Aff – TPP Withdrawal – CNDI 2016

1AC
The U.S. should withdraw from the Trans-Pacific Partnership

U.S. withdrawal would kill the TPP

Chirnomas 2016 [Ryan, partner at Westerman Hattori Daniels and Adrian LLP, “What’s in the
TPP for patent practitioners?,” American Intellectual Property Law Association,
http://www.aipla.org/committees/committee_pages/Biotechnology/ed/Shared
%20Documents/Ed_Buzz_201601.pdf]

However, all of this may be irrelevant, at least in the short term. The TPP becomes effective only
after it is (a) ratified by all member countries, or (b) ratified by at least six countries representing
85% of the GDP of the signatories, within 2 years of signature of the agreement (which has not
yet occurred). Being that the U.S. represents about 60% of the GDP of the signatories,
ratification will not happen without the U.S. Since 2016 is an election year in the U.S. and the
TPP is politically controversial, it is quite unlikely that the TPP will be ratified in the near term.

Pursuit of the TPP is anti-engagement with China – it seeks to contain and

prevent economic integration in order to benefit corporate and military elites.
Ahn ’14 (Foreign Policy In Focus columnist Christine Ahn is a Senior Fellow of the Oakland
Institute and Co-chair of Women De-Militarize the Zone (DMZ). “Why the Corporate Friendly
Trans-Pacific Partnership Is Really About Containing China's Rise,” FPIF, January 14, 2014,
http://www.alternet.org/world/trans-pacific-partnership-really-about-containing-chinas-rise)

The TPP spans 12 countries — including the United States, Australia, Brunei Darussalam, Canada, Chile, Japan, Malaysia,
Mexico, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore, and Vietnam — comprising 40 percent of the world’s economy. Like
nearly all trade agreements signed since NAFTA, the TPP is almost to certain to allow
multinational corporations from anywhere in the bloc to sue governments in secret courts to
overturn national or local regulations, such as Hawai’i’s recent GMO laws, that could limit their profits. So it’s not just
Hawai’i’s food sovereignty that’s at risk. “This is not mainly about trade,” explains Lori Wallach, director of Public
Citizen’s Global Trade Watch. “It is a corporate Trojan horse . The agreement has 29 chapters, and only five of them have
to do with trade.” More than 600 corporate lobbyists representing multinationals like Monsanto, Cargill, and Wal-Mart have had
unfettered access to shape the secret agreement, while Congress and the public have only seen a few leaked chapters. But
the
TPP is even more than a corporate Trojan horse. It’s a core part of the Obama administration’s Asia-Pacific
Pivot, which is centrally about containing China. A New Cold War? Ahead of the fall 2011 Asia Pacific Economic Forum (APEC)
meeting in Hawaii, then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton outlined a plan to transfer U.S. military, diplomatic, and economic
resources from the Middle East to the Pacific, in what she called “America’s New Pacific Century.” Describing
the pivot in
militaristic terms as “forward-deployed diplomacy,” Clinton hailed the TPP as a “benchmark for
future agreements” leading to “a free trade area of the Asia- Pacific.” Yet the TPP excludes
China, which has become the second largest economy in the world and is poised to outpace the
U.S. economy in a matter of years — a fact that is none too pleasing to U.S. elites accustomed to
unrivaled hegemony. Like the United States, the future of China’s economic growth lies in the Asia-Pacific region, which by
all indicators will be the center of economic activity in the 21st century. By 2015, according to a paper from the conservative Foreign
Policy Research Institute, “East Asian countries are expected to surpass NAFTA and the euro zone to become the world’s largest
trading bloc. Market opportunities will only increase as the region swells by an additional 175 million people by 2030.” Enter the
TPP. By increasing U.S. market access and influence with China’s neighbors, Washington is
hoping to deepen its economic engagement with the TPP countries while diminishing their
economic integration with China.

The TPP works to contain China regardless of exclusion, it’s a geopolitical

maneuver to stifle China as a rising power
Du 2015 [Ming, Reader in Law, Lancaster University Law School, “Explaining China’s Tripartite Strategy Toward the Trans-Pacific
Partnership Agreement,” Journal of International Economic Law, Vol. 18]

The emergence of the TPP puts China in a catch-22 situation. If China chooses to join the TPP, China
will have to join under the terms dictated by the USA and its allies. If China keeps itself outside
the TPP, China’s booming foreign trade and investment, the lifeblood of China’s robust
economy, will be negatively affected. Both prospects are not appealing to the Chinese
government. A shared observation among policy advisors in China is that the TPP has posed a
serious challenge to China as a new rising power . Though the Chinese government has never stated its official
policy toward the TPP other than a vague ‘open-minded attitude’, I submit that China has formulated what I call a ‘tripartite
strategy’ toward the TPP. This tri-partite strategy includes a wait-and-see attitude, pushing for alternative models of FTAs in the Asia-
Pacific region and accelerating domestic market-oriented economic reforms.

The TPP is the model free trade agreement for future mega-regional trade
deals, locking in global capitalism by integrating East Asia into the ever-
expanding ambit of the world’s bleak, U.S.-centered neoliberal future
Starrs 15 (Sean, professor of international Relations at the City University of Hong Kong, 5/13, “Making the World
Safe for Big Business” Jacobin Magazine, https://www.jacobinmag.com/2015/05/trans-pacific-parternship-china-
united-states-asia/) jf

Herein lies the uncertainty for the liberal economic order in East Asia, underpinned by American
hegemony. Chinese elites have benefitted massively from their integration with this order, but
their continued legitimacy within China depends on an ethnocentric nationalist project that has
the danger of becoming “too illiberal” in the eyes of the West. Rapid Chinese military upgrading
and rising territorial disputes in the East and South China Seas are aspects of this. This is where
the TPP comes in. US Defense Secretary Ashton Carter understood this well when he stated that
signing the TPP is more important than sending another aircraft carrier to East Asia. One core
factor behind the longevity of American power in the post–World War II era is its ability to
permeate other economies in a way that structurally aligns the interests of their ruling classes
with the interests of American hegemony . Japanese elites unwaveringly support American
hegemony not because they are forced to, but because it is in their interests to do so. Chinese
elites already depend on global capitalism, but to ensure they continue to do so into the
foreseeable future, the US requires their further liberalization and integration with — and
therefore dependence on — global capital (especially American corporations), global finance
(centered on Wall Street and the US Federal Reserve), and exports to Western consumers
(especially American). Of course, it’s not all about China. The US has been pressuring Japan to
liberalize its economy since the 1970s, and the TPP continues this quest by targeting Japanese
farmers and carmakers. Malaysia, Mexico, and Vietnam are important export platforms that
compete with China for foreign capital. Australia, Canada, and New Zealand are important
American allies. Broadly speaking, the more countries liberalize, the more open they become to
American influence. But everyone, including the Chinese, knows the TPP is mostly about China,
making it one of the most geopolitically-tinged trade deals ever. The TPP is about establishing
the norms and rules of the future by locking the most dynamic region on Earth — East Asia, and
especially China — into American-centered global capitalism . If the US can forge common
standards on IP protection and investor arbitration with Japan and Western Europe (through the
Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership), the West can continue to shape the rules of
engagement for the rest of the world. So if China wants to continue its integration with global
capitalism (which it must, because a sharp decline in economic growth would undermine the
authority of the CCP), then China will be pressured to continue to liberalize and harmonize its
rules and regulations with “international standards,” established by the West. Conforming to
increasing liberalization will also reduce the salience of any coherent alternative model of “state
capitalism” for others to follow. This is what some call “structural power” — the ability to shape
the rules and norms of the system so that others have little choice but to comply. Structural
power is often more effective than “relational power,” or simply trying to force others to do
something. And it explains why China, despite expressing an interest in joining, is being excluded
from the TPP negotiations — so they will not be able to alter the rules . The architects of the TPP
are structuring the agreement to serve their own interests: protection of intellectual property
rights and investor arbitration facilitate the continued dominance of the world’s top
corporations, which remain European, Japanese, and most of all American. Protection of IP
rights ensures that advanced knowledge sectors, like the pharmaceuticals industry, maintain
their healthy profit margins (and the poor continue to be denied life-saving drugs). US
agribusiness will profit from the opening of Japan’s agricultural sector, and Nike will benefit
from the further liberalization of Vietnam (where most of its shoes are manufactured). To
understand whose interests are being served, one simply has to note that US trade
representatives are accompanied by over six hundred “corporate advisers” to the negotiations,
which are shrouded in secrecy. Labor advisers? Zero. The TPP will also make it easier for
transnational corporations to sue governments for labor, environmental, health, safety, and
other regulations, in order to gain taxpayer compensation for “loss of future returns” due to
“expropriation.” Investor-state dispute settlement mechanisms — already in place in many
existing international investment treaties — will be consolidated and strengthened in the TPP to
ensure a single, more predictable, standard for the record-breaking number of new cases. One
such case, in 2011, involved Philip Morris invoking the 1993 Hong Kong-Australia investment
treaty to sue the Australian government for “expropriation” of its intellectual property. Australia
passed some of the strictest cigarette packaging laws in the world, covering the cartons in grisly
pictures of tumors and removed Philip Morris’s brand logo from the front. The TPP will make it
easier for corporations to challenge public health and other policies in supra-national courts,
circumventing domestic legal institutions. The TPP is under pressure in the US, especially from
big trade unions who argue that decades of trade and investment agreements have increased
the power of capital over labor, leading to the offshoring of manufacturing jobs and
skyrocketing levels of inequality. (Many in the EU are opposed to the even bigger Transatlantic
Trade and Investment Partnership, or TTIP, for similar reasons, but with more emphasis on
investor-state arbitration). If approved, the TPP would be the most expansive trade and
investment treaty in history, encompassing 40 percent of the world’s GDP, a third of its exports,
and almost half of the world’s foreign direct investment stock. It would likely breathe renewed
vigor into the TTIP negotiations, which have stalled due to mass protests, including a petition
with over one million signatories. It would pressure China to further liberalize and align with the
interests of American capital, as the TPP becomes the model for future mega-regional trade and
investment agreements. Most of all, it would further bolster the power of capital over labor in
both the US and abroad, ensuring that corporate, labor, and environmental regulations remain
lax. For these reasons, it is obvious we should be against the TPP — not to mention any
international agreement that enhances the power of capital. Instead of “free trade” agreements
that protect investors and corporations, the Left should fight for international agreements that
enhance labor and environmental standards (enshrining enforceable measures beyond mere
rhetoric), protect and nurture the independent power of unions, and impose greater regulations
and controls on capital, including capital mobility. But this must happen in the context of shifting
the balance of social forces against capital in each nation. With the former Second and Third
Worlds (especially China) now more deeply integrated into global capitalism than ever before,
this struggle is particularly urgent in the center of global capitalism — the United States.

TPP lets loose finance capital

Soong 2016 [Kua Kia, Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of Manchester, “Three vital
reasons we oppose the TPPA,” malaysiakini https://www.malaysiakini.com/news/326725]
Under the agreement, pharmaceutical companies, which are among those enjoying access to negotiators as “advisers”, can challenge any attempt to
make generic drugs more affordable by claiming that such measures undermine their new rights granted by the (TPPA) deal. In
the financial
sector, the agreement will water down regulatory safeguards put in place after the 2008
financial crisis and block any ban placed on risky financial products, including those toxic
derivatives that contributed to the crisis in the first place .

Chapters 9, 10, 11 of the TPPA provide a free rein to the operations of international finance
capital via the dismantling of capital controls, prohibition on financial taxation and by undoing
the stabilising tools set up in certain economies to counter the 2008 financial meltdown . Stiglitz has
warned that the TPPA presents "grave risks" as it "serves the interests of the wealthiest”.

Global finance capital driven neoliberalism ensures unending immiseration,

crisis, and environmental destruction
Peet 2011 [Richard, Professor at the Graduate School of Geography, “Contradictions of
Finance Capitalism,” Monthly Review, http://monthlyreview.org/2011/12/01/contradictions-of-
finance-capitalism/]
On the one hand, we find the overaccumulation of income in the hands of a few. On the other hand, we find the majority of people with stagnant or
declining real incomes, threatened by globalization, and with little collective bargaining power. And yet everyone is subject to sophisticated
inducements to consume. The continuation of high mass consumption is enabled not by working class
incomes, but by globalization of the production of cheap electronics, clothing, food, etc. With
stagnant real incomes, the “consumption-to-the-max ” that began under Keynesianism and Fordism, but remains typical
of neoliberal societies, requires credit and going into debt. So inequality produces indebtedness at all

levels, from consumers to industries to states, and in all aspects of life . This results in a newly intensified form
of a long-existing exploitation known as “debt peonage.” Whereas industrial capitalism primarily exploits productive workers through the wage system,
finance capitalism adds the exploitation of consumptive individuals via indebtedness. The idea is to have everything bought not
with dollar bills or pound notes, but with maxed-out credit cards, so that purchases yield several years of
interest at far-higher rates than banks pay on deposits (20 percent as compared with 2 percent). The commercial banks
and a range of other unregulated lenders of last resort (“no credit record, no problem”) reap the difference. The investment banks join

in by speculating on this vast pool of debt, as with mortgage bundling and credit default swaps,
where quick and easy money is made in large quantities . And then there are the various, highly sophisticated financial
maneuvers to increase, and then decrease, commodity prices via the futures markets—for example petroleum in early 2011, when the price of oil for
light, sweet crude went from $86 a barrel on February 11, to $110 on April 15, although there was no immediate shortage on the world market. The
name for this version of financial exploitation is price gouging. The cost is borne by people as consumers not just through exorbitant mortgage
payments and high gasoline prices directly, but also through losing your house, homelessness, not being able to get to work, or the sacrifices made in
avoiding these working family catastrophes—all this pain and suffering just to make rich people even richer! In other words, finance

capitalism intensifies old methods or invents new methods of exploitation, and new modes of
discipline, that pass mainly through the sphere of reproduction rather than the sphere of production: credit cards and bank loans;
inflated house prices; high commodity prices due to commodity futures trading; and a long list
of similar mechanisms thought up by sharp financial agent minds. This intensified exploitation
which functions through the medium of debt peonage, price gouging, and other , similar devices, is
the economic and cultural basis for the worst excesses of finance capitalism . Crisis 1: Finance Now we come
to the dangerous bit. Neoliberalism is a way of running the economy that produces dramatic price increases on the stock exchange, where the rich put
their money to make even more. But stocks and shares are a relatively safe bet, compared with neoliberalism’s other “irrational exuberances,” like the
vast financial apparatus surrounding the swollen credit market. Disaster strikes when, as in 1929 and 2007, the proportion of money going to the super-
rich 1 percent rises towards 25 percent, far-exceeding requirements for productive investment, and necessitating speculation to increase returns. For
the price of high returns is…eternal risk. Any investment fund that does not generate quick and large returns
(and therefore does not take on extreme risk), suffers disinvestment in highly competitive
markets, where money changes hands in computer-quickened moments. So there is a
competitive compulsion to take increasingly daring risks in search of higher returns that
temporarily attract investment. Financial managers overseeing capital accumulations compete for control over assets by promising
these returns. Those that fail to deliver high profit-rates disappear to be replaced by “more aggressive” investment analysts. So debt,

speculation, risk, and fear are structurally endemic to finance capitalism , in what Alan Walks calls “Ponzi
Neoliberalism.”16 Fear itself becomes the source of further speculation—buying gold or futures, for example. Debt and gambling spread from Wall
Street into all sectors of society—house prices, state lotteries, casinos, numbers games, bingo at the church hall, sweepstakes, Pokémon cards—
everyone gambles, even little kids. The
interlocking of these speculations is the source of their intractability.
So the financial crisis that began in 2007 had the following moments: vastly overpriced housing
particularly near booming financial centers; competition among financial institutions to offer easy

credit that makes everyone hopelessly indebted; the bundling of home mortgages and other
debts into tradable paper; very high levels of leveraging; and the use of assets whose value can
disappear in an instance to securitize other, even more risky, investments. It is not just that crisis
spreads from one area to another. Its more that crisis in one (like the inevitable end to the housing price bubble)
had exponential effects on the others (investment banks overextended into high risk speculations) to the degree that
losses accumulated that tested the rescuing powers even of client states and governance
institutions. Hence inequality is not merely unethical—it is dangerous. The combination of debt and speculation,
deriving from inequality, produces an inevitable tendency towards repeated financial crises . Crisis
2: Disarticulation However, financial crisis has catastrophic effects in capitalist economies already weakened by deindustrialization. The dominance of
finance capitalism over industrial capitalism was enabled by a rapid change in the productive structures of most Western countries over the last thirty
years. A disastrous loss of the industrial component resulted in widespread losses in manufacturing employment. U.S. manufacturing employment
peaked in 1979 at almost 20 million, and fell under neoliberalism to about 11.5 million in 2010. Politically, this weakened the organized labor base of
the Democratic Party. Realizing this, Bill Clinton’s “genius” was to switch allegiance from a declining organized labor to an ascending financial sector.
The Democratic Party has belonged to finance ever since. Economically, this is important because unionized industrial workers struggled for higher
wages matched with increased productivity. High mass wages were the main source of the boom in consumption that fueled the economic growth of
the post-war period—manufacturing still pays higher-than-average wages. Deindustrialization decreases worker incomes and undercuts mass
consumption, which weakens the central Fordist symbiosis that underlies modern capitalism and causes realization crises. In the longer term,
deindustrialization leads to what might be termed a “disarticulated economy.” This is an economy
deficient in key structural components, like manufacturing, so that growth in one sector does
not lead to growth in linked others. The map of the economy looks like a slice of Swiss cheese. Where did all the good jobs go? At
first to new industrial countries, like Mexico and South Korea, but more recently to China, where employment in manufacturing doubled as U.S.
employment fell almost in half. Obviously the main reason for the change in the global geography of employment is that hourly compensation costs in
manufacturing (wages plus benefits) amount to $1.50 or less in China, compared with $33.50 in the United States. The
neoliberal
response to global wage discrepancy is: let China do the manufacturing. This is based on the
liberal ideal of free trade, and this in turn on Ricardo’s (completely wrong) theory of
comparative advantage.17 Global industrial corporations profit no matter where the products
are made. Investment banks love “emerging markets,” while chaos in the world economy gives
lots of opportunities for futures, derivatives, currency, and other highly profitable speculative
instruments. There is, however, another view of deindustrialization and “free” trade, based on a different conception of economics in which the
“cost of production” goes beyond the wage bill to include a broader socio-economic expense. From this view, any country that deliberately allows the
disappearance of those high-paying, unionized, permanent jobs that support the entire production-consumption nexus is asking for trouble: the long-
term, structural weakness of deindustrialized economies and the failure of the supposed transition to high-valued, knowledge-based economies.
Trouble appears with ferocity at times of economic crisis. The Keynesian response to recession is
to stimulate the economy through fiscal and monetary policy. Tell consumers to go out and buy
that new appliance, and set teaser rates low, so they can buy on credit. Yet in a disarticulated
economy, the Keynesian multiplier does not work —spending in one area does not translate into employment and incomes
in other linked areas within a primarily national economy. Instead, it is more a case of a leaky multiplier. So what is the result of going

out to spend? Even more consumer debt in a recessed United States and a boom in the already
overheated Chinese economy. Keynesianism as we knew it has been rendered obsolete by over-
globalization. There is no effective policy response to crisis in disarticulated economies, and that
is the more basic reason that recession lasts. Crisis 3: Environment If this was all, we might escape irrational exuberance and
disarticulation and live to criticize another day. But the worst is yet to come, as the environment strikes back. The risk endemic to

finance capitalism extends to risky environmental relations. Capitalist culture becomes risk-
ridden, short-term in memory and anticipation, and careless about consequences—living for the
moment, without regard for the environmental future. Production, consumption, economy, and
the use of environments are subject to a more-removed-from-reality, more abstract calculus of
power, in which ability to contribute to short-term financial profit becomes the main concern,
and long-term consequences are not so much ignored as glossed over, through sophisticated
corporate advertising, think tank excuses, and pseudo-green propaganda (“we too care about
the environment”). Corporations that make extremely risky decisions with regard to
environmental consequences—oil companies that drill in deep water, for instance—make
higher-than-average profits, earning the confidence of the market that enables them to borrow,
invest, expand, and pay their upper management well . CEOs that actually practice environmental conscience do not get
the market’s confidence. Environmental risk (mitigated by good quality public relations to excuse the

“occasional mistakes”) represents the frontier in business success. Every time a BP-Gulf Coast-
type disaster is cleaned up—greenwashed, excused, and forgotten—the risk business just keeps
getting better, more knowledgeable, and smoother in its politico-cultural operations. So as BP
was recovering investor confidence in the summer of 2010 the company announced that it was
selling its onshore drilling operations to concentrate even more on deep-sea drilling . The risk that
produces economic catastrophe also creates environmental crises. When the contradictions of global finance capitalism moved the system into crisis,
as in the Great Recession starting in 2007, the state comes to the rescue of capital, the resurrection of economic growth is the urgent priority, while the
environment is the necessary sacrificial lamb. Instead, the problems that capitalism periodically encounters are said to be solvable through the market
mechanisms (carbon trading) that radical critics say causes them. The
neoliberal globalization that deindustrialized the
first world, and industrialized parts of the third world —Brazil, South Korea, China, and India—resulted in a
spectacular globalization of environmental destruction. Globalization of this neoliberal, financial
kind means that economic growth rates slow down in the “deindustrialized” center, but increase
rapidly in some peripheral industrializing countries at rates of 8–10 percent a year. China’s
economy grew fourteen fold between 1980 and 2006 to the equivalent of a GDP of $4.4 trillion, and India’s
economy grew six fold to $1.2 trillion,18 with carbon dioxide emissions quadrupling in both countries.
China’s carbon dioxide emissions from burning fossil fuels amounted to 407 million tons of carbon in 1980 and
1,665 million tons in 2006; India’s went from 95 million tons in 1980 to 411 million tons.19 Much of this
production and pollution is connected to consumption in the first world —40 percent of China’s product is
exported, and 20 percent of India’s, while both economies have become dramatically more export-oriented. So we have seen the globalization of an
economy, still centered on serving consumption in the high-income countries. This has led to an intensification of the
globalization of pollution, as evidenced from carbon dioxide emissions. In 2006 global fossil-fuel carbon emissions amounted to 8,230
million metric tons of carbon. In global terms, more than 500 billion tons of carbon have been released to the atmosphere from the burning of fossil
fuels and cement production since 1750, and half of these emissions have happened since the mid-1970s when it was already known that greenhouse
gasses caused global warming.20 The point is that environmental pollution is driven by economic necessity under
capitalism. It is necessary to pollute so that money can be made. Within the existing political-
economic context, drastically decreasing pollution can only be brought about by economic
recession. Thus, between 2008 and 2009 there was a temporary decline of 5.9 percent in global
carbon dioxide emissions from burning fossil fuels . This was brought about by a decline of 2.5 percent in global GDP, a
decline of 11.5 percent in the manufacturing production index, and a reduction of 40 percent in raw steel production.21 Yet it is politically

impossible for parties or governments to suggest, in effect, that the necessary price of ending
environmental destruction is a declining economy. The “solution” is to displace discussion
“upwards” from the national scale to the international. Upward displacement in the
environmental discourse necessarily takes the form of UN conferences, “Earth summits,” and
non-enforceable Protocols. Economic necessity produces endless political evasion on the
environment.22

TPP shuts out generics by establishing data exclusivity for biologic medicines,
securing a data monopoly for Big Pharma over bio-genetic material and
ensuring skyrocketing medical prices for those who can least afford it
Doctors Without Borders 2012 [“Trading Away Health: How the U.S.’s Intellectual Property Demands for the
Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement Threaten Access to Medicines,” http://www.doctorswithoutborders.org/sites/usa/files/TPP-
Issue-Brief-IAC-2012.pdf]

