Afghanistan Aff
Download 0.73 Mb.
|
- Navigate this page:
- I know poppy is really bad but we dont have enough power to grow wheat crops on our own
- "war on drugs" is big business
- Untold billions in homeless shelters, healthcare, chemical dependency and psychiatric treatment, etc.
- Economic inequality
- Promising investors
2AC AT: Alt Crops/ CapThe Taliban forces farmers to grow opium Manson 9 (Katrina, http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSSP435802._CH_.2400 , date accessed: 6/23/2010) AK The Taliban force us to grow poppy, so if there are any Taliban in the area then nobody dares to grow wheat," said a farmer, who did not want to be named. "I know poppy is really bad but we don't have enough power to grow wheat crops on our own. If we get any help from the government then we will grow wheat." Ending the drug war ensures the collapse of classes Drug Policy Alliance 1( http://www.drugpolicy.org/about/position/race_paper_econ.cfm) The U.S. "war on drugs" is big business -- a multi-billion dollar public/private venture that radically inflates the value of illegal drugs and is used to criminalize the poorest people of color, trapping them in a vicious cycle of addiction, unemployment and incarceration: $27 billion for interdiction and law enforcement, $1.3 billion for Plan Colombia in 2000. $9.4 billion in 2000 to imprison close to 500,000 people convicted of non-violent drug offenses, 75% of whom are Black. $80 to $100 billion in lost earnings. Untold billions in homeless shelters, healthcare, chemical dependency and psychiatric treatment, etc. It is rarely acknowledged that Black women are the fastest growing segment of the prison population and that Native American prisoners are the largest group per capita.(1) Approximately five million people -- including those on probation and parole -- are directly under the surveillance of the criminal justice system. To deliver up bodies destined for profitable punishment, the political economy of prisons relies on racist practices in arrest, conviction, and sentencing patterns. Black and brown bodies are the human raw material in a vast experiment to conceal the major social problems of our time. The racialized demographics of the victims of the "war on drugs" will not surprise anyone familiar with the symbiotic relationship between poverty and institutionalized white supremacy. Economic inequality and political disenfranchisement have been inextricably intertwined since the Trans-Atlantic slave trade. The racist enforcement of the drug laws is just the latest strategy to sustain the status quo. As political economist John Flateau graphically puts it: "Metaphorically, the criminal justice pipeline is like a slave ship, transporting human cargo along interstate triangular trade routes from Black and Brown communities; through the middle passage of police precincts, holding pens, detention centers and courtrooms; to downstate jails or upstate prisons; back to communities as unrehabilitated escapees; and back to prison or jail in a vicious recidivist cycle."(2) From Plantation to Prisons: Where Does the Money Go According to the United Nations International Drug Control Program, the international illicit drug business generates as much as $400 billion in trade annually. Profits of this magnitude invariably lead to corruption and complicity at the highest levels. Yet the so-called war on this illegal trade targets economically disadvantaged ethnic minorities and indigenous people in the U.S., Mexico, Colombia, Peru, Bolivia, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Myanmar, Laos, Thailand and Vietnam. Putting aside the question of legality, there is no evidence of a "trickle-down effect." These substantial profits are not enriching the low level players who constitute the vast majority of drug offenders. To the contrary, the black market drug economy undermines non-drug-related businesses and limits the employability of its participants. Discussing the "legal apartheid" that keeps the developing world poor, Peruvian economist, Fernando De Soto observes that "[t]he poor live outside the law . . . because living within the law is impossible: corrupt legal systems and warped rules force those at the bottom of the world economy to spend years leaping absurd hurdles to do things by the book."(3) "In a criminalized economy, the risk of imprisonment is almost 'a form of business license tax.'" (4) Who is profiting? In the United States, prison architects and contractors, corrections personnel, policy makers and academics, and the thousands of corporate vendors who peddle their wares at the annual trade-show of the American Corrections Association - hawking everything from toothbrushes and socks to barbed-wire fences and shackles. And multi-national corporations that win tax subsidies, incentives and abatements from local governments -- robbing the public coffers and depriving communities of the kind of quality education, roads, health care and infrastructure that provide genuine incentives for legitimate business. The sale of tax-exempt bonds to underwrite prison construction is now estimated at $2.3 billion annually.(5) Last year, the Wackenhut Corrections Corporation - which manages or owns 37 prisons in the U.S., 18 in the U.K and Australia and has one under contract in South Africa -- tried to convert a former slave plantation in North Carolina into a maximum security prison to warehouse mostly Black prisoners from the nation's capital. Promising investors to keep the prison cells filled these corporations dispatch "bed-brokers" in search of prisoners - evoking images of 19th century bounty-hunters capturing runaway slaves and forcibly returning them to the cotton fields. Corporations that appear to be far removed from the business of punishment are intimately involved in the expansion of the prison industrial complex. Prison construction bonds are one of the many sources of profitable investment for leading financiers such as Merrill Lynch. MCI charges prisoners and their families outrageous prices for the precious telephone calls which are often the only contact inmates have with the free world. Many corporations whose products we consume on a daily basis have learned that prison labor power can be as profitable as third world labor power exploited by U.S.-based global corporations. Both relegate formerly unionized workers to joblessness, many of which wind up in prison. Some of the companies that use prison labor are IBM, Motorola, Compaq, Texas < CONTINUED NO TXT RMVED> Directory: files files -> Answer True False 2 points Question 2 files -> Integer programming and game theory files -> 4 Integer Programming files -> Bpa vehicle Window Repair Scenario #1 task: Procure vehicle window relacement. Objective files -> Pop Warner History files -> North Carolina Inclusion Initiative Mapping Where Children with ieps are Being Served Purpose files -> Fall 2013 Spring 2014 Program Data: Standard 1 Exhibit 4d files -> Hanban – asia society confucius classrooms network 2010 request for proposal files -> Northern England’s set-jetting locations Download 0.73 Mb. Share with your friends:
|