T-Universal

A ‘federal jobs guarantee’ is universal.

O’Neill ’20 [Thomas O’Neill; December 29, 2020; author at Brown Political Review, probably an
undergrad; Brown Political Review, “Radical or Reasonable? The Case for a Federal Jobs Guarantee,”
https://brownpoliticalreview.org/2020/12/radical-or-reasonable-the-case-for-a-federal-jobs-
guarantee/]
Now, what is a federal jobs guarantee (FJG)? In essence, each and every American is guaranteed a job
managed by the government. These jobs range from infrastructure construction and maintenance to community development
projects. Along with these employment opportunities comes the benefits expected of a decent job: health insurance, paid leave, and
investment plans for retirement. Plans
vary, but popular propositions recommend a bureaucratic structure that
matches people to jobs needed at the state and local levels – prioritizing the needs and desires of communities in
determining production.

Limits–they can pick and choose specific groups to give a FJG. We can’t
possibly prep out that many, that leads to stale debates that shift away
from the topic we try to talk about.

Truth testing–we have generics on FJG but it’s impossible to test what is
and isn’t good without good prep

Voters for fairness and ground

 Elections DA
Biden wins in 2024, but it’s close
Kondik 23 [Kyle Kondik is managing editor of Sabato's Crystal Ball, the Center for Politics at UVA's nonpartisan newsletter on American
campaigns and elections. He is the author of The Long Red Thread (2021) and The Bellwether (2016) and is an Ohio native ,SABATO'S CRYSTAL
BALL, “Electoral College Ratings: Expect Another Highly Competitive Election”, published June 29, 2023,
https://centerforpolitics.org/crystalball/articles/electoral-college-ratings-expect-another-highly-competitive-election/, accessed 8/31/23]
//hacchs
Electoral College Ratings: Expect Another Highly Competitive Election Small edge to Democrats but
neither side over 270 to start KEY POINTS FROM THIS ARTICLE — Our initial 2024 Electoral College
ratings start with just four Toss-up states. — Democrats start with a small advantage, although
both sides begin south of what they need to win. — We consider a rematch of the 2020 election —
Joe Biden versus Donald Trump — as the likeliest matchup, but not one that is set in stone. A first
look at the 2024 Electoral College Democrats start closer to the magic number of 270 electoral votes
in our initial Electoral College ratings than Republicans. But with few truly competitive states and a
relatively high floor for both parties, our best guess is yet another close and competitive presidential
election next year — which, if it happened, would be the sixth such instance in seven elections (with
2008 as the only real outlier). Map 1 shows these initial ratings. We are starting 260 electoral votes
worth of states as at least leaning Democratic, and 235 as at least leaning Republican. The four Toss-
ups are Arizona, Georgia, and Wisconsin — the three closest states in 2020 — along with Nevada,
which has voted Democratic in each of the last four presidential elections but by closer margins
each time (it is one of the few states where Joe Biden did worse than Hillary Clinton, albeit by less than a
tenth of a percentage point). That is just 43 Toss-up electoral votes at the outset. Remember that because of a likely GOP advantage
in the way an Electoral College tie would be broken in the U.S. House, a 269-269 tie or another scenario where no candidate won 270 electoral
votes would very likely lead to a Republican president. So Democrats must get to 270 electoral votes while 269 would likely suffice for
Republicans, and there are plausible tie scenarios in the Electoral College. Map 1: Crystal Ball Electoral College ratings For the purposes of
these ratings, we are considering a rematch of the 2020 election — Joe Biden versus Donald Trump — as the likeliest matchup, but not one that
is set in stone. Despite a multitude of weaknesses, such as an approval rating in just the low 40s and widespread concern about his age and
ability to do the job, Biden does not have credible opposition within his own party, drawing only fringe challengers Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and
Marianne Williamson. It may be that Biden could or should have drawn a stronger challenger, and maybe something happens that entices that
kind of challenger into the race. But as of now, Biden appears to be on course to renomination. Trump faces
legitimate legal problems, specifically following his recent indictment over serious allegations that he improperly retained highly sensitive
government documents. However, we would never presume an actual guilty verdict in this or another case until it actually happens — nor are
we even sure a guilty verdict would prevent Trump’s renomination. It may be that the weight of Trump’s problems gradually reduces his level of
support over the course of this calendar year leading into next year’s primaries, allowing a rival to consolidate the non-Trump portion of the
maybe Trump is compelled to take some sort of plea deal that
party and really push him in the primaries. Or
involves him leaving the race. Those caveats aside, we see a party that is still broadly comfortable with
Trump as its nominee. Until that changes, he’s the favorite. It has now been more than a month since Trump’s leading
GOP rival, Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL), entered the race. As best we can tell, he has gotten no real “bump” from becoming an official candidate —
if anything, DeSantis’s polling position was stronger several months ago than it is today. Meanwhile, the field has gotten bigger, further
splintering the non-Trump support while the former president remains as a clear plurality (or even majority) leader in national and state-level
polling. This matters in a nominating contest in which even a plurality leader in a given state can end up getting the lion’s share or all of its
delegates (as we saw with Trump in 2016). For our general election outlook, we are not taking current polling much into account right now.
Biden’s national polling right now is probably worse than what our ratings reflect: Different polls show either Biden ahead by a little or Trump
We believe Biden would do better than
ahead by a little nationally, and about a tie in aggregate per RealClearPolitics’s average.
that, at least in the national popular vote, against Trump: Trump lost the popular vote twice, and we
doubt he would be a stronger candidate in 2024 than he was in 2016 or 2020. The last time Trump was on
the general election ballot was prior to the Jan. 6, 2021 storming of the Capitol, an event that can now be used effectively against him in a
general election setting. We just saw that in the 2022 election, several candidates who were tied to Trump running in key states — such as Kari
Lake and Blake Masters in Arizona, Herschel Walker in Georgia, several election-denying candidates in other statewide races across the nation,
etc. — underperformed the electoral environment. Midterms are not presidential elections, and this does not necessarily mean Trump can’t
the actual results from recent elections, which
win — he certainly could, and our ratings reflect that possibility. But
suggested significant problems for Trump, seem to be a better guide than off-year polling. We also are
not really taking third-party voting into account as of now, although one could imagine the third party vote, whatever size it is, hurting the
Democratic nominee more than the GOP nominee. The Green Party nominee, who might be left-wing intellectual Cornel West, could hurt Biden
from the left, while a potential candidate backed by the group No Labels could provide an outlet for moderate/conservative voters. However,
we do think it’s likely that any third-party candidate will poll better than they perform, and that the ultimate third party vote does not seem
likely to be large (perhaps bigger than 2020’s 2% of the total, but likely not reaching 2016’s 6%). Still, that may matter in a close race, so it is a
very important factor to watch. We have previously noted that Biden’s chances in the next election are very contingent on who the GOP
certainly doesn’t
decides to nominate as his opponent. As of right now, that person appears likeliest to be Donald Trump. That
make Biden a shoo-in next year, but it does make him better positioned to win, which is
reflected in our ratings. Let’s take a look at some state-level details of our initial Electoral College
ratings: — Democrats start with 191 Safe electoral votes, while Republicans start with just 122.
However, if you combine the Safe and Likely columns, the effective “floor” for both parties is essentially identical: 221 for Democrats, and 218
for Republicans. Texas is one of a handful of important states (Arizona and Georgia are a couple of others) that very clearly have trended
Democratic in the Trump era. But Texas is still a Republican-leaning state, as its big urban areas have not quite gotten blue enough to make up
for how red its lesser-populated places are. Other Likely Republican states Florida, Iowa, and Ohio have all moved right in the Trump era. Alaska
also appears here as Likely Republican as its GOP lean has eroded in recent years, but it’s also still clearly in the GOP column, and it’s included
here more as a curiosity than anything else. — We suspect the rating that might spur the most disagreement is starting Pennsylvania as Leans
Democratic, as opposed to a Toss-up. It’s also the one that, internally, we are the most conflicted about. On one hand, Pennsylvania only voted
for Biden by a little over a point in 2020 after backing Trump by less than a point in 2016. That basic fact argues for Toss-up. But we also think
Biden may have a bit more room to grow in vote-rich southeast Pennsylvania against Trump, which could help protect his narrow edge as
Republicans try to squeeze even more of a margin out of the state’s white rural and small-town areas. Certainly Democrats did great in
Pennsylvania in 2022, although we don’t necessarily view that as predictive — Democrats also did well in the 2018 statewide races, but that
didn’t prevent the state from being close in 2020. If you believe we’re giving an unreasonable benefit of the doubt to Democrats in
Pennsylvania, consider that we may be doing the same to Republicans in North Carolina, a state that was Trump’s closest victory in 2020. We
also may be giving the GOP a benefit of the doubt by listing Nevada as a Toss-up instead of as Leans Democratic, given the Democrats’ frequent
ability to pull out close victories in the state. But Democrats should be concerned that this working-class state’s center of votes, Clark County
(Las Vegas), is getting more competitive as opposed to getting more Democratic. — Arizona, Georgia, and Wisconsin seem like fairly clear-cut
Toss-ups, given how close they were in 2020 (each was decided by less than a point). But there’s a world in which the realigning patterns we’ve
seen in the Trump years, in which big metro areas like Phoenix and Atlanta are getting bluer, push their states (Arizona and Georgia) from a
reddish shade of purple to a bluish shade, and that Pennsylvania ends up being closer for president than those states are. Who the GOP
nominates will play a role here — maybe a non-Trump nominee ends up being a better fit for the party in the Sun Belt, which would solidify
Arizona and Georgia as Toss-ups or maybe even push them back to the Republicans. Wisconsin, meanwhile, may be the purest Toss-up on the
whole map: Its presidential margin was below a point in four of the last six elections. — In our 2020 ratings — when we ultimately missed just
one state, North Carolina — we started Michigan out as Leans Democratic, a decision that paid off, as Biden won the state by nearly 3 points
after it surprisingly backed Trump in 2016. It remains Leans Democratic here, along with New Hampshire, which has long been considered a
swing state but seems to have settled left of center. The GOP position on abortion, in particular, seems like a considerable problem in these
states (one could apply this argument to Pennsylvania too, among other places). — Maine and Nebraska, the two states that award electoral
Nebraska’s two statewide electoral votes and two of its
votes at the congressional-district level, have unique ratings.
three districts are Safe Republican, but the Omaha-based NE-2 voted for Biden by about a half-dozen
points in 2020, and we are rating it as Leans Democratic to start. Meanwhile, Maine’s northern 2nd District backed
Trump by about a half-dozen points in 2020 and it starts as Leans Republican. The two statewide electoral votes are rated as Likely Democratic
— Minnesota, New Mexico, and Virginia are also in that category — and the very Democratic 1st District of Maine starts as Safe Democratic.
Conclusion: A narrow battlefield We have previously noted that only seven states were decided by less than three points in 2020: Arizona,
Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. This
represents the real battlefield: Particularly if
the race is a Biden vs. Trump redux, we would be surprised if any other state flipped from 2020
outside of this group.
Federal jobs guarantee political suicide
Bhandari 19 [Ryan Bhandari, Former Senior Policy Advisor, Economic Program, “What Is the “Federal Jobs Guarantee” and What Are
People Saying About It?”, published March 25, 2019, https://www.thirdway.org/memo/what-is-the-federal-jobs-guarantee-and-what-are-
people-saying-about-it, accessed 10/12/23] //hacchs
The key difference between the two plans is the minimum wage for the new jobs. The Tcherneva plan establishes a $15 minimum wage and the
Paul et al. plan calls for an $11.80 minimum wage for all federally guaranteed jobs. Yet, both have the same underlying goal: Permanently solve
the problem of involuntary unemployment by making the federal government the employer of last resort. What are the Concerns? Ensuring
people have the opportunity to work and earn a good life is a shared value across the country. But, the federal jobs guarantee approach raises a
voters seem to be wary of it. In our polling, only 9% support a new program that
number of concerns. And
guarantees a full-time government job—36 points less than those who support a new program
where government works with business to create more good-paying jobs in the private sector. Among
just Democrats, the divide was starker: 14% support a federal jobs guarantee while 59% want
government to work with business to create private sector jobs. Politics aside, the federal jobs guarantee raises five
substantive concerns. #1: It solves a different problem. Right now there are over seven million open jobs and six million unemployed people.
Yet, many of these jobs are going unfilled. Why? Many people don’t have the right mix of skills or training. New jobs are often in different
places than old ones. Childcare and transportation are often prohibitively expensive. And others struggle with opioid addiction and other
conditions. And yet, a federal jobs guarantee doesn’t address any of this. Even during economic downturns, there are better and far more
efficient ways to help workers and communities such as targeted public works programs, hiring credits for employers, temporary tax cuts for
working families, extended unemployment insurance, and money to shore up state and local budgets.