3) Expanding data exclusivity: the U.S. is seeking to grant a backdoor route to monopoly status. Existing Flexibility: Data exclusivity is
not currently required in international law. The TRIPS agreement requires Member States to protect clinical data, but there is no
obligation to grant any period of monopoly or exclusivity in the use of these data. When a second entrant or generic manufacturer
applies to register and sell a generic version of a previously-registered medicine, the manufacturer has to provide data showing that
their product is bioequivalent to the original registration.25 The drug regulatory agency already has the necessary clinical data for
safety and efficacy, submitted by the originator, and must only assess if the generic version meets bioequivalence standards. The
introduction of data exclusivity prevents drug regulatory agencies from referring to existing
clinical data to approve registration of generic versions of a drug by “locking up” the clinical data
for a period of years, shutting down the entry of price-lowering generic competition for the
duration. Data exclusivity essentially creates a new system for granting monopolies in order to
prevent generic competition. Generic manufacturers are forced to wait for the “data monopoly”
period to end, even if the drug is unpatented, and even when a compulsory license is issued to
override the patent. The only way a generic manufacturer can get a drug registered without
access to existing clinical data is to repeat the clinical trials. However, duplicating clinical trials is
not only extremely costly, but also unethical, since safety and efficacy has technically already
been established, rendering further clinical trials medically unnecessary. Many experts and UN agencies,
including WHO, UNDP and UNAIDS, have recommended developing countries do not incorporate data exclusivity in their national
laws (see Appendix B). What the U.S. Wants: The USTR is currently proposing at least five years of data exclusivity for new chemical
entities and at least three years of data exclusivity for drugs containing an already approved active ingredient.26 Moreover, the
placeholder text
calling for data exclusivity for ‘biologic’ medicines in the TPP is especially alarming.
Pharmaceutical firms are lobbying for the data exclusivity period for biologics to be set at a
minimum of 12 years.27 Because biologics are structured differently than traditional chemical
medicines, second-entrant “generic” biologics are called ‘biosimilars ’ or “follow-on biologics,” and
require a different regulatory approval process. This would be the first time the U.S. has
included a demand on biologics in a trade agreement, and if incorporated in the TPP, it would
considerably delay the market entry of biosimilars . It is unclear if the U.S. will renege on the public health
safeguards specified in the May 10 Agreement, where exceptions were allowed in order to ensure governments could still effectively
implement public health safeguards, including compulsory licenses, caps and concurrent periods of exclusivity (vs. effectively longer
‘consecutive’ periods of exclusivity). Impact on Access to Medicines: Data exclusivity can delay the registration of generic or
biosimilar versions of a medicine for many years. Some
of the newest breakthrough medicines are biologics
sold at extremely high prices. The introduction of data exclusivity for biologics will delay the
introduction of affordable versions of these medications. The need for low-cost biosimilar
alternatives to highly expensive lifesaving drugs , including pegylated interferon to treat Hepatitis C and
herceptin to treat breast cancer, is acute. Some Members of U.S. Congress have expressed formal opposition to the
inclusion of any data exclusivity relating to biologics in the TPP.28 In fact, the U.S itself is considering reducing its current data
exclusivity provision for biologics from 12 to 7 years, in order to reduce the cost of medicines.29 In addition, the Federal Trade
Commission (FTC) has even recommended eliminating data exclusivity for biologics in the U.S.30 Examples: How Data Exclusivity
Keeps Prices High and Delays Generic Introduction Data
exclusivity, when implemented in national law,
provides a distinct monopoly from patent rights that often results in high prices and a delay in
market entry of generics. As a part of the U.S.-Jordan FTA, Jordan implemented data exclusivity.
A 2007 study by Oxfam(1) found that of 103 medicines registered and launched since 2001 that
had no patent protection in Jordan, at least 79 percent had no competition from a generic
equivalent as a consequence of data exclusivity. The study also found that prices of these
medicines under data exclusivity were up to 800% higher than in neighboring Egypt. A 2010
CPATH study(2) determined that once Guatemala enacted data exclusivity, some medicine prices
rose as much as 846 percent – even though just a handful of medicines were under patent
protection. Data exclusivity raises the price of medicines even when no patent exists. For
example, in the U.S., the price of colchicine, a treatment used mainly for gout, rose more than 5000%
after data exclusivity was enacted.(3) Colchicine has been in use for thousands of years, costs
almost nothing to produce, and cannot be patented. Therefore, generic formulations of the
tablet have been widely available since the 19th century. However, a new monopoly on colchicine
was created in 2009 when the FDA accepted clinical data from a one-week trial of the drug and granted data exclusivity to
URL Pharma. URL Pharma subsequently sued to force other manufacturers off the market, and
raised prices from $0.09 to $4.85 per pill.

The commodification of biologics data represents the apex of recombinant

capital, the financialization of life itself through speculative biocapitalism into
objectified laboratory data, leading to ontological estrangement that
underwrites disposability.
Thacker 2005 [Eugene, Professor of Media Studies at New School, The Global
Genome: Biotechnology, Politics, and Culture, p. 187-204]
A consideration of these types of companies not only illustrates the degree to which biotech has become infotech, but also suggests that the future success of the biotech industry is dependent on the ability to generate value out of the data collected from biological
material. All of this is predicated on the assumption that biological bodies—tissues, cells, molecules, chromosomes, genes—can be unproblematically translated into data. Such a move indicates the degree to which biotech relies on the notion of a stable “content” in

Recombinant capital demands that everything within biotech

the genome, irrespective of its material instantiation (be it in cells or in computer databases).45

has an informatic equivalent a direct link between

; it does not, like biotech research, demand that everything be translated into information, but it does demand

genetic bodies and relevant data. Recombinant capital touches the population, not through
direct genomic database management, but more indirectly through the commodification of such
databases. As biotech becomes increasingly privatized, the database corporations will such as Celera or Incyte

become the main biocommerce brokers. At issue is not the buying or selling of databases, but
the generative potential of genetic data genome databases ; in such a case, ethnic population , individualized SNP or genetic screening databases, and various

important for human medicine will become sources of a biopolitical management

animal genome databases . “Of Living,
Breathing,Yea Ev’rie Move” One of the major dynamics that characterizes the biotech industry presently is the privatization of molecular biology research, encapsulated in the biotech start-up company.46 This so-called corporatization of biotech is illustrated by
looking at the HGP. Originally a 15-year endeavor, the HGP was initiated in 1988 and is currently headed by various research institutions in the United States and abroad.47 It was and still is a “public-domain” research project. It is supported by two large
governmental bodies: the National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI, part of the NIH) and the DoE, in partnership with the Wellcome Trust in the United Kingdom. This publicly funded genome project was joined in 1998 by a small group of privately funded
genome projects, which positioned themselves in direct contrast to the publicly funded HGP. Celera Genomics (which at the time became involved as the Institute for Genomic Research [TIGR]) burst onto the biotech scene by claiming that it was initiating its own
human genome project and that it would complete the map of the human genome for less money and in less time than the HGP. Celera was followed by Incyte Genomics, which also claimed to be initiating its own human genome project. In constructing their own
genomes, both companies are adopting a subscription-only access model to their data, most of which is accessed by pharmaceutical companies for drug development. In addition, Human Genome Sciences, although not taking on the sequencing of the entire human
genome, has instigated a series of patent claims for techniques and products based on genes sequenced within the human genome. Each corporation and its strategy—Celera’s “whole genome shotgun sequencing,” Incyte’s use of in-house microarray technologies,
and Human Genome Sciences’ short-cut strategy of gene patenting—offers a different approach to the molecular biology research that we have seen with the HGP; research does not happen without a business infrastructure.48 We might differentiate the biotech

biotech and Big Pharma are

industry further by pointing to several trends. As is evident by looking at corporations such as Perkin-Elmer, Pfizer, Genzyme, or Millennium Pharmaceuticals, both start-ups

participating in the development of complex corporate bodies within the economic framework
of global capitalism. A driving economic force is finance capital, bolstered from within by a wide
range of “future promises” from biotech research What we are witnessing now (gene therapies, genetic drugs, and so on). in

is an intersection of economic systems with information technology

“digital capitalism,” to use Dan Schiller’s term, .49 As Michael Dawson and John
Bellamy Foster show, this trend leads to an emphasis on a “total marketing strategy” that is highly diversified: consumer profiling, individualized marketing, “narrowcasting,” “push-media,” and so on.50 Such trends are transforming medical research as well. More
often than not, a research field within biotech can flourish or perish in the future depending on the tides of stock values. In turn, those stock values are directly tied to the proclaimed successes or failures of clinical trials or research results. Most of the stock value of
the biotech industry is an example of what Catherine Waldby calls “biovalue”: with companies either being able to produce valuable research results that can be transformed into products (such as geneticbased drugs or therapies) or being able to take research and
mobilize it within a product-development pipeline (mostly within the domain of the pharmaceutical industry).51 However, the most significant factor for our concerns here is that the biotech industry, along with biotech research itself, is becoming an information
science, an informatics. As Ben Rosen, chairman of Compaq has stated, “Biology is becoming an information science . . . and it will take increasingly powerful computers and software to gather, store, analyze, model and distribute that information.”52 The advent of
advanced computer-based tools, the Web, and, soon after, a proliferation of e-commerce models has meant that computer technology offers the exemplary site for the continued extension of biotechnology as a model for future research and as a model for
business. Within biotech research such as the HGP, the generation of endless amounts of genetic sequence data and of genes to be analyzed has necessitated the incorporation of computer science into scientific analysis in the field of bioinformatics. As we have
seen, the most prevalent example of bioinformatics has been databasing—where, for instance, up-to-the-minute information on the HGP can be accessed by researchers worldwide via a Web site and a central database. Bioinformatics also includes complex analysis

In biotechnology,
systems, molecular and protein modeling applications, “gene discovery systems,” data mining tools, and the development of simulation environments in order to study further the function of genes and pathways.53

the bioinformatics of database access is inextricably connected, to software and subscription

models for research, which is where bioinformatics intersects with biocapitalism, or genetic
bodies are integrated into an advanced capitalist framework the . Discussing the free-floating dynamics of late capital, Fredric Jameson notes that

self-referential feedback loops of finance capital propel it into a zone of “autonomization,” a

viruslike epidemic that forms a speculation on speculations this autonomization has .54 For Jameson,

resulted in “the cybernetic ‘revolution,’ the intensification of communications technology to the

point at which capital transfers today abolishes space and time and can be virtually [sic]

instantaneously effectuated from one national zone to another .” It is this instantaneousness and total connectivity that has driven many labs to

If, in the
incorporate advanced computing and networking technologies (such as Celera), and it is this integration of biotech with infotech that has brought companies such as IBM, Compaq, and Sun Microsystems into the life sciences.

biotech industry, finance capital and laboratory research are interconnected, how does this
connection transform the “wet,” biological materials in the lab, the molecular bodies of life
science research it is in the unique, hybrid objects of the biotech industry
? One response is to suggest that —genomic databases, DNA

that genetic bodies and an immaterial labor intersect

chips, automated protein analysis computers— , the correlations . In other words

between bodies and capital, which enable a biotech industry to exist at all, are currently
mediated by computer and information technologies. The use of such technologies is predicated
on the assumption that a range of equivalencies can be established between , a patented , say

genetic sequence and the marketing of that sequence through genetic-based drugs . The opening example of Genentech
illustrates this point in the correlation between the molecular “tools” of the cell (the enzymes for cutting and pasting genes) and the novel molecules produced through those tools (Genentech’s human insulin product). The example of Genentech and recombinant

The science behind recombinant DNA technologies—is based on the

DNA technology is also helpful for another reason. Genentech—

ability to insert, reinsert, and recombine genetic sequences strategically to attain a desired end
Genentech is an example of a constant modulation of the generative
(for instance, the production of a novel protein).

potentials of both science research and capital accumulation; it is hypermarketing and product
management infused with laboratory technique. Boyer and Cohen’s challenge in forming
Genentech was about creating a context in which both science research
was not about making “health” or health care marketable; it
and capital accumulation would be reciprocally sensitive to each other, with a common goal of
maximizing profits (medical and economic). Current biotech companies have realized this connection, which is one explanation why the biotech industry is focusing so heavily on the production of “silver bullet” drugs and is

Because this logic of correlating bodies and value inserts itself at

sidestepping more complex, “messy” approaches such as systems biology.

multiple sites within the biotech industry (just as a recombinant gene can insert itself in multiple
ways within a strand of DNA), we might do better to refer to this fusion of corporate
biotechnology and information technology as recombinant capital. Recombinant capital is not
just the prevalence of online stock fluctuations, speculations, and losses; it is a diverse business
model that deals with the informatics of biotechnology both recombinant capital and . At their roots,

bioinformatics begin with the worldview that everything can be reduced to is information—or, to be more specific, that the world

informational pattern, a pattern that identifies the “essence” of the human body. Such a , in this case,

process requires a constant process of

involves a level of technical sophistication (for example, in converting DNA samples into computer databases), but, more than that, it

correlation between medical value and economic value. the process of In an example such as the genome databases of Celera or Incyte,

converting DNA samples into databases is also a process of creating a relationship between
medical value and economic value
(a possible gene target for a cancer drug) (the profit potential of such a gene when it is patented). Whether involving a sequence of DNA in the lab or a computer-generated
stock profile of a gene, medical value or stock value, information and information technologies enable genetic sequences to be decoded and enable online interactions within the market to fluctuate and interact. Thus, we might say that the balancing act in the
biotech industry between medical and economic value is mediated by information technologies, which can establish modes of correlating different value systems by converting everything into data. This mode of informatic abstraction means that, technically
speaking, both recombinant capital and bioinformatics operate according to an encodingprocessing- decoding protocol. For example, a bioinformatics approach to database management for one of the research centers in the HGP proceeds by developing a way to
translate genetic information into computer information. Once that genetic body is encoded as computer information, it can then be reconfigured and organized into a database structure. Likewise, recombinant capital also encodes the genetic body, but in a much
more diluted manner. Many online hubs for the biotech industry list side by side a daily update of research results or discoveries and stock quotes.55 As may be expected, glowing reports on Phase III clinical trials for a gene-based drug will show significant rises in
stocks, whereas a failed merger between two companies might show a decline. For example, the announcement in March 2000 by President Clinton and Prime Minister Blair that genomic sequence data should be “freely available to all” triggered a panicky
downward slide in biotech stocks, especially in those companies such as Celera and Incyte, which have built their entire stock portfolio on a genomic database subscription model.56 The Clinton-Blair announcement is important not for what it said (it said nothing
new, of course), but for what it demonstrated politically: a certain point of crisis in the discourse of biotech in the correlations between medical and economic value systems. This is one level of recombinant capital—that of online stock fluctuations, which is often in
direct correlation with either laboratory research results or offline scientific discourse. But stock value must first be developed, or cultured, so that an influx of stock investment can occur in the first place, and this is the level where laboratory research becomes more
fully integrated with economic interest. For a biotech start-up, there must of course be something to “sell,” something to garner potential investors’ attention and competitor companies’ envy. This something can be a product—“owning” the genome will certainly be
an asset—but it can also be a service or technique—such as genetic analysis or genetic profiling. It can also be related to technology development, such as silicon-based microarrays or DNA chips. Bioinformatics carries this next step, as the traditional biological “wet”
labs become more computerized, with the advent of “labs on a chip.” That is, once genetics is successfully translated into a problem of informatics, programming, and digital encoding, working with biological materials in the lab becomes abstracted into working with
code on a monitor. As with other restricted-access e-commerce models, the most in-demand data will be the most valuable and even the most costly to access and download. This will create a real-time value-assessment model in which each click by a researcher will
correspond in some way to the fluctuations of value in the data accessed and of the overall value of the company hosting the database. In this situation, the database-subscription business model is simultaneously research and real-time stock and pricing adjustment.

the most expensive and most costly research will be dictated first by economic
The end result is that

negotiations, second by data-access privileges, and last by a consideration of the disease or gene
being studied. The trend clearly foreseeable here is that research done on certain genes or
gene-based drugs will prosper, only because they yield from the beginning a low-risk, cost-
effective guarantee of success in clinical trials and market utility. Research of more , U.S. FDA approval,

complex diseases such as AIDS or the study of more complex biochemical pathways (in which
genes are not the central component) will be assessed as high-risk endeavors, highly
unpredictable, and unlikely to turn any returns in the near future. A shift in research will then be
encouraged, from knowledge- based medical models of healing to the full-fledged investment in
temporary, genetically specific drugs that have their own built-in obsolescence . Does the biotech industry really have anything
to sell to begin with? A Biovalorization of All Values As a way of looking at this network between bodies, data, and value, consider the recent strategy employed by some biotech companies to develop participatory models for DNA sampling. During the summer of
2000, DNA Solutions, Inc., announced the creation of the Gene Trust, the first large-scale, organized DNA sample bank.57 It is based on a volunteer model, and interested individuals can register and send in blood samples for DNA analysis and archiving. As an
information business, the Gene Trust will gather genetic samples from a range of individuals with a range of medical conditions. Such information will help pharmaceutical companies and research laboratories to speed up the process of therapeutics, drug
development, and clinical trials. Although on the research and development side the Gene Trust is exemplary of many biotech endeavors, on the consumer-patient side it is at the forefront of producing a new type of relationship between medical practice and the
biomedical patient. In short, the patient or consumer—who supposedly takes part in and ultimately benefits from the Gene Trust—enters into a unique relationship with his or her own information. The medical patient becomes a data patient. The data patient is
characterized by several constraints, all of which relate to the relationship between patient body and the medical use of computer technology. First, the physical, biological body of the medical patient must be translatable into computer-based information. Anything
that cannot be encoded will be either designated as supplemental or fully excised from the data patient’s profile. All medical diagnosis, treatment, and communication in the telemedical context will then take place via information and information technology. This
means that even personal consultation may involve remote physicians or technicians. One of the top priorities of medical treatment will therefore be the dataset relating to the patient. In addition, the data patient will constantly be mirrored by an electronic double,
his or her digital profile. In a sense, the real patient will have to negotiate constantly with this data double, so that they correspond to each other. This means changing the data in computers, especially when those data are used to make important health-related
decisions. The cycle starts when the medical patient’s genetic body is sampled and encoded. From there, a loop is initiated in which the patient’s biological body must always first answer to his or her telemedical profile. The types of drugs needed or the types of
therapy best suited to this patient will be decided at the level of informatics first and foremost (this is the basic logic of pharmacogenomics). The patient’s biological body will have been diagnosed and treated with no mention of the phenomenal condition of
embodiment, the blatant gap that currently exists between “wet” genetic molecules and digital codes, or the dynamic and flexible quality of the body. The point here is not simply to go back to those precomputer days of Galenic bedside medicine, endlessly listening

we should also be very astute in assessing the ways in which this complex of
to the patient’s testimonies. But

biological science and information technology structures a certain narrative of progress. The
data patient in genetic therapeutics and telemedicine presents us with a classical case of
Baudrillardian simulation, where the simulacrum not only verifies the real (what is real comes to
be what can be perfectly simulated), but also threatens to blur the real/simulated distinction.58
Because patient data cycle back on and ultimately affect the physical, real patient, there is a
confusion of where to locate the object of medical attention; in a sense, the real patient is
preceded by the data patient . As its name indicates, the Gene Trust represents itself as a form of voluntary, altruistic investment. As a long-standing legal concept, a “trust” involves a relationship between a property
owner and a property manager, where the latter is entrusted with the property of the former, with benefits going primarily to the property owner (in the same way that one entrusts one’s finances or one’s business to someone else). An investment trust (also called
a closed-end trust) involves a financial organization that gathers the funds of its shareholders and then invests them in a diversified securities portfolio. Simply put, securities (such as stocks) confer ownership of something that is not in the owner’s immediate
possession; it is a means of rendering property and materiality virtual. The owner of a stock can, theoretically, demand the right to receive the property designated in the stock, or, of course, the stock can be traded. As such, stocks can take on a free-floating fluidity,
as informational value units, which signifi- cantly, if only momentarily, detaches them from any material substantiation. Most investment trusts hand over the majority of the management and control of the funds to the financial organization. With a fixed number of
shares, the value of the portfolio will depend on the status of the supply and demand for certain types of shares in the market. We are already witnessing a massive virtualization of finance capital (the actual technological implementation in e-trading is perhaps only
its latest phase). What happens when we consider an investment trust based on the body? As patenting debates in the past have illustrated, one of the first transformations is that the body becomes, more specifically, biological property. Bodies as objects certainly
have their own convoluted history (in labor, sexuality, cultural stereotyping, etc.), but in the case of the Gene Trust the body is simultaneously genetic and informatic. It is genetic because what the Gene Trust is interested in is not personal testimony, patient-
described symptoms, or even past medical records. The Gene Trust is centrally interested in a molecular pattern that is commonly “read” as a sequence of letters. In contemporary biotech research, this reading of molecules also means that DNA is translated into
information, for computer-based analysis and diagnostics. This translation is a kind of body, framed by informatic and economic concerns, which we might call a “bioinformatic body.” As the basic logic of the legal trust indicates, the ownership of this biological
property is defined by its absence (the stock holder does not actually have the property designated in the stock). The Gene Trust’s central asset will be its databases and the diagnostic and medical information it can tease out of that genetic data. What the Gene
Trust volunteer donates is less his or her body and more bioinformatic value. Under a broad category of medical altruism, the Gene Trust promises a future of humanistic returns (the DNA sample you supply now could save a life in the future). In the meanwhile, the
more short-term circulation of biodata enables the Gene Trust, as a privately funded venture, to gain immediate economic returns. The Gene Trust, though it may communicate the best of intentions, actually has a twofold agenda, in that it uses investment in two
different ways. First and foremost, the Gene Trust presents itself through a rhetoric of an altruistic, biomedical humanism. The investment alluded to here is made possible by the overarching category of collective human well-being. At its basis is a biological
essentialism, which implies that because we all are the same genetically, volunteering for the Gene Trust is an investment in the future of human health. In fact, the sound-bite advertising phrases on the Web site push forth micronarratives (the young woman whose
aunt has Alzheimer’s and who is thus gaining a sense of “participating in history” by helping researchers combat disease). All of us have had some experience with the often traumatic effects of disease and the death of those close to us. Despite this, however, neither
the human genome projects nor their spin-offs such as the Gene Trust have mentioned the fact that scientific research still does not know for sure whether genes “cause” devastating diseases such as cancer. And researchers have yet to consider both the complex
effects of biological networks and environmental influences in a serious manner. What are the dynamics of change when a novel technology is introduced, via recombinant capital, into biotech research? The introduction of biologicinformatic hybrids as part and
parcel of biotech research has meant something different; it has meant that the data produced through biotech research always have a direct, linear, and causal relationship to the development of systems for generating biovalue (mostly with pharmaceutical
corporations and genetic drug development). We can see this not only in the primary interests of DNA chips (efficiency, cost-effectiveness, instantaneous results), but in the kinds of data they produce, suited for their adaptive utilization in genetic drugs and
preventive medicine.59 In this sense, the data produced by DNA chip and related technologies resemble demographics or statistics: a selected range of analytical categories (gene sequence, gene frequency, iterative patterns) composes a genetic profile of a DNA
sample. Once a greater number of genes are “discovered” to have direct and indirect relationships to a wide range of “disorders,” it is only a step toward seeing something such as DNA chips as sociobiological surveillance systems—biopolitical modes of regulating

recombinant capital can adaptively insert itself

and accounting for individuals and populations. Thus, one of the primary issues in projects such as the Gene Trust, is the ways in which

