from global warming is
seen by capital as a new El Dorado , opening up massive additional oil and gas reserves to
be exploited without regard to the consequences for the earth’s climate. In response
to scientific reports on climate change, Exxon Mobil declared that it intends to extract and sell all of the fossil-fuel
Energy corporations continue to intervene in climate
reserves at its disposal.41
negotiations to ensure that any agreements to limit carbon emissions are
defanged. Capitalist countries across the board are putting the accumulation of
wealth for a few above combatting climate destabilization, threatening the very
future of humanity.
Capitalism is best understood as a competitive class-based mode of production
and exchange geared to the accumulation of capital through the exploitation of
workers’ labor power and the private appropriation of surplus value (value generated
beyond the costs of the workers’ own reproduction). The mode of economic accounting intrinsic
to capitalism designates as a value-generating good or service anything that
passes through the market and therefore produces income. It follows that the
greater part of the social and environmental costs of production outside the
market are excluded in this form of valuation and are treated as mere negative
“externalities,” unrelated to the capitalist economy itself—whether in terms of the shortening
and degradation of human life or the destruction of the natural environment. As environmental economist K.
William Kapp stated, “capitalism must be regarded as an economy of unpaid costs.”42

We have now reached a point in the twenty-first century in which the externalities of this
irrational system, such as the costs of war, the depletion of natural resources,
the waste of human lives, and the disruption of the planetary environment, now
far exceed any future economic benefits that capitalism offers to society as a whole.
The accumulation of capital and the amassing of wealth are increasingly
occurring at the expense of an irrevocable rift in the social and environmental
conditions governing human life on earth.43

The alternative is to reject the epistemology of the 1AC- it is a colonial power used for
nation replication- instead you must endorse an alternative of an academic
interigation of power
Gani & Marshall 22, Jasmine K. Gani: PhD of IR @ LSE. Senior Lecturer of IR @ St. Andrews. Jenna
Marshall: PhD of Political Science @ Queen Mary University. Senior Researcher for Development and
Postcolonial Studies @ U-Kassel (The impact of colonialism on policy and knowledge production in
International Relations, International Affairs, Volume 98, Issue 1, January 2022, Pages 5–22, DOI:
10.1093/ia/iiab226)

Looking forward: academic and practitioner pushback against colonialism, and cautionary tales

Given the historical and ongoing mutual complicity between knowledge producers and policy-makers
in upholding imperial and racial orders, we now consider the responsibilities, possibilities and
challenges faced in altering the nature of that nexus. Doing so requires turning to what Danso and Aning
call an ‘episteme of alternativity’;41 and the primary way for academics to enact this would be to draw
on anti-colonial practice and legacies, rather than imperial competition, as the foundation of their
theorizing.

Thus, in his article, Sizwe Mpofu-Walsh forefronts global South policy-makers and focuses on the nuclear
order (a topic that is typically associated with realist IR) to demonstrate how it can be approached
through an alternative, critical epistemology.42 Disrupting the ‘Great Power gaze’, Mpofu-Walsh asks
what the politics of non-proliferation looks like from the perspective of the global South, especially the
African continent as the sole nuclear weapon-free zone (NWFZ). There, denuclearization is
fundamentally linked to decolonization. Thus anti-colonial goals, rather than hegemonic/imperialist
competition, are at the root of both policy and theorizing. How different would IR knowledge and
theories on nuclear weapons be if African praxis and the importance of NWFZs were taken seriously?
Turning to the Middle East, Gani similarly argues in her article that the inclusion of non-western history
and voices—from policy-makers to activists and scholars—in think-tank discussions can mitigate the
latent colonialism that shapes western policy.43

Nevertheless, even with an incorporation of non-western practice and knowledge in policy making and
scholarly theorizing, multiple perspectives that are marginalized even in the local context, owing to class
or gender, may continue to go unheard.44 One crucial way in which both academics and practitioners
can challenge such patterns is by adopting a more expansive reading of what constitutes ‘knowledge’
and indeed ‘practice’. In doing so, we can dismantle some of the constructed and false hierarchies
between elite ‘knowledge’ and ‘research’ on one hand, and local ‘tradition’ on the other.45 The former
is assumed to be objective, reliable and associated with western (and western-validated) universities;
while the latter is viewed as subjective, unscientific and commonly associated with Indigenous,
racialized, grassroots communities. Assumptions about who counts as a true knowledge producer or
‘expert’ is not only elitist but heavily racialized and gendered. Definitions of who counts as a
‘practitioner’ are equally narrow, so that scholars or policy-makers may place much weight on the views
and actions of state, global governance and corporate practitioners, but do not view as equal
practitioners those involved in everyday practice in their communities—those who in fact sustain their
ecology, livelihoods, security and identities, all while having to navigate the impact of top-down
policies.46
Both the articles by Jan Wilkens and Alvine Datchoua-Tirvaudey on climate justice, and by Althea Rivas and Mariam Safi on the organizing and practices of Afghan women, share knowledge from non-elite local communities and
challenge the above binaries and hierarchies. In their article on climate justice in the Arctic and the Mediterranean, Wilkens and Datchoua-Tirvaudey explain that academic–practitioner knowledge exchange has often been a
contributing factor in continued climate injustice.47 The existing patterns of this knowledge exchange on climate governance are dependent on hierarchies of knowledge, namely, the valorization of western/‘scientific’ knowledge
production at the expense of the needs and knowledges of the Indigenous and local communities most affected by climate change (i.e. the community-based practitioners, rather than the institutional/state ones). Moreover, the
spaces where such knowledge exchange takes place are often exclusionary (in who is invited, in the parameters of discourse and/or in the extortionate costs of participating), producing an intra-elite debate.48 Having identified
these racialized patterns, they offer a corrective decolonial strategy for ethical climate governance, founded on practice-based knowledge and diverse ways of knowing that bring in those excluded insights.