MAGA Victory leads to wars and democratic backsliding

Taylor 23 [MILES TAYLOR, Taylor is the former chief of staff of the Department of Homeland Security. He is the author of the forthcoming book
Blowback: A Warning to Save Democracy from the Next Trump (Simon & Schuster) and host of the podcast The Whistleblowers (iHeart Radio) , “Another
Trump Presidency Would Be Even Worse Than You Think”, Time, published JULY 12, 2023, https://time.com/6294052/new-trump-presidency-would-be-
even-worse/, accessed 8/29/23] //hacchs
That’s because “Trump 2.0” won’t be as bad as many think. It will be worse. Over the course of the past two years, I’ve
interviewed dozens of former officials about the ex-president’s undisclosed plans, including what Trump or a savvier successor would do in office next time. The picture was
bleaker than I expected. I thought I’d seen the worst. After all, I served as chief of staff at the Department of Homeland Security for part of the Trump era. We believed the
man’s immoral impulses could be managed. We were catastrophically wrong. I wrote an unsigned opinion piece from within the administration to shine a light on presidential
misconduct, but it only got darker. So I quit my job, unmasked myself as the anonymous author, and recruited others to campaign against the president in 2020. Trump lost. In
many ways, so did I. Contending with the vindictive chief executive nearly destroyed my life, from financial and legal troubles to stalkers and death threats. More importantly, it
nearly destroyed our republic. Since then, I’ve wondered: how much worse could it have been? What will happen if the disgraced tycoon or the “next Trump” recaptures the
First, ex-officials I
presidency? I’ve asked cabinet secretaries, Trump aides, whistleblowers, and current and former GOP leaders. Three predictions alarmed me the most.

spoke with warn that the executive branch will be weaponized by another MAGA president in previously unreported
ways. “The damage Trump did in the first term is reparable,” said former national security advisor John Bolton, but he said
the next Trump “would do damage that is not reparable, especially in a White House surrounded by fifth-raters.”
Intelligence agencies and the military are of particular concern. “The MAGA movement has paved the way for a politicized intelligence
community,” explained Fiona Hill, a former advisor on Trump’s National Security Council (NSC). She worries that having
ideologues run such agencies “will lead the United States into wars” – wars that America might not be prepared to win.
Trump’s former defense secretary Mark Esper added that his “biggest concern would be withdrawing troops from key
places abroad” and “abandoning alliances,” projecting the next Trump could leave America vulnerable to attack. Other
defense leaders worry about military forces being brought home for the wrong reasons. Indeed, Donald Trump came close to deploying armed U.S. troops on American soil in
February 2019. After watching television footage of migrants at the border, he told aides to invoke the Insurrection Act to put down what he called “an invasion.” Then-
president Trump prepared to include the announcement in his State of the Union Address, forcing a number of officials (myself included) to rush to the White House and talk the
president out of it. Next time, no agency will be spared from such abuses of power. Interviewees told me about everything from MAGA plans to force the Education Department
to kick undocumented children out of public schools (the idea was a “cockroach that wouldn’t die,” claimed Josh Venable, Trump’s former chief of staff at the
department) all the way to “fully gutting” the Department of Veterans Affairs in order to use its $250 billion budget on other political priorities (“Veterans
the legislative branch
would die by the thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands,” explained Jim Byrne, Trump’s number-two at the agency). Second,
will be neutralized and GOP objectors muzzled. Former Tea Party congressman Reid Ribble said Congress’s checks and balances against the
presidency “will be undone entirely” by another MAGA White House. Current and former Republican representatives like him projected that another Trump would actively
obstruct Congress, from bypassing the Senate by installing unqualified “acting” officials to run government agencies to simply ignoring subpoenas . If there’s a
legislative agenda, one veteran GOP operative said it would be: “guns, gays, and girls.” The White House would pressure
Congress to water down gun laws, overturn protections for same-sex marriage, and seek to outlaw abortion, putting the culture wars center stage. Meanwhile, would-be GOP
dissenters will think twice about voicing concern. “I don’t use the word ‘frightening’ very often, but it really did frighten me,” recalled former GOP Congressman Scott Rigell,
reflecting on how swiftly people like him were ostracized from the party for opposing Trumpism, calling it “cult worship.” Even after GOP rebels like Adam Kinzinger and Denver
Riggleman were run out of Congress, the vitriolic threats and abuse continued. “Now I carry at all times,” one ousted Republican confessed, revealing a concealed pistol in his
waistband. “I’m carrying a Wilson Combat 45.” Former RNC chair Michael Steele said the intimidation works, which is why it will escalate next time. “That’s why the hammer
came down so hard on Liz Cheney—to send a message of fear,” he remarked. “No one wants to be targeted the way she’s been targeted.” Third, the justice system
will be used to punish the MAGA movement’s enemies. Former FBI leader Andy McCabe and others worry that purging the FBI of “the deep
state” has gone from an unserious Trump refrain to a mainstream GOP position. They fear the bureau will be used for revenge. “You will see

them cock the weapon and aim it at a new target,” explained Tom Warrick, a Trump-era counterterrorism czar.
“I assume we are going to see the invention of domestic terrorist enemies ,” he said. Warrick predicted political
opponents would be harassed under the guise of counterterrorism — “one of the scariest aspects of what a ‘Trump Two’ would bring into office.” The courts
may not be able to protect these Americans, especially if the White House ignores the judges, as Trump wanted to do . Jon Burks, former chief of staff to

House Speaker Paul Ryan, said that a refusal by Trump 2.0 to comply with court orders could spark “war in the
justice system.” Others used words like “civil war,” “soft secession” and “political assassinations” to describe
how such a period might devolve. Such terminology would have seemed absurd less than a decade ago. Now it is eerily common in conversations with former
officials. So what can we do? We should assume the probability of a MAGA redux is significant. The GOP’s anti-democratic, populist wing remains

firmly in control of the party, and if another Trump-like leader is elected, Congress and the courts will struggle
to keep up. We may be left to depend on conscientious insiders, the dwindling few in government who are prepared to blow the whistle in times of crisis. Unfortunately,
they risk extinction. The cost of speaking up in the U.S. remains alarmingly high, and would-be whistleblowers fear crowd-sourced hate and death threats. Short of giving up on
free speech, there’s only one way to lower the price of dissent: increase the supply. More people must step forward and tell the truth, especially the many GOP figures who
privately shared with me their fears about the MAGA movement, or the everyday Americans who’ve been swept up in it, only to find they’ve been swindled. The only scenario
As the 2024 primary
scarier than a wayward president deploying troops on U.S. city streets is the scenario in which no one is brave enough to say anything.

season approaches, voters can make sure we don’t end up in this situation by telling themselves the truth:
democracy can’t afford a repeat.

Democratic collapse is an existential threat --- controls every impact

Kasparov 17 (Garry Kasparov, Chairman of the Human Rights Foundation, former World Chess Champion, “Democracy and Human
Rights: The Case for U.S. Leadership,” Testimony Before The Subcommittee on Western Hemisphere, Transnational Crime, Civilian Security,
Democracy, Human Rights, and Global Women's Issues of the U.S. Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, February 16 th,
https://www.foreign.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/021617_Kasparov_%20Testimony.pdf)
As one of the countless millions of people who were freed or protected from totalitarianism by the United States
of America, it is easy for me to talk about the past. To talk about the belief of the American people and their leaders that this
country was exceptional, and had special responsibilities to match its tremendous power. That a nation founded on freedom was
bound to defend freedom everywhere. I could talk about the bipartisan legacy of this most American principle, from the
Founding Fathers, to Democrats like Harry Truman, to Republicans like Ronald Reagan. I could talk about how the American people used to care
deeply about human rights and dissidents in far-off places, and how this is what made America a beacon of hope, a shining city on a hill.
America led by example and set a high standard, a standard that exposed the hypocrisy and cruelty of
dictatorships around the world. But there is no time for nostalgia. Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, the collapse of the
Soviet Union, and the end of the Cold War, Americans, and America, have retreated from those principles, and the
world has become much worse off as a result. American skepticism about America’s role in the world deepened in the long,
painful wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and their aftermaths. Instead of applying the lessons learned about how to do better, lessons about faulty
intelligence and working with native populations, the main outcome was to stop trying. This result has been a tragedy for the billions of people
still living under authoritarian regimes around the world, and it is based on faulty analysis. You can never guarantee a positive outcome— not in
chess, not in war, and certainly not in politics. The best you can do is to do what you know is right and to try your best. I speak from experience
when I say that the citizens of unfree states do not expect guarantees. They want a reason to hope and a fighting chance. People living
under dictatorships want the opportunity for freedom, the opportunity to live in peace and to follow their dreams. From
the Iraq War to the Arab Spring to the current battles for liberty from Venezuela to Eastern Ukraine, people are fighting for that opportunity,
giving up their lives for freedom. The United States must not abandon them. The United States and the rest of
the free world has an unprecedented advantage in economic and military strength today. What is
lacking is the will. The will to make the case to the American people, the will to take risks and invest in the long-term
security of the country, and the world. This will require investments in aid, in education, in security that allow countries to attain
the stability their people so badly need. Such investment is far more moral and far cheaper than the cycle of terror, war, refugees,
and military intervention that results when America leaves a vacuum of power. The best way to help refugees is
to prevent them from becoming refugees in the first place. The Soviet Union was an existential threat, and this focused the attention of the
world, and the American people. There existential threat today is not found on a map, but it is very real. The forces
of the past are making steady progress against the modern world order. Terrorist movements in the
Middle East, extremist parties across Europe, a paranoid tyrant in North Korea threatening nuclear
blackmail, and, at the center of the web, an aggressive KGB dictator in Russia. They all want to turn the world
back to a dark past because their survival is threatened by the values of the free world, epitomized by the
United States. And they are thriving as the U.S. has retreated. The global freedom index has declined for ten
consecutive years. No one like to talk about the United States as a global policeman, but this is what happens when there is no
cop on the beat. American leadership begins at home, right here. America cannot lead the world on
democracy and human rights if there is no unity on the meaning and importance of these things.
Leadership is required to make that case clearly and powerfully . Right now, Americans are engaged in
politics at a level not seen in decades. It is an opportunity for them to rediscover that making America
great begins with believing America can be great. The Cold War was won on American values that were shared by both
parties and nearly every American. Institutions that were created by a Democrat, Truman, were triumphant forty years later thanks to the
courage of a Republican, Reagan. This bipartisan consistency created the decades of strategic stability that is
the great strength of
democracies. Strong institutions that outlast politicians allow for long-range planning . In contrast, dictators can
operate only tactically, not strategically, because they are not constrained by the balance of powers, but cannot afford to think beyond their
own survival. This is why a dictator like Putin has an advantage in chaos, the ability to move quickly. This can only be met by strategy, by long-
term goals that are based on shared values, not on polls and cable news. The fear of making things worse has paralyzed the United States from
trying to make things better. There will always be setbacks, but the United States cannot quit. The
spread of democracy is the
only proven remedy for nearly every crisis that plagues the world today. War, famine, poverty,
terrorism–all are generated and exacerbated by authoritarian regimes. A policy of America First inevitably
puts American security last. American leadership is required because there is no one else, and because it is
good for America. There is no weapon or wall that is more powerful for security than America being envied,
imitated, and admired around the world. Admired not for being perfect, but for having the exceptional
courage to always try to be better. Thank you.

Consult AIAN CP
The United States federal government ought to conduct a prior, binding, genuine
consultation with federally recognized tribes over whether or not to adopt a federal
jobs guarantee for American Indian Nations.
The United States federal government should only adopt a federal jobs guarantee for
American Indian Nations if it is approved as a result of the consultation, and adhere
with any requested modifications.
Prior attemp absent native consultation failed–consultation is key to solvency
Beyer and Heinrich 22 (Don, Representative from Virginia serving on Congress' Joint Economic
Committee, and on the House Committee on Ways and Means, Martin, Democratic Senator from New
Mexico, 5-13-2022, “Native American Communities Continue to Face Barriers to Opportunity that Stifle
Economic Mobility,” IJEC, https://www.jec.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/democrats/2022/5/native-
american-communities-continue-to-face-barriers-to-opportunity-that-stifle-economic-
mobility#:~:text=The%20Joint%20Economic%20Committee%20analyzed,American%20community%2C
%20finding%20the%20following%3A&text=Native%20Americans%20face%20barriers
%20to,participation%2C%20educational%20attainment%20and%20income.) – NT-RS