into a range of contexts, from hard lab research to the highest ethers of finance capital. In doing
so, it scans, cuts, and recombines the resources inherent in fields such as genomics, articulating
them as information-based solutions to an ideology whereby disease is fully accounted for
through genes. In recombinant capital, sociobiological perspectives allow for the quick
development of commercial health-care models based on a simple model of mechanical
addition or blockage through genetic drugs . Biomaterial Labor, or Living Dead Labor It will be helpful to summarize some of my main points thus far. In the biotech industry, we see—in
instances such as genetic engineering (e.g., Genentech), patenting, genetic testing, and gene banking (e.g., the Gene Trust)—a continual negotiation between economic and medical value. How is “life itself ” positioned in this tension-filled zone? In the case of
banking endeavors such as the Gene Trust or Celera’s high-tech genome project, we see biological “life itself” inserted at multiple points: in biological samples from patient volunteers, in extracted DNA in test tubes or plasmid libraries, in digital DNA in computer
databases, in bioinformatics software analyzing DNA, in molecular modeling applications, in genetic screens utilizing DNA chips, and so forth. It seems, then, that “life itself” is constantly positioned between medical and economic value: life situated between labor
and capital. Again, I want to note the twofold tendency of biotechnology in this regard: on the one hand a thoroughly informatic view of biology and on the other hand an informatic view of biology that is nevertheless not immaterial. If we take all this into
consideration, what is the role of “life itself” in the nexus of life, labor, and capital? We can now begin to address this question by considering Marx’s notion of living labor elaborated earlier and the notion of immaterial labor in the Italian autonomist tradition in
relation to contemporary biotechnology. As seen previously, Marx makes a number of important contributions to our general understanding of the role of technological development in the relation between labor and capital. In particular, he sets up two relationships
that take on new meaning in the context of biotechnology. The first relationship is that between living labor and dead labor, with the latter represented by machinery. Although this relationship certainly can take the more familiar Luddite form of a replacement of
humans by machines, Marx also notes how it qualitatively changes human labor, in effect opening onto activities defined by control, regulation, and intellectual labor. However, Marx also generates some ambiguity in his distinctions between living labor and labor
power as well. On the one hand, living labor is always conceived of by capital as potential labor power, labor that is a commodity, labor that is made amenable to a quantitative exchange in wages. Yet, on the other hand, capital never totally subsumes labor, if only
because labor is defined temporally and is always potential. This tension, highlighted by In each of these cases, we see plenty of technology at work—thermal cyclers, incubators, computers, and so forth. But more important, we also see a range of technologies that
have some biological process at their center—cellular replication, cellular differentiation, DNA annealing and ligating. In other words, without these core, biological processes—processes that occur routinely in the living body—there would be no biotechnologies, no
regenerative medicine without cellular differentiation, no PCR without DNA base pair bonding, no bioreactors without cellular metabolism. In the short history of the biotech industry, the well-known examples of the production of human insulin, HGH, and other
genetic engineering feats are a demonstration of the ways in which “naturally occurring” biological processes are harnessed and made to work in the context of a biotechnology industry. Transgenics, GM foods, and regenerative medicine are currently following suit.
But this is certainly not the only kind of activity that takes place in the biotechnology lab. Within the biotech industry, we can identify several different kinds of labor. There is, first, modern factory labor involving the production of either goods such as prescription
drugs or tools such as gene sequencing computers (intersecting with the information technology industry). The worker who performs this labor might formally correspond to what Negri calls the “mass worker.”60 Second, there is the immaterial labor surrounding
the marketing, promotion, design, and public-relations factors of the pharmaceutical industry, focusing mostly on drugs and diagnostics. However, the role of information technologies is increasingly becoming a key part of this labor as well (e.g., databases, software
design, data services, programming), as the fields of genomics, proteomics, and pharmacogenomics are attempting to show. Along with these two types of labor, there is also the more highly skilled labor that takes place in labs, be they at universities, research
institutes, or biotech companies. These jobs include principal investigators, administrators, professors, lab technicians, student assistants, work studies, and so forth, formally akin to Negri’s “professional worker.” Both in the lab (research) and outside of the lab
(grant writing, affiliations, patent applications), these jobs require a combination of education and skilled experience. Finally, as a special category, we might also mention those workers in the medicine and health-care sectors who are often the endpoint of biotech
research (e.g., prescribing new drugs, requiring tests, analyzing biological samples, nursing, and coordinating health insurance). Although these jobs are also skilled jobs, they exist apart from the basic lab research we see in genomics, proteomics, or bioinformatics.
However, in the case of the medical application of biotechnology, they are connected because they serve as the point of contact between a biotechnology and an individual patient. Clearly, there are many types of labor involved in the biotech industry. However, in
some sense, none of this is new, for every industry arguably has this sort of breakdown—a combination of conventional and contemporary forms of labor. What is it, then, that makes the biotech industry unique? One possible answer is that all these types of

labor in the biotech industry revolve around a more fundamental type of labor: the specific type
of labor performed routinely by cells, proteins, and DNA it bypasses altogether . In other words, biotechnology is unique in that

the division between humans and machines, or between human living labor and the dead labor
of machinery of which Marx spoke. Certainly, in any molecular biology or genetics lab, one will find an array of technologies, including familiar tools such as pipettes, the centrifuge, or cell cultures, as well as more modern tools such as thermal
cyclers, oligonucleotide synthesizers, and entire labs full of networked personal computers. Therefore, to state simply that the biotech industry ignores technology is inaccurate. What is important to note is that each of these technologies is predicated on a
deceptively simple principle: that the “naturally occurring” processes of biology at the molecular and genetic levels can be recontextualized in such a way so as to transform them into an instrument, a technology. If we accept Marx’s points concerning the labor-
capital relationship and the more contemporary formulation of “immaterial labor,” then we might ask how the situation has changed in the current biotech industry, an industry that produces novel artifacts—biotechnologies—that seem to fulfill Marx’s description
of a mechanical “organism” and yet at the same time frustrate any clear division between living and dead labor. Right away we can note a number of differences between Marx’s characterization of industrialism and the biotech industry. In the biotech industry,
Biology is the motive force, the method, the medium. Biology is what drives production. Biology is the source material. Biology is the process of production. Biology is not replaced by machinery, but it replaces machines. Biology is the technology. Biology is the
product, the endpoint, and the aim. Biology does not aim to produce a material good or a service, but, above all, more biology. The result is a vision of biotechnology in which biology is the technology. What characterizes the current biotech industry is that the

In the biotech industry, biology is the technology, and that technology is

technology that biology is, is seen to be informatic.

informatic, without ever becoming purely immaterial. Instead of an immaterial labor that is
concentrated in the computer and information industries, we see a biomaterial labor that brings
together the emphasis on informatization with the novel ways in which biological “life itself ” is
radically recontextualized in bioinformatics the existence of this uncanny,
genetic engineering, genomics, and . Within the biotech industry,

“living” labor of cells, enzymes, and genes is an indicator that the relationship between life,
labor, and capital is undergoing some significant changes. In biotechnology, labor power is
produced through recombinant DNA and genome databases
cells lines, transgenics, , PCR, . The results appear to be products and services like any other:
prescription drugs, genetic diagnostics, cell- or gene-based therapies, and novel in vitro and in vivo means of producing antibodies and other compounds for medical use. The notion of biomaterial labor is meant to indicate these significant shifts in the labor-capital

biotechnology produces information—

relation within the biotech industry (which does not exclude government-funded or universitybased research). What does this literal produce? On one level, it

test results, experiment results, assay results—which is then used to perform more
experiments, leading ) to the development of an application such as a biomarker for drug
(it is hoped

targeting. On another level, however, this biotechnology simply produces biology—it produces
itself, or, rather, it generates the conditions for the subsequent instrumentalization of biology . The
interest in biotechnology from a scientific view is that it is not simply “used up” in one experiment, but forms a whole panoply of techniques and experimental systems for research. The development of cell cultures is one example, in which specific foreign DNA can
be maintained in culture indefinitely. The biotech industry produces not just products or services (though it does produce both, certainly), but above all biology: drugs, therapies, cells, tissues, organs, and information. The core of the production process in the

biotech industry is that it is fully constituted by biology: biology is what produces, it is how production occurs, and it is what is produced. Biology is the technology in biotech, but that technology is, at its core, biological. The core of the
biotech industry is biological “life itself,” or, put another way, the economic uses of “life itself. ” As an industry, biotechnology is markedly different from nineteenth-century
industrialism or early-twentiethcentury automation, but it is nevertheless an industry, one built around the ability to harness biology (see table 5.1). The key to understanding the biotech industry as an economic endeavor is this basic approach of

providing the conditions in which “life itself” can become productive, living labor . In the case of biotechnology,

living labor actually means the work performed by biology : mammalian bioreactors, transgenic lab animals, immortalized cell lines, labgrown tissues and organs,
 what is the difference between contemporary genomics and
and the bioinformatic labor of cells, enzymes, and DNA. But if this is the case, then

ancient practices of agriculture and fermentation? The history of molecular genetics provides us
with one important difference: the role played by information in relation to “life itself.” If one of
the primary innovations of molecular biology was the emphasis on sequences, codes, and
messages in DNA, then it follows that this informatic understanding of biology can be further
expanded in databases What differentiates the living labor of the biotech
plasmid libraries, genome , and genetically engineered animals.

industry from earlier forms of classical biotechnology is the emphasis on an informatic—but not
immaterial—understanding of biological “life itself.” This emphasis is historically accompanied
by the way in which the biotech industry combines the “immaterial labor” of the computer and
information technology industries with the newly emerging biomaterial labor of cells, enzymes,
and DNA . At the same time, biomaterial labor raises a set of complicated questions. For instance, in biomaterial labor, biology performs work, and yet there is no worker, no subject; biomaterial labor is strangely nonhuman. Who sells the labor power
of biomaterial labor? We have a situation in which there is living labor without subjectivity. If biomaterial labor is a labor power in the biotech industry, and if there is no human subject or wage, is there still exploitation and alienation? Is biology always already
biomaterial labor? In biomaterial labor, has this twofold change—the nonhuman scale of genes and the role of informatics—altered the quality of human subjects’ labor in the biotech industry? Another question: Does biomaterial labor configure biological “life
itself” as more natural or more artificial? Consider the arguments for and against patents in the biotech industry. On the one hand, patents for, say, transgenic plants, animals, and microbes are seen to be safe and useful, in part because they are fully biological and
thus bear some close relation to “nature.” Yet, in order to fulfill the criteria for patentability, scientists must show that their inventions are “new, useful, and nonobvious”—in short, that they are artificial. Biomaterial labor—and by extension the biotech industry—

at the level of ontology, biomaterial labor points to a

presents us with the paradoxical notion of a “life itself” that is both transparent and yet totally mediated. Finally,

qualitatively different type of estrangement, a biological estrangement (indeed, biology generally can be understood as the estrangement of

The very fact that your “own” body parts (cells, DNA) can be patented without your
“life itself”).

knowledge implies a unique type of separation between biology and embodiment. Biomaterial
labor gives us a paradoxical life without agency, a “life itself” that is always already objectified in
the lab, even as your cells outside you are transplanted back into your body (as in tissue
engineering) .

Moreover, this financialization of biomatter is underwritten by a history of

genomic science inaugurated by racialized nuclear holocaust rendering
narratives of modern progress complicit in an unending mobilization for
preemptive extermination
Bahng 15’ ( Aimee Bahng, Assistant Professor of English Women’s, Gender, and sexuality
studies and African and African American Studies Comparative Literature, Specters of the
Pacific: Salt Fish Drag and Atomic Hauntologies in the Era of Genetic Modification, Journal of
American Studies Cambridge University Press and British Association for American Studies,
http://www.dartblog.com/document/Bahng%20Specters%20article2.pdf)

The NHGRI’s selective forgetting of Hiroshima and Nagasaki also signals the instrumentalization
of Japanese survivors of the nuclear blasts and their descendants on behalf of genomic science,
which at its inception sought to align its interests with a more profitable demographic than the
survivors of nuclear warfare. When Jodi Kim writes about the US government prohibiting the Atomic Bomb Casualty
Commission from treating the Japanese subjects whom they were studying, she recognizes the ways in which wartime targets
become objects of state knowledge. That targeting and objectifying , I would argue, are twin
functions of the same practice of biopolitical subjection, the “reducing of others to data.”  This
realignment included a reorientation of scientific research toward the financial sector, in which
speculations on the HGP’s potential to predict and preempt disease and genetic “defects” would
ultimately become the source of prolific financial speculation wherein venture capitalists could
bet on scientific research and its conversion into private-sector enterprises like individualized genetic
sequencing services such as those offered by andme.com. To the extent that the HGP’s official narrative
attempts to fold the story of nuclear devastation into a narrative arc of the possibility of
regenerative medicine, the renarrativization capitalizes on the proleptic logic that the United
States used to rationalize the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki to begin
with. Donald Pease argues that “this fantasmatic representation of a nuclear holocaust in the future
anterior” not only erodes the event’s historical actuality but, in its projection, also inaugurates a
national-security state now primed for all kinds of speculation on potential futures against which
the nation can mobilize and militarize . Similarly, the Human Genome Project presents itself as securitization against
the onslaught of an uncertain mutagenic future, wherein investment in genetic engineering hedges against potential risk. My
transposition of financial discourse (investing, hedging, forecasting) to the emergence of the HGP signals the next move of this essay
to interject the emergence of genomics research into a confluence of financial and military securitization. As we will see, the
Human Genome Project, in its attempt to informationalize biomatter and delink it from the feeling body,
both subscribes to and is constituted by a strong turn toward quantification that helps convert
biological life and sentiment into finance capitalism’s terms of calculable, potential risk . From the
late s through the late s, “basic science” did not commercialize so much as it financialized,
putting significantly more pressure on scientists to project the potential applications and utility
of their research to sources of private funding with the purpose of fueling a derivatives market
of betting on and hedging against the prospects of emerging techno-scientific research . In order
to get funding, proposals necessarily include a speculative section, usually in the concluding paragraphs, wherein scientists imagine a
future application of their research. As part of acquiring its federal funding, the NHGRI published a series of overlapping five-year
plans outlining the priorities and goals of the HGP. Plotting
the trajectories and articulating the potential
future benefits of research, these documents constitute forms of speculative writing . Reading the
 Strategic Plan reveals a striking shift in rhetoric. The plan opens with “optimism about the potential contributions of genomics
for improving human health.” Optimism recurs as a point of emphasis in the document. The Strategic Plan identifies the cell
biological models that have led to a better understanding of Crohn’s disease and cancer as “examples [to] justify the optimism about
genomics’ potential to accelerate the understanding of disease.” The report’s conclusion names the “audacious vision” of what
sequencing the human genome could mean for the “ultimate control of many human diseases.” The plan attributes this audacious
vision to the origins of the HGP, but the origins the plan names (which include R. Dulbecco’s  article in Science, “A Turning Point
in Cancer Research: Sequencing the Human Genome,” and the National Research Council’s  Mapping and Sequencing the
Human Genome) do not include the Alta Summit of  and have already turned away from the study of radiation’s effects on
genetic mutation. It is an origin story born out of what Avery Gordon might call “repetition-as-displacement.” Indeed, “audacious
vision” can only come about via the repression of genomic research’s attachment to the Manhattan Project. Whereas the research
on inherited genetic mutations garnered attention and funding from the Japanese government and the US Department of Energy
(who worried about getting sued for the long-lasting and wide-reaching damage of radiation on anyone anywhere near either a
bombing target or a testing site), the NHGRI’s more audacious priorities for biomedical research claim to reach “well beyond what
any one organization can realistically support, and will (once again) require the creative energies and expertise of genome scientists
around the world and from all sectors, including academic, government, and commercial.” If research on radiation was seen as
important primarily by people who perceived themselves to be immediately affected by the specific sites most commonly associated
with the atomic age, then the HGP’s new directions were bound by no such geographical locations. The plan’s new terrain would be
the limitless future and its securitization of healthy, wealthy individuals from risk (of disease, disaster, or accident).

Our advocacy represents an alternative mode of affirmative speculation that

endorses mutation over regeneration, difference over the homogenizing
calculability of finance capital, a temporal and genetic drag that refuses the
erasure of history under the marching orders of white neoliberal progress.
Endorse the speculative fiction of the affirmative as a reconceptualization of
trans-pacific futurity, an affirmation of the detritus of finance capital holding
wild assembly for a future otherwise.
Bahng 15’ ( Aimee Bahng, Assistant Professor of English Women’s, Gender, and sexuality
studies and African and African American Studies Comparative Literature, Specters of the
Pacific: Salt Fish Drag and Atomic Hauntologies in the Era of Genetic Modification, Journal of
American Studies Cambridge University Press and British Association for American Studies,
http://www.dartblog.com/document/Bahng%20Specters%20article2.pdf)

Despite an apparent acceleration of regulatory mechanisms, the GM future of Salt Fish Girl is
nonetheless teeming with unbridled, queer life – queer in that transgenic and mutant life forms
travel beyond normative conceptualizations of speciation, temporality, and communicability to
form promiscuous bonds with one another. Clones produced by and for the factory assembly
line find a way to reproduce themselves offshore, or rather on the banks of a magically fecund
river whose reproductive power prolifically spawns mutation in the Unregulated Zone. The
mutagenic conditions of the Unreglated Zone facilitate Miranda’s very conception. Though her
mother Aimee Ling is “a good eight years past menopause,” her desire for a genetically rogue
durian fruit growing in the Unregulated Zone compels her to reach beyond the seemingly safe
and sterile enclave of Serendipity to satisfy her craving . “She wanted it so badly, she would have taken the
risk, but my father said that wild things weren’t safe. She knew that. She wanted it anyway.” This strange fruit – infused
with the mythical powers of generation of the serpentine goddess of creation, who has coiled
herself around its seed – fertilizes Miranda’s mother’s egg with Nu Wa’s genetic essence.
Conceived in a moment when her mother craved wild durian, Miranda embodies her mother’s
momentary rebellion against the privatization of food . “I should never have brought you that evil fruit,” Stewart
tells Aimee, Only barbarians eat those kinds of things. You know if it doesn’t have a Saturna sticker it isn’t safe. Everything has been
affected by these modified pollens. If it grows wild in the Unregulated Zone you have no idea what kinds of mutations have
occurred. Here, the discards from the lab experiment gone wrong, through fish genetics, through
queer desire, hold wild assembly. Improvisational life forms and experimental practices form ad
hoc community networks and resistance movements that coalesce spontaneously and
ephemerally, on the fly, on the run, cobbled together from recycled and repurposed materials.
The Unregulated Zone is also home to all sorts of other mutant forms of commerce and life.
Pirate television, backyard farming, and reconstructed bicycles offer alternative models of
communing for workers fleeing the corporate compounds, once “the stock market crisis and the
further devaluation of the dollar” compel Saturna to start cutting pensions and firing workers. 
The clones who escape the Pallas shoe factory start making sneakers with revolutionary
messages etched into their soles, sold on the black market to foment pedestrian speech acts in
the mud. The artistic shoe impressions traverse unregulated space and indicate the hidden currents; the sudden, unexpected
connections; unseen networks; and spontaneous associations that constitute the lived urban space beyond the frame of the
blueprint and the planned city of Serendipity, or its Disney counterpart of Celebration, Florida .
Insofar as they do the
often anonymous work of disruption, these anarchic footprints instantiate Salt Fish Girl’s
guerrilla tactics against the imagination of a neater, more compliant futurity. They participate in
a “creative sabotage of the future.” This is a story of clones, fish, and mutants who enact an
“improvisation of kinship” to intercede in the collusion of corporate greed and scientific
ambition.  What brokers these alliances across species might be described best as queer
desire. Queer theorizations of kinship, collectivity, and affinity-based politics become quite
helpful in formulating the particularly queer ways that Salt Fish Girl reconceives transpacific
futurity. POSTSCRIPT: TRANSPACIFIC ECOLOGIES I thought, we are the new children of the earth, of the earth’s revenge. Once we
stepped out of mud, now we step out of moist earth, out of DNA both new and old, an imprint of what has gone before, but also a
variation. By our difference we mark how ancient the alphabet of our bodies. By our strangeness we write our bodies into the
future. The
Pacific Ocean is occupied. An assemblage of mutagenic and discarded life forms
helps us formulate transpacific futurity from below, by thinking speculatively from the
perspective of the irradiated fish, the never-disintegrating bead of microplastic, the Asian
migrant worker, the embryonic stem cell, the disappearing coral reefs. This heterogeneous,
unmannerly crowd of indeterminate actors is bound together by a vague but potent sense of
disenfranchisement. They have been cast as disposable service workers in global capitalism’s
transpacific speculations. By bringing together labor histories of Asian migration to, from, and
between the Americas with projections of Asian biotech futures, I mean to tether twenty-first-
century extrapolations about transpacific futurities in the era of global finance capitalism to
earlier histories of US imperialisms across the Pacific. Thinking transpacific futurity from the
extrapolation point of nuclear fallout demands a perspectival shift that disrupts the promissory
optimism surrounding how genetically modified organisms as well as other forms of biocapital
exchange will deliver the so-called Asian Century . In my reading of Salt Fish Girl and the NHGRI’s Strategic Plan,
“fallout” emerges as abjected futurity, tugging at the sails of a more triumphant narrative of
techno-scientific progress. After a six-month investigation in Thailand, The Guardian put together a report on
“The Supermarket Slave Chain,” tracing the packages of frozen shrimp sold in the vast majority of
supermarkets in the US and Europe to Burmese migrants coerced into indentured servitude on
Thai shrimping boats, where their invisible, free labor makes them feel “worthless.” “The fish
has more value than we do,” one worker says. “We are less than human.” He, like the Salt Fish
Girl, who finds work in a factory assembling tin animal wind-up toys, expresses textbook
alienation. He and the fish constitute the flotsam, the detritus, the imperial debris circulating in
the Pacific Ocean, ground together into fishmeal to feed global capitalism. They are precisely the
ones the Trans-Pacific Partnership renders disposable, even as it calls into being an Asian
futurity. Larissa Lai imagines transpacific futurity differently. Salt Fish Girl traces the biopolitical currents of the transpacific,
bringing Asian/American labor histories into conversation with circulations of other forms of biocapital, including Monsanto seeds,
embryonic stem cells, and irradiated fish. These human and inhuman assemblages point to an alternative apprehension of Asian
futurity from the perspective of transpacific life. The novel’s multiple forms of drag – genetic, temporal, and literary (though I did not
go into the last of these here) – produce a number of interventions into the construction of speculative futurity. Salt Fish
Girl’s interspecies “animacies,” including but not limited to the genetic drag of Miranda’s dreaming sickness and the
clonal genealogies of Evie and the Sonias, also facilitate a temporal drag that folds back into the story of GM
futures the transpacific historiographies of wars in Asia and the collusion between military,
industry, technology, capitalism, and scientific research. If the bombings of Hiroshima and
Nagasaki and the atomic afterlives of the Bikini Atoll constitute the specters of the Pacific that
haunt the era of genetic modification, then Lai’s invocation of them through the transgenic
bodies of Miranda Ching and Salt Fish Girl – through the spliced DNA of saltwater carp and Asian
migrant – suggests the queerness of a transpacific ecology .
 Topicality
Engagement means non-coercive accommodation which requires an absence of
limiting, constraining, or delaying the increases in a target country’s power.
Prefer this definition because it’s written in the context of facilitating the best
intellectual exchange over the topic of engaging China.
Johnston & Ross 1999 [Alastair Iain, John L. Loeb Associate Professor of the
Social Sciences in the Government Department at Harvard University, and
Robert S., Professor of Political Science at Boston College and Associate at the
John King Fairbank Center for East Asian Research at Harvard University,
Engaging China: The Management of an Emerging Power, xiv-xv]
The volume’s comprehensive approach to studying engagement means that the contributors have vastly different research agendas.
To encourage a common dialogue among the contributors and to facilitate the generation of a common
understanding of engagement with cross-national applications, the contributors have worked within a
common definition of engagement. For the purpose of this volume, engagement is defined as follows: The
use of non-coercive methods to ameliorate the non-status-quo elements of a rising major
power’s behavior. The goal is to ensure that this growing power is used in ways that are consistent with peaceful chance in
regional and global order. In this approach, amelioration of the rising power’s behavior does not include
efforts to hinder the accretion of relative power. This is better understood as “containment ”. We
have neither defined nor limited the methods of amelioration, preferring that individual authors characterize the methods used by
the respective countries and/or multilateral institutions. “Non-coercive methods” include such strategies as
accommodation of legitimate interests, transformation of preferences , and entanglement in bilateral and
multilateral institutional constraints. The contributors clearly differentiate engagement from containment. In contrast to
containment, engagement seeks neither to limit, constrain, or delay increases in the target
country’s power nor prevent the development of influence commensurate with its greater
power. Rather, it seeks to “socialize” the rising power by encouraging its satisfaction with the
evolving global or regional order. Our definition of engagement specifically excludes coercive
policies.