The article by Rivas and Safi also provides an example of how the academic–practitioner nexus can be ‘decolonized’, one in which everyday knowledges of Afghan women, in all their diversity and complexity, are centred in
peacebuilding efforts.49 Their article, co-written by an academic and a local practitioner, offers a methodology of how to take into account the internal hierarchies of positionality, interests and knowledges that are always present
when engaging with grassroots communities for the sake of ‘research’. Rivas and Safi also demonstrate the importance of registering and valuing the unlooked-for, atypical knowledges from below, such as the subtle observations
offered by Afghan women in rural areas that, contrary to wider assumptions, reflect their political engagement and interest.

Caution against extractivism in the search for such local knowledge exchange is at the forefront of both the above contributions.50 Thus academics should remain reflexive in what the purpose of their research is, and who really
benefits. Moreover, a praxis of decolonizing such research necessarily entails taking time in a way that is at odds with the current culture of speedy and multitudinous productivity in academia: the rapid churning out of articles
from ‘the field’ should raise appropriate questions about how, why and for whom that research is being conducted.

Of course, at issue is not just whom but also what we consider as worthy of scholarly and policy attention, and how inclusive we are of alternative methodologies. Dependence on state and official archives, ‘canonical’ theorists,
written records and English-language sources all reproduce the racialized hierarchies inherent in the prioritization of certain types of knowledge and transmission.51 These factors also close the door on appreciating the power—
both practical and ideational—generated by collective social action, whose impact cannot (and should not) be individualized to one or a few visible and often romanticized protagonists. Recognizing all this and reading into the
silences of the archives should encourage greater attention to non-hegemonic record-keeping, story-telling and witnessing beyond elitist and prohibitive barriers—from oral histories, to poetry, art and independent publishing on
paper and online. As anti-colonial and anti-racist thinkers and activists have long argued, these are the ways in which those who are dispossessed and marginalized, but also, consequently, autonomous, have kept their identities,
cultures and memories alive, and sought to prevent their experiences from being suppressed and erased.52 In the face of systematic racism and the colonial dismantling of their histories, those who are marginalized are not, in fact,
silent but continue to cultivate and share knowledge, even if they may lack the resources and type of support received by hegemonic knowledges (and people).53 Recognizing the equal validity of marginalized forms of knowledges
in both academic and policy realms pushes back against the de-representation in knowledge exchanges within elite spaces and formats.

However, it would be erroneous to assume from these arguments that knowledge produced by so-called elite communities is always bad, and that knowledge or cultural production from the bottom up is always more authentic
and supports the cause of justice. Srdjan Vucetic's article unsettles multiple binaries, between the elite and the ‘masses’, as well as between academics and practitioners.54 Drawing on the work of Stuart Hall, he complicates what
we read as knowledge production and who we see as its progenitors, challenging the notion of purely top-down (and imperialist) identity construction. Exploring the role (and popularity) of nationalistic films and novels as signifiers
of this consensus between policy-makers and wider society, Vucetic demonstrates that it is not enough to hold accountable only those deemed to possess political capital, be they policy-makers or academics. Rather, it is necessary
also to challenge the broader pressures and expectations of the public that produce a collusion between elite and mass discourse, and help to foreclose the adoption of more critical, justice-oriented policies. Thus, if we focus solely
on academics and practitioners in any anti-racist work, we miss the uncomfortable reality that narrow, exclusionary nationalism that foments such racism and imperialist foreign policies actually enjoys substantial ‘buy-in’ from
people and may be an accepted part of a local (in this case British) identity.

This observation reinforces the need outlined above for a more expansive approach to defining knowledges, but this time when interrogating the generators of coloniality. This in turn allows us to bring into equal focus other
facilitating institutions and mediums of knowledge dissemination, many of which play a pivotal role in making colonial tropes and erasures more palatable, accessible, even culturally and economically valuable. This theme runs
through several of the articles in this special issue. As noted above, Vucetic's article focuses on cultural output; Antweiler looks at museums and schools; Baji considers the instrumentalization of local folklore for imperialist
ideologies in Japan; Plonski and Manchanda examine the power of racial capitalism via Israel's surveillance industry and marketing; and Gani scrutinizes the impact of journalistic discourse and think tanks.

Thus far, a lot of responsibility for challenging the racial and colonial dynamics of the academic–practitioner nexus has been placed with knowledge producers, whether within or outside academia. But it is necessary to emphasize
that efforts have already been under way, not only to ‘decolonize’ our academic disciplines, but to bring that discourse into the public realm. At that point practitioners need to carry their share of responsibility in listening to and
applying the expertise (whether academic or community-based) that can foster more just policies. Instead, the attention policy-makers give to expertise is often selective and politicized, based not on what can actually improve
people's lives but on what helps to justify the existing approaches adopted by governments. The current denigration and growing securitization of critical race theory, especially in the United States but increasingly elsewhere, is an
example of attacks on emancipatory knowledges that challenge power and oppression. Offering another stark example of this, Amal Abu-Bakare explores in her article the lack of any serious attempts to confront Islamophobia in
society, despite the wealth of research and expert advice from scholars and community-based practitioners available to policy-makers.55 Focusing on the cases of the UK and Canada, she highlights the way in which practitioner
intervention, in this case that of security and police officials, has actively prevented the adoption of expert guidelines on tackling Islamophobia on the grounds that they might interfere with their counterterrorism strategies. In
many ways this is a blatant acknowledgement from policy-makers that their counterterrorism strategy is inherently built upon racial tropes and discrimination. In contrast, so-called ‘neutral’ research on terrorism and/or
counterterrorism is embraced by practitioners, precisely because such research might not ask uncomfortable questions about the racial foundations or assumptions that are necessary to enact their policies.