*AIAN = American Indian and Alaska Native

AIAN and white unemployment rates may seem insubstantial, the lower participation rate for AIAN masks the more dire circumstances of individuals searching for employment on reservations in places like South Dakota and Arizona where the gaps in employment are more dramatic.
Using similar methods to those employed by the Minneapolis Fed, Joint Economic Committee Democratic staff estimate that since 2007 the Native American unemployment rate has remained an average of twice that of non-Hispanic, white Americans. However, there has been marked
improvement in employment since the California v. Cabazon Supreme Court decision and the 1988 signing of the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act (IGRA), which reaffirmed tribal sovereignty and opened the door to tribal government gaming on reservation land. The IGRA facilitated the
creation of tribal gaming enterprises like casinos and bingo halls, creating jobs on reservations where employment opportunities can be limited. Following the passage of this legislation, from 1990 to 2010, the unemployment rate dropped 6.9 percentage points and the female labor force
participation rate increased 6.0 percentage points. The median Native American household made over $25,000 a year less than the median non-Hispanic white household in 2019 Between 2000 and 2019, household income grew more in Native American households than in white, non-
Hispanic ones. However, AIAN households still make over $25,000 less than the median non-Hispanic white household, as can be seen in the figure below. The past 40 years have seen rising wage inequality and stagnating wage growth in the United States. Because Native workers are
overrepresented at the bottom of the income distribution, even relative to Black and Hispanic workers, decades of anemic wage gains among low-income workers have hit the Native community especially hard. Approximately one in six Native American families lives below the poverty
level Native Americans experience higher rates of poverty than white individuals, irrespective of age . In 2019, Nearly one in six AIAN families live below the federal poverty level, and that increases to 26% for families with children under 5 years old. Overall, more than 25% of children
(ages 17 and under) who identify as AIAN (alone or in combination with another group) live in poverty, and among seniors (those 65 years and older), nearly 15% live in poverty. Among adults younger than the retirement age (between the ages of 18 and 64), or those most likely to
participate in the workforce, 19% live in poverty. For comparison, less than 6% of all white families, less than 10% of white families with a child under 18 and around 7% of white seniors live in poverty. The consequences of these relatively high poverty rates among Native Americans are
felt throughout the life cycle. Poverty has well-documented adverse effects on children’s educational outcomes and limits young adults’ ability to pursue post-secondary education. Children born to families at or below the poverty line are more than twice as likely to be in poor health
when they grow up as those who are born into families with incomes that are more than twice the poverty line. Policies that expand access to employment, adequate wages and opportunities to build wealth, will help alleviate Native American poverty and the corresponding negative
outcomes. Nearly 80% of Native Americans over the age of 25 hold less than a bachelor’s degree Native Americans are much less likely than their non-Native peers to graduate from high school or attend college. As can be seen in the figure below, of individuals who self-reported as
AIAN (whether alone or in combination with another ethno-racial identity), 79% had less than a bachelor’s degree and 16% had less than a high school diploma. Of those identifying as AIAN alone, approximately 84% had less than a bachelor’s degree and 19% had less than a high school
diploma. These levels are dramatically different than for those who identify as non-Hispanic white, among whom only 63% have not completed a bachelor’s degree and less than 7% have less than a high school diploma. Economic success depends not only on whether an individual
received an education but on whether they got a good enough education to lead to a well-paying career. In recent decades, the economic returns to education have increased substantially, and more education is becoming more frequently needed to achieve a basic level of financial
success. Native Americans are disproportionately likely to live in poverty, including those who do not live on tribal lands. For those that do, the limitations on tribes’ abilities to raise revenues prevent them from taking even the limited tax-related steps available to poor municipalities to
address the underfunding of tribal schools. While 90% of native students attend traditional public schools, the quality of the education provided to much of the other 10% by the Bureau of Indian Education (BIE) is widely regarded as unacceptably low. Native American Communities
Continue to Face Barriers to Opportunity that Stifle Economic Mobility The BIE is a federal entity responsible for the educations of 46,000 students who attend more than 180 schools which are under varying levels of federal control. Beyond the various oversight programs under the BIE,
there are more than 200 federally-recognized Tribal Education Departments operating in 32 states, all of which wield diverse tools and authorities to “implement education goals and priorities,” furthering tribal self-determination in education. In the schools directly managed by the
Bureau, BIE has repeatedly failed to implement necessary reforms and student services. For 13 years, the U.S. Department of Education has warned the BIE that they are failing to meet minimum expectations for special education services in the schools they actively oversee. The BIE has
also failed to implement reforms in these schools that would track academic performance and allow families to hold them accountable in the same ways that parents served by traditional public schools are able to do. Some tribally controlled schools that technically fall under BIE are the
exception to this record of poor performance. For example, the Santa Fe Indian School (SFIS), a Pueblo-governed middle and high school, has been lauded by federal entities as an institution that not only prepares students for higher education but offers nationally recognized academic
programs and produces a large number of Gates Millennium Scholars. While success stories like SFIS show that providing quality education to Native youth outside of traditional public schools is well within reach, remedying these dramatic disparities in access to a quality education would
increase opportunities for economic success for young Native Americans. DISPARITIES IN WEALTH, ACCESS TO BANKING AND CREDIT THAT LIMIT ECONOMIC SECURITY AND OPPORTUNITY The typical Native American family holds less wealth than the typical white family The typical white
family has more than twice the wealth of the typical families who identify as AIAN, Asian, Native Hawaiian, Pacific Islander or having more than one ethnic and racial identification (see figure below). Yet, these figures may underestimate the wealth gap between white and Native American
families. This is because the Federal Reserve Board’s Survey of Consumer Finances, the most reliable source of data on net worth by some identity categories, does not disaggregate within this category. For that reason, more granular wealth data are not available for any specific group.
Recent research uses local, more disaggregated data from Oklahoma to paint a more nuanced picture of the wealth position of Native American households in the Tulsa metropolitan area. The typical Native American household in Tulsa holds anywhere from eight to 88 cents for every
dollar of wealth held by the typical white family in the area. This wide range is explained by the variation observed across tribal affiliation and enrollment, and underscores the challenge of understanding how Native American household wealth is distributed. For example, tribally enrolled
Cherokee households in the Tulsa metropolitan area have a higher net worth relative to other Native households tribally enrolled and not enrolled. While the precise magnitude of the wealth disparities observed in the Tulsa metropolitan area may not reflect the financial reality of all
Native American families in the United States, the estimates offer important insights into the varied experience of Native American communities. Native American households face barriers to homeownership, a vital tool to build wealth Despite a strong preference for ownership, a smaller
share of Native households own their homes today than in 2000. Only about half of Native households (in this case, those identifying as AIAN alone) owned their home in 2020, relative to more than 7 in 10 white households (see figure below). In fact, the rate of homeownership for
Native households stood below the national average last year. While 75% of Native households report having a strong desire to own their home, they face significant barriers. To start, Native American communities face an inadequate supply of housing. This has led to overcrowding and
physical housing problems that are far more severe in Native American areas than in other parts of the country. A Department of Housing and Urban Development study finds that 68,000 units need to be built in Indian Country to alleviate substandard and overcrowded homes. Some
experts believe these figures may underestimate the precise level of need given the prevalence of poor-quality housing and severe overcrowding in these communities. Access to affordable capital is a persistent challenge for Native Americans who wish to own their home; among other
aspects, administrative burdens, lack of access to land title records, lack of financial institutions on or near tribal lands, data titles and inter-agency inefficiencies have limited conventional lender participation in these communitie s. Even when private capital reaches them, Native
borrowers are more likely to pay a high premium that limits their ability to accumulate equity and build wealth. The Native American Communities Continue to Face Barriers to Opportunity that Stifle Economic Mobility Center for Indian Country Development at the Federal Reserve Bank
of Minneapolis finds that loans with Native Americans as the primary borrower have an average interest rate that is nearly 2 percentage points above the average loan for non-Native Americans. These higher-priced home loans are found predominately on reservation lands; around 30%
of mortgages for Natives on-reservation were high-priced, compared to only 10% for non-Natives near reservations. Native American households are disproportionally harmed by lack of access to banking services More than 1 in 10 (or 16%) of Native American households are unbanked.
This figure is three times higher than the national average. A larger share of Native American households lack access to banking than any other minority group in the United States (see figure below). Unbanked Native households lack access to a checking or savings account in part due to
banking deserts. On average, majority-Native American counties have only three bank branches. This figure is lower than the nine-branch average in non-metro counties, and well below the 26-branch overall average for all counties nationwide. Obtaining access to banking services is
difficult for Native American families when the nearest bank branch is, on average, 12 miles away from the geographic center of a reservation and sometimes even more than 70 miles away. In contrast, the nearest banking branch is within less than 1 mile on average for most counties
across the country. Being unbanked is expensive and time-consuming. Each financial transaction for the underbanked involves fees and costly hurdles. The unbanked must pay fees to send and receive money, to cash checks and even to simply use debit cards. For example, Native
Americans are more likely than their white counterparts to report using costly, reloadable prepaid debit cards, and less likely to use a credit card. Overall, Native American communities are less likely to use mainstream financial services products and more likely to use alternative financial
services products. Native American businesses are more likely to struggle in obtaining credit There are about 300,000 Native-owned small businesses in the United States, which generate around $50 billion in annual revenue. Native American business owners generate jobs and economic
activity in a wide array of industries, including tourism, gaming, energy, agriculture, forestry, manufacturing and federal contracting. Despite these contributions, small businesses owned by Native Americans struggle to access bank credit. Relative to all business owners, fewer AIAN

Native
business owners report using bank financing to start their business. In 2012, for example, about 6% of AIAN businesses owners reported using formal bank financing as source of startup capital. By comparison, nearly 8% of all business owners reported doing the same.

American business owners also report a greater reliance on informal banking financing, like credit cards,
for business startup and growth than non-Native entrepreneurs. About 10% to 15% of Native-owned businesses
consistently report using credit cards to finance start-up costs. This figure is 3 to 5 percentage points higher than what is typical for non-Native
entrepreneurs. The Native Nations Institute and the U.S. Department of Treasury’s Community Development Financial Institutions Fund find
that Native American entrepreneurs face more barriers than others in obtaining business capital, including prohibitively high interest rates on
loans and the inability to use trust land as collateral. Limitedaccess to capital and structural inequalities leave
minority-owned businesses more vulnerable to economic shocks. For example, Native-owned small
businesses are among businesses that have been most financially harmed by the coronavirus pandemic;
a survey of small businesses in Indian Country in 2020 found that about 68% of businesses saw at least a 20% revenue reduction, while 1 in 6
businesses reported having lost all revenue (as of mid-July 2020) because of the pandemic. Small businesses in tribal areas were
also less likely to receive Paycheck Protection Program assistance and received less, on average, than
businesses in non-tribal areas when they were able to obtain support. NATIVE AMERICAN COMMUNITIES WERE
DISPROPORTIONALLY HARMED BY THE PANDEMIC AIAN communities lack access to health insurance, medical care facilities and grocery stores
The AIAN community disproportionately lacks access to critical services and supports, like health
insurance, medical care facilities and grocery stores, leading to chronic health conditions . This made Native
communities especially vulnerable to the coronavirus and contributed to higher rates of infection, hospitalization and death. Past efforts
to address health disparities have fallen short. In treaties spanning nearly the entire history of the
United States, the federal government committed to provide Native Americans free health care in
exchange for tracts of land. This trust obligation, like many others to the AIAN community, has not been met. The Indian
Health Service (IHS) is consistently and chronically underfunded with the capacity to spend $3,333 per user on average compared to $9,404 for
the Department of Veterans Affairs and $12,744 for Medicare. Unlike other federal health programs, IHS does not receive advance
appropriations, making it difficult to plan long-term health infrastructure such as facility improvements and health professional recruitment and
retention. This
lack of funding coupled with the fact that tribal communities tend to be in rural, remote or
isolated locations, has led to a devastating and dangerous lack of access to hospitals and adequate
health care. For those who can access care, nearly a quarter of Native Americans have also reported that they have personally experienced
discrimination when visiting a doctor or health clinic. Native American communities lack access to affordable health insurance. Nearly 20% of
those who identify as American Indian or Alaska Native alone are not covered by either public or private health insurance, a rate higher than
that of almost every other group (see figure below). In addition to being particularly harmed by the health effects of the pandemic, research
has shown that stay-at-home measures exacerbated long-standing barriers in AIAN communities to accessing healthy food.
Households on reservations must travel more than 20 miles on average to reach the nearest supermarket, one of the longest distances
nationwide. Stay-at-home measures and a need to reduce social exposure led more AIAN households to opt for shorter distances to
convenience stores, which tend to have more processed foods and less fresh produce. The
underfunding of tribal health care, a
high uninsured rate and restricted access to hospitals and grocery stores has led to worse health
outcomes in Native communities. Native Americans have been found to experience higher rates of chronic liver disease and
cirrhosis, diabetes, heart disease, cancer and lower respiratory diseases, among other health problems. Moreover, AIAN persons have a life
expectancy that is 5.5 years less than the average American (73 compared to 78.5). These chronic conditions have also put tribal communities
at a greater risk of COVID infection, hospitalization and death. Native Americans were more than twice as likely to contract COVID-19 and die
than non-Hispanic white Americans Lower health status also
made Native Americans more vulnerable to the health
effects of the pandemic. As recently as February 2022, data from the CDC shows that AIAN persons are 1.6 times more
likely to contract COVID-19, 3.1 times more likely to be hospitalized and 2.1 times more likely to die of
COVID¬19 compared to non-Hispanic white persons. These rates are higher than those of all other minority groups tracked
by the CDC (see figure below). The losses are particularly devastating for AIAN communities, where tribal elders are crucial to maintaining
cultural traditions and language. Tribal revenues have been disproportionally impacted by COVID-19 COVID-19
has exposed the
economic vulnerability of tribal economies and tribal revenue streams . Like states and cities, tribal
governments are responsible for providing key services to their communities . Unlike states and cities,
tribal governments cannot collect adequate taxes to pay for such services, making them uniquely
dependent on income from tribal enterprises or federal government appropriations . Tribal enterprises have
proliferated since the late 1980s, and they serve as engines of economic activity, locally and regionally. For example, S & K Electronics is one of
many enterprises owned and operated by the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes on the Flathead Indian Reservation, and it generates
about $1 million for the tribe to help fund departments ranging from forestry to health care. In addition to S & K Electronics, the Confederated
Salish and Kootenai Tribes own gaming and energy enterprises and a local bank. Tribal enterprises are active participants in an array of
industries, including hospitality, tourism, energy, technological manufacturing and financial services. The gaming and entertainment sector in
some tribal economies is massive and has been especially impacted by social-distancing measures. In 2019, tribal gaming enterprises alone
generated $17.7 billion in taxes for federal, state and local governments. Researchers estimate that, together, tribal gaming and non-gaming
enterprises and tribal government support 1.1 million jobs and more than $49.5 billion in annual wages and benefits for workers, a majority of
whom are non-Native workers. While these enterprises have largely reopened, all were closed at the height of the pandemic. This caused a
crucial revenue source for tribes to disappear, such that in the fall of 2020, over half of tribally owned enterprises reported revenue losses of
more than 20%. As a result, enterprises have fewer revenues to allocate to tribal governments, which results in cuts to essential community
services. In a survey of tribal governments, 75% responded that they had been forced to reduce services related to economic development
because of falling revenue streams. Over the long-term, this will restrict tribes’ pandemic recovery and overall economic growth. CONCLUSION:
EXPANDING ECONOMIC WELL-BEING AND MOBILITY FOR NATIVE AMERICAN COMMUNITIES Native American communities
continue to face pervasive disparities after centuries of maltreatment and exclusion. The legacies of the
past persist today in the form of inequities that continue to threaten the economic security and
opportunities of AIAN communities. Across metrics of economic well-being, Native Americans are
disproportionately underserved, economically vulnerable and limited in their access pathways to
building wealth. These longstanding inequities have left Native communities much more vulnerable than
their counterparts to the negative impact of economic shocks and public health crises. Expanding
economic justice for Native communities will require keeping up with trust and treaty obligations and a
broad basket of proactive structural policies. To help address the immediate public health and economic impacts of the
coronavirus, President Biden’s American Rescue Plan invested over $31 billion in Native American and tribal communities, making it the single
largest federal investment in AIAN communities in U.S. history. Investments in the bipartisan Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, including
$11 billion for tribal entities, are an important first step to addressing pervasive structural barriers in AIAN communities that restrict economic
growth and limit economic opportunities. The bipartisan Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act includes $3 billion in funding for the Tribal
Transportation Program, invests $3.5 billion in the Indian Health Service Sanitation Facilities Construction Program and $2 billion in spending for
the NTIA Tribal Broadband Connectivity Program. Already, the Biden Administration announced in December 2021 that nearly $10 million in
awards from multiple departments that play a role in overseeing broadband funding and development would be used to bring high-speed
internet services to tribal lands. These and additional programs and funds dispersed in the future will connect the least connected group in the
United States to the digital economy, helping to open a small window of opportunity for economic development, education, telehealth and
more. Further investments in Native American communities and institutions will help improve AIAN well-being, health and education outcomes,
as well as the financial security and mobility of these families. Because Native American households are more likely to be unbanked than any
other households in the United States, expanding access to Community Development Financial Institutions (CDFIs) would help facilitate more
access to credit for Native American and tribal families. A study found that growing up on Native tribal reservations with reduced access to
banking is equivalent to a significantly lower likelihood of having a credit report, lower credit scores and a loss in annual earnings of $6,000.
Proposals of postal banking and other public banking options could also help improve the financial position of Native American families, as they
can expand access to free bank accounts that can be used to receive money, make payments and withdraw cash. These are all important steps
to increase economic opportunity and prosperity of Native Americans for generations to come. However, more
will be required via a
concerted and enduring effort from both the federal government and tribal governments to ensure just
outcomes for Native people. In this process, it is important to keep in mind that under the principle of self-
determination, tribal nations should determine what their priorities are and what kinds of projects
they welcome on their homelands.