TPP is containment and isolation of China.

Yu ’15 (Peter, “How China's exclusion from the TPP could hurt its economic growth,” OCTOBER
19, 2015, http://fortune.com/2015/10/19/china-exclusion-tpp-economic-growth/)

Why China might care about being left out of TPP From its inception, the TPP has been
considered by many as a strategic instrument to isolate or contain China. Given the country’s
ambitions, its leaders are understandably concerned about the concerted effort by the U. S. and
other Asia-Pacific countries to curtail its economic growth and geopolitical influence . China’s outsider status
could also be seen as an indictment of its inadequacies, such as limited intellectual property protection and a lack of government
procurement standards. The
exclusion of China not only has caused the country to lose face, but has
also provided a painful reminder of its continued struggle to gain an equal status in the
international community. Finally, the lack of TPP membership will prevent China from enjoying
new tariff reduction and preferential market access . If this regional pact is to operate according to design, it will
divert trade and manufacturing from China to TPP members.

You get a relations links – the TPP is damaging US-China relations because of
the direct economic exclusion.
Zhou ’15 (Steven Zhou is a journalist based in Toronto. He is a regular contributor to The
American Conservative, Muftah and Ricochet media, among other outlets. “The TPP risks making
US-China relations worse,” November 6, 2015,
http://america.aljazeera.com/opinions/2015/11/the-tpp-risks-making-us-china-relations-
worse.html)

The Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), finalized last month by 12 Pacific Rim nations, including the United States, will be the largest
trade pact in modern history. It will rewrite the rules that affect how about 40 percent of the global
economy does business, with the intent of increasing trade and investment. The White House released the agreement’s
text to the public yesterday. Much discussion regarding the TPP has focused on the absence from the
pact of China, the largest economy in the Asia-Pacific region. President Barack Obama has portrayed the exclusion
as an attempt by the U.S. and its allies to “write the rules” in the region before China does . But
this kind of antagonism does nothing to push U.S.-China relations — perhaps the most important bilateral
relationship in the world — toward anything productive . The increasing anti-China rhetoric that has accompanied the
Obama administration’s Asian pivot will result in fewer opportunities to partner on major global
initiatives and hurt both nations economically . While the U.S. and China have cooperated on a
number of important issues, including a notable recent agreement on climate change,
geopolitical tensions persist. President Xi Jinping, who has led China since 2012, has pushed for a new brand of
nationalism that emphasizes the projection of Chinese power in Asia. This has gotten China into territorial disputes with its
neighbors, which in turn have looked to the U.S. for help. China’s periodic alignment with Syria, Iran and Russia has set it at odds
with the Obama administration’s strategy in the Middle East. Finally, Washington has serious concerns about Chinese cyberattacks
on U.S. businesses. Given
all this, China’s ruling Communist Party has been very nervous about the
TPP from the beginning. The Obama administration is selling the TPP to Congress and to the United States’ international
partners as an opportunity to get a jump on China in writing global trade rules. The TPP includes China’s neighbors and major trading
partners such as Japan and Australia, and the Chinese leadership is worried about losing regional influence.
 Can’t Trust Think Tanks
Their think tank evidence isn’t neutral or objective but embedded in the very
neoliberal apparatus it’s trying to defend, reject their evidence for the
corporatist propaganda that it is

Carroll and Huxtable 2014 [William K., Professor of Sociology at the University of Victoria,
2008 recipient of the University of Victoria Faculty of Social Sciences Research Excellence Award,
Past President of the Economy and Society Research Committee of the International Sociological
Association, David “Building capacity for alternative knowledge: the Canadian Centre for Policy
Alternatives,” Canadian Review of Social Policy, January, Issue 70]

As is well documented, think tanks have generally been funded by and inclined toward the
principal propertied interests--the corporate sector--reflecting the structural power that resides
in capitalist control of both productive economic enterprise and financial resources (Carroll
2004; cf. Brownlee 2005; Burris 2008; Domhoff 2014). Think tanks furnish 'a crucial
infrastructure and increasingly professional transfer capacity for their class based
constituencies' (Fischer and Plehwe 2013: paragraph 10), combining expertise in research,
consulting, lobbying and advocacy, in a multifaceted practice of political and social 'knowledge
shaping' (Bonds 2011). In Canada, Carroll and Shaw (2001) have traced the development of a
'neoliberal policy bloc', composed of several key policy-planning groups, whose boards of
directors form a dense network of interlocks with each other and with the boards of the largest
corporations in Canada.

Particularly significant has been the rise of 'advocacy think tanks' (Abelson 1995) such as
Vancouver-based Fraser Institute, which have played influential roles in championing the
neoliberal policy agenda 'market-driven politics' (Leys 2001). Neoliberalism is an evolving and
variegated paradigm, yet at its centre is 'the project of imposing market-disciplinary regulatory
forms' (Brenner et at 2009:183) upon political and social life--thus the priorization of free
markets, privatized assets, the free flow of capital, 'consumer choice' and even the 'right to
work', in preference to public programs, goods and investments, regulations on business, and
the collective rights of workers. But regardless of whether they are strident advocates of
neoliberalism or more moderate voices, think tanks of the right and centre-right contribute to
the hegemony of corporate capital--its prestige, perceived legitimacy and the credibility of pro-
corporate policies. These groups function as embedded elements of a social network, within
which neoliberal business activism has taken shape and form. Ties between the corporate world
and the world of policy groups--and the direct participation of corporate directors in policy-
group work--enable a continuing conversation in which political frames can be aligned and
adjusted, effecting a moving consensus between capitalists and their organic intellectuals
(Carroll and Shaw 2001).
TPP Bad
 Big Pharma
TPP enshrines Big Pharma’s death-dealing monopoly on medicine
Stiglitz 16, (Joseph Stiglitz, 03-28-16, Joseph E. Stiglitz is Senior Fellow and Chief Economist at
the Roosevelt Institute and a professor at Columbia University. A recipient of the Nobel
Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences (2001) and the John Bates Clark Medal (1979), he is a
former senior vice president and chief economist of the World Bank and a former member and
chairman of the (US president’s) Council of Economic Advisers, The Roosevelt Institute, “The
High Health Costs of TPP’s “Free Trade’’”, http://rooseveltinstitute.org/high-health-costs-tpps-
free-trade/)

Despite protests from industry lobbyists who are upset that they did not get everything they
wanted, big pharmaceutical companies are some of the biggest winners in the Trans-Pacific
Partnership (TPP). This supposed “free trade” agreement between the United States and 11
countries in the Americas and Asia would enshrine expansive monopoly protections for
intellectual properties that shield drug makers from competition and provide them with new
powers to challenge government decisions aimed at managing health care costs. ∂ A win for Big
Pharma here will leave virtually everyone else worse off, with their higher profits coming at the
expense of higher health care costs for consumers and taxpayers, avoidable deaths and
suffering, and health innovations being brought to market at a slower pace. ∂ In order to maximize public
welfare, intellectual property rights (IPRs) must strike a balance between providing incentives for innovation and enabling their
widespread dissemination so people can benefit from and build on new ideas and technologies. Since past knowledge is the most
important input to the production of new ideas, more restrictive IPRs actually restrain opportunities for future innovation. Patents
are part of innovation systems in all countries; however, both recent and historical economic evidence shows that patents with
varying degrees of strength have little relationship to measures of innovation, investment, or economic performance. In other
words, patents are not the only way to incentivize research and development.∂ Nowhere is it more imperative to get the IPR balance
right than in the health care field. The
1984 Hatch-Waxman act struck the right balance, saving U.S.
consumers, employers, and taxpayers more than $100 billion per year with lower-cost generic
medicines. Since then, pharmaceutical firms have developed new policy devices to claw back
their monopoly protections and are advancing these policies in trade agreements. TPP would
lock these in place in the U.S. and export them to other countries, tipping the IPR balance for all
TPP partners as well as countries outside the bloc. ∂ First, TPP will require countries to implement
measures that allow “evergreening” of monopoly protections that prevent the introduction of
low-cost generic treatments to the market. TPP achieves this by requiring signatory countries to
grant new 20-year patents for new uses of old medicines or for trivial alterations of existing
medicines. For example, if a drug that is dosed four times a day is reformulated to be dosed
once a day, this would qualify it for an additional 20 years of monopoly protection. ∂ Second, one
of the most controversial issues in TPP negotiations focused on “biologic” medicines developed
through biotechnology rather than chemical synthesis that offer cutting-edge treatments to
some of our most pressing health problems. The question was whether the companies that
develop these drugs should get even more monopoly rights in addition to their patents and for
how long. The final TPP deal did not include the 12 years of biologics market exclusivity that U.S. negotiators and the
Pharmaceuticals Research and Manufactures of America lobby had demanded—a period the Federal Trade Commission found
unjustifiably long and that exceeded the standard President Obama sought in three successive budget proposals. However, for at
least five years, the TPP would prevent regulatory authorities from authorizing the sale of the biologics equivalent of generics:
biosimilars. Regulatory approval of biosimilars would rely on a competitor’s safety and efficacy data even if a biologic drug were not
under patent. This would raise prices and limit access to such medicines for people in all TPP countries. ∂ Third, stronger IP
rights are not the only TPP measures that privilege Big Pharma over the public interest. The
agreement places constraints on the ability of national health care authorities and programs to
develop lists, or “formularies,” of preferred treatments that qualify for reimbursements based
on evidence of their therapeutic efficacy. TPP would give drug and medical device companies
new rights to influence the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services’ decisions on what to
include in such lists. Health authorities will be required to duly consider not only therapeutic
value but the “operation of competitive markets” in deciding which treatments to cover,
regardless of whether better or more cost-effective treatments are available. This leaves open
the door for slick marketing to create demand for a product, even if it is not medically
efficacious. Indeed, the whole purpose of formularies is to limit the market power of the drug
companies and ensure that the government pays for the most effective and cost-effective
treatments.∂ Finally, with health as with other areas of concern, TPP’s problematic investment
chapter opens a new, broad range of public policies to challenge from foreign investors. Under
TPP, investors can demand cash rewards if they think government actions violate the new
investor rights granted by TPP and diminish their expected profits. Intellectual property rights
and government “authorizations” are explicitly listed among the “covered investments,”
meaning pharmaceutical firms could use investment disputes to attack national health
authorities’ formulary decisions and slow regulatory approvals of medicines.

TPP gives Big Pharma the right to sue governments attempting to regulate the
price of medicine, ensuring the linkage of healthcare to capital.
Doctors Without Borders 2012 [“Trading Away Health: How the U.S.’s Intellectual Property Demands for the
Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement Threaten Access to Medicines,” http://www.doctorswithoutborders.org/sites/usa/files/TPP-
Issue-Brief-IAC-2012.pdf]

The leaked TPP investment chapter contains provisions that would give private corporations the
right to sue governments if the regulatory environment negatively affects their “investments,”
including expected profits. The definition given to ‘investment’ in the TPP encompasses
intangible investments, including intellectual property.35 Granting companies these rights could
therefore undermine TPP governments’ ability to issue regulations to protect public health and
promote access to medicines, and expose them to lawsuits from corporations that claim their IP
rights are being infringed upon by government action. This could happen if, for example, a
government decided to regulate drug prices. A company could then claim that the government’s
action negatively impacts their ‘investment’ in the country. To resolve disputes, the TPP proposal
creates extra-judicial international investor-state tribunals that bypass national judicial systems
and even WTO-based dispute settlement mechanisms, can override national laws and issue
penalties for failure to comply with its rulings, and that make decisions via closed-door
processes that are usually unappealable. Example: Challenging Public Interest Regulations
Through Investor-to-State Arbitration Investor-state tribunals have proven to be extremely
problematic, undermining legislative, administrative, and judicial decisions to protect other
public health issues. The tobacco company Philip Morris is currently capitalizing on investment
rules in trade deals to sue Uruguay and Australia for introducing packaging laws banning
branding on cigarette packaging as part of their public health campaigns against smoking. Philip
Morris claims that by ensuring that public health warnings are included on cigarette packaging
and removing branding from cigarette packaging, governments are infringing on the tobacco
company’s trademark and investment rights.

TPP sets the stage for Big Pharma “evergreening” or the indefinite extension of
patent rights for medicine, plants, animals, diagnostic and therapeutic
procedures and surgical methods, which uniquely puts pro-bono health care
practitioners at risk for lawsuit. The empirical result has been an 8 to 12-fold
increase in the cost of life-saving medicine.
Doctors Without Borders 2012 [“Trading Away Health: How the U.S.’s Intellectual Property Demands for the
Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement Threaten Access to Medicines,” http://www.doctorswithoutborders.org/sites/usa/files/TPP-
Issue-Brief-IAC-2012.pdf]

Existing Flexibility: The TRIPS agreement includes important flexibilities for governments to decide what type of pharmaceutical
products deserve to be protected by patents in a given country. Essential requirements such as ‘novelty,’ ‘inventive step,’ and
‘industrial applicability’ can be defined by lawmakers in different countries so they are appropriate within the context of national
circumstances (i.e., public health needs). The TRIPS agreement allows countries to set their own
patentability standards, and therefore developing countries like India, Philippines and Argentina have started defining
grounds for rejecting a patent, for instance if the pharmaceutical substance claimed is just a new
form of a known substance. This flexibility is important because it allows governments to
prohibit so-called “evergreening," which enables pharmaceutical companies to extend the
patent life and monopoly protection of old drugs simply by making minor modifications to
existing formulations or dosages, without necessarily increasing the therapeutic efficacy for
patients, or by identifying a new therapeutic use for an existing medicine . What the U.S. Wants: The
U.S. is seeking to erode this flexibility by requesting that TPP countries introduce new rules that
would severely limit the ability of each country to define what is ‘patentable .’ For example, the USTR
proposal for the TPP requests the patenting of a “new form, use or method of using” and “new
formulations” of an existing product – even if there is no increase in efficacy – a provision that
enables the practice of evergreening.21 In addition, the U.S. seeks to require that plants and
animals be patentable, as well as diagnostic, therapeutic, and surgical methods for the
treatment of humans or animals .22 The TRIPS Agreement explicitly allows governments to exclude these inventions
from patent protection. This provision goes beyond even what U.S. law allows, which exempts practicing surgeons from patent
liability23 and may preclude the patentability of some diagnostic methods. Impact on Access to Medicines: Evergreening
significantly affects access to medicines by allowing pharmaceutical companies to extend patent
monopolies, potentially keep prices high indefinitely, and delay the arrival of more affordable
generic medicines into the market. The patentability of surgical methods without an exemption
for practicing surgeons is especially relevant for MSF because it can raise doctors’ liabilities if
they are found to infringe a patent during the practice of a medical operation . This is the first time that
the U.S. has included requirements to patent surgical methods in a trade agreement with developing countries. Examples: How
Expanding the Scope of Patentability Impacts Access to Medicines Cancer patent application rejected In2006, the Indian
patent office rejected Novartis' patent application for a life-saving anti-cancer drug imatinib mesylate
on the grounds that the application claims a ‘new form of a known substance ’ (Novartis’ patent
application was related to a particular crystal form of the salt of imatinib mesylate). This opened up generic
competition, bringing down prices from over US $2,400 per patient per year (ppy) to US $200 ppy.
Novartis appealed the decision and the case is currently pending an Indian Supreme Court hearing. The U.S.’s proposed IP
provisions in the TPP would have forbidden India to reject the patent and allowed Novartis to
continue evergreening its old drug. HIV drug more expensive due to evergreening GSK's original patents for
Abacavir (ABC), ananti-retroviral, expired in 2009 and 2010, but the company has been able to extend
its monopoly in many countries, including in developing countries, by filing for additional patents covering
new formulations of the same drug. In Malaysia, where GSK has been granted numerous patents
for ABC, including for the “salt form” and pediatric variations of the drug, the public sector pays more than US
$1,200 ppy for pediatric ABC, more than 8 times the price of the generic version in other
countries, which sells for as low as US $139 ppy .

Data exclusivity only spurs innovations in Big Pharma profit-maximization, not

healthcare
Kilic and Pine 2015 [Burcu, Professor of International and Comparative Patent Law and Policy at Queen Mary, University
of London, Courtney, J.D. from Elon University, 2015-2016 president of the Intellectual Property Society at Elon Law, “Decision Time
On Biologics Exclusivity: Eight Years Is No Compromise,” http://www.ip-watch.org/2015/07/27/decision-time-on-biologics-
exclusivity-eight-years-is-no-compromise/#_ftn1]
Eight years of exclusivity would keep biologic medicines out of the hands of many who need
them. Prices frequently exceed $100,000.[17] In the United States, for patients with insurance, biologic
medications are often classified as “specialty” medications, and often the consumer is forced to
pay upwards of 20-30 percent of the cost of the medication .[18] According to AARP, which has taken a public
stance against long terms of exclusivity, shortening the period of exclusivity in the US would be “a critical
element of any comprehensive effort to contain healthcare costs,” since “biosimilars [are priced]
40 percent lower than their brand-name counterparts.[19] Locking eight years of exclusivity (even
it is shorter than 12 years) into the TPP would still prevent adequate reforms in the US, and force other
TPP countries with less resources to adopt a policy that a rich country like the US can scarcely
afford. In other TPP countries, like Vietnam, where pharmaceutical procurement accounts for half of
overall health spending, this could spell disaster for patients and government payers .[20]
The cost of extended exclusivity is not only monetary. Extended monopolies can threaten
innovation, which relies on prior knowledge, with progress measured by the next innovation,
not the last.[21] Therefore, policies that lengthen the time of exclusivity may actually reduce the
pace of innovation because it stifles discovery of new or improved biologic treatments .[22] Kenneth
Arrow, a Nobel laureate in economics, has argued that “the incentive to invent is less under
monopolistic than under competitive conditions” reaching the conclusion that monopolists
don’t innovate.[23]
 Human Rights
The TPP is an extension of the U.S.’s pursuit of human rights through trade,
intertwining global capital with the universal figure of the human subject
The White House 2015 [“ADVANCING HUMAN RIGHTS THROUGH THE TRANS-PACIFIC
PARTNERSHIP,”
https://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/docs/tpp_and_human_rights_factsheet.pdf]

Trade policy should reflect not only our interests, but also our values. The Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) has provided the
Administration with significant opportunities to make progress on human rights issues . Both in the
agreement itself, as well as in our bilateral engagement, we are working through trade to ensure that people
everywhere are treated with dignity and respect. We are working on country-specific issues and
building on our human rights dialogues. We are also using TPP to support jobs, take on corruption, and improve living standards for workers and families at home and
abroad. Brunei. In high-level meetings with senior Bruneian government officials, we have made it clear that protecting human rights – including the rights of LGBT individuals – is a core American value. We have
begun to see some progress. In March, Brunei informed the United Nations of its intention to sign the United Nations Convention Against Torture (UNCAT). We are also continuing to engage Brunei on other steps
it can take to demonstrate that the implementation of its penal code will conform to universally recognized human rights and fundamental freedoms. Malaysia. We have sustained extensive engagement with the
Malaysian government and stakeholders in the international community to fight trafficking in persons. In Malaysia, human trafficking often takes the form of foreign workers subjected to forced labor, with some
in situations of debt bondage. TPP is on track to require signatory countries to address forced labor through enforceable labor provisions. Further, we are working with Malaysia to encourage specific actions to

prevent trafficking, protect victims, and prosecute and convict traffickers and overall help ensure that Malaysia can meet this commitment. Vietnam. We are devoting substantial effort to advance the
cause of human rights in Vietnam. We have already seen some progress as a result of this engagement. While Vietnam’s human rights challenges remain serious, under the spotlight of the TPP debate, we have
seen progress – ratification of the UNCAT in 2014, political prisoner releases, and a commitment by the government to overhaul key laws to bring them into conformity with international standards. Included in the
legal reform agenda will be changes to Vietnam’s labor laws in order to bring them into compliance with international standards that are part of the TPP labor chapter. We have made clear to the Government of
Vietnam that taking constructive steps in this regard is an important element of our bilateral engagement. Human Rights Dialogues. We engage in regular consultations with TPP countries on human rights issues

and, as a result of TPP, are expanding our human rights dialogues in the region . Brunei recently agreed to begin regular bilateral
human rights consultations as part of our Senior Officials Dialogue. This is an important step, and will create a process through which we can regularly engage with Brunei on human rights issues, explore new
avenues of cooperation, and discuss additional positive steps. We also have an annual bilateral human rights dialogue with Vietnam, the most recent session of which was recently held in Hanoi.