Abu-Bakare's article offers an example of the limitations of academic–practitioner knowledge exchange.

Exhorting scholars to make their research policy relevant does not address the unequal receptivity
towards critical research that may challenge policy. Nor does it sufficiently take into account the implicit
disciplining that can take place in that process of knowledge exchange. Those very spaces or channels
that are created to facilitate sharing, listening and negotiation between knowledge producers and
practitioners (through all the blurred boundaries between them) may reproduce and reify hierarchies
through unequal interactions. Is real dialogue possible if power dynamics render the interlocutors
unequal?56 Or, in their efforts to be heard, taken seriously, and make their presence worthwhile,
academics and other knowledge producers may find themselves being subtly socialized into the very
modes of speech and thought that they sought to criticize. This can also happen in reverse when
grassroots practitioners share spaces with scholars and elite institutions. The path-breaking and radical
ideas needed to initiate change on some of the most deep-seated problems in politics and society may
be diluted in such spaces for the sake of pragmatism and communication, undermining the ability to
imagine real alternatives to the status quo. This is not to say that knowledge producers, whether
academic or community-based, should not engage with policy-makers, but rather that they should be
clear in what they seek to achieve—if, for example, constructive dialogue or receptivity to expertise is
unlikely, it is at times necessary and an ethical responsibility simply to register alternative ideas or
contestation. Returning to the point made at the start of this piece, this cautions us in how we champion
‘impact’ and knowledge–policy engagement, especially if we only recognize engagements that
supplement and are ‘useful’ to systems of power rather than those that hold them to account.

Conclusion

This special issue introduces the readers of International Affairs to the relatively undertheorized and
underhistoricized relationship between race, knowledge production and policy-making. The articles
demonstrate the ways in which practitioners have historically relied on research produced within the
academy to inform policy, initiating the establishment of departments and disciplines for this purpose,
but they also show the reverse to be equally true: that policy, both foreign and multilateral, influences
the possibilities and parameters of research, funding and recruitment practices, and retention of jobs.57
A key goal of this special issue has been to foster reflection on the ways in which knowledge production
(in its multifaceted forms) contributes to or challenges the practice of racism and coloniality; and the
ways in which policy and practice shape, validate, limit or ignore knowledge production—in ways that
either perpetuate or interrogate coloniality. As the three categories delineated above show, the
academic–practitioner nexus is best captured as a series of foreclosures that actively work to uphold
narrowly espoused evolutionary myths of the discipline and entrench a naturalization of white-racialized
subject positions in academic discourse on the ‘international’, while sidelining scholars and activists,
notably women and people of colour, who have made undeniable contributions to analysis of the
contemporary world.58 All this brings into view, as one scholar puts it, ‘the fundamental ways in which
IR already is, and always has been, complicit in ordering politics’.59

As we have argued in this introductory piece, the exposure in this special issue of the deep academic–
practitioner nexus confronts and challenges the ‘gaps’ discourse advanced at the expense of making
visible the existing reciprocity that disciplines the boundaries of acceptable enquiry. The outcome of this
disciplining at the theoretical level can be seen in the construction of paradigms that normalize
Eurocentric presuppositions on ‘how the world is’. But such outcomes are also made manifest through
material implications generated by narrow policy responses and policy instruments.

The special issue is not just an exposure, though; it is also a call for repair. To embark on a project of
repair, those involved in knowledge production, dissemination and application—within academia, think
tanks, museums, schools, cultural production and policy—first and foremost need to recognize that
their work is not detached from the real world, even if they seek to make it so. If the articles in this
special issue have shown anything, it is that there can be no realistic and honest demarcation between
political and apolitical knowledge: to assert neutrality is like offering a blank slate that will inevitably be
written over. It is worth knowing that even with the best intentions, a scholar's work is likely to be co-
opted for political ends; and that one's erasures and blind spots regarding injustice, even if innocently
produced, will be taken as justification for inaction and marginalization of these injustices in the real
world.

Sincerity in seeking to prevent racist or imperialist co-optation necessitates more open interrogations of
power and commitments to justice: and without doubt IR, whether ‘analytical’ or ‘critical’, and
academia more broadly, are filled with sincere and honourable scholars who care about the world they
live in and have the capacity to enact positive change. Questioning and challenging accepted and
expected modes of academic enquiry requires courage and creativity, both of which are aided through
collective effort. This special issue, then, is an invitation to adopt that courage and creativity in how we
cultivate knowledge, in questioning the purpose and the ends of that knowledge, and to be discerning in
how we try to put it into practice.
 T:
A. Topical affirmatives must enhance --- civil, administrative procedures, remedies,
provisional measures, border enforcement, and/or criminal procedures.
IPR is distinct from IP. IPR is the legal right to use IP
Lus Mentis 2005
“What is intellectual property (IP/IPR)”, https://www.iusmentis.com/ip/#:~:text=IP%20and%20IPR,-The
%20term%20intellectual&text=In%20such%20cases%2C%20the%20term,patent%22%20and
%20%22copyright%22. --- ECM
IP and IPR

IP) is sometimes used as something separate from intellectual property rights (IPR). In such cases, the term IP means the
The term intellectual property (

(abstract) product of the intellect and the term IPR means a legal right covering IP . For example, an invention
and an original work of authorship are intellectual property and protected by the intellectual property right called "patent" and
"copyright".