Their own ev concedes USFG doesn’t know enough to solve

1AC Akee ’21 (Randall Akee is a senior economist at the Council of Economic Advisers, currently on leave from his position as an
associate professor in the Department of Public Policy and American Indian Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles. Akee is a
research fellow at the Harvard Project on American Indian Economic Development. “Sovereignty and improved economic outcomes for
American Indians: Building on the gains made since 1990,” JANUARY 14, 2021, https://equitablegrowth.org/sovereignty-and-improved-
economic-outcomes-for-american-indians-building-on-the-gains-made-since-1990/)
The exercise of American Indian tribal sovereignty over the past 30 years resulted in more economic
growth and improved well-being for American Indians than during any other point in the more than
500-year history post-contact with European colonists and settlers. Increased self-governance over tribal lands and
resources created new economic and employment opportunities for American Indians and for non-American-Indians on or near tribal lands and
resources as well.1
These advances are the foundation upon which policymakers can build to develop policies to address
persistent earnings and income inequality faced by American Indian workers and their families. Even
though American Indians are a relatively small proportion of the United States as a whole, in certain jurisdictions, they comprise a relatively
large proportion of the population. In states such as Oklahoma, New Mexico, South Dakota, Montana, North Dakota, and Arizona, the American
Indian population ranges from 5 percent to 13 percent of these states’ populations. Some tribal governments control (relatively) large amounts
of land areas in these states, which should result in meaningful influence over the demand and supply of labor and job creation in these states.
But, as this essay details, large hurdles remain before American Indian tribal governments can fully realize
their economic and political opportunities to provide full employment (through public or private enterprises) for
their citizens. Significant reductions in family poverty rates and unemployment rates almost doubled real per
capita income between 1990 and 2015, yet still-significant income gaps remain, largely because American
Indians residing on reservations are less likely to be employed full time than their White counterparts.
After detailing these findings—presented against the backdrop of the recent gains in tribal self-governance—I conclude with a look at three
areas that hold the most promise for improving earnings and employment for the American Indian population on reservation lands:
Support tribal sovereignty and industry innovation Reduce barriers to economic development Improve data collection for American Indians
While not all of these recommendations detailed below focus directly on individual American Indian workers, their families, or their
employers, they are
important in stimulating economic development and eliminating existing obstacles in
and around tribal lands. This economic development and the well-being of American Indians are not only
important in their own right but are also key to greater economic growth in these mostly rural and
underdeveloped regions of the United States.
The problem: Economic and labor conditions of American Indian workers and their families
There is surprisingly very little research on the determinants of earnings and wage growth for
Indigenous peoples in the United States. The vast majority of existing research focuses on the
American Indian reservation-based population, which is what I focus on in this essay, excluding the urban American
Indian population in my analysis.2 Nonetheless, systematic analysis and evaluation of policies intending to improve the earnings and
employment opportunities of American Indians are few and far between.3 Existing longitudinal datasets often do not have a sufficient number
of American Indians in order to conduct the standard analyses employed for other races or ethnic groups around the nation.
As a result, researchers
do not have the rigorous set of studies over time for these populations.
Therefore, there are many opportunities for future researchers to expand upon this report
and investigate determinants of earnings growth and employment growth for the American Indian
population. Identifying policy solutions to improve the earnings and employment of American Indians is not a trivial task.
First of all, there is little rigorous evaluation of labor force training programs or policies available,
compared to other race and ethnic groups in the United States. Additionally, data for this group are notoriously difficult to come by due to the
small proportion of American Indians in the overall U.S. population. Still, there are some broad datasets that enable researchers to present a
broad picture of the economic conditions of American Indian individuals and their families.

Cap K

FJG guarantees expand the market both geographically and temporally into every sphere of existence.
Meadway, 20—economist and Novara Media columnist (James, “Pandemic Labour and the Politics of
Job Guarantees,” https://novaramedia.com/2020/05/13/pandemic-labour-and-the-politics-of-job-
guarantees/, dml)
The reaction to this was exactly as Kalecki forecast. One way to understand the emergence of neoliberalism as the game-plan for running economies from
the 1970s onwards is that it was a direct attempt to wrest back control over the economy on the part of
management, breaking union organisation as it did so, and radically depoliticising all questions about the economy –
from the distribution of its rewards to the control over what and how it produced.
In terms of presentation by the government and media, the economy was shifted from something that we all take part in
and create – something, in other words, that is the product of all of our work, plus the natural riches of the world we inhabit – and into a
mysterious external force that, like an angry volcano-god, demanded sacrifice: unemployment, pay cuts, austerity. This
brutality was glossed over with rhetorical appeals to competition, and to calculation: one was good, the other
necessary.
What has happened under the pressure of the pandemic is that the reality of the economy as a social process has been rather starkly revealed. We can all see now
that work performed in specific ways matters, whether it is care work or delivering food. The (classically neoliberal) move to disguise all these
specific forms of work behind a general claim of seeking ‘productivity’ – with, naturally, some of the most important work
being the most ‘unproductive’, since it produces no output that can be reasonably counted or measured, as in the case of carework – suddenly looks
rather flimsy. Meanwhile, this economy has plainly over-rewarded activities that are valueless, or close to valueless, and massively under-rewarded some
essentials – to the point of depriving the people performing essential work of the protection they need. What researchers based mainly at Manchester University
usefully labelled the “foundational economy” after the Great Financial Crisis should now be the focus for a slow, humane move back towards a functioning society:
first get the fundamental tasks that a minimum civilised existence today requires – like keeping shops open or buses running – done right and safely. Everything else
is secondary. The exit from this phase of the pandemic crisis will pose specific problems – which sectors to reopen? how to guarantee safety when they do? – that
require specific and detailed answers. The left should be proposing that control of this process is put in the hands of those who actually do the work, and who will
be first to suffer the consequences of infection, rather than to the scheming of this government and Tory donors. Income support and the suspension of essential
payments, from utility bills to monthly rent, are all necessary during this period and for the immediate future, and current income provision should be preserved
and expanded. But these furlough income payments aren’t a job guarantee. In a sense, they are the exact opposite: they are a non-work guarantee. They are
guarantees of protection for when work should not be performed. Guaranteeing jobs in a pandemic. Indeed, there are specific concerns with job guarantees that
the pandemic emergency poses, centred critically on the degree of authoritarianism imposed. It is one thing to say everyone should work. It is quite another to insist
that everyone must work, even when it is actively dangerous – or could seem to be so. The government’s current messaging, such as it is, leans towards should; it
may move into must, and cuts to furlough payments inch it towards that. It is essential, in circumstances of pandemic risk and with the possibility of second or more
waves of the current virus, as well as the high degree of uncertainty around the immunity of those who have been infected, to have the right to refuse work and to
insist on the right of refusal in unsafe conditions. Most people have a good sense of this already, as the polling unease about ending the lockdown clearly indicates.
Of course, it would be possible to write a comprehensive, codified ‘Job Guarantee’ which also built-in recommendations for work only being provided if it was also
safe. It would also be possible to write promises in this Job Guarantee to make sure hours were short, pay was high, union membership provided and so on. But the
more desirable the features of the guaranteed job, the harder it would run into Kalecki’s political barrier: the
greater the encroachment on
the prerogative of employers to set the conditions of employment, the greater the resistance by those
employers. The job guarantee we would want is not a job guarantee we are likely to get.
In practice, where workplace organisation is weak, a general Job Guarantee would be more likely to
create substandard but nonetheless compulsory jobs. Indeed, some of the technocratic supporters of a
general Job Guarantee envisage precisely this mechanism at work: creating undesirable guaranteed jobs
to reduce the inflationary pressure on the wider economy by undermining conventional employment.
By substituting miserable guaranteed work for the misery of unemployment, workers outside the
guaranteed sector can still be disciplined to accept lower wages, worse conditions, and the authority of
their employer. And for employers, the ability to draw from a stock of easily accessed, suitably work-
disciplined and perhaps even trained workers is, potentially, preferable to drawing additional labour from a stock of the
unemployed. We’ve already seen variants of this form of ‘Job Guarantee’ in the form of workfare schemes.
The major barrier to this outcome is the existence of strong, independent trade unions. But as Ben Wray notes, citing Kalecki in his recent article for Conter, these don’t exist at present. If we take strike days as an indication of union power, the latest figures suggest trade unions have
never been weaker – at least until now.
Since the financial crisis, we have seen a decade of weak economic growth matched with stagnant or falling real wages but very significant job creation. On Wray’s estimate, about 1m unionised and relatively secure jobs in the public sector have been replaced with non-union, poorly paid
and insecure private sector jobs. But the peculiarity of the pandemic is that it has now created the conditions where those who work are potentially in a position to exert some control over how that work is performed. The strikes by retail workers across the US for greater protection at
work are the best example of the broader point. For the UK, whilst there have been a few scattered strikes (most notably by bin workers), it has been the top-level negotiations between the TUC and a strongly anti-union government that have been most telling.
What we don’t know, as yet, is how the UK’s labour market, with its weak unions and proliferation of crap jobs, will respond to a collapse in demand as we move out of the initial phase of this crisis. After the Great Financial Crisis of 2008-9, unemployment spiked upwards, but then rapidly
came down as shoddy, poorly-paid, insecure jobs were created on a grand scale over the next decade.
The same pattern seems more unlikely now, largely because the immediate future is one in which the regulation of labour will remain extensive, and therefore the ability to create new jobs difficult – and, potentially, expensive in terms of the provision of health protection for additional
employees. Unemployment maintained at a continuously higher level is likely, but it may lose the disciplinary function Kalecki highlighted where the need to monitor and regulate labour is still present – as it will be. The shift in the balance of power created by the pandemic can remain in
place at least as long as restrictions on work are necessary – and that shift, in turn, opens up the requirement for more direct forms of control and management of labour.
The new frontiers of control: biology and data.
There is a further twist to the problem of the disputed control of work. We can see already the glimmerings of a future in which the biological monitoring, regulation and control of labour becomes far more pervasive: infra-red sensors built into Amazon warehouses, mass contact tracing,
temperature checks on the morning commute.
Where once the monitoring of one’s health was largely left to the individual worker, the pandemic is beginning to socialise this on a grand scale. At the same time, the sudden expansion of homeworking under the lockdown has (in effect) hugely expanded the boundaries of the workplace
– not just geographically, as is obvious, but also temporally, with working days expanded and the work-life balance “obliterated” for those working from home. Somewhere down the line, of course, the great private behaviour-monitors of credit scoring and life insurance will move into
this space, whilst the $14bn commercial genomics market is set to grow exponentially over the next few years.
These are all massively data-intensive technologies and industries. And they increasingly impose themselves on what, historically, was a sphere of human life outside of the market and free from the direct control of capital. The frontier of control for work is no longer simply in the
specialised locations where work is performed – the office, the factory, the building site – but, potentially, the entire sphere of our existence, from the home to the workplace, and all points in between.

Capitalist accumulation is unsustainable, causes extinction and planetary immiseration.