This speculative idealization and regulation of humanity as bare life sets the
stage for unending intervention
BAUCOM 05’ (Ian Baucom, Ph.D., English, Yale University 1991 M.A., African
Studies, Yale University 1988 B.A., Political Science, Wake Forest University
Specters of the Atlantic: Finance Capital, Slavery, and the Philosophy of History,
p. 190-193)
Read alongside the examination of rights discourse in Hardt’s and Negri’s Empire, Homo Sacer suggests that over the course of
the past several centuries, rights
discourse has constituted bare life and the sovereign regulation of
bare life in two primary ways: via an internal (or biopolitical) regime of sovereign power and via an
external (or geopolitical) regime of sovereignty .33 For Agamben, the internal or biopolitical operation of rights-
based sovereignty is primarily characteristic of the domestic functioning of the modern nation-state and arises the moment a
state accords to itself what Foucault called the “care” of life.34 Taking
the care of life (as life) into its own hands,
the state thus potentially (and actually) affords itself the power to regulate, evaluate, normalize,
produce, or end the life of both its citizens and its resident aliens , that is, both those it nominally
represents and all those others present before (or within) it. The external or geopolitical corollary to this
constitutional power arises the moment a state or extrastate body gives itself the responsibility
to care, globally, for bare human life and so potentially (and actually) affords itself the legal
prerogative to exceed its domestic boundaries and suspend the normal operation of
international law in the name of defending such abandoned life (which the state or extrastate
body thus renders legally present to itself but takes on no corresponding obligation to
represent). For Agamben (now following Arendt’s lead as much as Foucault’s), such internal and external exercises of
sovereignty have repeatedly revealed the grimmer side of rights-based discourse whenever a state body has linked the
possession of rights to the figure of the citizen. This is not only because by linking rights to the citizen the state thereby also strips
the noncitizen of rights (hence the haunting figure of the refugee) or awards itself the power to strip a subject of rights by
stripping him or her of citizenship (hence the paradigmatic figure of the German Jews), but because by linking bare life to rights to
citizenship, the state (or other sovereign body) causes even those who are citizens, even those both present before the law and
represented by it, to stand before the law as a type of bare life (zoe) only accidentally imbued with signature political
characteristics (bios) which the state might at any moment no longer oblige itself to recognize .
The more fully it is
globalized and the more fully it is linked to a global humanity , therefore, the more fully a discourse
of rights renders everyone, citizen and noncitizen alike, bare life—whether actually or potentially so. But if this is the
case, then once again, Agamben’s history (of sovereignty, bare life, rights, and the witness) remains crucially incomplete. The
problem of citizenship may well reveal much regarding the inner workings and perils of rights-based discourse, and a genealogy of
modern sovereignty that runs from the French Revolution to the Holocaust may be essential, but it is also partial. While the latter
fails to recognize that for the bulk of its modern history the Western state has been not only national but imperial, the former
fails to acknowledge that over that same time period the haunting opposite (and double) of the citizen has been both the
domestic interloper (the refugee, the Jew) and the extradomestic alien captured by the imperial state (the colonial subject, the
slave). There has been a great deal of work in recent decades on European colonialism and modern state power that valuably
complicates and expands the sort of analysis Agamben provides.35 My interest here is with the other history Agamben neglects
but without which his account, however productive, also remains excessively partial. I do not mean to suggest that slavery is
uniquely original to a modern discourse on rights and a Euromodern politics of witnessing, the genealogical source of
modern sovereignty, or modernity’s first scene of bare life abandoned, but, instead, that all of these things (above all that
practice of witness that is my chief subject here) have taken on much of their dominant modern form (that
is, their imperio-occidental form) in relation to slavery. Which also means that like the figure of
the colonial subject, the refugee, or the Jew, the figure of the slave (as an embodied type of
bare life) has also recurrently produced and splintered the politics of witness and the politics of
human rights, and that that figure has been —crucially if not exclusively— organizational to the two major
political forms whose longtwentieth-century history I am attempting to outline: the cosmopolitan interestedness I associate with
witnessing and the liberal cosmopolitanism that characterizes the politics of human rights . To take only
the example of the Anglo-Atlantic world (as I do here), it seems clear that an archive of melancholy witness of the sort
exemplified by Granville Sharp’s testament and the other texts I will be discussing serially contests not only the legitimacy of
slavery itself but recurrently competes for an oppositional property in the fate of the slave (and hence, by its own terms, in the
fate of humanity) with a liberal, cosmopolitan, and rightsbased discourse on slavery and humanity whose eighteenth- and
nineteenth-century paradigm was the trans-Atlantic abolitionist movement, and whose late-twentieth- and twenty-first-century
incarnations are manifest in the range of global human rights movements of the sort exemplified by the 2001 Durban World
Conference against Racism. Let me be clear. I am not thereby indicating that slavery and abolition (or
contemporary human rights movements) are the same thing. Offered a choice between the two
the choice is clear. What I am suggesting is that the choice itself is meaningfully false, that it
both obscures the fact that this is not the only choice available to us (suggesting, as it does, that
liberalism is the only alternative to the grim alliance of race terror, global capital, and modern
state and parastate power) and conceals the twin epistemological grounding of rights discourse
and sovereign reason in a speculative idealization and regulation of humanity as bare life. The
trouble with human rights discourse is not that it fails to indict sovereign violence but that its
language of indictment, its grammar of human understanding, is borrowed from (and implies
the universal unquestionability of) the epistemological register and human understanding on
which both democratic and totalitarian forms of sovereignty draw . Indeed, as Hardt and Negri argue, and
as the recent justification of the conquest of Iraq as a human rights war would seem to indicate,
we appear to be inhabiting a moment in which humanity (channeled through the language of
human rights) is on the point of becoming the articulated principle for the constitution of an
entirely global sovereign power. I part company with Hardt and Negri (and join Agamben, while also offering my
revisions to his account) in arguing, however, that this moment is not in fact recent but long, repeating, and
intensifying (formally commensurate, that is, with the repeating, intensifying, long twentieth century whose nonsynchronous
period contours I have sketched). By my reckoning, this moment dates back over two centuries. And one of
its moments of beginning is in the late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century history of
circum-Atlantic slavery, which both saw the still most massive ever constitution of an entire
class of raced persons as exceptional subjects of the law and revealed, in the name of an
opposition to slavery, a militarization of human rights discourse whose effect was to
demonstrate and expand the global sovereignty of a hegemonic world state. I am speaking,
now, of the British state, whose post-1819 determination to blockade the West African slave
factories of its European rivals and to interdict their slave ships seamlessly linked Enlightenment
human rights discourse to the project of securing the British navy’s maritime sovereignty and
the British economy’s global hegemony.
 Micro-Finance
Specifically, the TPP promotes microfinance
Hope 5/25/2016 [Ashly, Strategic Policy Advisor for Australian Securities and Investments
Commission, Financial Services Sector Regulation Research Advisor for tralac, Former
Department Liaison Officer for the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister and Treasurer, Former
Policy Analyst for the Department of Treasury, Former Office Manager and Researcher at the
Australian Embassy in Beijing, “Financial services in the TPP and the interests of developing
countries,” http://www.tralac.org/discussions/article/9753-financial-services-in-the-tpp-and-
the-interests-of-developing-countries.html]

More interesting, however, is the policy space that Viet Nam preserves under its Section B
schedule, including allowing Viet Nam to: Take measures relating to the equitisation of state-owned banks and
restructuring of credit institutions; Grant advantages or rights to development finance institutions , co-
operatives, people’s credit funds and microfinance institutions; Impose a cap on the number, or restriction on the scope,
of pilots of new financial services; Adopt measures supporting a public purpose – such as income security, social welfare and small
and medium enterprise development; Adoption of any measures relating to the establishment, ownership and operation of
securities markets and related infrastructure; and Provide differential treatment to a foreign central securities depository with
respect to its interaction with the Vietnamese depository. These
reservations give Viet Nam significant space in
important policy areas, including enabling the careful facilitation of innovation and financial and
economic development through piloting financial services and the support of SMEs. They will
also enable Viet Nam to manage the transition from state-owned financial institutions as it sees fit
as well as enabling a cautious approach to still-new central clearing authorities and take an approach to securities markets that is in
Viet Nam’s interest. In a country with critical financial market infrastructure such as securities markets still in state hands, this is not
unexpected. Viet Nam provides a good example of where the particular circumstances of individual members have been
accommodated to support both enhancements in financial sector regulation and broader economic and social development. It is
by no means the only example – the TPP shows that with careful tailoring in the context of
overarching principles of free trade and good governance, agreements can be made that
accommodate diverse membership and support trade. This is particularly important in financial
services – a complex, risky area for regulatory relaxation that supports and facilitates so much
other trade and development.

The racialized figure of the subprime debtor underwrites this form of

financialized humanitarian development, existing as the necessary site for
obliteration and unending indebtedness that sutures the economic relation as
such. Microfinance is merely the new subprime frontier of millennial capital,
finding new colonial subjects to discipline through the financial instruments of
western neoliberalism.
Chakravartty and da Silva 2012 [Paula, Associate Professor at the Gallatin School and the
Department of Media, Culture and Communications of New York University, and Denise Ferreira,
Associate Professor at the Institute for Gender, Race, Sexuality, and Social Justice at the University of
British Columbia. Before joining UBC, she held the inaugural chair in Ethics, at the School of Business and
Management and the directorship of the Centre for Ethics and Politics, at Queen Mary University of
London, “Accumulation, Dispossession, and Debt: The Racial Logic of Global Capitalism—An Introduction,”
American Quarterly, Vol. 64, No. 3]

A
Houses are unsettling hybrid structures. A house is, in all its figurings, always thing, domain, and meaning—home, dwelling, and property; shelter, lodging, and equity; roof, protection, and aspiration—oikos, that is, house, household, and home.

house is a juridical-economic-moral entity that, as property, has material political and (as asset), (as dominium),

symbolic value. Houses refer to the three main axes of modern thought: the economic,
(as shelter) , as such,

the juridical, and the ethical, which are the registers of the modern subject. It is , as one would expect, , in fact,

impossible to exaggerate the significance of individual (private) property in representations of

modernity.1 No wonder, in Kindred, Octavia Butler chose to signal the end of Dana’s
incomprehensible task—her travels to antebellum Maryland to save her white ancestor, Rufus,
whenever his life was in danger—with her losing part of her arm stuck in the (at the “exact spot Rufus’s fingers had grasped”)

wall of her house. A “red impossible agony” marked the end of her forced journeys, reminding
Dana that whenever summoned by Rufus she could either kill him or let him die. Since her
charge was to keep him alive, the only choice she ever had was never hers to make. Having
made the choice, she finally realized that, as his descendant, she had a debt to Rufus, expressed
as the obligation to keep him alive. Failing to meet this obligation, killing him or letting him die,
tantamount to refusing the debt, and with it the relationship, as it did, would result in
punishment of the worst kind for Dana. Failing to pay a mortgage, the notorious subprime loan,
charged interest rates far in excess of those offered to “prime borrowers,” “high-risk
borrowers,” like Dana, also owe a debt that exceeds the legitimacy of both the law (contract)
and morality (obligation). References to law and morality prevail in condemnations of those , expectedly,

served with “subprime” loans, who are construed as intellectually and morally unfit if (illiterate) (greedy)

measured against any existing descriptors of the modern economic subject: the (liberal) rational
self-interested, the (historical-materialist) productive-creative laborer, and the (neoliberal)
obligation-bound debtor/creditor. The “immanent risk of foreclosure” and ultimately loss of
home for millions in the United States overwhelmingly affected Black and Latino/a borrowers
and communities. Lacking property and stocks passed down through generations and burdened
by greater reliance on consumer credit, Black and Latino/a borrowers were less able to weather
the sudden decline in home values .2 Foregrounding their predicament, the incomprehensible task of affording the consequences of not-paying what the lenders knew were unpayable debts allows
questions that challenge the assumption that the failure to meet an obligation should necessarily lead to punishment when the lender’s profits are secured by betting and spreading the risk globally, against the “high-risk” borrower.3 In considering the unpayable
debts as a trigger for the current financial crisis, this special issue highlights the racial and colonial logic of global capitalism. Since the late 1980s and early 1990s, Ulrich Beck, Anthony Giddens, Roland Robertson, and other early theorists of globalization have called
attention to the significance of risk.4 Few of these scholars, however, anticipated that racial/ cultural difference, as an element of representation, would enter into risk calculations in the ways it did during the boom phase of the housing market. Moreover,

unregulated flows of capital are engendering a

subsequent research on the “circulation of risk,” shifting the analytic focus away from the postindustrial North, revealed that “

turbulence that is undermining the lives of even peoples who inhabit territories incomparably
distant and different from the landscapes of metropolitan capital. ”5 Nor did this scholarship anticipate that the state—the nation-state most theorists
saw disappearing, engulfed by a global political entity to come—would play such a pivotal role in creating the institutional conditions to test these risk calculations. Given the public outrage against the unjust “socialization of loss” extracted by investment banks, it is

Why should the holders of the

difficult to see the bailout of Wall Street as anything other than a massive debt forgiveness scheme for those at the “top of the guilt [profit] hierarchy” for the current crisis.6 then

“subprime mortgage” pay the exorbitant interest rates attached to their loans? Why should the
economically dispossessed be expected to take on the risk assumed by those who, enabled by
the privatization of public housing and the deregulation of financial markets, bet against them?
Why should they pay for those who bet on the “truth” of prevailing constructions of Blacks’ and
Latino/as’ racial (moral and intellectual) traits, on the certainty that they lack in
“creditworthiness” and are “untrustworthy” debtors? Questioning and challenging the moral grammar of neoliberal debt management can be traced back to civil
disobedience and calls for a “debt jubilee” for structurally adjusted Africa a decade before the current crisis, and were foreshadowed in Argentina’s unprecedented sovereign default in 2001 paving the way for the “unthinkable” possible exit of Greece from the
eurozone in 2012.7 “Millennial capitalism,” where wealth is generated “purely through exchange . . . as if entirely independent of human manufacture,” has unleashed debtors’ revolts in many forms.8 In the global South, the last three decades have seen an upsurge
of what the anthropologist Janet Roitman has called “fiscal disobedience,” from food and price riots, tax revolts, boycotts, farmer suicides and protests, organized and spontaneous opposition to high-interest microfinance loans—which set powerful precedents for
the kinds of anti-austerity uprisings and movements that we see in Europe and North America today.9 This special issue reads the subprime crisis as a “relative” of crises that transformed the political economic horizons of Africa, Asia, and Latin America in the 1980s
and 1990s. We hope to highlight these resonances approximating national and global responses to the logic of neoliberalism to profit from calculated “mistakes” (like lending money to persons and nations precisely because they would not be able to pay it back) and
read the subprime crisis through a dual lens of race and empire. American studies as a field has housed scholars interested in the relationship between the architectures of U.S. Empire and the apparatuses of social (racial-ethnic, class, and gender-sexual)
subjugation.10 The global financial crisis cannot but compel us to further this exploration. In putting together this special issue, we posed the following question: How could the predatory targeting of economically dispossessed communities and the subsequent
bailout of the nation’s largest investment banks, instantly and volubly, be recast as a problem caused by the racial other (“illegal immigrants” and “state-dependent minorities”)?11 Beyond the immediate politics of blame, our interest is in situating the racial moment

these recent histories are

of the financial crisis in the last three decades of neoliberal backlash waged across the postcolonial (global) South. As a starting point for our discussion we assume that

themselves embedded in the colonial and racial matrix of capitalist accumulation of land
(conquest and settlement), exploitation of labor (slavery, indentured labor, forced migration),
appropriation of resources, and ultimately the very meaning of debt in the what Walter Mignolo calls

“modern/colonial world system this unpayable debt marks the .”12 We begin to frame an answer to our question by considering how

particular operation of postcolonial/racial subjugation that shows how the state continues to , one

play a crucial role ensuring the health of global capitalism the term subprime . In this sense, we argue that

mortgage has become a racial signifier in the current debate about the causes and fixes for a
capitalism in crisis microfinance loans “targeting” poor women in
. Here, our argument resonates with Ananya Roy’s compelling point that

remote villages and urban peripheries are the “new subprime frontier of millennial capitalism.”
As with high-risk mortgages, these are “instruments of financial inclusion and instances of
exploitative predatory, lending , even the “subprime marks the limits of the .” For Roy, the contradictory premise is that

democratization of capital, the tenuous promise of a “pro-market pro-poor” fix to the

” in this case

problem of unequal neoliberal development we read the “subprime” as a .13 Similarly,

racial/postcolonial, moral and economic referent, which resolves past and present modalities
and moments of economic expropriation into natural attributes of the “others of Europe we .” With this,

seek to dissolve the subprime signifier of 2008 as the latest in a succession of historic processes
of what David Harvey identifies as “accumulation by dispossession .”14 Naming the global crisis the “subprime crisis,” the dominant voices across the

the subprime crisis

U.S. media did more than merely reproduce the conservative mantra that blames Blacks and Latino/a immigrants for all the evils that befall the nation. In the remainder of the introduction, we highlight how

facilitated this exacting of profits from places and persons produced as unsuitable economic
subjects conquest and slavery, along with the postcolonial apparatus of raciality,
. We do so by shifting the focus on to how

produce places and persons marked by a debt that—like Dana’s to her slave-owner ancestor—
cannot be settled even with death . In the next section, we foreground a racial/postcolonial analysis of the crisis in relation to a brief overview of the works of two critical scholars: David Harvey and David
Graeber. Framing the discussion of the subprime crisis in terms of how it represents a moment of racial/colonial—that is, postcolonial— subjugation characteristic of a new configuration of the state/empire and market axis, the second section of the introduction
provides a historical overview of the current moment of crisis. In the final section, we show how the essays assembled in the special issue interrogate the “official story” of the crisis across three interrelated dimensions. The first set of essays locates the current
moment of crisis both temporally and spatially, drawing connections to previous moments of debt, austerity, and resistance in response to U.S.-led neoliberal transformations both at “home” and abroad. Reading literary and media texts, the second set of essays
targets more directly the political-symbolic (discursive, ideological, and cultural) realms, and describes how the naming of the crisis “subprime” refigures old and new mechanisms of writing of the racial subaltern as naturally (morally and intellectually) unable to

economically dispossessed Blacks and

thrive in the modern capitalist configurations built by Europeans and their descendants everywhere. Finally, the third set of essays focuses on how

Latino/as, living in urban United States, now exist in a racial architecture in which postracial
discourse and neoliberal practices combine to exact even more profit from the very penury
resulting from the expropriation unleashed in previous moments and modalities of racial and
colonial subjugation . Dispossession and Debt: The Racial Logic of Global Financial Capitalism In his account of the global financial crisis, The Enigma of Capital, David Harvey recalls that the early wave of foreclosures did not cause
much alarm because “the people affected were low income, mainly African American and immigrant (Hispanics) or women single-headed households.”15 Panic began to spread when foreclosures hit “white middle-class” households in 2007, and it was only in
September 2008 when Lehman Brothers declared bankruptcy that the crisis became official, its demise caused by “the mountain of ‘toxic’ mortgage-backed securities held by banks or marketed to unsuspecting investors all around the world. Everyone had acted as if
property prices could rise forever.”16 Many of the essays assembled in this special issue draw from Harvey’s generative concept of “accumulation by dispossession” to describe the workings of contemporary U.S. capitalist empire. Here we are engaging with Harvey’s
arguments because of its significance in current critiques of race and empire. However, when designing this introduction, and considering the contributions as a unified intervention in both American studies and critical racial and ethnic studies, we were left with a
question: if, as scholars in these fields recognize, colonial, racial and imperial modalities of power include very efficient mechanisms of expropriation (of land, resources, and labor) what is left to be dispossessed in this new moment of (accumulation by)
dispossession? How is it that they are rendered expropriatable anew? In The New Imperialism Harvey provides a gripping analysis of the world after 9/11, where the combined wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, he argues, mark a new phase of U.S. imperial domination.
For Harvey, “accumulation by dispossession” describes this new imperial moment, where primitive accumulation (forced extraction and privatization of the commons) has become a more dominant feature of neoliberal globalization as opposed to expanded
reproduction (economic growth where workers are incorporated as consumers). He argues that in addition to the “appropriation and cooptation of pre-existing cultural and social achievements as well as confrontation of supersession,”17 “primitive accumulation”
and its new guise “accumulation by dispossession” are contingent on the (state-sanctioned) use of force with the effect of reconstituting the power of global elites against the diminished capacity of organized labor worldwide. Drawing on Hannah Arendt’s liberal
critique of imperialism, Harvey argues that the very constitution of neoliberal globalization can be seen as a process of acquisition of “new territories”—either through national or regional financial crises. Explaining the current crisis in The Enigma of Capital, Harvey
points to the squeezing of variable capital (wages) for the vast majority of U.S. workers: “Household debt skyrocketed, but this required that financial institutions both support and promote the debts of working people whose earnings were not increasing. This

started with the steadily employed population. [By the late 1990s, the] market had to be extended to those with lower incomes. . . . Financial institutions, awash with credit, began to debtfinance people who had no steady income.”18 Returning
once again to Dana’s predicament , the essays in this issue ask the question that Harvey does not even consider, one that he also seems to see as already asked and answered by the subprime mortgages

what is it about blackness and Latinidad that turns one’s house (roof,
themselves and their securitization, which is:

protection, and aspiration) and shelter into a death trap? A brief discussion of the anarchist anthropologist David Graeber’s alternative history, Debt: The First 5,000
Years, can unpack this question. In this much-lauded book, Graeber offers an alternative account of economic history, returning exchange to the core of the critique of capitalism.19 Having a historical trajectory that precedes the advent of money, he argues that
three “modalities of behavior” have existed to different degrees in all societies across time: communism, exchange, and hierarchy. In Graeber’s reading, Blacks and Latino/as might have been so “naturally” blamed for the crisis because of their unrootedness, by the
fact that as racial subalterns they are but strangers. Regarding prevailing accounts of human collectives and human relationships, Graeber’s argument extends familiar accounts of human relationships—including Robert E. Park’s definition of “race relations” as the
kind that develop between strangers.20 What he does add to these discussions is an argument that ties violence and monetization; only with the advent of money do all earlier forms of obligation become quantifiably precise debt. Graeber’s argument is relevant
here because this assemblage of essays and Graeber’s book have something to contribute to one another. That something seems crucial to the subprime enigma. For the colonial, following his logic, marks Blacks and Latino/as as unrooted—they exist in an

How could anyone

impersonal social context from which they originate and from which their very presence produces. Instead of taking this fact for granted, we see the authors in our volume engaging the following question:

expect to profit from unpayable loans without debtors who were already marked by their
racial/cultural difference ensuring that at least some among them would not be able to pay?
This is precisely what makes “high-risk” securities profitable. The Black and Latino/a holders of
subprime loans, like Dana, owe incomprehensible and unpayable monetary debts precisely
because they are not constructed as referents of either the relationship between persons
presumed in commerce (which precedes all other economic circumstances) or the Graeber states
capacity that according to Karl Marx ultimately determines their value of exchange (the
productivity which Locke Ricardo, and Marx agreed elevated the human thing). Here
John , David

raciality, the onto-epistemological toolbox that has transmutated the spatial “others of Europe”
into historical “others of whiteness,” seizes and undermines any possible relationship by
establishing that the white/European alone is superior because he alone knows
transcendentality.21 Raciality, as it places the “others of Europe” before the horizon of death,22
disappears with the very possibility of a relationship that would make a debt/credit situation
comprehensible and hence the debt something that could be eventually paid precisely because
of how it makes the colonial other and their descendants as lacking the moral attributes
(African and Indigenous)

characteristic of persons and places

(self-determination, selftransparency, and self-productivity) that truly embody the traits (the ones they originate from)

that distinguish the proper economic subject .23 What we suggest is missing in the preceding discussions of accumulation/ dispossession and debt is the consideration of how these “new
territories” of consumption and investment have been mapped onto previous racial and colonial (imperial) discourses and practices. If we go back to C. L. R. James’s Black Jacobins, Cedric Robinson’s Black Marxism, and Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth, to
name only three classic anticolonial, racial, and global interrogations of historical materialism, we are reminded of how historical materialism alone cannot account for the ways in which capitalism has lived off—always backed by the colonial and national state’s
means of death—of colonial/racial expropriation.24 As Manu Goswami writes in her critique of both historical materialism and the “excision” of “socioeconomic coordinates from colonialism” in postmodern theory, we must look at the “tangled causal relationships”
of the lived experiences of the colonial space and the “expansive logic of capital.”25 Contesting the “evolutionary assumptions” that guide Harvey’s theories (“Flexible accumulation follows Fordist production as barbarism follows savagery”), Anna Tsing proposes
instead the notion of “spectacular accumulation,” which “occurs when investors speculate on a product that may or not exist.”26 This could mean biotechnology or real estate, but her point is that it could also take us back to the “South Sea bubble and every gold
rush in history.”27 Returning to how the subprime crisis allows us to highlight links otherwise missed by prevailing accounts of racial subjugation, we draw on Roy’s argument that microfinance (subprime) loans targeting poor women in the global South are part of a
“frontier of empire.” Roy traces the travel of microfinance mediated by a “kinder and gentler World Bank” from Bangladesh to Afghanistan and throughout the Middle East: “As microfinance is a preferred weapon of mass salvation, so the Middle East is the site at
which the war on terror and the war on poverty are conjoined.”28 This evokes a kind of space of death Achille Mbembe describes as distinctive of the postcolony.29 In short, the essays in this issue add to the library of postcolonial and critical racial theories of the
state that establish how neoliberal architectures and discourses of dispossession act on earlier forms of racial and colonial subjugation. Building on this challenge, we come back to the question of how to theorize racial/ postcolonial subjugation and economic
exploitation in the context of the current financial crisis.30 The concept of differential inclusion seeks to attend to the degrees in which the various racial subaltern collectives enter into the U.S. racial configuration,31 but cannot help explain why Blacks and Latino/as
figure as highly profitable as aberrant economic subjects in the very articulation of postracial claims of achieved equality. Race in the naturalized ways U.S. Americans deploy the term cannot be the privileged and sole critical descriptor of the variety of ways in which
the racial/colonial logic of displacement, dispossession, debt, and death have visited the “others of Europe,” as conquered/ colonized natives, enslaved Africans, Asian indentured laborers, and so on. The common usage of the term assumes that race as a social
operator enables and protects white privilege against every other nonwhite collective. In the case of the subprime crisis, this might mean that because Asian home owners were more protected than their Black and Latino/a counterparts, one could make the case
that class inequalities as opposed to race offer more explanatory insight. In fact, scholarly and popular writing about inequality in the United States today and its social consequences by both liberal scholars like Theda Skocpol and neoconservative provocateurs like
Charles Murray of Bell Curve infamy make exactly this argument.32 As with other improper economic subjects, the excess value the Black and Latino/a subprime mortgage holder refers to their ontological deficiency, or as G. W. F. Hegel describes Africa, for being a
thing.33 How raciality disappears with that relationship and the capacity that substantiates it can be understood only if one attends to two other aspects of the modern subject—which both raciality and historicity attribute to persons and places to determine their
legitimacy as juridical, economic, and ethical entities. Raciality thus produces the “other of Europe” as a being without self-determination. Both natural history and science of life take geographic and bodily traits as signifiers of mental (moral and intellectual)
characteristics, which register how universal reason has deployed its productive powers. For natural history, these correspondences were welcome as a moment of the very cataloguing that was knowledge itself, a knowledge that reiterated European/ white
superiority but had no concern with the “others of Europe” because it also established that they would not be able to thrive or survive outside their original environs. For the science of life the stakes were higher. In the post- Enlightenment era, once universality and
historicity became ethical descriptors of the properly human, then the task of justifying how rights such as life (security) and freedom had not been ensured for all human beings required that human difference—which could be registered only as mental difference—
become irresolvable.34 Expropriating or killing the native or the slave would not be morally tenable if they could claim the same self-productive (mental) capacity as conquerors, settlers, and masters. As Sylvia Wynter has described in her groundbreaking work, two
major epistemological and cosmological transmutations corresponding to Michel Foucault’s chronology of modern thought very effectively reconciled the foundational ethical turn within colonial history: from the secular (terrestrial) human that characterized the
Renaissance to the scientific (global) mapping of humanity in the nineteenth century. Raciality skillfully located the modern subject within the confines of Western Europe and its North American outpost.35 In turn, the proximity that is eradicated by monetization as
assumed in Graeber’s account of the emergence of debt/credit does not hold. As Wynter describes, the first question asked about the inhabitants of “discovered lands” was whether these were divine creatures, whether their nakedness marked the innocence of
proper subjects of the divine ruler or the wickedness of those who do not fear his name. After the “first encounter,” the recurrent question left to those with a scientific itch led to the following question: Given the fact that their heads (and other body parts) clearly
indicated their mental (intellectual and moral) inferiority, would their inferior traits contaminate the mixed offspring? And in the case of Brazil, whether they would aid the task of civilization by accelerating their (in this case the Blacks’) demise? Focusing on the
productive effects of the analytics of raciality allows us to shift the question from a consideration of how exclusion and differentiation contradict the modern ethical embrace of the universal. This allows us to see how racial and cultural differences have instead been

incomprehensible
deployed to reconcile a conception of the universal (as encapsulated by the notion of humanity) with a notion of the particular (of difference as marked in bodies and spaces). This discussion is meant to show how