The term IP is also used to denote things for which no explicit legal right is provided.
An invention can be protected by a patent. An original work of authorship is protected by copyright. A distinctive product name can be registered as a trademark. But for instance, a domain

a trade secret can be considered IP but there is no separate legal right to protect these. Hence they
name or

cannot be called IPR.

B. Violation – the plan doesn’t strengthen USFG protection of DIPR, it just assists IP to
become IPR which isn’t a protection

C. This is a voting issue—

1. Precision – grammar is the basis for predictability because our reading of the
resolution determines what should be researched.

2. Ground & Limits – expansive interpretations of protection allow affs to refuse to

engage the heart of the topic which sidesteps core offensive negative DA ground like
courts, trade, econ, relations, and polx DAs and increasing tariffs/taxes good bad
debates.

3. Fairness – Potential abuse is a voting issue—it expands our research burdens and
decreases the time we can spend researching topical affs.at best the affirmative is
effects t

D. Voters –
Trump hasn’t changed his views much since he left office, but his environment, at home and abroad, has—and so,
too, perhaps, has Trump’s understanding of how to wield executive power. Washington’s situation is
considerably more dangerous than it was during the years of his administration, with multiple wars on its plate, intensifying
great-power rivalry, and a fraying liberal order. Moreover, while out of power, Trump’s team has done the
transition work it did not do the first time around; they will be empowered by a transformed Republican Party and come
equipped with a very detailed list of friends and foes—and thus be better positioned to bend bureaucratic politics to their
will. The states that would be poised to thrive under a second Trump term are U.S. rivals and adversaries
such as China and Russia; those that would most likely suffer are traditional friends of the United States such as European countries,
Japan, and partners in the Western Hemisphere.

Of course, the precise policies of a future Trump administration are impossible to predict, not least because they would bear the characteristics
of a president who is emotional, undisciplined, and easily distracted. But there is good reason to think Trump 2.0 would be Trump 1.0
on steroids. His return would result in a more unilateral, more aloof, and sometimes more aggressive United
States, less committed to upholding the geopolitical structures and liberal values that are already under growing pressure.
Barring a surprising surge for Ambassador Nikki Haley, Trump is on track to be the Republican nominee for president and is neck and neck with
President Biden in the national polls. Given that national security experts expend considerable effort every day trying to assess the
consequences of potential geopolitical shocks that have a vastly lower likelihood, it is crucial to try to plan for another Trump White House and
understand the challenges such an administration would pose to international affairs.

NO ADULTS IN THE ROOM

Trump’s general views of the world today are little different than they were during his first term in office. By all indications, he still believes that
Washington’s global alliance network is a hindrance, not an asset; that tearing up global trade regimes is the best pathway to economic security
and prosperity; that the United States has more to gain from diplomatic dalliances with dictators than from deep relationships with long-
standing democratic allies; and that a unilateral, hypertransactional foreign policy is the best way to deal with enemies and friends alike. He
also continues to conflate U.S. interests with his own interests, whether political or pecuniary.

What has changed is that the members of a new Trump administration will be far less likely to restrain his worst
impulses. In Trump’s first term, many of the most important members of his national security team, as well
as Republican allies on Capitol Hill, held more traditional Republican views. When Trump expressed a desire to go in a different
direction, they had access and clout to explain why that might be a bad idea, and they often persuaded him. This is what
played out, for example, in the Afghanistan strategy review of 2017. Just as important, for the many issues on which Trump simply did not
engage, his traditional appointees were able to conduct a normal policy below his radar , as was the case with the
2018 National Defense Strategy. Finally, in the few areas where slow-rolling and end-running and other normal bureaucratic gimmicks were
used to thwart a determined Trumpian policy flourish, the paucity of true-believing MAGA warriors at every level of the bureaucracy made it
difficult for Trump to have his whims fulfilled. It is far from clear that there will be such guardrails this time around.

Trump has already developed plans to intimidate the bureaucracy by reclassifying employees so as to deny them civil
service protections and make it possible to fire them en masse. His allies are talking about using the powers
of the presidency to root out members of the military who do not show sufficient MAGA leanings.
Trump certainly won’t repeat his first-term mistake of appointing senior officials and military brass, such as retired
generals Jim Mattis and John Kelly, who were adamant about placing their loyalty to the Constitution ahead of
personal loyalty to Trump. And many MAGA loyalists who did serve in the first administration now have a better understanding of the
bureaucracies that once frustrated them—and will be better positioned to enact more radical changes if they regain power.

In theory, Congress could still constrain a destructive president. If the Democrats managed to retain control of the Senate, or to regain control
of the House, they would be able to use the power of the purse to direct what the executive branch could or could not do. But these
legislative tools are weaker than they appear. Congress has, for instance, passed a law making it harder for a
president to withdraw formally from NATO. Yet the law is constitutionality dubious. And a president who
simply disowns those alliances as a matter of policy—for example, by reducing to zero the number of U.S. troops
deployed to NATO or by loudly insisting he will not come to the defense of countries if Russia attacks them—can
effectively undermine the alliance even without a formal U.S. withdrawal. There is simply no good way for
Congress to Trump-proof U.S. foreign policy, given the considerable powers of the executive branch. Trump would also face a
Congress less inclined to impose such constraints, having established ideological mastery of the Republican Party, whose old-line elites can no
longer claim that his agenda is aberrant and must be resisted.