Robinson, 23—Distinguished Professor of Sociology, Global and International Studies, and Latin
American Studies at the University of California at Santa Barbara (William, “The Violent Crackup of the
Post-WWII International Order: Notes on the Geopolitical Crisis and Global Capital,” Journal of World-
Systems Research, Vol. 29, No. 1, dml)
Some scholars have framed the crisis of global capitalism in terms of a declining U.S. hegemony and the rise of a Chinese competitor. But no new
nation-state power can supply the political authority necessary to stabilize the now-inextricably integrated global economy. The crisis of hegemony in the
international system takes place within this single, integrated global economy. No one state, no matter how powerful, can control the process of global
accumulation. This disjuncture between a globalized economy and a nation-state-based system of political authority generates
enormous
geopolitical tensions. The end of Western domination of world capitalism is upon us as the center of gravity of the global
economy shifts to China. But China will not become a new hegemon. Rather, we are moving towards political multipolarity at
a time of acute crisis in global capitalism—prolonged economic turbulence and political decay. The
breakdown of the political organization of world capitalism is not the cause but the consequence of contradictions
internal to a globally integrated system of capital accumulation. Escalating geopolitical conflict is pushing us towards
global conflagration. Wars provide enormous outlet for surplus accumulated capital. Historically they
have pulled the capitalist system out of accumulation crisis while they serve to deflect attention from
political tensions and problems of legitimacy. The most urgent task at this time is to prevent World War III.
The more we understand the changing nature of this beast that is global capitalism, the better we are situated
to work out strategies of resistance and transformation. The task before us is ever more urgent in the face of
the threat of nuclear holocaust, the collapse of the biosphere, and ever more acute inequality,
immiseration, and social disintegration around the world
Vote negative is to expose the cracks in their fantasy—that’s key to change the frame of political
possibility without falling for the tyranny of policy comparison.
Fletcher, 23—Associate Professor, Sociology of Development and Change, Wageningen University (Robert,
“Traversing the Neoliberal Fantasy,” Failing Forward: The Rise and Fall of Neoliberal Conservation, Conclusion, pp.
211-214, dml)
Such critique of critique has only multiplied in recent years in the face of the increasingly daunting range of social and environmental problems confronting us.3 Yet
one must also remain careful not to move too quickly down the path from defining and analyzing problems to prescribing solutions. Despite his
expressed opposition to this latter position, even Foucault could not resist the temptation at times, as exemplified by his curious if fleeting celebration of the
progressive possibilities of the 1979 Iranian Revolution (e.g., Foucault 1999). With hindsight, it is easy to understand the seduction of this stance. At that historical
moment, standing on the brink of the neoliberal onslaught he himself so presciently foretold (Foucault 2008), having witnessed the bitter failure of previous efforts
to cast the Soviet Union in a progressive light as well as dissipation of the ’68 euphoria, it must have appeared, as it did to Horkheimer and Adorno (1998: xi) some
three decades earlier in the midst of World War II, that humankind “instead of entering into a truly human condition, [was] sinking into a new kind of barbarism”
once more. At that point, itwould have been difficult not to succumb to the siren song of any movement that
might offer a ray of hope in the gathering darkness. Similarly misplaced optimism has afflicted otherwise
even-keeled critical analysts time and again, from disavowal of Soviet atrocities by Cold War communist sympathizers to Žižek’s (2008)
praise of Chavez’s Venezuela despite growing evidence of that regime’s mounting totalitarian impulses. Dynamics like these warn us to be
wary in our eagerness to start celebrating ostensive alternatives too quickly. Pushing back against this
growing trend, Konings, for instance, echoes Foucault in asserting: A major factor luring progressive intellectuals into the game of making policy
proposals is the tyranny of “what is your alternative?”—that is, the notion that public intellectuals only behave
responsibly if they do not only offer criticism but also put forward alternative policy proposals . However, in
situations where we find ourselves at many removes from the levers of public authority, to prescribe
policy alternatives is bound to be either presumptuous and pointless (because the political actors that we would
like to carry our programs are nowhere to be found) or conservative in its political implications (because after
many radical calls in the desert we learn to ratchet our ambitions down to a level where they can easily be taken up by
existing agencies). Once we buy into the game of making policy proposals we can only sound ridiculous and
irrelevant or end up participating in the legitimation of prevailing relations of power. We may be able to
find a trade-off between these two extremes, but we will have structurally hobbled our capacity for the
production of critical knowledge. (2009: 355) Rather than succumb to this lure, Konings follows Hegel via Žižek (1993) in advising us
to “tarry with the negative,” suggesting that, “For the time being, the most productive role that progressive intellectuals can
play is to . . . trace and publicize the inconsistencies between prevailing practices of power and their
idealized representation in the official institutions, narratives and symbols of our polity” (2009: 356). I agree that this type of critical analysis has
utility in its own right, and that to be effective it must be followed through to the point that one is certain one has fully understood the contours of the problem at
hand—what Haraway (2016), as previously noted, calls “staying with the trouble.” But I also agree with Haraway that we need not stop at that point; we can instead
attempt to tread the “fine line between acknowledging the extent and seriousness of the troubles and succumbing to abstract futurism and its affects of sublime
despair and its politics of sublime indifference” (2016: 4). While avoiding Konings’ twin pitfalls of either vacuous utopian fantasizing or outlining politically pragmatic
proposals—or alternately pursuing a diluted “trade-off between these two extremes”—we can, I believe, still continue to point toward the type of more radical
change that would get us closer to the sort of world we truly want to inhabit. In the passage (quoted in full in note 6 of chapter 2) made famous by Klein’s (2007)
analysis of his perspective as a “shock doctrine,” Milton Friedman claimed that the “basic function” of his cohort of neoliberal
ideologues was “to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the
politically impossible becomes the politically inevitable” (Friedman 2002: xiv). In pointing to this function, Friedman highlighted the
interrelationship between ideational and material dimensions of social change, asserting, “Only a crisis—actual or perceived—produces real
change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around” (2002: xiv). It is
astounding how prescient this prognosis now appears, looking back upon the neoliberal ascendance Friedman himself helped to orchestrate:
how the 1973 accumulation crisis indeed created the space for Friedman and colleagues to promote the ideas they had been nurturing for
decades prior as the basis of the new world order, and in this way transforming a philosophy that had indeed seemed “politically impossible”
only a short time before into what has now been able to assert itself as the inevitable outcome of a teleological development. In a parallel yet
opposite strategy, therefore, we might follow Friedman’s lead in our own promotion of “vital alternatives” (Dressler et al. 2014) to neoliberal
conservation. 4 For the reality, as outlined in chapter 8, is that there is already a wealth of alternative “transition discourses” in development
throughout the world, via both on-the-ground practice and more abstract conceptualization. The main current impediment to fully realizing
these is that, from the perspective of a persistent neoliberal hegemony, they do appear politically infeasible at present. Yet as Friedman among
others has taught us, such perceptions can be subject to dramatic transformation over time (see also Yurchak 2013). After all, one of the main
functions of hegemony, noted in chapter 1, is precisely to “define . . . what is realistic and what is not realistic, and to drive certain aspirations
and grievances into the realm of the impossible, of idle dreams” (Scott 1990: 73). A
main strategy of both socialist and anarchist politics has
thus been to make “impossible demands” of the current social order so as to challenge this hegemony and
sustain the idea that, as the World Social Forum asserts, another world is possible beyond the impoverished horizons
of neoliberal capitalism. In addition to highlighting already existing alternative practices and proposals and helping to flesh out the
contours of the alternative world(s) to which they point—the focus of the previous chapter—another productive role for critical scholarship
beyond critique may be to explore the conditions of possibility that would allow such alternatives to become first imaginable and then realistic.
This is my aim in the following.

Ferk DA
Current dem backing of Rosner key to end FERC stalemate and pass essential
sustainable energy policies
Willson and Cama 23 ( Miranda Willson, Timothy Cama. "Sources: Manchin backs FERC energy analyst for
commission seat." E&E News by POLITICO. Web. 9-7-2023. accessed 10-3-2023. <
https://www.eenews.net/articles/sources-manchin-backs-ferc-energy-analyst-for-commission-seat/ >.)//ahcchs
A Federal Energy Regulatory Commission [FERC] staffer would be the next member of the
powerful panel if Senate Energy and Natural Resources Chair Joe Manchin has his way. The West
Virginia Democrat has recommended to the Biden administration that David Rosner fill the vacant
FERC seat, according to six people familiar with the nomination process. The people were granted anonymity because they were not
authorized to speak publicly. If nominated and confirmed, Rosner would join the commission as a
Democrat — giving FERC a 3-2 Democratic majority over Republicans for the first time since
early January. Rosner has worked since 2017 as an energy industry analyst in FERC’s Office of Energy
Policy and Innovation. But he has been assigned to Manchin’s committee since last year. Detailees are employees who serve temporary
assignments elsewhere in the government to offer specialized expertise. “He’s a FERC staffer who’s detailed over to work for Manchin, which is
a little unusual, but he’s very knowledgeable,” said one of the FERC observers granted anonymity to speak about Rosner. “It
wouldn’t surprise me if there’s some level of comfort with him based on his working [on the Hill].” While Manchin’s office did not say whether
the senator is backing Rosner, the six people said Rosner has emerged as the frontrunner for FERC’s open seat.
FERC oversees much of the electric grid and reviews natural gas pipelines and other large energy
projects for approval. Having just four commissioners opens up the possibility of stalemates on
key energy projects and regulations, spurring clean energy advocates and others to call for the
confirmation of a fifth commissioner. FERC declined to comment on Rosner and the nomination process. An agency
spokesperson referred questions to the White House, which did not respond to a request for comment about Rosner or whether President Joe
Biden would nominate him. Rosner also did not respond to a request for comment. Rosner is an economist who has focused on electric
transmission, offshore wind, fuel security and other issues at FERC, according to his LinkedIn profile. He holds a bachelor’s degree in economics
from Tufts University and a master’s degree in public policy from American University. Prior to his time at FERC, he worked at the Department
of Energy for 2 ½ years. Manchin’s
position on potential FERC candidates is crucial given his role on the
Energy and Natural Resources Committee and Democrats’ slim majority in the Senate. “Getting
somebody that Manchin has a personal relationship with would seem to be the way to go. But
that’s just speculation on my part,” said Ted Thomas, an energy consultant and former chair of the Arkansas Public Service Commission, who
said he hadn’t heard about Rosner being under consideration. Last November, the coal-industry-connected senator effectively blocked the
confirmation of former FERC Chair Richard Glick. Manchin had criticized Glick’s efforts to analyze the climate change impacts of natural gas
pipelines. His spokesperson said at the time that he was “not comfortable” holding a hearing for Glick, who ultimately left FERC at the end of his
first term in early January. People who know Rosner said he has bipartisan chops and expertise on the power
sector and natural gas pipelines.

dems hate the aff

Peter-Christian Aigner and Michael Brenes 18, historians of twentieth-century America; “The Long,
Tortured History of the Job Guarantee”, https://newrepublic.com/article/148388/long-tortured-history-
job-guarantee, eden
It took a half-century of growing inequality, a massive recession, a spoiler primary campaign by a self-proclaimed socialist, and
the election of a quasi-fascist, but big ideas are here again for Democrats. Medicare for All, paid family leave, tuition-free
college—not since the late 1960s and ’70s has the Democratic Party had such a bold, liberal agenda. Now, likely presidential
candidates are even talking about job guarantees and universal basic income. The future seems left indeed. But before
assuming that anything is possible, it is worth considering just how bad things had to get for these goals , many
of which were first proposed long ago, to be revived—and what destroyed these causes in the past, when the
progressive coalition was much stronger. Major reform of the kind now under consideration has only passed in times of extreme crisis. (Think about how much of the liberal Democratic state was enacted in a
mere six years, shared between the New Deal and Great Society.) And while the party appears to have decided to “lurch left” to win back the blue-collar whites who voted for Donald Trump after voting for Barack Obama, there is no shortage of research demonstrating that American
economic policy has long been well to the right of where voters actually want it. The job guarantee is a great example. Over the last month, progressives have been celebrating the legislation recently introduced by Senator Cory Booker, calling for a pilot job guarantee in 15 cities and

But this bill preempts universal job guarantee legislation being drawn up by Bernie Sanders and rejects
regions, co-sponsored by Senators Elizabeth Warren and Kirsten Gillibrand.

even the limited job guarantee advocated by the Center for American Progress, suggesting that Democratic leaders still do not understand the
excited by the idea ought to remember, too, that it was liberals, not
severity of the problem. Those
conservatives, who have killed job guarantee bills in the past. Joblessness also fell dramatically, if we count public
labor—to 9 percent in FDR’s first term, and to 6 percent in 1941 (and this was before the war). No later Congress was more successful. The
growth rates in that period were impressive, too, averaging between 8 and 10 percent, far better than most recovering economies. Kiran Klaus
Patel, in his 2016 book The New Deal: A Global History, notes that direct job-creation was the most distinctly American feature of the New Deal,
although many local governments have used the program in economic downturns through history. Philip Harvey, Steven Attewell, Edwin
Amenta, and others have argued that FDR’s Committee on Economic Security saw the better-known insurance and welfare program as
fallbacks, actually, to a primary, “forgotten leg” in the welfare state: public employment. Recent pieces on the job guarantee sometimes note
that FDR gave the right to work the top spot in his famous second Bill of Rights. And with fear of depression returning after the war, farmers,
unions, and liberals mobilized behind a Full Employment bill that ostensibly would have created a permanent WPA. But while
a pair of
racist southern Democrats and one northern Republican are often blamed for defeating this social
democratic legislation, the best new research finds that it was already “one of the most conservative”
proposals floating around Congress, before the House ever voted—watered down by the New Deal
Keynesian economists who drafted and reworked what became the 1946 Employment Act (which provided
full employment in rhetoric only). Happily, depression did not return. But in the fabled 1950s economy, unemployment steadily increased after three recessions, and then “automation” entered the lexicon. By the late
1950s, Walter Reuther, the left-labor leader, was calling for a March on Washington and a “Marshall Plan for the cities,” soon joined by civil rights leaders. John F. Kennedy responded with the first national job training program, but it did little. Lyndon Johnson followed with the
Keynesians’ solution: a tax cut, expected to “unleash” the market and (what else?) “create jobs.” Unemployment fell, helped by the Vietnam War, but high rates of joblessness remained, particularly for the “unskilled” and discriminated groups. Very soon after LBJ’s War on Poverty began,
various government departments began pushing for direct job-creation and calling for the government to become “employer of last resort,” ideas JFK and LBJ had many times rejected. But domestic welfare was subsumed by the war. Hubert Humphrey carried the banner in 1968,
promoting federal planning for jobs, housing, and community development. But when he lost to Nixon, reformers in the party rejected this approach. “New Politics” Democrats turned to George McGovern, who implied that postwar Keynesianism had failed, and instead offered a far less
popular solution with voters (and the poor): a “demogrant,” or universal basic income (UBI). Every American would receive an annual income of $1,000, instead of a job. The debate between “guaranteed” jobs or income played out in the 1972 primary between Humphrey and McGovern.
Each candidate battled for the soul of the Democratic Party, with two competing versions for resolving unemployment and poverty. In Humphrey’s corner were the NAACP and AFL-CIO. Remnants of the anti-war movement and wealthy suburban liberals backed McGovern. There were no
winners. After Humphrey’s primary attacks, McGovern quickly abandoned the demogrant, a third as large as Nixon’s guaranteed income plan (a precursor to the Earned Income Tax Credit), which Eugene McCarthy led the fight against. Then came the larger economic crisis of the 1970s:
rising unemployment, high inflation, and stagnating wages. Democrats made an unusual move, endorsing the Humphrey-Hawkins Act in the 1976 platform, the first real attempt to establish a job guarantee since the late New Deal. House Majority Leader Tip O’Neill called it the
“centerpiece.” Voters responded by electing a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate, a 74-seat majority in the House, and Jimmy Carter, who officially committed to support the bill. But the same veterans of the Great Society killed it. Carter blamed high energy prices for “stagflation,” as
well as unions—the largest army in the Democratic base. Despite support from civil rights and religious groups, Carter refused to provide an enforcement mechanism for the legislation, which passed, but in a gutted, toothless form, just like the earlier Employment Act. Ronald Reagan
dismantled the job program Nixon had been forced to create just before his reelection. In response, Democratic Party elites followed the advice of the so-called New Democrats, and steadily moved right on “bread and butter” issues. When the Cold War ended, Bill Clinton, who cut his
teeth on the 1972 McGovern campaign, reanimated the idea of converting the military—the longest-running, if unacknowledged, jobs program in the U.S.—to more economically and socially productive industries (as McGovern had suggested a generation earlier, taking off from the now-
lonely work of Seymour Melman). But the idea never took. Even self-admitted socialists like Oakland’s Ron Dellums refused to close military bases in his district, emblematic of Democratic politicians across the board who failed to recognize defense as an endless source of patronage and