(moral) obligations and unpayable (monetary) debts—such as Dana’s and those offered
subprime loans—expose a political-economic architecture that has always thrived on the
construction of modern subjects who lack mental (moral and intellectual) capacities the . In other words,

analytics of raciality allow us to see how, since the last third of the nineteenth century at least,
modern political-economic architectures—in Europe and in its colonies—have been
accompanied by a moral text, in which the principles of universality and historicity also sustain
the writing of the “others of Europe as entities facing certain and necessary ” (both a colonial and racial other) (self-inflicted)

obliteration. Just like this time around in the global financial capitalist casino, the house (the
cozy statefinancial capital home) cannot but always win because when betting on the other’s
(Black and Latino/a) inability to pay back its debts, it is betting on something it has itself brought
into being . Debt, Neoliberalism, and Crises In The Darker Nations, Vijay Prashad makes a polemic and persuasive case that debt played a central role in the “assassination of the Third World”; in fact, its “obituary” was written in New Delhi in 1983, at
the meeting of the Seventh Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) meeting. Prime Minister Indira Gandhi mediated between Fidel Castro’s address to delegates “about how the unfolding debt crisis portended the end of the Third World” and the promise of a technocratic
neoliberal future spelled out by S. Rajaratnam, Deputy Prime Minister of Singapore. Prashad writes of the growing consensus among “the more influential” NAM elites to resolve the debt crisis engulfing Latin America and Africa, who argued that “individual contracts
between the indebted state and its debtor should be the approach, rather than the totality of the Third World against their creditors.”36 We feel that it is useful to revisit the trajectory of neoliberalism beginning with the “assassination” of the anticolonial utopian
project, fully aware of its many internal flaws. Fields like American studies and cultural studies are well versed in critical research that has tracked how neoliberalism as a mode of government and a political rationality became hegemonic in the United States and the
United Kingdom in the 1980s and 1990s.37 It is, however, sometimes forgotten that it was Latin America—the Southern Cone countries including General Augusto Pinochet’s Chile in the 1970s—that became a “laboratory experiment” for Friedrich von Hayek, Milton
Friedman, and the “Chicago Boys” to carry out the first iterations of austerity that were adopted by the World Bank in the 1980s.38 By the early 1990s and under the presidency of George Walker Bush, the neoliberal program seemed well on its way to institute its

two simultaneous shifts

own worldwide version of Pax Americana in the guise of what Timothy Mitchell has termed “McJihad.”39 That peace could not begin to materialize, as the Cold War was followed by that

rendered the human a global (racial) signifier: first, the elevation of the human rights framework
into the new global ethical program, and second, the emergence of a new principle for
international relations, which allowed for the use of force to stop humanitarian crisis.40 Leading
both efforts, the United States, with its economic and military might, became the sole ruling
power advancing the cause of hegemony of financial capitalism. We can look back at this period as one where scholarly attention turned to much more
optimistic accounts of globalization, when very few would challenge the description of the U.S. performance in the global context as that of an empire.41
Far from being a novel phenomenon, the speculative epistemologies
underwriting this colonial humanism and the materiality of its global scope are
by secured by the transatlantic slave trade
BAUCOM 05’ (Ian Baucom, Ph.D., English, Yale University 1991 M.A., African
Studies, Yale University 1988 B.A., Political Science, Wake Forest University
Specters of the Atlantic: Finance Capital, Slavery, and the Philosophy of History,
p. 158-161)

The French Revolution, the terrifying categorical

Kant, of course, is by no means unique in arguing so.
imperative it articulates (the terror-secured demand it makes that the person of individualized,
particularized desires, wills, and purposes negate himself or herself under the abstract signs of
“Man,” the “Rights of Man,” and an anonymous, collective project of freedom), and the modern
subject that fashions itself by disinterestedly identifying itself with that terror, imperative, and
revolution, provide, as Žižek insists, the staples of a dominant philosophical tradition of accounting
for the origins of modern subjectivity. For that explanatory tradition, the shift from what Žižek designates the
individualized, pre-Enlightenment subject S to the sublimely self-negated or “barred” Kantian subject $ is inevitably negotiated by
the encounter with revolutionary terror and the abstract universal project of absolute freedom that terror exists to secure. But this,
as we have seen, is not the only way of accounting for that shift from S to $. Žižek and (on this issue) his surprising predecessor,
Edmund Burke, suggest another. And it is this other account which I believe can profitably complicate Spivak’s reading, provide us
with an alternate genealogy of the vanishing subject and so alter our account of how we get from there to here, how
eighteenthcentury finance capital and Nike’s responsibility page are trading in a common, centuries-long, economy of foreclosure,
how, in Benjamin’s terms, the now and the what-has-been might “come together in a flash to form a constellation.” The pertinent
passage is worth reciting: It would be of great theoretical interest to establish the conceptual link between this genesis of self-
consciousness and the modern notion of paper money…. In order to arrive at paper money as we know it today [the] deictic promise
with concrete dates and names has to be depersonalized into a promise made to the anonymous “bearer.”… And the subject who
came to recognize itself as this anonymous “bearer” is the very subject of self-consciousness… [a subject that] has to relate to itself,
to conceive of itself, as (to) an empty “bearer” and to perceive his empirical features which constitute the positive content of his
particular “person” as a contingent variable. This shift is again the very shift from S to $.23 I will not repeat my reading of this or of
the Burkean argument with which it is in such uncanny agreement. Suffice to say that both Žižek’s and Burke’s analyses
of
the correspondence between the speculative epistemologies of the eighteenth-century financial
and French revolutions and both their respective diagnoses of the origins of the modern subject
in a culture of speculation that finds its reciprocal and variant forms in the ideologies of abstract
reason and abstract value, permit us to bring the arguments I have been making to bear on
Spivak’s analysis of the long-durational and serial foreclosure or disclosure of the native
informant as a predicate need of the “great texts of the Atlantic tradition” and the imperial
civilizing mission. I suggested earlier that if something like a Benjaminian image of the Zong case were
not so much substituted for the Kantian image of the French Revolution as transposed onto that
image, the resultant dialectical image could function as a sign in which modernity finds itself
anticipated, demonstrated, and recollected . What I had in mind was precisely such a double image of origins of the
modern and the modern subject; precisely such a disclosure of the emergence of the foreclosed subject $ of modernity as a
predicate effect and need of the twin-andlinked speculative revolutions these twin-and-linked events bring to light. The
problem of the modern subject, as I have further argued, is not however only one of its origin
and rise but one of its spread, not only one of its emergence but one of its global reproduction.
Žižek’s brief comments ask us not simply to reveal how this subject $ originates but to indicate
how it becomes modernity’s typical mode of subjectivity, how it is universalized, how it travels
from the speculative zones of an original set of eighteenth-century metropolitan spaces-of-flow
and secures for itself, and for the modernity it indexes, an ever more global theater of address .
Kant’s answer is to link the universalization of this subject, and hence of both modernity and the promise of progress, to the
recurrent spectacle of the French Revolution, the event whose extrametropolitan dissemination he insists will secure that subjective
identification with a collective project of freedom on which a progressive and cosmopolitan modernity depends. Burke and Žižek
imply something else, suggesting that it
is not by remembering the French Revolution that humanity at
large will normalize itself as a homogeneous, interchangeable, typical collectivity, but that it is
through the global spread of another revolution coincident with and fundamental to that
revolution, through the global reproduction of a financial revolution first headquartered in
Europe’s metropolitan spaces-of-flow, that the speculative subject of modernity will become the
typical subject of the globe and that the modernity philosophically indexed to the existence of
this subject will progressively universalize itself . On this account, a global memory of the French
Revolution does not serve as a cosmopolitan modernity’s precondition. Rather, the global
circulation of paper money, the global implication of metropolitan and extrametropolitan
subjects in the massively co-lateralizing networks of finance capital, and the global extension of
this speculative revolution serve to secure the increasingly universal existence of a modernity
coterminous with what I have been calling the long twentieth century . Spivak’s account is of course not
inimical to this reading. Indeed, by the end of her text, finance capital has assumed the burden she earlier associated with the
imperial dissemination of the Kantian sublime. But there is less of a shift from the culturalist project of the
eighteenth- and nineteenth century imperial civilizing mission to the financializing project of
late-twentieth century capital than Spivak implies. If the two projects both act to foreclose
alterity, they do so not sequentially but simultaneously. Global finance capital does not belatedly
reassume the subject-forming, modernity distributing, Enlightenment project of empire, but
licenses and is licensed by that project from the very beginning.24 My mild Žižekian alteration to Spivak’s
account of the imperial foreclosure of extranormative identity is that if Spivak is correct to argue that empire
licenses its civilizing mission by refitting its subjects for the consumption of the Kantian sublime ,
then the sublime in question is simultaneously the Jacobinical and the speculative modes of the
sublime apposite to the French and financial revolutions of the eighteenth century. I do not ,
therefore, propose that the case of the Zong and Nike’s microloan program are identical
phenomena. They are not. Indeed, as I will suggest in concluding this section of the text, part of what is at stake in juxtaposing
these events in the way I have is the need to read the singularity of systemically related phenomena. Rather, as that
language of systemic relation implies, I am arguing that these late-eighteenth-century and late-
twentieth-century events are subtended by and script a common and long-durational cycle of
accumulation, speculation, and subjectification. The globalization increasingly identified as the
signature characteristic of our moment and regularly indexed to the spread of global finance
capital is, I am thus suggesting, less of “our moment” than we often think, as “our” moment is itself
less of “its” moment than we might assume . Indeed our time might, after all, best be understood in Bloch’s terms as
a nonsynchronous order of time, as a contemporaneity that is not contemporary with itself. If such reflections suggest that we might
valuably reperiodize our present (even as we reconsider our notions of periodicity), then one way to do so is to address the ways in
which weinhabit the tail end of a long twentieth century, a long contemporaneity stretching back
from this moment to the mid– and late eighteenth century, a modernity indexed to the global
production and reproduction of that speculative subject of abstract reason and abstract value
brought to light in the hearing held in Lord Mansfield’s courtroom and reilluminated by the
reapparition of Spivak’s native informant in Nike’s corner of hyperspace. If the 250-year history
of modern finance capital and its speculative epistemologies, subjectivities, and value forms
provide the basis for such a reperiodization, then that same history also implies a remapping of
our theaters of critical address—implies, moreover, that we need not await the advent of the
late twentieth century proper to discover a set of transnational and anational territories of flow
that have given and give shape to our world. The eighteenth- to late-twentieth-century Atlantic
cycle of capital accumulation examined here is one of these; its rise and spread are what the
case of the Zong and the announcement of Nike’s microloan program in their different but
related ways bring to light; its self-reproduction through the systematic foreclosure of alterity
and the systematic distribution of the speculative epistemologies, subjectivities, and value forms
of finance capital what they disclose.
 Finance Capital/Firmative Speculation
Firmative speculation predicts and exploits.
Commons 13 (Uncertain Commons, a group of scholars who participate in a range of
disciplines, including cultural studies, English, media studies, philosophy, Middle Eastern studies,
and South Asian studies. 2013. “Speculate This!”)

To think affirmative speculation, we begin with its opposite: the mode of firmative speculation
that produces potentialities and then exploits and thus forecloses them. The recursive formula
—produces, exploits, forecloses—underpins a constellation of firmative practices. But what
does it mean to “firm” the future? Often this securing takes the form of “expert knowledge” that
states, corporations, and supranational institutions present as facilitators of the public good. A
firmative speculation calculates, communicates the calculation, socializes us into that
interpretive rationality, and then globalizes instruments, techniques, protocols, and policies.
Moving across multileveled domains of speculative activity, we focus on these four functions:
calculation, communication, socialization, and globalization.

Firmative speculation prioritizes corporations and causes wealth inequality.

Commons 13 (Uncertain Commons, a group of scholars who participate in a range of
disciplines, including cultural studies, English, media studies, philosophy, Middle Eastern studies,
and South Asian studies. 2013. “Speculate This!”)
When the lack of confidence is small, the possibility of error can be dismissed—depending, of course, on the stakes. The higher the
stakes, the lower the acceptable range of errors. Fukushima has shaken confidence in probabilistic projections as the best protocol
for thinking about nuclear safety. Analysts note the absence of a separate tsunami-safety cooling system at the Fukushima Daiichi
plant built in 1967 in the Tohoku region; at that point the probability of a 3.1 meter tsunami was estimated from an earthquake
survey of 1965 after the 9.5 Chilean earthquake in 1960. [6] The question that concerns us here is one of calculating probabilities.
The Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) and its university collaborators downplayed data from paleotsunami research that
forecast possible massive tsunamis in the region. But this should not come as a surprise. There
are very few instances
where corporate interests do not trump public interest ; probabilistic thinking as a legitimate
objective calculus is readily put to cynical use in such situations. The debates around climate
change—the struggles over correct data, degree of complexity, estimates and levels of certitude
—reveal deeply invested contestations of future projections. Government agencies challenge
scientists; scientists refute each other’s findings; corporations obfuscate studies; think tanks and
journalists politicize alternative interpretations and scenarios . What is clear is that TEPCO is no anomaly. By
2002 the company had calculated a 5.7-meter average for the surface-wave magnitude of likely tsunamis in the Tohoku area, and it
gambled on this estimate for the next decade. [7] But contemporary seismological research was already moving away from
measuring surface-wave magnitudes to studying long period waves and measuring the “seismic moment.” A further problem lay in
the projection that a megaquake in the Tohoku area was at least a thousand years away; seismological agencies focused their
attention on the Tokai district, and not the Tohoku region, as the most vulnerable site. Here the logic of aggregation proved to be
the obstacle: when a situation is highly unique and with too small a probability to be classified within a group of instances similar to
one another, it often falls outside likely scenarios and estimates. Leaving aside the possibility of negligence, there was already low
concern about seismic activity in the Tohoku region. It is not that the infirmity was never a part of the calculus. Even Frank Knight,
while making the case for reasonable business speculation as critical to the healthy circulation of capital, insisted on the internal
limits to human comprehension. Humans are like animals after all, Knight argued, for despite our capacity for calculative rationality,
we remain at the mercy of “intricate physico-chemical complexes that make up organic systems.” [8] These organic forces, Knight
explained, provide an explanation for market volatility, always subject to the dynamism of its physical, chemical, and biological
environments. The solution for Knight lay in “professional speculators,” coteries of specialized experts who, while not intrinsically
superior in judgment or foresight, could pool and spread losses on behalf of industrialists. These professionals are now recognizable
in hedge fund managers, insurance agents, or financial analysts who advise customers to diversify their portfolios for any weather.
Risk has been spread: bundled, cut up, parceled—“tranched”—and rerouted through sophisticated financial instruments, until no
one could tell good from bad risks. Old familiar instruments such as mortgages, already an abstraction of the probable value of
property, are further abstracted into complicated derivatives. New information technologies facilitate the collection, storage, and
analysis of colossal data sets; they allow for formulas that reduce variations to remote, almost untenable, possibilities; they enable
the transcription of markets into everyday data streams available for lay investors—now visualized in shiny numerical ribbons, in
holograms and tables, in interactive models. This is the phantasmagoric playground for speculative living in the present. One comes
upon tickers not just at stock exchanges but also at home as news broadcasts stream financial data below the talking heads and
footage (CNBC was the first to institute these electronic tickers in 1989). Cultures of speculation burgeon in a technological
unconscious as connectivities improve and bandwidths materialize science-fiction fantasies of propinquity and speed. [9] The drone
of industrial production fades to invisible elsewheres made immaterial in the virtualized market as world picture. Concrete risk
recedes before spectacular abstraction. Firmative speculation produces probable states as calculable alternatives wrapped in
investment contracts (futures, options, swaps) and choices for individual portfolios. Such packaging forecloses alternative
possibilities in the interests of a precise rate of return. This kind of speculative blocking operates across all markets, not just in the
financial world. In the context of the thriving market for biologicals (plants, animals, and human tissues), a ready example of such
foreclosures is the case of the neem tree (Azadirachta indica). A tree indigenous to the South Asian subcontinent, all parts of the
plant (bark, twig, gum, oil) are put to common use, and therefore its potential value—fungicidal (for medicinal and cosmetic use),
gustatory (as cuisine), and antidesertification properties (for ecological use)—is seen to be a traditional commons. In 2005 the
European Patent Office revoked its granting of a patent to W. R. Grace, a company that sought to use all of neem’s fungicidal
properties as pesticide. Such patenting foreclosed all other possible values (for example, medicinal use for oral hygiene, leprosy,
intestinal worms, scabies, piles, urinary disorders), with the company claiming their laboratory enhancements to the plant extracts
added value to the fungicide. Here monetization firms one pathway of use, foreclosing multiple potentialities. Furthermore, in such
scenarios the industrial capture of capacities threatens the prized resource via its overuse and depletion. Arguing against the
enclosing of common resources, Vandana Shiva, the director of the Research Foundation for Science, Technology, and Ecology in
New Delhi, Magda Aelvoet, the president of the Green Party in the European Parliament, and the International Federation of
Organic Agriculture Movements (IFOAM) lodged a case against the patent office, highlighting the rampant biopiracy that transferred
biological wealth (plants and knowledge) from the commons in the Global South to a few corporations in the Global North. Seeking
to develop the particular use of a resource that promises maximum future remuneration, firmative speculation forecloses other
uses. Here speculationmakes an entire world (a point we develop below), metastasizing existing
geopolitical distributions of financial, technological, and legal power into the future. Such global
distributions of inequity fueled by speculative monetization are hardly surprising , argue
Marxist geographers, since speculative finance is geographically expansive in its reach. [10]
Surplus capital in search of new avenues invests in largescale housing, recreational, and
infrastructural projects all over the world, spurring land acquisition, legal and coercive, on an
unprecedented scale; the coming profits from these projects (the theme park, the new resort, the luxury
condo) are then sold as securities. Investors, financiers, and construction companies play the
futures market in the unfolding story of massive dispossession of those who made their living
from farms, forests, or waterways.