But perhaps
the greatest reason Trump 2.0 will be different from Trump 1.0 is the changes in the geopolitical
environment abroad. If he returns to the Oval Office, Trump would be acting in a far more disordered world. In 2017,
Trump took office as the post–Cold War era was ending. There were tensions with China and hot wars in the broader Middle East against the
Taliban and the Islamic State, known as ISIS, but the situation is far more dire today. Now, he
is running for a second term amid major
hot wars in eastern Europe and the Middle East, a growing risk of conflict across the Taiwan Strait and in the South
China Sea, escalating tensions with Iran and North Korea, and other crises. An unruly world demands more of the
international engagement and leadership Washington has often provided since 1945—the opposite of what it will likely get if
Trump returns.
MORE KABUKI, MORE CHAOS

The foreign policy of a second Trump administration will likely be an unusual mix of continuity and change. Some of his policies would, at first,
seem to differ from Biden’s only by degree. Trump would surely intensify economic competition with China, albeit with a focus on cutting the
bilateral trade deficit and onshoring critical supply chains. He might announce a Reagan-like “peace through strength” agenda that raises U.S.
defense spending, a goal that could split hawks from doves within the Democratic Party just as aid to Ukraine now splits internationalists from
neoisolationists within the Republican Party.

But such policies would come, of course, with a Trumpian spin. A military buildup would likely be accompanied by an aggressive politicization of
the military, as Trump would seek to root out senior leaders that he believes showed inadequate loyalty to him in the past. Economic
competition with China will likely go hand in hand with a renewed quest for a “historic” trade deal of the sort Trump sought but failed to
achieve between 2017 and 2020. And in dealing with many adversaries, Trump will once again fall back on a strategy of kabuki competition—
hot rhetoric and rising tensions, but without coherent policy or clear strategic purpose.

More important, Trump would likely pursue sharper versions of the policies of his first administration. As his campaign has
already made clear, he seems certain to intensify his attacks on U.S. alliances, especially NATO: former National
Security Adviser John Bolton has warned that Trump would have withdrawn from the alliance had he won a second term
in 2020. Regardless of whether Trump goes that far, he could easily, on his own, attach more conditions to effective U.S. participation in
NATO and U.S. partnership with treaty allies in East Asia, demand exorbitant financial tributes from other member states, or
simply undermine relations within such multilateral groups by stoking tensions over such issues as climate policy and
trade. Trump has already proposed a universal tariff, which would shred the existing international trade
regime by unilaterally taxing all imports to the United States.

Meanwhile, European
states on NATO’s frontlines and Asian governments such as Taiwan and South Korea
would have to contend with a more transactional, less committed United States. Trump has already mused about
ending the war in Ukraine in 24 hours, and his first-term attempt to hold Ukraine’s security hostage to pursue a vendetta against Biden may
indicate a readiness to impose an unfavorable peace deal on Kyiv. Trump would also be less committed to Taiwan’s security. If Beijing attacks
the island, he once remarked, “there isn’t a fucking thing we can do about it.”

Broadly speaking, a Trump administration seems likely to step back further from the greater Middle East. Since Trump has no interest in
providing U.S. security for the world, his administration would presumably be less willing to take steps, as the Biden administration has,
together with the United Kingdom, to protect vital shipping lanes from Houthi attacks.

It is hard to imagine that the Trump administration would be as committed as the Biden administration to achieving a stable peace that
addresses both Israeli and Palestinian interests. The desire for a big deal with Saudi Arabia might push Trump to address the Palestinian issue—
something that was off the table in the Abraham Accords but cannot be ignored after the October 7 attacks and the war in Gaza. There are few
plausible scenarios for a favorable outcome in the Middle East and none that would not require a significant U.S. commitment. So it is hard to
see how Trump would be able to square his support for Israel with a desire to shed U.S. commitments in the Middle East.

A second Trump term would also likely involve further policy incoherence in the Middle East, however, since he might also be willing to
pair a retreat from the region with some dramatic military action on the way out the door. Given Trump’s order to
assassinate Qasem Soleimani, the head of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps, in 2020—a risky move that many in the administration feared
would set off an escalation spiral with Tehran—he may prove more willing than Biden has been to conduct lethal strikes against
Iran and its proxies if they target U.S. personnel, or to return to what the Trump administration called a “maximum pressure” policy meant to
deliver a better nuclear deal than the one he inherited in 2017.

A new Trump administration will also almost certainly further downgrade democracy and human rights as policy objectives. And just as Trump talked endlessly about migrants and building a
wall on the Mexican border during his first term, he would likely take a more extreme approach in his second—namely, a more militarized border and more restrictive policies on refugees,
combined with an intensified war on drugs.

HUGGING, HEDGING, AND OTHER HACKS

During the first Trump administration, many foreign leaders developed “Trump hacks” for dealing with this most unusual of presidents. The first approach consisted of hiding and hedging, a
strategy that appealed to countries such as France and Germany that had the most to lose if Trump dismantled the American-led international order. Thus, French President Emmanuel Macron
and German Chancellor Angela Merkel both attempted to keep some distance from Washington to minimize points of friction with Trump, yet at the same time tried to fill the leadership
vacuum in transatlantic institutions and assert a greater role for bodies such as the European Union. Although they avoided a full-blown transatlantic crisis, they could not prevent Trump from
stirring up numerous diplomatic insults and skirmishes that were mitigated somewhat by reassurance from the more pro-ally factions within the Trump administration and by Republicans on
the Hill. Moreover, they simply lacked the full range of tools—military, political, economic, and diplomatic—to compensate for Trump’s abdication of America’s traditional leadership role.