Support for a government-imposed ceiling on unemployment, for socially useful, economically productive, and
pork.

individually satisfying work, has remained extraordinarily high into the Reagan era and present . But popular
support alone cannot enact legislation. Clear barriers, intellectual and institutional, stand in the way.
Wall Street is considerably stronger, and unions are on their knees. Under Trump, an exciting groundswell
of activism has appeared. But it is questionable whether the resistance is powerful enough to defeat the
donor class, which is violently opposed to a job guarantee. And many of the special interest groups
that have replaced the unions and civil rights groups of earlier decades remain “heads without bodies,”
unable to marshal constituents to the cause. Grassroots organizations like Black Lives Matter or the
National Women’s March, meanwhile, lack the deep pockets of these liberal lobbies. Democratic policy
goals have lurched left, but there is no major effort underway to reform the electoral or legislative
system, as the left in earlier periods believed necessary to any major policy goal. Even when the left had both the
numbers and financing to rival the GOP, job guarantees were rejected for weak temporary programs because
New Deal and Great Society liberals assumed, like their opponents, and most Democratic leaders today, that
capitalism would eventually (one day! soon!) provide for all. The jobs vs. income debate is somewhat a false either/or, but
it is not surprising that one-percenters in Silicon Valley and Democratic Party elites still favor the UBI
overwhelmingly against a public option in the labor market, despite persistently lopsided support for
one and not the other. A job guarantee threatens corporate power, while an income guarantee
subsidizes it. If the latest job guarantee is not going to end like the rest, progressives will need to grapple with these ideological and
institutional barriers. Or fail once more.

FERC essential to transition to renewable energy and prevent climate change – only
possible with dem majority
Peskoe 22 Ari Peskoe is Director of the Electricity Law Initiative at the Environmental & Energy Law Program. He has written extensively
about electricity regulation, on issues ranging from rooftop solar to constitutional challenges to states’ energy laws. Prior to the Electricity Law
Initiative, Ari was an associate at a law firm in Washington, D.C., where he litigated before the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission about the
Western Energy Crisis.

(Ari Peskoe, "The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC)." Harvard Law School. Web. 10-26-2022. accessed 10-5-2023. <
https://eelp.law.harvard.edu/2022/10/the-federal-energy-regulatory-commission-ferc/ >.)//ahcchs

FERC has broad authority over the power sector’s interstate operations and planning activities and is the
permitting agency for all interstate natural gas pipelines. With sweeping powers over these vital energy
industries, FERC is a key player in facilitating the clean energy transition. FERC’s decisions influence the
mix of resources generating electric power and affect the energy industry’s emissions. FERC is an independent
regulatory commission whose members are nominated by the president and confirmed by the Senate. The administration has only
indirect influence over FERC through its nominations. That said, the Department of Energy has undertaken several transmission studies and funding initiatives, including some dictated by the

FERC has exclusive jurisdiction over transmission operations and planning,

Infrastructure Investment of Jobs Act of 2021. Because

its authority overlaps with this Biden administration priority. ELECTRIC TRANSMISSION: REFORMING PLANNING AND INTERCONNECTION
PROCESSES FERC proposed major reforms to transmission development to facilitate clean energy

deployment. Transmission is the industry’s nervous system that enables utilities, power generators, and consumers to
coordinate operations and collectively improve the industry’s efficiency. Utilities have historically extended their transmission
networks to meet industry challenges. In the 20th century, new transmission connected neighboring systems and new power plants, enhanced reliability, and facilitated regional trading.

Today, transmission expansion is needed to exploit remote renewable energy resources and enable a
more flexible network that can keep increasingly complex systems in balance and able to withstand
severe weather or other disruptions. In 2021, FERC held technical conferences on transmission development and operations and solicited public comments on
several transmission topics. With the benefit of the record it developed in those proceedings, FERC has thus far proposed three major transmission

rules in 2022: Long-Term Transmission Planning: Proposes to require transmission providers to plan for transmission needs based on projected 20-year changes to the resource mix and
consumer demand. Interconnection Processes: Proposes reforms for standard agreements that govern procedures for connecting new generators, with the goal of cutting down delays in
bringing new generation capacity online. Extreme Weather Performance: Proposes to require the North American Electric Reliability Corporation (NERC) to develop planning standards that
account for extreme hot and cold weather events that can affect transmission reliability. In the fourth quarter of 2022, FERC will hold technical conferences on transmission planning, rate

oversight and interregional transmission development. It could issue additional proposed rules about transmission in 2023. INTERSTATE
POWER MARKETS: REVERSING TRUMP-ERA RULES THAT HAMSTRUNG CLEAN ENERGY RESOURCES: FERC approved revocation of rules that benefited
fossil generators. Three regional transmission organizations — PJM, New York ISO, and ISO New England — conduct annual or monthly auctions designed to ensure that the
region has sufficient resources to meet peak consumer demand for electricity. These capacity auctions allow power plant owners to offer their generation capacity to the market. Auction rules
approved by FERC limit resource owners’ offer prices in various ways. From 2018 to 2020, FERC imposed additional limits on offer prices that applied to resources benefiting from state policies.

FERC has prioritized traditional power plants over new clean energy resources by forcing the latter to offer into the auction at
higher prices than they had before the rules took effect. Starting in the summer of 2021, each of the three market operators filed new auction rules to replace

the limits imposed by the Trump-era FERC. FERC approved the rules proposed by the New York and New England organizations. However, when
FERC voted on rules filed by PJM, it had only four commissioners, and the vote was split 2-2. When
there’s a tie vote proposed rules go into effect, and several parties have challenged this result in federal
appeals court, arguing that FERC cannot change its policies without issuing a majority-approved order.
The Third Circuit is likely to decide the case in early 2023.

Climate turns structural violence

 Universal CP
CP: The United States Federal government should adopt a federal jobs
guarantee

Who is indigenous, and who can get jobs? That creates a double bind---either they get
to pick and chose who is indigenous---or they use blood testing to determine
authentic indigeneity, which is bad.
Archuleta ‘5 (Elizabeth Archuleta(Professor of English at University of Utah), Refiguring Indian Blood through Poetry, Photography, and
Performance Art Studies in American Indian Literatures, Volume 17, Number 4, Winter 2005, pp. 1-26)
that makes sense. It’s in the blood, in the dynamic. The daughter realizes, A halfbreed woman can hardly
do anything else but attack herself, her blood attacks itself. (56) She believes, “There are historical reasons for
this [the blood attack- ing itself]” (56). While the daughter positions her mother’s illness in a historical context, she also implies that
her mother has learned to hate herself, which explains why she “can hardly do anything else but attack
herself.” The history of white–Indian relations is written in the blood of the mother’s body, exhibiting
itself as physical illness and dysfunction. The narrator unites illness and history through blood whose
“Indian” side inevitably attacks a foreign intruder, meaning the white, Euramerican blood contained in her
mother’s body, a foreign blood that has colonized and assumed power over the “Indian coun- try” that is
her mother’s body. The dominant culture’s construction of and American Indians’ tendency to
adopt “authentic” Indian iden- tity based on blood quantum standards leave the mother unable
to “make peace / being Indian and white” (56). Her racially mixed body no longer signifies
clearly within either system of identification, which leaves a question about how her being is
constituted. Conflict- ing definitions of self render her invisible, because, she says, her blood’s
varied strains “cancel each other out. / Leaving no one in the place” (56). No one accepts her as
white or as Indian, leaving her to feel that she is “attacked by everyone,” and thus, her body
becomes “conquered, occupied, destroyed / by her own blood’s diverse strains” (56). The
rhetoric the mother uses to describe her illness grounds it in historical violence and social
injustice against American Indians; yet, she still blames herself for circumstances beyond her
control. The poem’s framing of blood quantum also focuses on metaphors of invasion and attack. Using the language of war and
colonization provides the daughter with a model for helping her understand the devastation her mother
has experienced as a mixed-blood woman. Her mother’s body cannot make peace with itself, a statement
reflect- ing Indigenous peoples’ ongoing struggles with the United States . At the same time, her use of war
metaphors also serves a political func- tion. To say that her mother’s body is conquered, occupied, and de- stroyed
implies that enemies with battle plans and strategies for vic- tory must exist, which begs the question, Who is the enemy and what are their
plans? In
the United States’ attempt to rid itself of Indians, Washington bureaucrats devised and legally
codified blood quantum standards as a psychological strategy for relocating inside Indian bodies the
legal, physical, and politics wars between Indians and the federal government. Allen’s narrator has no answers for
resolving the problem of blood quantum. She merely shrugs her shoulders and says, Well, world. What’s to be done? We just wait and see what
will happen next. (56) By framing blood quantum through dialogue, analogical matrices, and metaphors, Allen’s poem demonstrates an
alternative to the al- ready recognized and studied cultural frameworks for interpreting and understanding mixed-race identities among
American Indians.

Narrativizing a settler-native antagonism reinforces colonial violence – assumes

economic migrants are settlers, justifies disposability based on connection to land –
atomizes resistance
Sharma 15—Director, International Cultural Studies Program, University of Hawai’i Manoa (Nandita, “Strategic Anti-Essentialism:
Decolonizing Decolonization,” Sylvia Wynter: Being Human as Praxis, Chapter 7, pg 170-180, dml) [“nos”=Latin for “we”/“us”]