The epistemological protocols of finance capital gain their legs in the

transatlantic slave trade
BAUCOM 05’ (Ian Baucom, Ph.D., English, Yale University 1991 M.A., African
Studies, Yale University 1988 B.A., Political Science, Wake Forest University
Specters of the Atlantic: Finance Capital, Slavery, and the Philosophy of History,
p. 106-112)
If the eighteenth century manifests itself in crucial respects as the century of the typical and the
average; if the Zong trials reveal the moment in which that average finds itself and the
speculative epistemology it expresses legally enthroned as the obligatory value form of finance
capitalism; and if the Zong’s insurance contract thus fashions itself as an analogue of those
Parisian arcades that Benjamin found to concentrate within themselves the dominant capital
and epistemological protocols of their capital moment, then, as Weskett’s definition of the average makes
clear, the key to that contract, moment, mode of speculation, and speculative epistemology is
that procedure by which value detaches itself from the life of things and rearticulates itself in
the novelistic theater of the typicalizing imagination. And at the definitional heart of that
procedure (which is itself the very type of its typicalizing age) there is, Weskett’s text indicates, a typical set of events
from which an insurance culture derives its organizing protocols, a typical set of circumstances
from which the concept of the average is determined, a typical situation that reads like both a
description of and an invitation for the Zong massacre. There is another way of putting this. The typical
and the average, I have been arguing, are the primary categories within which finance capital and the
speculative culture apposite to the triumph of such a regime of abstract accumulation express
their operation. Finance capital and its culture of speculation finds itself at once secured and
articulated by that theory and practice of insurance that exists to reexpress the (after)lives of
persons and things not as themselves but as a suppositional, aggregate mode of being in the
world. Insurance thus underwrites the hegemony of the average and the typical. It secures
these, however, much as the law secures the abstract principles it exists to ensure: by defining for
itself a set of material precedents, typical cases from which (in full tautological casuistic form) to derive its
general principles of operation. In the late eighteenth century, as Weskett’s text indicates, all these
precedents from which an insurance culture derives its operative protocols are drawn from the
field of marine insurance. There is of course nothing surprising about this. Britain’s global hegemony from this
moment to the middle of the nineteenth century was an oceanic hegemony, its capitalism a
transmarine capitalism, and its speculative culture one secured, as the jingo cadences have it, by the
assurance that “Brittania rules the waves.” Ruling the waves, Britain also derived its rules of
sovereignty from its maritime hegemony, not just its naval dominance of the Atlantic,
Mediterranean, and Indian Oceans, but from the rules of commerce that made of these oceans
the primary territories of its regime of capital accumulation. Absent the flow of commodities
crisscrossing the trade routes of these marine expanses, Britain could not have maintained its
hegemony. Absent the development of a marine insurance industry, it could not have
established that hegemony. The British empire was built on its capital reorganization of the
globe. That capital organization demanded, however, that the particular investments of an
imperial merchant class be insured and that the value of the investments thus insured be
recognized as recuperable and real even in, or exactly in, the event of their loss. How? By defining, in
advance of any given risk commerce might run, a typical set of test cases which could be
appealed to (after the event of loss) as the source of a guarantee that what might have been lost
was not in fact lost but insured and, thus, that speculative investment in the practices of imperial
commerce could continue unabated. Marine insurance, unsurprisingly, supplied these precedents.
The concept of averaging (or general averaging) unified their principles of operation. And the principle
of the general average, in its turn, defined for itself a representative test case, a typical
precedent from which the entire exfoliated practice of recognizing the continued existence of
lost things and the real nature of speculative values depended. At the heart of what I have been
calling an Atlantic cycle of accumulation is finance capital. At the heart of finance capital is
insurance, particularly, in the eighteenth century, marine insurance. At the definitional heart of
marine insurance is the concept of the average. And at the heart of the average is a
representative test case which reads like an invitation to the Zong massacre: Whatever the master of a
ship in distress, with the advice of his officers and sailors, deliberately resolves to do, for the preservation of the whole, in cutting
away masts or cables, or in throwing goods overboard to lighten his vessel, which is what is meant by jettison or jetson, is, in all
places, permitted to be brought into a general, or gross average: in which all concerned in ship, freight, and cargo, are to bear an
equal or proportionable part of what was so sacrificed for the common good, and it must be made good by the insurers in such
proportions as they have underwrote.47 This is the first sentence of Weskett’s definition of the “general average,” the major of the
three types of averaging with which insurance concerns itself. The three types—all of whose protocols, like Weskett’s general theory
of insurance itself, assume marine insurance as their normative ground —are the “simple average,” which “consists in the
extraordinary expenses incurred” by a ship; the “petty average” which pertains to such minor affairs as harbor towing expenses, and
“general average” which pertains to “expenses incurred… for the preservation of the ship” and, as the most fundamental issue
addressed by the practice of averaging, those “damages sustained” by the ship or its cargo.48 The situation that Weskett envisions in
this introduction to the concept of the general average, the paradigmatic situation from which insurance practice deduces its full
range of valuing procedures, is identical to that with which he has earlier introduced the basic notion of the average and from which
he derives his account of its protocols: “Average and contribution are synonymous terms in marine cases and signify a proportioning
of a loss to the owners of goods thrown overboard in a storm…. [Its fuller definition] is as follows—Average means the accidents and
misfortunes which happen to ships and their cargoes, from the time of their lading and sailing, ‘till their return and unlading…. When
goods arrived damaged, the first thing requisite is, to find out the true quantum of the damage or loss, or the diminution in value
which they have sustained; and then to apportion that loss on what would have been the value of the goods if they had arrived safe
and undamaged.” 49 To speak of the average is thus to speak of insurance’s most complex work of valuation, as it is to speak of a
general damage or loss theory of value, of that full range of circumstances that might degrade a good’s thingly existence, without—if
it was insured—affecting its ultimate “value.”50 The average begins with damage or loss, computes the extent of loss, and then
substitutes, as a sort of prosthesis for what has been lost, the “what would have been.” Average
is then the word
insurance gives to that paradigmatic finance-culture procedure by which lost singulars find
themselves reexpressed as speculative but exchangeable typicals. And its paradigm, the “typical”
situation from which its protocols are deduced, is the Zong massacre —not to be sure as a unique event
but, precisely, as a type of event, a paradigm of that typical event that the theory of the average
establishes as its general precedent and test case . Such, certainly, was Collingwood’s determination when, in
October of the year that Weskett’s Digest was published, he called together his officers and crew, informed them that their ship was
in distress, its water and food supplies running out, and, having sought their advice, as he was obliged to do, “deliberately resolve[d]
… for the preservation of the whole…. [to throw] goods overboard” with the intention of justifying his acts under the law of jettison
and claiming average compensation for “what was so sacrificed” on the basis of “what would have been the value of the goods if
The Zong, then, was not an aberration, not some wildly exceptional
they had arrived safe and undamaged.”
event which could nevertheless, somehow, just barely, be encompassed or made sense of by the
dominant cultural logic of its age, not some anomaly that with the greatest of imaginative effort could be
contained within the bounds of a logic that Lord Mansfield, in the appeal hearing held subsequent to the Guildhall verdict, implied
Collingwood’s actions had stretched just this side of the breaking point (“It is a very uncommon case,” Mansfield pronounced from
the bench of his court, “it shocks one very much.”)51 Nor
was it simply a case to which the moment could
valiantly bring its mind, a boundary event to which this finance culture could somehow manage
to apply the historical peculiarities of its intelligence, method, epistemology, or imagination. It
was, instead, the very type of the type of case which that moment’s value theory had identified
as its test case, the type of the type of event in which that moment found the full range of its
cultural, capital, and imaginary protocols concentrated, the typical sort of loss event from which
this typicalizing age deduced its speculative procedures, average theories, theoretical realism,
and money forms of value. The Zong, thus, was not only a name for a late-eighteenth-century legal case. It was, as James
Chandler has taught us to reunderstand the word, an eighteenth-century case par excellence; a situation which a casuistic
jurisprudence (“casuistry,” Chandler reminds us, is, most simply put, “a discipline for dealing with the application of principles to
cases”) could submit to the test of “a general normative scheme,” precisely, if tautologically, because it defined the type of situation
from which that general normative scheme could deduce itself.52 The case, like the historicist situation (“The relation of cases and
casuistries to the notion of the situation has always,” Chandler argues, “been close”; contemporary New Historicism, he further
observes, tightens the fit by means of the “anecdotes” that serve as its test “cases”), thus generates a bidirectional interpretive
practice, “a two way-movement in which now the general normative scheme, now the particular event or situation, is being tested.”
It produces a process of simultaneously reading the meaning and value of the particular off the grammar of the general and
construing the general from the representative particular. And it is as such a situation, as such a two-way case, that the Zong at once
falls within, and can be made sense of by, the general normative schemes of its typicalizing moment while defining the very type of
situation on which the normative schemes of that (long, repeating) moment depend.53 * Weskett
may have argued that,
with regard to insurance practice at least, this is not true, that though finance capital might depend on
insurance, though insurance might rely on the notion of the average, and though the concept of the average might have defined as
its typical situation a captain throwing goods overboard and so identified such acts of jettison as the test case for its average theory
of value, histheory does not imagine slaves to be included among those jettisoned things , does not
A maritime trade built on the
envision some Captain Collingwood to be the master sacrificing his goods to the sea.
transport of slaves and an insurance industry heavily financed by the slaves it included among
the commodities it was willing to underwrite cannot, however, claim such innocence . * There is one
more thing to be said about Weskett’s text, one more general point to be made about the work it performs
not only as a digest of insurance theory and practice but as a guidebook to that finance culture
which found in the insurance and average values that underwriters like Weskett placed on things
an absolutization of its general theories of value and modes of speculation. Weskett’s Digest provides
both a theory for the practice of insurance and serves as a monument to its success. It is both an abstract of how insurance might
continue to be practiced and a display of what that practice has already accomplished. And among the objects of success it displays,
the most significant are the tables and lists of those forms of human personhood, historical event, and commodified object that, by
1781, insurance had succeeded in drawing within its empire of value. I will not cite all of these, a selection will suffice. In the section
of his text devoted to “Lives” (a section entirely composed of annotated premium tables), Weskett includes the following: By a table
of Mr Thomas Simpson, in his Treatise of Annuities… it appears that out of 1280 newborn infants, 410 die within the first year; and
that of the 870 remaining, 170 die within the second year; and so on, as is below exhibited:—according to which, the premium to
insure the life of a newborn infant for one year would be 410—100/1280 or 32 and 40/1280 per cent. and the premium for the life
of a one year old appears to be 170—100/870 or 19 570/870 per cent. And so on, as in the following Table: See Table In his section
on “General Averages,” Weskett includes, among the items in his list of “all the particulars which fall under the denomination of
general average,” and thus qualify as recompensable damages or losses, not only the predictable (such as “All that is thrown
overboard, or damaged by a jettison for a ship’s safety” and “The value of any goods or stores taken away or plundered by
privateers”) but the bizarre: “Charges (in Roman Catholic countries) of carrying the Holy Virgin home, offering thanks, and what is
given to the poor.”55 In
his list of “the great variety of commodities which at different times become
the subjects of insurance,” Weskett includes: Under Class 1. Least Hazardous: Alabaster, Beads, Brass, Bricks, Bugle,
Bullion, Cane, Canvas, Coals, Coin and Medals, Copper, Copperas, Coral, Cork, Cowries, Culm, Deals, Elephants Teeth, Gold and Silver
Plate, Horn Ware, Iron, Lead, Liquors, Logwood, Mahogany, Marble, Masts, Oil, Ores, Pewter, Pinch, Plank, Staves, Stone, Tar, Tiles,
Timber, Tin, Wooden Ware. Under Class 2: Common Hazardous: Brushes, Butter, Candles, Cards, Cat-lings, Cattle, Chariots, China,
Coaches, Cochineal, Crockery, Feathers, Glass, Glue, Hair, Hats, Hogs Bristles, Hops, Horse Furniture, Hosiery, Household Furniture,
Kelp, Leather Manufactures, Lime, Linens, Matts and Matting, Painters Colours, Parchment, Plaster of Paris, Quills, Rice, Rosin,
Sedans, Silks, Slaves, Soap, Tallow, Tarras, Tobacco Pipes, Tortoiseshell, Toys, Vellum, Vermicelli, Wax, Wearing- Apparel,
Whalebone, Woolens, Yarn. Under Class 3: More Hazardous: Flax, Hemp, Hides, Skins, Sugar, Tobacco…. 56 * What do all these
things have in common: alabaster, beads, brass, bricks, newborn infants, coral, cowries, one year olds, glass, glue, hair,
oil, goods seized by pirates, lime, linens, goods thrown into the sea, parchment, quills, carrying the Virgin Mary home, rice, rosin,
two year olds, sedans, silks, slaves, soap, vermicelli? What do all the things in this grotesque
Borgesian list have in common? The money form, the invisible equal sign that insurance places
alongside each one of them, the speculative epistemology that over the course of the century
drew each of them within its ever expanding territory of address, converted each of them into
not only a type of thing, person, or event, but into a negotiable type of money, attached to each
of them a premium, an insurance evaluation, and an average value, imagining for each of them
an afterlife within the speculative territory of the “what would have been” and treating this
imaginary existence as the condition of their worth. Each item added to the list, each item that “at
some time or another became the subject of insurance,” signaled another victory for finance capital, a further
demonstration of the flexibility of its imagination, a further extension of its empire of value. Like
the lieutenant’s foot, clerk’s eyes, captain’s bladder and lungs converted into so many compensatory shillings, guineas, and pounds
by the Lords Commissioners of the Admiralty, these candles,
silks, infants, holy processions, and slaves
entered the list of “things” on which the money form had gone to work, that it could subject to
itself, that it could convert into an ocean-crossing network of loans, debts, bonds, and bills of
exchange, an archipelagic eddy of circulating paper money, a circum-Atlantic cycle of
accumulation.
The TPP engages in the futuristic capitalism that results in endless amounts of
flotsam, pollution, and trash. This abundance of waste and garbage also is a
physical representation of the abject future within this futuristic capitalism.
Bahng 15’ ( Aimee Bahng, Assistant Professor of English Women’s, Gender, and sexuality
studies and African and African American Studies Comparative Literature, Specters of the
Pacific: Salt Fish Drag and Atomic Hauntologies in the Era of Genetic Modification, Journal of
American Studies Cambridge University Press and British Association for American Studies,
http://www.dartblog.com/document/Bahng%20Specters%20article2.pdf)

A Trans-Pacific Partnership – characterized by one Nation reporter as “NAFTA on steroids” –

attempts to shore up corporate interests and move global elites on both sides of the Pacific
toward this financialized future. Meanwhile, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric
Administration (NOAA) produces models for forecasting tsunami flooding, generating colorful
projections of wave amplitude that get misleadingly redeployed online as supposed trajectories
of radiation fallout from the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster. In the months and years
following “/,” the NOAA image goes viral, metastasizing in the popular imaginary as a
transpacific expanse, glowing green with radiation. Despite their divergent utopian and
dystopian trajectories, these twin transpacific futures of financial potential and ecological fallout
are intimately conjoined – a conjuncture perhaps most aptly figured in the Great Pacific Garbage
Patch, a stew of ever-disintegrating but never-degrading plastic particulates swirling in the
North Pacific Gyre. A conglomeration of global capitalism’s detritus, this slurry of micro plastics
instantiates rapid economic development’s cultivation of disposability, pollution, trash, and
practices that prioritize immediate profit over long-term sustainability. In many ways, the
Garbage Patch is a physical manifestation of the abject future: an accumulation of flotsam and
that has been jettisoned from the more sanitized and burnished visions of “new Asia”: gleaming,
futuristic cityscapes built on the promises of a financialzed global biotech industry as well as
older and ongoing practices of exploitation of displaced migrant labor.

Capitalism’s booming industry has the foundation of the horror of the Atlantic
slave trade. As the industry strengthens so does that anti-black foundation.
The AFF’s economic engagement with china is understood trough the global
economy rooted in anti-blackness.
BAUCOM 05’ (Ian Baucom, Ph.D., English, Yale University 1991 M.A., African
Studies, Yale University 1988 B.A., Political Science, Wake Forest University
Specters of the Atlantic: Finance Capital, Slavery, and the Philosophy of History,
p. 72, 6-23-16)
An eighteenth-century financial revolution may have been centered in Britain, but it was
centered there only by concentrating in first one and then in three or four British cities the
money-managing operations of a quasi-global economic system, or, indeed, an overlapping set
of systems: an AngloIrishScottish-Welsh system of capital, social, and imperial exchange that a
revisionary New British History has recently begun to examine; an Anglo-Indian-Pacific system
channeling the flow of bodies, commodities, capital, and power along a London-Bombay circuit
of exchange; and the Anglo-Atlantic cycle of accumulation of primary interest here. If London
was, finally, the British capital of the eighteenth century, it was so because it was the sole place
in which all these circuits fully intersected, the site where these circular geographies of capital
overlapped. The networks of credit that fed the revolutionary potential of each of these capital
geographies—even as they defined their extent and sprawl—linked London, however, to what
were quite clearly a set of transnational financial terrains. And throughout the eighteenth
century one of the primary such territories of credit, perhaps “Britain’s” most important credit
territory, was that territory stretched between the outposts of the triangular trade, that circum-
Atlantic territory of slave trading and imperial war making that generated so great a share of
both the credits and debts for sale first on London’s and then on Liverpool’s exchange s. The
debts the Royal Navy ran up as it pursued a British hegemony over the Caribbean and fought to
maintain imperial sovereignty over the American continent; the soldiers’ and sailors’ payrolls
dispatched to Lord Cornwallis and Admiral Rodney as they waged war on the colonial patriots
and pursued the French from one Caribbean port to another; the constantly accumulating debts
of compensation paid out to the wounded and the families of the dead; and, above all, the
interest bearing bills of exchange that were consigned to naval storekeepers in Kingston,
victualing agents in Barbados, and quartermasters in Newfoundland served as a constant source
of enrichment to the financial revolution: an always open trans-Atlantic factory of debt. And as it
produced ever greater quantities of debt, put ever more paper money into circulation, more
thoroughly addicted the national economy to the speculation and trade in financial instruments,
this modern method of war financing increasingly transformed the cities in which it was
headquartered. Like those modern methods of profiting from the slave trade pioneered at the
turn of the century by the stockjobbers of London’s Exchange Alley and perfected at its end by
the Liverpool capital houses, these means of funding (and exploiting the funding) of the imperial
war machine reinvented the economic and social life of Britain’s major port cities, making them
less the capitals of a national economy than the dominant relays in a transoceanic circuit of
exchanges, less the storehouses of the nation’s wealth than the financial catchment zones and
epistemological flashpans of an Atlantic cycle of accumulation.
 Environmental Destruction
TPP would make environmental destruction inevitable
Stiglitz 16, (Joseph Stiglitz, 03-28-16, Joseph E. Stiglitz is Senior Fellow and Chief Economist at
the Roosevelt Institute and a professor at Columbia University. A recipient of the Nobel
Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences (2001) and the John Bates Clark Medal (1979), he is a
former senior vice president and chief economist of the World Bank and a former member and
chairman of the (US president’s) Council of Economic Advisers, The Roosevelt Institute, “TPP’s
Hidden Climate Costs”, http://rooseveltinstitute.org/tpps-hidden-climate-costs/)
President Obama has said that “no challenge poses a greater threat to future generations than climate change.” Yet the word “climate” is
conspicuously missing from the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). Worse, many provisions of the proposed trade agreement between the United States

and 11 Pacific Rim countries could undermine critical policies and initiatives needed to contain global
climate change.∂ All the evidence suggests that in order to limit global warming to the 2 degrees Celsius that scientists see as critical to avert
the worst effects of climate change, we must retrofit global economic structures for production, investment, and trade. Instead, TPP would

cement in place a system that treats the environment as distinct from and subordinate to
international trade and investment.∂ Though trade negotiators may treat commerce and climate as separate problems, the
emissions giving rise to climate change are in fact an unaccounted cost of the goods and services exchanged in our increasingly complex and globally
integrated production and consumption chains. Not paying for these large social costs of pollution in production and global shipping delivers a hidden
subsidy to the corporations polluting our global atmosphere.∂ Any good trade agreement would seek to do away with distorting subsidies to producers.
One cannot have fair trade if firms are not required to pay the environmental costs they impose on society, which also present an existent threat to life
on this planet. TPP does nothing to prohibit these typically hidden subsidies or others, such as subsidies for fossil fuels, buried within the tax system. ∂
TPP is worse still because it creates the risk of lengthy lawsuits and sizable cash awards to investors for
government actions that would rein in many of the current hidden subsidies for greenhouse gas
pollution or ban climate-imperiling products and production methods . For instance, under TPP rules,
government policies to incentivize more environmentally sustainable goods and services—even
with voluntary labeling—can be challenged as illegal “technical” trade barriers unless the
government has requested a specific policy exception in the existing agreement. Countries that
lose such cases will face millions in sanctions unless they eliminate the policy favoring more
socially and environmentally sustainable conditions .∂ Arguably, the countries party to TPP may not launch such attacks on
each other’s climate policies, but the agreement’s expanded investor rights empower polluters to do so directly. TPP’s investor–state

dispute settlement (ISDS) system allows foreign investors to sue governments for actions
perceived as violating new rights afforded by the agreement and to demand compensation for
expected future profits undercut by such policies. This threat creates an explicit obstacle to
many government actions to reduce carbon emissions or other forms of climate pollution .∂
When investors bring disputes, they will be heard in private international tribunals stacked in
favor of business interests. Arbitrators in such tribunals have repeatedly interpreted agreements
like TPP to mean that changes to the policy environment harming their bottom line violate
investor rights and deserve compensation, sometimes amounting to billions of taxpayer dollars .∂
Corporations in carbon-intensive resource extraction and electric utility industries are some of the biggest users of these ISDS mechanisms. In January,
the energy company TransCanada launched such a challenge against President Obama’s decision to reject the Keystone XL pipeline, demanding $15
billion in compensation using the North American Free Trade Agreement’s (NAFTA) investor arbitration system. TPP would expand the scope of this
system.∂ The threat cuts both ways: Currently the American firm Lone Pine is challenging Canada’s moratorium on hydrofracking under the St.
Lawrence River. Unlike NAFTA, TPP explicitly would extend actionable investor rights to cover government
contracts for the “exploration, extraction, refining, transportation, distribution or sale” of
government-controlled natural resources like “oil, natural gas, … and other similar resources .”∂
Other seemingly arcane implications of TPP could also have big consequences for climate change. Current U.S. law requires the

Department of Energy (DOE) to assess the economic impact and public interest before
approving exports of liquid natural gas (LNG). However, the law also instructs the DOE to
approve “without modification or delay” exports to any country with which we have a trade
agreement.∂ DOE assessments make clear that exporting gas benefits gas companies (who can charge higher prices) while harming consumers
and other businesses (who will pay more for gas and electricity). But more gas exports will also incentivize intensified

hydrofracking, a natural gas extraction technique that is itself associated with significant
greenhouse gas emissions. While shifting foreign consumers away from dirtier coal energy would be good, the worry is that the carbon-
intensive costs of liquefying, transporting, and then reconstituting gas will more than offset carbon savings. A full public interest analysis might attempt
to assess whether that is the case, but if TPP were enacted, U.S. officials would lose the right to review all LNG
exports to TPP nations.

The TPP engages in the futuristic capitalism that results in endless amounts of
flotsam, pollution, and trash. This abundance of waste and garbage also is a
physical representation of the abject future within this futuristic capitalism
Bahng 15’ ( Aimee Bahng, Assistant Professor of English Women’s, Gender, and
sexuality studies and African and African American Studies Comparative
Literature, Specters of the Pacific: Salt Fish Drag and Atomic Hauntologies in the
Era of Genetic Modification, Journal of American Studies Cambridge University
Press and British Association for American Studies,
http://www.dartblog.com/document/Bahng%20Specters%20article2.pdf)
A Trans-Pacific Partnership – characterized by one Nation reporter as “NAFTA on steroids” –
attempts to shore up corporate interests and move global elites on both sides of the Pacific
toward this financialized future. Meanwhile, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric
Administration (NOAA) produces models for forecasting tsunami flooding, generating colorful
projections of wave amplitude that get misleadingly redeployed online as supposed trajectories
of radiation fallout from the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster. In the months and years
following “/,” the NOAA image goes viral, metastasizing in the popular imaginary as a
transpacific expanse, glowing green with radiation. Despite their divergent utopian and
dystopian trajectories, these twin transpacific futures of financial potential and ecological fallout
are intimately conjoined – a conjuncture perhaps most aptly figured in the Great Pacific Garbage
Patch, a stew of ever-disintegrating but never-degrading plastic particulates swirling in the
North Pacific Gyre. A conglomeration of global capitalism’s detritus, this slurry of micro plastics
instantiates rapid economic development’s cultivation of disposability, pollution, trash, and
practices that prioritize immediate profit over long-term sustainability. In many ways, the
Garbage Patch is a physical manifestation of the abject future: an accumulation of flotsam and
that has been jettisoned from the more sanitized and burnished visions of “new Asia”: gleaming,
futuristic cityscapes built on the promises of a financialzed global biotech industry as well as
older and ongoing practices of exploitation of displaced migrant labor.
 Neoliberal and Imperialist
TPP is the centerpiece of the U.S. imperialist Asia pivot project.
Macapinlac & Smith 2/7, (Nina Macapinlac is an activist, 02/07/16),"TPP Is A Tool For US
Hegemony In The Asia Pacific," PopularResistance.Org, https://www.popularresistance.org/tpp-
locks-is-a-tool-for-us-hegemony-in-the-asia-pacific/ FB
To announce its official launch, the New Jersey Philippine Solidarity Committee condemns to the utmost extent today’s signing of the Trans-Pacific
Partnership Agreement (TPP) in New Zealand. As an anti-imperialist coalition of individuals and organizations, the New Jersey Philippine Solidarity
the TPP as a one-sided “free trade” agreement that will only benefit the interests
Committee opposes

of the global elite class at the expense of the poor and working class peoples of the world,
especially in underdeveloped countries like the Philippines. Incidentally, the New Jersey Philippine Solidarity
Committee also commemorates today as the 117th anniversary of the Philippine American War as part of BAYAN USA’s Philippine Solidarity Week.
With the acquisition of the Philippines, Cuba, Puerto Rico, and Guam, the
Philippine American War was the birthplace of
US imperialism whose legacy lives on today through US economic and political hegemony.
Pushed for by the Obama administration, the TPP is a testament to the relevance of the
Philippine American War in today’s world and is a living manifestation of the United States’
continued stranglehold on the economies of the Third World. By launching a series of events for Philippine
Solidarity Week, the New Jersey Philippine Solidarity Committee demonstrates the strength in unity across movements in the fight for national and
social liberation. Anticipated to be the largest “free trade” agreement in the world, the TPP encompasses 12 nations that make up 40% of the global
GDP. These nations, consisting of the United States and 11 Pacific Rim countries (New Zealand, Australia, Brunei Darussalam, Canada, Chile, Japan,
Malaysia, Mexico, Peru, Singapore, and Vietnam), will formally sign the agreement today but each member state will still need to ratify it for the TPP to
go into full force. If two years elapse and not all member states have ratified the agreement, the TPP can still go into force if at least six countries have
successfully ratified and represent 85 percent of the total GDP of the original member states between them. This means that the TPP is effectively dead
if the United States does not sign on, making it more urgent that US-based communities and organizations come together to strategize and organize
against the approval of the agreement domestically. The Trans-Pacific Partnership is an egregious corporate power grab. While it’s being promoted by
corporate and political elites under the guise of “free-trade,” in reality, only5 of the 29 chapters included in the
agreement have anything to do with trade. The majority of the agreement seeks to undermine
national economic sovereignty through trans-national corporate governance, putting profits
before the rights and needs of the 99%. The TPP affirms and expands existing agreements made
through international bodies such as the World Trade Organization and the International
Monetary Fund that promote the extraction and exploitation of developing economies through
forced financial and economic dependency. One of the most devastating components of the TPP
is the Investor State Dispute Settlement. Any law or regulation that stands in the way of a
company’s profits such as health safety laws; workers rights; women’s rights; food safety; gay
rights; animal rights; minimum wages; unions; civil rights; nuclear power plant regulations;
environmental protections; etc., can be “challenged” in this non-democratically elected international court. Corporations
and big business will be able to sue entire countries through a corporate tribunal if the TPP is passed. Moreover , the TPP is the economic

centerpiece of the so-called “U.S. Pivot to Asia,”a term that refers to a deliberate foreign policy
strategy of consolidating and ensuring US hegemony in the Asia Pacific region. The second part
of the “pivot” is militarization , which is used to secure US control over trade routes, markets,
and territories. Having a very strategic location in the Asia-Pacific with easy access to China
and surrounding countries, the Philippines is used to deepen U.S. aggression in the Asia Pacific
region through the indefinite basing of U.S. soldiers , many of whom are being deployed to the Philippines from the
Middle East. The recent unconstitutional upholding of the Enhanced Defense Cooperation Agreement (EDCA) by the Philippine Supreme Court will
further entrench the U.S. military in the country and pave the road to more bases. The TPP, as well as the shift of military
troops to Asia Pacific, is an intensification of an ongoing trend of trade liberalization and
imperialism.