The second approach for dealing with Trump involved hugging and humoring, a strategy that appealed to leaders with personalities that were well matched to Trump’s. British Prime Minister
Boris Johnson made a point of flattering Trump and stroking his ego to smooth relations. Likewise, Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe went to extraordinary lengths to court Trump, even
giving him a gold-plated golf club after his electoral victory in November 2016. These efforts paid dividends: Japan fared better than other U.S. allies in the Asia-Pacific during Trump’s
presidency, and Trump did not give Johnson the bullying treatment he gave Johnson’s predecessor. Yet few other foreign leaders had the mix of chutzpah and domestic support to risk such an
approach.

A third approach involved emulation and emoluments to get on his good side. This tactic appealed to leaders who shared Trump’s authoritarian inclinations and understood his need for
seemingly spectacular achievements: Hungary’s Viktor Orban, Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Saudi Arabia’s Mohammed bin Salman, and even Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu. Trump’s most
significant diplomatic achievement, the Abraham Accords, showed the possibilities and the limits of this approach. Netanyahu succeeded in getting the Trump administration to broker a deal—
normalization between Israel and several Arab states—that was long imagined as a crucial part of a comprehensive Middle East peace settlement, but Trump’s variant did not involve Israel
making any of the requisite concessions or even to acknowledge the Palestinian issue. That strategy seemed to work better than anyone had expected—until Hamas blew it up with its vicious
October 7 terrorist assault on Israel. (Arguably, the emulation and emoluments approach held for Russia, as well, although in that case, it was clear that Putin was the leader being wooed and
Trump was the one doing the wooing.)

Finally, a fourth approach that some foreign leaders took was to maintain an adversarial posture and dare Trump to make good on his threats. The countries that caused Trump the most
trouble (Iran, North Korea, Venezuela) all pursued this line to some extent. Although each received some of Trump’s most intense forms of coercive diplomacy—in Iran’s case, up to and
including the targeted killing of Soleimani in January 2020—all ended Trump’s first term in a stronger position of defiance, having made no meaningful concessions to his demands. Arguably,
this is the approach that China also relied on, especially once Trump started ratcheting up the tariff war.

Several lessons emerge from this record. Hugging, humoring, and emulating can be humiliating because Trump’s erratic behavior requires frequent flip-flops. Moreover, it may not work in the
long run: Japan faced demands to quadruple the amount of money it paid to offset the cost of hosting U.S. forces, despite Abe’s ardent courtship of Trump. Hedging and hiding is a viable
strategy only for states whose interests are not much affected by U.S. power or that can plausibly compensate for U.S. disengagement from existing alliance structures. At present, only China
has the potential to fill a power vacuum left by the United States stepping back from playing its traditional geopolitical role as the focal point for alliances, but the U.S. economy remains too
important to China’s prosperity to make a true hiding and hedging strategy viable.

On the other hand, governments such as China that adopted a hardball negotiating stance were often able to do business with Trump to their benefit. This was because Trump proved to be so
eager for a deal that he undermined his own bargaining leverage: the agreement that Trump was desperately trying to finalize with China in early 2020 would have offered little benefit apart
from a short-term increase in soybean exports. Finally, leaders who openly defied Trump endured a lot of tension but usually emerged with their interests intact. This was especially true for
states that shared Trump’s disdain for the liberal international order. Even the terrorist group ISIS saw positive results from hanging tough: Trump abruptly ended the counter-ISIS fight before
a decisive victory was achieved, the equivalent of spiking the ball on the five-yard line.

AVOIDING A ROUT

For U.S. allies, there are many reasons why it will be harder to cope with Trump during a second term than during his first. For one thing, it will be much more difficult to make the case that
Trump is an aberration from the traditional pattern of U.S. leadership. At the same time, most liberal democratic allies will find it unpalatable to wrap good policies in bad but exigent
emoluments to get Trump to go along with them. Since far fewer traditional Republicans would serve in key posts, foreign governments would have few advocates and partners within the
administration to help them mitigate Trump’s anti-ally impulses. That would leave many liberal allies scrambling to preserve as many of the benefits of the old rules-based international system
as possible—without U.S. power underwriting them. As a result, a second Trump presidency could deepen regionalization, including, for instance, greater cooperation between Japan and
Australia or between the United Kingdom and eastern European countries—but without the United States as the diplomatic and military connector. France and Germany may well try to revive
some version of Macron’s vision of a European-led security system despite prospects that are no better than before.

Paradoxically, if Trump’s diagnosis of the international order is correct—that is, if all the benefits of the U.S.-led order could be preserved
without U.S. leadership if the allies stopped free-riding—then the consequences of a Trump restoration would be manageable. It is possible
that some combination of other middle powers stepping up and pursuing prudent hedging could be enough to hold the existing order together,
at least for a time. But
a Trump-led U.S. retreat could quickly turn into a rout with the collapse of the order
that has provided relative global prosperity without a great-power conflagration for nearly 80 years. Much
would depend on how much advantage traditional adversaries such as China and Russia seek to gain, and how fast.