Emerging in the post–World War II era, indigeneity

is a relatively recent mode of representation, one that
encompasses very diverse people across the Americas, indeed across the world, often under a single, shared
subjective understanding of being the “first” to live in any particular place.22 Being indigenous is a form of co-
identification among people who previously did not see any connection with one another. It is also a way of laying claim to particular lands (or,
more accurately, territories) on the basis of having (or having once had) specialized knowledge of that place. Yet, this
mode of
representation, however new or potentially expansive, remains particularistic. Indigeneity is a form of subjectivity
that emerged because of the devastation wrought in the aftermath of 1492. Moreover, it is a form of subjectivity that interpellates people into
efforts to gain national sovereignty within the global system of national states. Indigenous, then, as a mode of representation includes the often
unacknowledged elision between native as a colonial state category of subjugation and indigenous as a category of resistance. Indigenous
conceptualized as such retains two interrelated problems that ensure that the kinds of unequal
relationships organized in the aftermath of 1492 are reproduced. First, by denying the social constitution of the
category of indigenous, it disavows people’s now-long history of connectivity **across (and sometimes
against) this category. Because this connectivity challenges the particularistic nature of indigeneity,
recognition of interrelationality is itself represented as a threat. Second, by continuing to limit the criteria
of membership of each nos, each is unable to accept as co-specifics those who are rendered as always-
already oppositional others. Indeed, in making any particularistic nos, the significance of omitting certain
others cannot be underestimated. The category of indigenous, thus, does a sort of political work. It
produces a particular nos (and thus a particular Other-to-indigenous nos).23 For some (though certainly not all) of
those currently constituted as indigenous, it seems that one of the consequences of the enormously uneven Columbian exchange is the
denunciation of the process of exchange itself. Today, the movement of life, plants, humans, and other animals is often cited as the cause for
the devastation wrought on their native equivalent.24 Rather than focus on the hierarchical and exploitative relations of the Columbian
exchange, some assume that the cause of the problem was / is mobility itself. Within
such a worldview, that which moves is
consequently denounced as inherently polluting, and, in an idiom that is gaining in popularity, movement and
migration are posited as inherently colonizing. An understanding of mobility as always colonizing is
evident in the expansion of the term “settler colonist” to include all those deemed nonnative in any
given space. Recently, within both indigenous studies and social movements for indigenous rights, the historical distinctions
between the voyages of Columbus (and other colonizers) and those of slaves who survived the Middle Passage, indentured
workers recruited in the wake of slavery’s abolition, and present- day migrants captured in a variety of state categories ranging from
illegal to immigrant, have been collapsed. All, it is claimed, are agents of colonialism. It seems, then, that as there has
been an expansion in the subjective understanding of people as indigenous, there has been a subsequent expansion in their other. Put
differently, within
some indigenous systems of belonging, all past and present people constituted as
migrants are situated as colonizers. In our present “great age” of migration, how did “colonizer” become a meaningful way to
describe people who move across space?25 Indeed, how did “colonizer” come to be an increasingly dominant mode of representing indigenous
people’s others, others who were once understood as cocolonized people or, at least, not as an oppositional other? Is there a relationship
between these particularistic modes of representation and the false separation and hierarchical ranking of different but related experiences of
colonization, such as the processes of expropriation and people’s displacement across space? The answers to these questions lie within the
logics of autochthonous systems of representation and the ways in which claims to indigeneity bring to life discourses of alienness or
foreignness. Jean Comaroff and John Comaroff argue, by “elevating to a first-principle the ineffable interests and connections, at once material
and moral, that flow from ‘native’ rootedness, and special rights, in a place of birth,” autochthonous discourses place those constituted as
natives at the top of a hierarchy of the exploited, oppressed, and colonized and insist on the centrality of the claims of natives for the
realization of either decolonization or justice.26 Within the negative duality of natives and nonnatives that such discourses put into play,
origins (and, in some contexts, claims of original, versus later, human discovery or inhabitation) become the key determinant of
who belongs in any given space today—and who does not. The quintessential alien or foreigner within autochthonous
discourses is the figure of the migrant. This is because the hegemonic understanding of what it means to be a migrant in today’s world is one
where migration is seen as movement away from one’s native land. Thus, migrants come to stand as the ultimate nonnative. Such
a move
works to shift the focus from a dialectics of colonialism—where the key historical dynamic is one of
expropriation and exploitation, and the key relationship is one between the colonizers and the colonized—to one where the
dichotomy between native and nonnative becomes central to both analysis and politics. Patrick Wolfe, a
historian of Australia, captures this perspective well in his claim that “the fundamental social divide is not the color
line. It is not ethnicity, minority status, or even class. The primary line is the one distinguishing Natives from settlers—that is,
from everyone else. Only the Native is not a settler. Only the Native is truly local. Only the Native will free the Native. One
is either native or not.”27 From such an autochthonous perspective, being native is both spatially and temporally dependent.
Temporally, migrants may be identified as natives at some point in time and in some given space, but once having moved away from the spaces
where such representations may be claimed, they become nonnatives. Spatially, migrants remain native but only to the places they no longer
live in. Thus, some argue that migrants can continue to claim native rights to places they have moved from if they are able to show genealogical
descendance from those with native status in that space.28 Candace Fujikane, in dismissing Asian claims to belong in the United States, puts it
this way: “Indigenous people are differentiated from settlers by their genealogical, familial relationship with specific land bases that are
ancestors to them. One is either indigenous to a particular land base or one is not. Asian Americans are undeniably settlers in the United States
because we cannot claim any genealogy to the land we occupy, no matter how many lifetimes Asian settlers work on the land, or how many
Asian immigrants have been killed through racist persecution and hate crimes, or how brutal the political or colonial regimes that occasioned
Asians’ exodus from their homelands.”29 In this logic, indigeneity is racialized/ethnicized, and in the process, land
—or more accurately, territory—is as well. Natives, it is assumed, belong in “their” native land and only there.
Further, who can be recognized as native is dependent upon ancestry, thereby adding blood to the
discourse of soil. Descent becomes of further importance in this distinction, for many indigenous people are, of course, also Asian (and
European and African and so on) as well as vice versa. It is one’s ability to claim some indigenous ancestor that can
allow one to be seen as indigenous today. While such claims can be social and not biological, many
indigenous groups, following from certain governments’ own categorical recognition of indigeneity, rely on some form of
blood quantum rule that requires a minimal indigenous lineage. Not surprisingly, such criteria for belonging (and for the rights
and entitlements of membership) have not always worked for those subordinated through other axes of
oppression and exploitation. Thus, many women have found that their claims to native status are often
the first to be discounted.30 In this, there is an ironic historical continuity of autochthonous ideas and practices of
belonging and the underlying logics of the colonial (and, in some places, postcolonial) state. Indeed, the meaning of
native was one that was used to distinguish the colonized from the colonizer so that the natives could
be represented as less human and, therefore, as legitimately colonized. Being native, then, was a signifier of being
colonized and the ultimate signifier of abjectness. Nativeness as a mode of representation, then, was designed to
institutionalize the new racist orders implemented by different colonial empires. Importantly, all colonized
people were variously identified as “the” natives in order to signal their lack of membership in the propter nos of the colonizers.31 In the post–World
War II era of postcolonialism, when, through much struggle, colonial empires were removed from the list of legitimate forms of political rule, the right to claim rights within and to any given space came, increasingly, to be seen as
belonging to “the” natives. After all, we were told, the anticolonial project was often posited as fighting for the rule of the natives for the natives. Not surprisingly, then, the battle over resources and over place has, thus,
increasingly become one about the meaning of nativeness. In this way, autochthonous modes of belonging are significant in advancing particular nationalized regimes of rights, for the national subject is often defined through an
exclusive racialized / ethnicized criteria through which political rights and rights to property, especially social property rights in land and natural resources, are to be apportioned within any claimed national space. Contemporary,
postcolonial forms of racism are often based on ideas of autochthony. All those who are said to have migrated to the places where they live (or who cannot prove their prior inhabitance) are increasingly viewed as agents of
(instead of co- victims of) colonial projects. The ruling ideology of nationalism has provided an explanation for belonging and has come to be a key way to distinguish between who is properly native to any given place and who is
not. Today, the rhetoric of autochthony is evident throughout the world, including diverse sites in Europe, southern Africa, Central Africa, Latin America, North America, and the Pacific. Significantly, such a discourse spans the
political spectrum from the Right to the Left. Here, I focus on the emergence of autochthonous discourses in indigenous nationalist politics (engaged in by both natives and nonnatives) in the territories claimed by Canada and the
United States, with a particular focus on the Hawaiian archipelago, where this discourse is well rehearsed. The position that all migrants are settler colonists has been advanced in a number of recent scholarly works in Canada and
the United States. In the context of Hawai’i, it has been argued that “Asians” in Hawai’i (most of whom are the descendants of contractually indentured plantation laborers who began arriving in the mid- 1800s) are “settler
colonists,” active in the colonization of native Hawaiians due to their nonnative status.32 The main distinction between the two groups, they argue, is that native Hawaiian claims are based on rights of national sovereignty over
“their land, water, and other economic and legal rights,” while Asians, because they are not native, have no right to make such claims.33 In a Canadian context, Bonita Lawrence’s and Enakshi Dua’s article “Decolonizing
Antiracism” (2005) in Social Justice makes some of the same arguments made by the contributors to the special issue of Amerasia Journal on “Asian Settler Colonialism in Hawai’i.”34 Like them, Lawrence and Dua also focus on
those nonnatives who are nonwhite. They contend that the antiracist praxis of nonwhites has “contribute[d] to the active colonization of Aboriginal peoples.”35 Indeed, they contend that “antiracism is premised on an ongoing
colonial project” and on “a colonizing social formation.”36 Postcolonial critiques of national liberation strategies, social constructivist critiques of the naturalness of races or nations, and arguments against ethnic absolutism, such
as those made by Stuart Hall, become, for them, examples of how antiracism is a colonial practice.37 Lawrence and Dua maintain that these kinds of analyses colonize indigenous people by “contribut[ing] to the ongoing
delegitimization of Indigenous nationhood.”38 In these essays, then, critiques of nationalisms or of the naturalization of social categories are tantamount to attacks against indigenous people. It is in such assertions that we can find
the ideological character of autochthonous discourses. In arguing for the theoretical and political centrality of nativeness, there is an effort to depoliticize native nationalisms. By insisting that any critique of nationalism is
tantamount to a colonial practice, the nationalist assumptions and politics of native nationalisms are taken out of the realm of that which can be contested. Consequently, native nationalisms are posited as the only strategy for
decolonization. It is precisely the nationalism inherent within autochthonous discourses that helps to explain not only why all nonnatives are conceptualized as colonizers but also why the (varied) critics of nationalism (or those
who argue for the social basis for ideas of race and ethnic purity, or those who uncover a politics of solidarity across such lines) are also colonizers. Negatively racialized persons, in this logic of nationalized self- determinacy, are
relegated to being mere minorities of various nations and their existing or hoped- for national sovereign states. Thus, because they are not a people / nation as defined by hegemonic doctrines of self- determinancy, Asians, for
example, in Hawai’i, or elsewhere in the United States and Canada, are represented as not- colonized and, therefore, in the dualistic mode of autochthonous representations, as colonizers. Within autochthonous
discourses one can only be colonized if they “belong” or are indigenous to that space itself. In this view, the
colonization that people experience supposedly ends once one moves away from the colony (or, now, the
postcolony). Instead, these migrants come to be represented as colonizers. Because a key aspect of the
subjective understanding of indigenous is being a colonized person, only other colonized persons can be
seen to be co-specifics. Neither those constituted as migrants nor their struggles can be perceived as
part of anticolonial struggles. As such, they cannot be included as commensurate human beings within
any colonial or postcolonial space.

AFF leads to increased stigma–reinvigorates racist stigma

Martinson and Lapham 22 [Jessica Lapham∗ and Melissa L. Martinson, “The intersection of welfare stigma, state
contexts and health among mothers receiving public assistance benefits”, National Library of medicine, published 2022 May 9,
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9127679/ , accessed 10/13/23] //hacchs
The stigmatizing nature of the US welfare system is of particular importance not only because it has
shown to deter eligible applicants from participating in public assistance programs despite facing
economic hardship, but also because stigma is an important fundamental cause of health
inequities. Although scholars agree stigma is shaped by individual and contextual dimensions, the role of context is often overlooked.
Given the heterogeneous nature of US state welfare environments, it may be critical to consider the ways in which state policy, social and
economic contexts condition the relationship between welfare stigma and health. Using a multilevel lens, this study first examined the impact
of experienced and perceived welfare stigma on self-reported health among female public assistance recipients with children. Second, we
assessed the moderating effect of uneven state TANF policies, income inequality, and negative public welfare attitudes in shaping these
associations. Using data from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study merged with state-level economic and social measures, we
employed a series of multilevel logit models with random effects. Findings show experiences and perceptions of welfare stigma are significantly
linked to poor health regardless of state contexts, and outcomes vary markedly by race, ethnicity and education. States with strong
anti-welfare attitudes amplified the relationship between experienced welfare stigma and
poor health for Black and Hispanic mothers, and state economic contexts modified the relationship
between experienced welfare stigma and poor health for mothers with less than a high school
education. TANF generosity had no moderating effect on health suggesting state policy environments have limited ability to protect welfare
recipients against the stigmatizing effects of the US welfare system. Results have implications for explaining stigma related disparities in health
within the context of U.S. welfare environments and informing policies that may be key levers for reducing health inequities. Highlights •
Experiences and perceptions of welfare stigma are associated with poor health. •State economic
and social contexts exacerbate these relationships. • Results have implications for explaining stigma related
disparities in health. Go to: 1. Background Growing consensus among scholars and government stakeholders suggest social and economic
policies have the potential to directly or indirectly influence health through the distribution of health promoting resources and improvement of
conditions in which people live (e.g, Marmot et al., 2008; Osypuk et al., 2014). This paradigm is based on the premise that broader political,
social and economic forces can improve population health and reduce health inequities. While there is some evidence to suggest social
programs more universally administered and tied to work such as unemployment insurance and the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) are
associated with improvements in health outcomes (e.g., Cylus et al., 2015; Hoynes et al., 2015), the health benefits of means-tested programs
that target low income groups such as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) and Temporary Assistance for Needy Families
(TANF) remain less convincing (e.g., Coiro, 2001; Heflin & Ziliak, 2008; Wu et al., 2018).
 Case

Framing
Extinction is likely but discounted by cognitive biases---even marginal reductions in
risk outweigh.
Chase Hamilton 22, Associate at Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld LLP, Co-founder and Project
Manager of Going to Mars: Science, Society, Sustainability at Duke University, J.D. from Duke University
School of Law, B.A. in Philosophy and Government from the University of Texas at Austin, “Space and
Existential Risk: The Need for Global Coordination and Caution in Space Development,” August 2022,
Duke Law & Technology Review, Vol. 21, No. 1, p. 15-19

Almost everybody agrees extinction would be bad,99 but it is difficult to comprehend just how bad.
Still, in order to incorporate existential risks into policymaking considerations, it is important to speak in
terms of expected value, which requires us to estimate the badness of extinction.100

For one, a sudden existential catastrophe would entail the death of all living people. In quantitative
terms, this would be worse than any tragedy humanity has ever experienced, surpassing the number of
deaths accrued from the Holocaust seven hundred times over.101 Nevertheless, attempting to imagine
catastrophe on such a mass scale does not typically motivate us to the same degree as a tragic accident
involving the death of even a single child.102 This is a classic case of scope insensitivity, our
psychological inability to “feel” the badness of outcomes as scaling up with the number of deaths
involved.103 In fact, psychological research demonstrates “mass numbing”—a person’s willingness to
pay to save other people from some risk actually tends to decrease as the number of people at risk
grows beyond ten or so.104 Rationally, however, each person’s death would represent a great loss and
ought to be avoided. This is one way existential risks involve stakes much higher than most other
traditional policy concerns.