TPP is another neoliberal policy that increases exploitation and control over
China.
Bowie 6/24, [Nile Bowie is a political analyst and photographer, 6/24/16), "Trans-Pacific
partnership: Neoliberal arm of Obama’s Asia-pivot," RT International, https://www.rt.com/op-
edge/trans-pacific-partnership-obama-704/ ]
Everything that the public knows about the TPP so far has come from various leaks, and if the final agreement looks anything like the
the implications would be far reaching, affecting everything from the cost of
negotiating text,
medicines to internet freedoms by broadening international copyright and intellectual property
rights legislation in line with US law. Make no mistake – the TPP is a neoliberal wish list that
would empower corporations to skirt national laws and courts, while directly challenging health,
environmental and other public interest policies. What makes the TPP so alarming is that it aims
to create judicial authorities higher than national governments, in the form of extra-judicial
tribunals overseen by the World Bank and UN. If multinationals feel that existing government policy has hindered
their expected future profits, national governments would be obliged to dole out compensation with taxpayer dollars. If the TPP
were to be passed into law,
it would: create incentives for corporations to offshore millions of jobs &
encourage bottom-of-the-barrel low wage conditions in participating countries, prohibit bans on
risky financial instruments, speculation, and derivatives; countries would be banned from
enacting capital controls and banks would enjoy significantly less regulatory oversight, impose
strict intellectual property legislation that would undermine access to the internet and digital
file-sharing, as well as stymie the product of generic medicines that may violate US patents,
lower food safety regulations and flood markets with those products, empowering corporations
to decrease environmental and health safeguards, and make signatory countries accountable
to international tribunals, giving corporations the ability to demand compensation for any
expected future profits that are hindered by existing national laws. Like NAFTA, which dismantled the US
manufacturing base and led to thousands of job losses, the TPP promotes offshoring through incentives for corporations, leading to
wages being driven down and heightened inequality. Pharmaceutical giants would be allowed to increase drug prices and limit
consumers’ access to cheaper generic drugs, which is bad news for many of the developing countries taking part. On the digital
front, ISPs could be required to scrutinize user activity, while the creation and sharing of user-generated content would be stifled by
drastic extensions of copyright protection. In the financial department,
the TPP imposes extreme deregulation
policies that have contributed to the global economic crisis, while prohibiting countries from
enacting capital controls, an essential policy tool to counter destabilizing speculative cash flows .
While Chuck Hagel and the gang over at the Pentagon are busy repositioning US military muscle to the Asia-Pacific, the Obama
administration realizes that it must offer Pacific nations – who would otherwise have greater incentives in deepening economic ties
with China – an attractive stake in the ailing US economy. The countries involved in the negotiations – Australia, Brunei, Chile,
Canada, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore, Vietnam, and now Japan – include major economic players in Southeast
Asia. The
TPP is clearly the economic arm of the ‘pivot to Asia’ policy, roping strategic
economies into a legally binding corporate-governance regime, lured in by the promise of
unfettered access to US markets. Many believe that the underlying purpose of Washington’s
renewed interest in the Asia Pacific region is to counter the influence of China, which will soon
overtake the US as the world’s largest economy . Examining the Beijing-aphobia conjecture of US foreign policy
theoreticians like Robert Kagan can provide a clearer understanding of the TPP. An article penned by Kagan back in 1997, published
with our friends at the Brookings Institute, articulates the China-containment narrative that undoubtedly strikes a chord with the
policy architects of today. Kagan
writes that the “present world order serves the needs of the United
States and its allies, which constructed it,” and that “Chinese leaders chafe at the constraints
on them and worry that they must change the rules of the international system before the
international system changes them.” Kagan also references the literary classic, ‘Gulliver’s Travels’, where an explorer
by the name of Lemuel Gulliver finds himself shipwrecked on an island, overtaken by a community of six-inch men called Lilliputians,
who have tied him down with ropes and stakes, preventing him from moving. Kagan cites a conversation with Chinese military
analysts, where he posits that Chinese leaders worry that they will "play Gulliver to Southeast Asia's Lilliputians, with the United
States supplying the rope and stakes."
The TPP is the most vivid policy directive that indicates that the US
is hoping to deepen its footprint in Southeast Asia to counter the growing economic and military
clout of China in the region.

Corporate-friendly arbitrators interpret the TPP for their own gains and
corporations get to take advantage of governments
Stiglitz 16, (Joseph Stiglitz, 03-28-16, Joseph E. Stiglitz is Senior Fellow and Chief
Economist at the Roosevelt Institute and a professor at Columbia University. A recipient
of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences (2001) and the John Bates Clark
Medal (1979), he is a former senior vice president and chief economist of the World
Bank and a former member and chairman of the (US president’s) Council of Economic
Advisers, The Roosevelt Institute, “Who Gets to Write and Interpret the Rules Under
TPP?”, http://rooseveltinstitute.org/who-gets-write-and-interpret-rules-under-tpp/)
If the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) is enacted, multinational investors will be able to sue the
United States and other host country governments in private international arbitration (investor–
state dispute settlement, or ISDS) when they feel domestic laws, regulations, or other
government actions violate their rights under the new agreement. How will such challenges be handled? No
matter how well contracts or treaties are written, disputes will inevitably arise. And there needs to be a low-cost,

expeditious, fair, open, and consistent means of resolving disputes. This is a basic public good
provided by every democratic society. The system created by TPP to adjudicate investor
disputes, in contrast, fails to meet these basic criteria. Under TPP, tribunals comprised of three
individuals—typically, practicing investment lawyers specialized in this boutique area of international law—would decide

whether governments had to pay investors potentially billions of taxpayer dollars because of
rule changes intended to improve the health and safety of our workers, food, environment, and
financial system. Business could demand compensation for any regulation that resulted in the
diminution of their expected profits and value of their investment. These arbitrators would not
be tenured, impartial judges. In the ISDS system, arbitrators rotate between representing
investors in investment arbitrations and sitting in judgment on investment tribunals—worse,
they can fill these conflicting roles simultaneously. This game of musical chairs is played among a
relatively small group of lawyers who are either bringing or adjudicating cases against
governments; reportedly, 15 arbitrators have decided more than half of all international investment
arbitration cases. Only investors can initiate disputes under this system. They choose not only
their own lawyers, but also one of the three arbitrators (with a second chosen jointly by the
plaintiff and the defending government). Arbitration lawyers that buck the system risk being
culled from the herd. These are glaring conflicts of interest for people asked to judge what is
“reasonable” and “fair and equitable” in balancing public and private interests. Other aspects of this
private arbitration system are equally frightening: While
arbitrators are supposed to follow rules articulated in
investment agreement texts, they have interpreted the texts very expansively . Decisions can be—and
have been—“legally incorrect,” but they cannot be reviewed or appealed except on narrow
grounds. Since a tribunal’s ruling cannot be appealed on the legal merits, in most cases there is
nothing the loser can do. Two individuals can , in effect, thwart the considered deliberation of
Congress and the president and completely circumvent U.S. courts. This process does not even
markedly speed up the resolution of disputes, nor is it cheap. Unlike professional judges,
arbitrators are paid by the hour, creating perverse incentives to stretch out cases for years even
if claims will ultimately be dismissed. Legal fees typically run into the millions for governments,
which makes it especially difficult for smaller, poorer countries to fend off threats . For example, Uruguay,
which is not a TPP member but is being sued under a similar agreement, was forced to rely on the charity of Bill Gates and Michael Bloomberg to
defend its tobacco warning label against Philip Morris International. Australia has spent more than $50 million defending against a separate challenge
from Philip Morris, which was finally dismissed on December 15 on procedural grounds. TPP’s investment dispute adjudication is also strikingly
asymmetric: Thereare no reciprocal responsibilities corresponding to expanded foreign investor
property rights. “Host” country governments and citizens cannot sue foreign investors that
violate local environment, public health, consumer protection, and labor laws, and they certainly
don’t have recourse to arbitration tribunals. A balanced system would enable lawsuits to pierce
the corporate veil and pass responsibility up through the increasingly complex web of global
value chains. It’s not that these problems with the ISDS adjudication mechanism and legal standard were unknown to U.S. negotiators that
pushed this system on TPP partners, nor were alternatives unavailable. One option would be relying on domestic courts, or at least requiring that
claimants show that domestic remedies have been exhausted and proven unfair before they proceed to arbitration. Another would be relying on state–
state dispute settlement, as Brazil has done in its investment agreements, and as the World Trade Organization (WTO) does in trade disputes. Europe,
in its negotiations with the U.S. over a Transatlantic Agreement, has proposed replacing investment arbitration with a permanent investment court,
which would address many of the issues raised. Even the EU–Canada investment and trade agreement already signed had better safeguards. But the
U.S. Trade Representative (USTR), wanting to please America’s business community, has shunted these alternatives aside. The USTR would
undoubtedly dispute the interpretations of TPP provided here, but they are based on broad consultation with experts across the world. In past
agreements, complexities and ambiguities such as these have provided ample scope for arbitrators to rule repeatedly in favor of
corporate interests over the public interests. TPP has clearly not fixed these problem problems. If TPP’s trade benefits were
enormous, the partner nations might not want to forgo those benefits until the agreement could be renegotiated to include stronger safeguards for the
public interest. But
even government economists have calculated TPP’s benefits to be negligible, and
we suggest that they may be negative. Only corporate interests—and only those working against
the public interest—have something to lose if these provisions are renegotiated. President Obama and
negotiators need to level with the American people about the dangers posed by this stacked system of private justice. Members of Congress, in
weighing this and future agreements, need to insist on an open, fair, and accountable process—and one that focuses more on protecting the public
rather than corporate interests.
 Affirmative Speculation
Our centering of the subprime debtor and the specters of the Atlantic in finance
capital meditates on the very possibility of home, debt, the human, and
racialization by way of Octavia Butler’s Kindred. This reading of the archive
against the grain without the hope of returning to the purity of origin
represents a critical fabulation that ruptures the mimetics of policy debate’s
traditional adherence to technocratic verisimilitude. Confronted with a violence
which exceeds and structures representation, scandalizes semiotics, and
saturates the archive, the 1AC tells an impossible story of by amplifying the
impossibility of its telling, dwelling in the disavowed absences which suture the
status quo and whose foregrounding throw dominant narratives into genre
crisis.
Nyong'o 15’ ( Tavia, associate professor of Performance Studies at New York University. He is
the author of The Amalgamation Waltz: Race, Performance and the Ruses of Memory
(University of Minnesota Press, 2009) and is completing a manuscript on race and temporality,
“Unburdening Representation”)

To appeal to fabulation, or the storytelling function , as I have been throughout this essay, may appear to grant
too much agency or significance to discourse and narrative. Such a claim might also be poorly timed, given the emergence of a range
of post humanisms and new material isms that seek, in at least some of their versions, to displace the human from its central
position in theoretical debates. From the vantage point of black studies, however, I would tend to follow
those who suggest that we are not yet human, that the human is a regulatory ideal on a horizon
we have not yet arrived at, and that to complete the impossible task of finding a narrative form
adequate to addressing that audience would be to fabulate, in Deleuze's terms, a "people who are
missing."16 The risk in such a fabulation of a collectivity to come, of course, is that it may be mistaken
as entailing a disconnection from history. This is why I find Saidiya Hartman's formulation of a
"critical fabulation" to be so necessary. That her account of such a project is given within the
context of her refusal to "recover" or speak for the obliterated black female lives she encounters
in the archive of the Atlantic slave trade returns us again to the central tension in Spivak's formulations regarding
subaltern speech in the colonial modern. Hartman describes her project in the following terms: Is it possible to
exceed or negotiate the constitutive limits of the archive ? By advancing a series of speculative
arguments and exploiting the capacities of the subjunctive (a grammatical mood that expresses
doubts, wishes, and possibilities), in fashioning a narrative, which is based upon archival
research, and by that I mean a critical reading of the archive that mimes the figurative
dimensions of history, I intended both to tell an impossible story and to amplify the impossibility
of its telling. ... The method guiding this writing practice is best described as critical fabulation. ... By playing with and
rearranging the basic elements of the story, by re-presenting the sequence of events in divergent stories and
from contested points of view, I have attempted to jeopardize the status of the event, to
displace the received or authorized account, and to imagine what might have happened or
might have been said or might have been done . 17 Hartman's critical fabulation refuses the coercive
mimeticism that would demand that she produce, in her terms, a "romance" to fill in the missing
voices of the archive. Instead, her tactic is to mime "the figurative dimensions of history" itself-
to zero in on those points where archival reconstruction and narrative invention come into
maximum tension-and to (re)produce the sense of instability and potentiality immanent to the
event. In radically different circumstances from Portrait of jason, Hartman nonetheless also encounters a series of characters in
the archive, singularities her work can do nothing to restore life to, nor manufacture a post humous voice, but whose haunting trace
interrupts attempt at a consistent or complete historical account of their destruction and erasure. It is the spectrality of Hartman's
discourse that forestalls its decay into romance (or, for that matter, another genre such as the gothic). Critical
fabulation is
not a genre or a discourse but a mode by which both genre and discourse can be set into
oscillating tension, through the upsetting of a key demand of representational mimesis: the
demand that a representation be either true or false, either history or fiction. Commenting on how
Deleuze upsets this classic schema of representation, which Deleuze traces to Platonic conceptions of ideal forms (and Plato's
corresponding distrust of mimesis), Gregory Flaxman notes: Deleuze insists that the task of reversing Platonism must be sought in
Plato himself insofar as he alights on the concept of the simulacrum-a copy without a model- IV. with which both transcendent Ideas
and subsequent idealisms are dispatched. In the dialectical pursuit of the sophist, we are finally compelled to encounter the
appearance qua appearance (apparaftre) of something that cannot be distinguished "from originals or from models." ... If we insist
on the difference that distinguishes the powers of the false from mere deceit, it is because these powers create an excess of truths,
a plurality of possible worlds, that bear the world beyond the precincts of truth and lying. 18 Rather
than representations,
on this reading, what fabulation produces is simulacra, cop- ies without a model. Embracing
inauthenticity becomes our means of unburdening representation. It is telling , on this score, that at
the end of her essay on the archive, Hartman turns to the science fictions of Octavia Butler for
an example of the kind of ethical relation to the past that critical fabulation seeks. Butler's
imaginative narrative, in Kindred, of a contemporary person time traveling back to the era of
chattel slavery, only to discover that her role must be, in part, to reproduce the violent and
racist conditions of exploitation that begat her own ancestors, provide for Hartman a very
different shock to thought than the compensatory move of traditional recovery narratives.
Kindred amplifies the impossibility of telling the impossible story, as Hartman describes the
work of critical fabulation, modeling the loss of the self and the discovery of "another me ."

Our form of speculation is great!

Bahng 15’ ( Aimee Bahng, Assistant Professor of English Women’s, Gender, and sexuality
studies and African and African American Studies Comparative Literature, Specters of the
Pacific: Salt Fish Drag and Atomic Hauntologies in the Era of Genetic Modification, Journal of
American Studies Cambridge University Press and British Association for American Studies,
http://www.dartblog.com/document/Bahng%20Specters%20article2.pdf)

In its counterimagining of genetic recombination’s potential, Salt Fish Girl in particular proffers a
politics of mutation rather than regeneration. Whereas regeneration’s aim is to restore a body
to an original or normative state, mutation finds its expression in changing the materiality of a
thing, likely in ways that alter conceptualizations of bodies, differentiation, origins, and copies.
Lai construes a transgressive set of possibilities in mutation and its unpredictability in an era of
rampant genetic modification (GM) marketed for its precision and control. Anchored by twin
narrators located in different times – one in the past, one in the future – the novel slips between
temporal streams, and just when the year  holds up the regenerative potential of
bioengineered futurity, Lai’s slipstream techniques point the reader to the histories of
biocolonialism and even older forms of empire that have given rise to this dubiously
manufactured future. In this way, Salt Fish Girl as speculative fiction ruminates on two forms of
future-making: fabrication and fabulation, wherein the distinction and the tension seems to be
their relations to actualization – either the realizing of potential or the opening of possibility . THE
GHOSTLY MATTER OF TRANSGENIC ORGANISMS In Lai’s speculative fiction, the future promised by advances
in DNA recombination techniques is always already haunted by the past. Miranda Ching, one of
the not-quite-human protagonists, is a “child afflicted by history.”  She, like many of the other
genetically modified inhabitants of this mutant future, exhibits symptoms of the “dreaming
sickness,” a mysterious malady speculated to be a “new breed of auto-immune diseases, related
to genetic and other industrial modifications to our food supply,” wherein people become
consumed with the experience of traumatic histories of war, famine, and violence. Miranda relates the story of
one girl “who smelled of cooking oil, who remembered all the wars ever fought. She could recall and recount every death, every
rape, every wound; every moment of suffering that had ever been inflicted by a member of her ancestral lineage.” The
dreaming sickness instantiates “memory as haunting,” the return of the repressed, and in this
case the ghostly matter has been spliced into one’s DNA – a condition that renders the host
ghost, producing a primordial urge to drown rather than relive the disavowed experience of
violence. Also called the “drowning disease,” this condition becomes so unbearable that its
sufferers can only find relief when submerged underwater.  The girl who smelled of cooking
oil walked into the ocean and never returned. Miranda herself retreats to the bathtub.
Traumatic experiences find their afterlives in transgenic forms, the constant undertow of such
memories driving some to oblivion but others toward revolutionary pursuits . These ghostly matters
point to the ways in which the genomic dystopia of Miranda’s world is a continuation of the
necropolitical past. Nextcorp, the multinational corporation who produces the clone laborers
of the novel’s near future, “bought out the Diverse Genome Project around the same time
[Miranda] was born … It focused on the peoples of the so-called Third World, Aboriginal
peoples, and peoples in danger of extinction,” so all the factory workers have brown eyes and
black hair. In Salt Fish Girl, the genetic engineering that produces clone workers of the
future draws on the already racialized logics of the biobank. The dreaming sickness becomes
Lai’s vehicle for positioning the intertwined histories of war, labor, and the environment as the
precondition for the age of genetic modification . In their discussion of dispossession and debt in the contemporary
moment, Paula Chakravartty and Denise Ferreira da Silva articulate the “racial logic of global financial capitalism” and establish “how
neoliberal architectures and discourses of dispossession act on earlier forms of racial and colonial subjugation.” Lai’s novel recalls
such a disavowed history of genomics and clarifies how futuristic scientific enterprise builds on neocolonial practices, from
bioprospecting to racialized internment.

We must radically re-imagine and position ourselves outside the futurity of

capitalism that is also tied to the state. Only after this process can we engage
with a radical unfurling and mutation that addresses those who’s position is
one financialized disposability.
Bahng 15’ ( Aimee Bahng, Assistant Professor of English Women’s, Gender, and sexuality
studies and African and African American Studies Comparative Literature, Specters of the
Pacific: Salt Fish Drag and Atomic Hauntologies in the Era of Genetic Modification, Journal of
American Studies Cambridge University Press and British Association for American Studies,
http://www.dartblog.com/document/Bahng%20Specters%20article2.pdf)
Both financial speculation and speculative fiction participate in the cultural production of futurity
– a term that highlights the construction of “the future” and denaturalizes its singularity, even
while acknowledging its substantial effects on how we materialize the present. Financial
forecasters produce extrapolative fiction when they functionally convert data into an
interpretive arc. Econometrics extrapolates from data collected by the University of Michigan Consumer
Sentiment Index and Index of Consumer Expectations, for example, which reduce “sentiment” and
“expectation” to numeric values in an attempt to measure and then advise for or against
hedging uncertain futures. This data-fication is also a rendering of data into fiction, into statistical narrative,
which Kathleen Woodward has characterized as “the preeminent expression of late capitalism.” I argue not
only that financial speculation produces a kind of speculative fiction, but also that despite its
overtures to fact over fiction, financial speculation enters into dialectical relation with the
literary production of futurity. In this vein, I join a wider, emerging interdisciplinary discussion about what could be called
the cultural studies of finance. Historians and cultural theorists of science have additionally called our attention to how
scientific speculation, technological forecasting, and promissory futures transform “basic science” into an “entrepreneurial science,”
wherein scientific
inquiry follows an economy of deliverable outcomes and profitable goods rather
than perhaps a less manufactured curiosity . In an entrepreneurial approach to science, narratives of
futurity function as scripts in laboratory protocols, military strategies of preemption, and
economic extrapolations alike, instrumentalizing the speculative mode by attaching it to funding
mechanisms that call on scientists to anticipate and project the potential impact, benefit, and
even profit their research might have in the future. These resulting prospectuses constitute forms of speculative
narration; however, as Colin Milburn suggests, “we have yet fully to take on the manifold ways these practices interrelate with the
predominant mode of speculative narration in the modern era – namely, science fiction.” Milburn points out scientists’ active
disavowal of any substantive relationship that their work might have with the literary genre of science fiction (also called
“speculative” or “extrapolative” fiction). Eschewed from the spatial construction of the pure and rational laboratory, science fiction
seems nonetheless already part of the scientific process of imagining possibilities. If, however, STEM (science, technology,
engineering, and math) fields remain oversaturated by white men, science fiction, with its possibly more successful recruitment of
writers of color, queer thinkers, and women, might not only offer some explanation of historical exclusions and abuses of, say,
I explore
imperial science, but also gesture toward how science itself might begin to imagine other kinds of possible future.
speculation not as the predictive calculations designed to turn a profit on the containment of
risk, but rather as a modality of radical unfurling and mutation. In its counterimagining of
genetic recombination’s potential, Salt Fish Girl in particular proffers a politics of mutation rather than
regeneration. Whereas regeneration’s aim is to restore a body to an original or normative state,
mutation finds its expression in changing the materiality of a thing, likely in ways that alter
conceptualizations of bodies, differentiation, origins, and copies. Lai construes a transgressive set of
possibilities in mutation and its unpredictability in an era of rampant genetic modification (GM)
marketed for its precision and control. Anchored by twin narrators located in different times – one in the past, one in
the future – the novel slips between temporal streams, and just when the year  holds up the regenerative potential of
bioengineered futurity, Lai’s slipstream techniques point the reader to the histories of biocolonialism and even older forms of
empire that have given rise to this dubiously manufactured future. In this way, Salt Fish Girl as speculative
fiction
ruminates on two forms of future-making: fabrication and fabulation, wherein the distinction
and the tension seems to be their relations to actualization – either the realizing of potential or
the opening of possibility.