As in the first Trump presidency, the greatest beneficiaries of a second one are likely to be U.S. adversaries because
they will be given a host of new opportunities to disrupt the existing order. China might exploit the fact that Trump does not
care about defending Taiwan and pursue quick action to recapture the “rebellious” province. Chinese leader Xi
Jinping might just sit back and let Trump torch U.S. alliances in Asia to China’s benefit later. Putin might play along with Trump’s
proposed “peace” deal on Ukraine as a way of getting the West to sanctify his gains at Ukraine’s expense. He could also stonewall in the hope
that Trump would cut off Ukraine aid altogether, leaving Russia free to march on Kyiv once again. Regardless of which
path they choose, adversaries will likely be able to count on Trump as a useful tool in their efforts to undermine the traditional U.S.-led alliance
system, which has long served as the primary constraint on their power.
Yet another basket of states, backsliding allies and hyper-transactional partners, will likewise welcome a Trump rerun. If Israel’s beleaguered
Netanyahu is still clinging to power after Trump’s inauguration, Trump’s pledge of unconditional support for Israel may serve as the lifeline
Netanyahu needs to avoid accountability for his catastrophic mishandling of Israeli security. The Arab regimes that helped deliver the Abraham
Accords would likely welcome the return of transactional diplomacy, even if they may be much less likely to pursue further normalization deals
in the absence of a viable Palestinian peace plan. Populist leaders in Argentina, Hungary, and perhaps even India would also welcome the cover
provided by a new Trump presidency in their efforts to resist international pressures to uphold minority rights.

Taken together, these various responses to Trump’s return to the White House would result in a highly
volatile international system, one marked by an extraordinary amount of geopolitical instability and a power
vacuum at its center. Amid a chaotic U.S. retreat, Washington’s traditional allies and partners would mostly be left without viable
approaches for managing their relations. And traditional adversaries would enjoy the upper hand in their dealings with the United States. One
of the more interesting questions in contemporary international relations is how much resilience is built into the existing international order—
how long it can continue functioning without the active, constructive engagement of the world’s strongest power. Since 1945, the answer to
that question has been unknowable. If Trump wins in November, however, the world may quickly find out.
 Case:
Weed cannot be trademarked as the USPTO MAKES IT ILLEGAL
Jennifer Visintine, 8-27-2015,[She regularly advises clients regarding trademark selection, registration and enforcement, domain
name disputes, and copyright ownership, registration, fair use and infringement issues] "Branding your bud: Why trademarks are tricky for
marijuana businesses", Thompson, https://www.thompsoncoburn.com/insights/blogs/tracking-cannabis/post/2015-08-27/branding-your-bud-
why-trademarks-are-tricky-for-marijuana-businesses

Brand loyalty builds businesses. That’s why most businesses need successful brands, and, ideally, brands backed by a federal trademark
registration. But because of the federal laws affecting marijuana and related products, marijuana growers and distributors don’t have access to
the same avenues of brand protection. So although Dr Pepper/7 Up, Inc., can trademark “Hawaiian Punch,” a Colorado cannabis grower can’t
trademark “Maui Waui.”

Still, marijuana companies do have some options for federal trademark protection for certain items and services. State trademark protection is
another option. In this post, we’ll give background on trademark law and how it applies to businesses in the cannabis industry.

Trademark basics

Trademarks identify the source of goods and services and include not only words and logos, but also slogans, symbols, colors, sounds and
product designs. For example, KIVA is a trademark for medical cannabis chocolate bars and SELL SMARTER is a slogan for financial services for
marijuana retailers. You generally can obtain unregistered trademark rights by simply using the trademarks. However, the rights are limited to
the geographic area where the marks have been used. As a result, a company that uses a trademark only in Washington state will only acquire
rights in that state, and can’t enforce its rights in other states.

Marijuana companies that understand the need to differentiate their products and services from those of their competitors need to know what
they can do to enhance and protect their brands. This is where the registration process comes into play. A federal trademark registration
provides significant benefits, including nationwide protection and a presumption as to the ownership of the trademark, but might be difficult to
obtain for a variety of reasons; a state registration doesn’t provide the same benefits, but is easier to obtain.

What qualifies for federal trademark protection?

Although medical marijuana may be legal in certain states, licensed marijuana sellers are facing a serious brand
protection problem with federal trademark registrations.

The use of a trademark in commerce must be lawful to form the basis of a federal trademark
registration. Where it appears that the mark is used in connection with a product/service that is illegal
under federal law, the Trademark Office might refuse registration of that mark on grounds that it is not
in lawful use in commerce. Generally, the Trademark Office presumes that use of a trademark in commerce is lawful unless evidence
shows a violation of law, such as the sale or transportation of a controlled substance.

As it currently stands, the

Controlled Substances Act (CSA) specifically prohibits manufacturing, distributing,
dispensing, or possessing certain controlled substances, including marijuana and marijuana-based
preparations. In addition, the CSA makes it unlawful to sell, offer for sale, or use any facility of interstate
commerce to transport drug paraphernalia, i.e., “any equipment, product, or material of any kind which is primarily intended
or designed for use in manufacturing, compounding, converting, concealing, producing, processing, preparing, injecting, ingesting, inhaling, or
otherwise introducing into the human body a controlled substance, possession of which is unlawful under [the CSA].”

Therefore, you cannot obtain a federal trademark for those types of goods/services. For example, you cannot
obtain federal trademark registration for a mark in connection with pipes for marijuana, marijuana bongs, or a marijuana strain name.

Federal registration is possible, however, for other goods and services that are not illegal under the CSA. For example, a medical marijuana
business might be able to register its strain name for cookies or other food items not infused with cannabis, promotional products such as
shirts, or educational services or publications. Most cannabis-related applications that the U.S. Trademark Office has approved so far cover
dissemination of information about marijuana. In this way, businesses are able to gain protection for their trademarks for marijuana-related
uses through legal goods/services.