The badness of extinction would not end at losses felt in the present, but would be severely
exacerbated by the loss of a future for humanity. This additional loss would be even worse than an
utterly devastating catastrophe, such as the mass death of billions.105 This is because the ultimate
potential of life on Earth is incomprehensibly high. The most conservative estimates predict that,
absent extinction in the next one billion years, the Earth can support 1016 human lives of present-day
length.106 The scale of that number leads to a shocking result: assuming, as almost all ethicists do, that
future lives are about as morally valuable as today’s lives,107 [FOOTNOTE] 107 Moral philosophers
widely agree that future lives are about as valuable as present ones. After all, for most of human
history, we were future lives, and we generally take our lives to be worth living. See, e.g., PARFIT, supra
note 105, at 425 (“[In general,] we ought to be equally concerned about the predictable effects of our
acts whether these will occur in one, or a hundred, or a thousand years.”); John Nolt,
Nonanthropocentric climate ethics, 2 WIRES CLIMATE CHANGE 701, 703 (“[M]any intergenerational
ethicists view the discounting of harms and benefits to future people as unjustifiable discrimination.”);
ORD, infra note 114, at 413 (noting that the overwhelming majority of philosophers reject a pure time
preference on valuing human lives). [END FOOTNOTE] “the expected value of reducing existential risk by
a mere one millionth of one percentage point [0.00000001%] is at least a hundred times the value of a
million human lives.”108 In other words, even marginal reductions in existential risk tend to swamp
other policy interests. These numbers become even more gargantuan if one assumes that humanity will
develop advanced technologies and eventually expand into space.109

There are other, nonquantitative reasons that the loss of humanity’s future would be uniquely bad.110
One is an argument from normative uncertainty: there is no consensus regarding what outcomes would
count as a big win for humanity.111 Humanity should therefore preserve its ability to recognize value
and steer the future accordingly, which will not be possible if humankind no longer exists. 112 Another
argument looks not to the future, but the past: each generation has a custodial responsibility to
continue the human project left to us by our ancestors.113 These arguments help demonstrate that the
stakes involved in existential contexts are unique and significant.

For the majority of people who do not take existential threats seriously, it is not because they seriously
doubt the stakes, but because they do not believe that such events have a realistic chance of actually
occurring. 114 Given that the potential losses from existential risks are so high, one would hope that
their probabilities are low enough—far, far below 1%—to bring their expected values into a range that is
reasonably comparable to other risks. That unfortunately does not seem to be the case. Startlingly,
surveyed experts predict the likelihood of extinction by 2100 to be between about 10% and 25%. 115
These figures are about one million times higher than what people normally think116 and may still be
conservative.117 If these estimations are even close to being correct, existential risk mitigation should
be of the utmost priority wherever even minor gains in existential security can be confidently made.

AND, the impact’s not universal---destructive use reproduces spatial injustices through
targeting procedures.
Jacqueline Foertsch 13. Professor of English at the University of North Texas. 08/30/2013. Reckoning
Day: Race, Place, and the Atom Bomb in Postwar America. Vanderbilt University Press.

More broadly speaking, one’slocation in the American landscape when the bomb exploded—that is, during
America’s early atomic/cold war era—intersects
with one’s “place” in the American social hierarchy in significant
ways. For the bomb presented Americans, especially those who have always enjoyed more freedom
of movement, with a series of spatio-ethical dilemmas: where to go if the bombs should fall, who and
what to leave behind. While the suburban boom of the immediate postwar period had myriad causes, one significant reason was the
strong sense that America’s cities were the easiest and most likely of nuclear targets. Elaine Tyler May has examined
the leafy, low-slung, spread-out qualities of American suburbs and has persuasively observed in these a response to atomic fears of urban
verticality, congestion, and entrapment. For May it was especially the
hunkered down, ranch-style home that “exuded this
sense of isolation, privacy, and containment” (94). In atomic fictions of the period, the city is depicted as the
site of conflagration; those characters lucky enough to find themselves in the suburbs or on the farm
on “X-day” fare better and depend less on which way the wind blows during the fallout period . While the
suburban choice—again, for the white middle-class, for whom such choices were exclusively provided—seemed obvious, the decision with
respect to whether or not to go underground, to build a bomb shelter and prepare to survive there in the atomic aftermath, was always a more
fraught proposition. In the enmeshed social setting of the suburbs, how would it look to build a shelter when no one else was doing so?
Kenneth D. Rose suggests that the lone suburban shelter-digger might seem not only eccentric (violating the cardinal rule of conformity) but
also “immoral.” “At issue,” says Rose, “was controlling entry to one’s personal or community shelter . . . to keep out radioactive fallout but also
‘to prevent exceeding the maximum capacity of the shelter’” (93). How did one build to suit one’s immediate family but not spaciously enough
to include neighbors and passersby, or even parents, in-laws, aunts, and uncles from the “old country” (i.e., the urban birthplace)? The
pointlessness of resurfacing in a ruined, depopulated post-nuclear environment may have dissuaded many from taking the plunge in the first
place; others sought the furthest reaches of American civilization (and beyond) in their understanding that the key to nuclear survival was
location, location, location. We attach extremist notions like nuclear survivalism to a specific racial, classed position in the US—white
(sometimes white-supremacist) lower-class place-holders who take to the hinterlands in order to reject not only the nuclear jeopardy in which
America has placed its citizens from the cold war to the present but also much of what America represents (see, e.g., “Religious Group”). Such
outward-boundedness positions one near the bottom of America’s social scale, while downward-boundedness (bomb shelter-building) was a
distinctly suburban (and, to some degree, urban) phenomenon and thus associated with America’s middle class. In short, there was less stigma
attached during the cold war to digging down than to lighting out, despite the seemingly more bizarre nature of the downward-digging: while
survivalists thrive on the US’s geographic and ideological margins into the twenty-first century, today no middle-class suburbanite would
construct a bomb shelter in his backyard, so unorthodox an act would it be, and the two-hour commute has become more and more the norm.
Perhaps, sixty years ago, a move to the suburbs was deemed so eminently respectable that included with the purchase
of one’s private lot was the right to go a little crazy in one’s fenced-off backyard— to prepare for a post-nuclear life underground
no matter how objectionable it was to some. In America’s “burnt out,” “bombed out” urban cores, locales we have
tagged with post-nuclear adjectives since the postwar period ,1 remained America’s “undesirables”—
African, Asian, and Latino Americans and other ethnic persons or immigrants with low incomes; poor
whites; the elderly; gays and lesbians; the mentally disturbed; the otherwise socially delinquent.
Ironically, their lives in inner city high-rises positioned these postwar Americans “at the top,” while
everyone understood that such physical superiority carried neither privilege nor security . If anything, the
last place one wanted to be at this moment was up, and yet this particular sector of the American
population had few other choices: the suburbs were closed to them, rural ties had been severed
generations earlier, and the atomic threat found many of America’s persons of color trapped at
ground zero. Questioning “the Negro’s relative exposure and immunity to nuclear annihilation” for Negro Digest in 1963, the sociologist
and black studies founder Nathan Hare praised African Americans’ emotional fortitude and resistance to physical travails—even the anticipated
intense heat of atomic blast—due to their “cotton-chopping, cotton-picking backgrounds in the Southern sun and long years of tending ovens
and furnaces in white kitchens and factories” (31). Yet Hare is intent on critiquing the demographic patterns of postwar society that have
trapped the black community in northern ghettoes “near the centers or bull’s-eyes of our big cities” (28). Citing racial residency patterns at that
point, Hare notes that “a 10-megaton bomb on Washington, DC, or Chicago . . . would just about take care of the Negro community” (29).
Hare’s observations are echoed today by Katherine McKittrick
and Clyde Woods, who decry America’s long history of
“uneven geographies,” wherein “black and poor subjects are disposable precisely because they cannot
move or escape” (3). This insight crystallizes the crisis faced by atomic-era African Americans, thought
to deserve their fate for failing to meet the criteria for admission to the suburban safe haven. Philip
Wylie’s novel Tomorrow! is a nuclear preparedness/survival fantasy that includes a map of the fictional sister cities that are its setting; these
surround a “Negro District” that is dead-center during the climactic nuclear explosion. The story ends with its surviving characters, all of whom
are white, viewing a scene of pristine, suburban-style rebirth. This vision resonates with those of postwar urban planners who could not but
associate the bomb, despite its frightening implications, with their growing desire to revamp city life, specifically to “save the American city
from ‘the blight . . . gnawing at its innards’” (qtd. in P. Boyer 152). The National Paint, Varnish, and Lacquer Association produced a fright-
mongering public service announcement in the mid-1950s that has achieved cult status in the intervening decades, The House in the Middle. As
it opens, a disgusted narrator harangues against the combustible trash and rotting wood “you’ve seen in too many alleys and backyards—in
slum areas” and crows about the destruction suffered by cluttered, littered, unpainted frame houses subjected to H-bombing at the Nevada
Proving Grounds, images of which accompany his voiceover. Only the paint job of the lucky middle house saves it from the same fate, itself
racialized, since “light colors” and “white” are recommended as the most light- and heat-reflective shades. Implicit in such texts, therefore, are
visions of the nuclear-induced “urban renewal” that recent thinkers such as Martha A. Bartter and Dean MacCannell have broadly denounced,
while Michele Birnbaum incisively reads the constructedness of racial identity thus: “we can describe one [race] only in terms of the other—a
kind of Heisenberg principle of race in which racial difference is situational, provisional: it depends upon who is looking and who is next to
whom” (3). As whiteness depends for its significance upon its position with respect to blackness (and vice
versa), we see this supplemental relation repeated in the demographic shifting of the postwar US:
African Americans, forced to remain in rapidly declining inner cities, maintained these locales as viable
(i.e., populated) nuclear targets, creating in turn the relative safety of the “uninhabited” white suburban
sanctuary.
Extinction outweighs – it’s a categorically distinct impact that results in an irreversible
end to all life.

It forecloses the possibility of any change which is a premise they’ve said is good
proven by the presence of the aff

Before extinction– Trump and climate both turn structural violence

Adv
They don’t specify what they do beyond a FJG--reject any solvency that assumes
community education, services, etc–the GOP would dismantle any good the FJG could
do. Don’t let them fiat it if it’s not in the plan text
Invades on sovereignty---if the affirmative has the government create infrastructure
and jobs on tribal lands that violates treaties and expands control.

Jobs Guarantees are used to condition welfare assistances and support white capital
Klein, and Fouksman, 2021 (Elise, Senior lecturer @Australian National University, Elizaveta,
Lecturer at King’s College London, Reparations as a Rightful Share: From Universalism to Redress in
Distributive Justice, Development and Change, Volume 53(1): 31-57)

There are two specific

policies that, as this article goes to press, together further the ongoing injustices of settler
colonialism, particularly in remote regions of the country. The first is the Cashless Debit Card. The Cashless Debit Card is a type of income management that
quarantines 80 per cent of state benefits received by working-age people, and is justified on the basis of restricting alcohol and gambling purchases. It limits the
amount of cash that can be withdrawn to 20 per cent of the total money recipients receive. A high proportion of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples are
put on the Card, and have reported that the Card makes the use and management of their meagre social security payments challenging, causing further financial
difficulty and stress (Klein and Razi, 2018). Second, and intersecting with the Card, is t he
remote work-for-the-dole programme called the
Community Development Program or CDP. It requires the same cohort of working-ageparticipants, who are almost all Aboriginal and Torres
Strait Islander peoples and receive a state payment, to attend manufactured ‘work-like’ initiatives for up to 20 hours a

week for a payment well below minimum wage (Altman, 2015; Commonwealth of Australia, 2019). The requirements for CDP are
harsher than the government’s non-remote and mainly non-Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Jobactive workfare programme, because of its rules and because of
the remote setting. This has resulted in CDP rates of non-compliance and non-attendance 30 to 40 times
higher than in the Jobactive programme (Fowkes, 2016). People who do not attend what some in the programme term ‘make-work’ or ‘bullshit
jobs’ (Graeber, 2019) lose their welfare money, and families go without. Both of these policies further settler colonialism .
While the programmes focus on behavioural deficiencies of the unemployed, the key cause of unemployment in the remote and regional areas such as the East
Kimberley is the absence of formal jobs (KDC, 2013), and so the programmes are superfluous to their own stated policy objectives. These
programmes
also support the expansion of private and largely White capital, thus transforming Aboriginal and
Torres Strait Islander subjectivities into sites of accumulation by dispossession . For example, the private company
which provides the Cashless Debit Card profits from the project. Finally, underpinning these job-creation initiatives are specific

(Western) norms as to how work is defined. While many Aboriginal peoples in and around Kununurra engage in
productive work ‘on country’, undertaking customary (non-market) work for livelihood, this is not
recognized or valued by the state. Such productive work activities have endured over a decade of
critique by politicians, business leaders, policy makers and some Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander elite, who frame this work as
being outside the ‘real economy’, and as promoting narratives about Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander passivity,
dysfunction and non-participation in work (Altman, 2014). Such discourse also ignores Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples’
engagement in other productive and socially reproductive activities such as unpaid care work and care of country. These types of work are

overlooked, and bodies passed off as unproductive and unemployed are subsequently compulsorily
forced onto punitive and conditional welfare schemes (Altman, 2019). People on these programmes know
what they are about. In the East Kimberley, the Cashless Debit Card is called the White card, as it is, in the words of
one participant, ‘taking us back to the ration days’ (Klein and Razi, 2017: 7). Patty Gibson has framed this imposition and control of Aboriginal

and Torres Strait Islander peoples’ welfare expenditure by the Australian state as the ‘re-imposition of colonial forms of

governance’ when Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, prior to the 1970s, ‘were not entitled to handle cash like other citizens and rationing
regimes were used to control Aboriginal movement and labour, as well as to try and discipline people out of “Aboriginal”

behaviours’ (Gibson, 2012: 63). Klein and Razi (2018) link the polices of the Cashless Debit Card and CDP workfare to broader settler colonial processes in the
East Kimberley region. For instance, Kununurra itself is a town created through the damming of the Ord River, which flooded over half of Miriuwung country,
including important Miriuwung songlines — significant knowledge networks carried through generations about Miriuwung culture and land. This dramatic
dispossession for accumulation has not benefited Aboriginal peoples; the scheme has resulted in only 260 (predominately non-Aboriginal) jobs (Grudnoff and
Campbell, 2017). And as documented in the Senate Inquiry into Indigenous Stolen Wages (Parliament of Australia, 2006), indentured and unpaid Aboriginal labour
built the pastoral industries of the East Kimberley. Finally, many families suffered through Stolen Generation policies whereby their children were taken from them
and used as slave or indentured domestic labour in settler households. In line with this history ,
people are now put on work for the dole
— another form of indentured state labour programmes and income management.