Below are some real-life examples from U.S. Trademark Office records:
Accepted: MEDICAL JANE (providing a website featuring information, news and commentary in the field of health and wellness relating to
medical marijuana); DR. GANJA (medical marijuana medical referral services); THE MARIJUANA COMPANY (clothing, namely, shirts, t-shirts,
sweatshirts, tank tops, bandanas, pants, headwear, and footwear); THE BLUNT-HEADS BLUNT (bumper stickers)

Rejected: MAUI WAUI (medical marijuana); PRIMORA (medical marijuana)

The FDA as well will prohibit the distribution of weed, making trademarks unlawful
Matthew G. Miller., 7-16-2024,[Miller has a J.D., Seton Hall University School of Law and a B.S., Chemistry, University of Chicago] "How
Will Cannabis Rescheduling Affect Federal Trademarks’ New Jersey Law Journal https://www.law.com/njlawjournal/2024/07/16/how-will-
cannabis-rescheduling-affect-federal-trademarks/

In practice, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO), the agency that evaluates trademark applications, generally presumes
that an applicant’s use of a given mark in commerce is lawful, if the application record indicates that there is
a violation of federal law the examining attorney will issue a rejection on those grounds. In re Stanley Bros. Soc. Enters., 2020
USPQ2d 10658, at *10. However, the examining attorneys at the USPTO do receive cannabis-specific training and are
typically able to assess when an application pertains to cannabis or not. When such a determination is made, the
examining attorneys will reject applications as not being lawful use in interstate commerce. In particular, two federal
statues are commonly cited: the CSA, 21 U.S.C. Section 841, and the Food Drug and Cosmetic Act (FDCA) 21 U.S.C. Section 301-392.
Additionally, the USPTO’s official policy is that “[r]egardless of state law, marijuana and marijuana extracts … remain Schedule I controlled
substances under federal law and are subject to the CSA’s prohibitions.” TMEP 907.

When such a situation occurs, trademark applicants do have an opportunity to respond to such a rejection, however it is not always possible to
overcome these rejections, as some drafting errors during the application process are fatal and would need to be refiled to address.
Additionally, applicants should be advised that however tempting, it is never a good idea to lie to the USPTO. So, when asked for additional
information about the applicant’s use or intended use of the applied-for mark, if the applicant cannot honestly respond to those questions in a
way that shows the examining attorney that the applicant is doing some business that is not in violation of federal law, then that application is
likely dead in the water resulting in both wasted time and money.

Many applicants are tempted to list CBD-infused goods as part of their trademark application, as the terms
of the Agricultural Improvement Act of 2018, Public Law 115-334 (colloquially known as the “Farm Bill of 2018”), state that cannabis sativa L.
plants, which contain less than 0.3% delta-9-tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), are considered to be federally-legal hemp, which is permitted to
travel across state lines. However, adding CBD to a nutritional supplement or other foodstuff is a violation of the FDCA. This is
because the FDA has indicated that the compound CBD is undergoing “significant clinical research” and on those grounds the FDA
has the authority to regulate (and prohibit) the inclusion of that substance into foodstuffs and for sale as a nutritional supplement.
Thus, trademark applications which list CBD-infused foods will not be able to overcome a rejection
under the FDCA.
If you were reading carefully above, you would see that the TMEP citation stated that because cannabis was a Schedule I substance that it was
prohibited to transfer through interstate commerce. This is a true statement, but suggests that if cannabis is not a Schedule I substance then it
is allowed to be sold across interstate lines because it is a non-Schedule I substance. Unfortunately this
interpretation is not correct
as all scheduled compounds under the CSA have some sort of restriction in terms of their manufacture
and distribution. In the case of Schedule III, in order to be legally sold under the FDCA, the FDA would have to approve the applied-for
substance through the standard drug approval process. While there is an FDA-approved drug that contains CBD, Epidiolex, that drug is the only
cannabinoid-containing medicine which is FDA approved; therefore any non-Epidiolex products will still be unlawful to sell under the FDCA.
Therefore, despite the many benefits of rescheduling, an improvement to the experience that cannabis companies have while
applying for federal trademarks is not one of them.

Disease capable of extinction will burn out too quickly – if it can spread, it must keep
some hosts alive
Ádám Kun et al ’23, March 31, and András G. Hubai, Adrienn Král, Judit Mokos, Benjámin Áron
Mikulecz & Ádám Radványi, “Do pathogens always evolve to be less virulent? The virulence–
transmission trade-off in light of the COVID-19 pandemic,” Biologia Futura, accessed July 16, 2024,
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s42977-023-00159-2

The transmission–virulence trade-off hypothesis posits that from an evolutionary point of view, it is not
beneficial for the pathogen to kill its host before being passed to another host. In this regard, it is similar
to the avirulence hypothesis. However, the replication of the pathogen within the host causes some
inevitable damage to the host. Thus, an increase in the number of pathogens increases both
transmission and virulence. Both replication and transmission require a living and, in many cases, active
host. If the host is dead, it can no longer help the reproduction of the pathogen, nor can the host take an
active part in transmitting it. High virulence is detrimental to the pathogen, and so it is bound to evolve
to a lower level of virulence to better spread. In plain words, if a pathogen causes its host to lay in bed
or even to die instead of happily going around and transmitting the infection, it will be outcompeted by
mutants that cause less damage to the host and allows it to produce more pathogens and infect other
hosts. This is the verbal description of the transmission–virulence trade-off.