E-Waste+Neg+-+Case+Turns

1. Growth Turn –

a) E-Waste is crucial in assisting the technological growth of developing nations. The Basel Action Network, 8-24-06, Executive summary, “The Digital Dump”

Increasingly, the growth rate of information technology in developing countries is becoming astronomic as well. Not only is there a natural hunger among the populace in developing countries to stay abreast of technological developments in order to compete and communicate in an increasingly globalized world, but some of the newer technologies, such as the Internet and cell phones, have actually allowed developing countries to “leap-frog” over the endemic developmental problems of inadequate infrastructure (e.g. land phones, libraries, etc.).

Due to the lack of financial resources available to most people in developing countries, much of the growth in the IT sector in developing countries has been fueled by the importation of hand-me-down, used equipment from rich, developed countries, whose consumers are all too happy to find buyers for it. As a result, many brokers and businesses have sprung up to channel used equipment from North to South, rich to poor.

b) This outweighs the case—the economic benefits from e-waste are key to improving the environment—we need to afford it. Rachel Ross, January 3, 2005, Toronto Star, lexis [Zhuang]

"We in India do not have enough computers and other electronic products. These products would be just lying and polluting the environment at the end of their life. By importing similar products from richer countries, our recyclers are able to reach economies of scale and make extraction of resources from these dead products economically viable. As a result, environmental stress in India is lowered, as it is in the exporting countries." Mitra further argues better environmental practices can only come through increased consumption, which stimulates the demand for great efficiency, because that's when those gains start to make economic sense. "Environmental quality, just like any product quality, is a value-added product," he said. "One has to be able to afford it."

3. Turn: Domestic re-importation would create a demand for more materials – it hurts the environment. Richard Smith, US State Department Dispatch, October 14, 1991 http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1584/is_n41_v2/ai_11590385/pg_2 [ Zhuang]

The disruption of international trade for resource recovery will undermine our domestic recycling initiatives. The loss of international markets would create domestic surpluses; these would combine with resulting low prices to reduce or eliminate markets and profits needed for the survival of domestic programs recycling materials such as paper and scrap metal. The loss of our $75.3 million annual trade in recyclable paper with the EEC, for example, would almost certainly lead to increased landfilling of paper at home. Inhibiting recycling will, in the end, expand demand for virgin materials, with associated environmental costs.

5. Prison turn –

a) Prison labor is the cheapest strategy after export dumping. Gopal Dayaneni, environmental justice and human rights campaigner, and Aaron Shuman, coordinates prison support at Prison Activist Resource Center, Urban Habitat, Spring 2007, Vol. 14, No. 1, http://urbanhabitat.org/node/857 [Zhuang]

Responsible e-waste recycling in the United States is a growing niche, led by small businesses and nonprofits, but it’s becoming increasingly difficult to compete with the low-cost options of export dumping and prison labor. Faced with shrinking municipal and state budgets, officials responsible for managing e-waste are most often seeking their lowest-cost option, giving Unicor’s mostly Black and brown captive labor strategy a profound market advantage. For this to change, we must force these same officials to create sustainable electronic recycling programs, which can create living wage jobs in local communities where workers and the environment at least would have the protection of the law.

b) The prison ewaste industry is equivalent to sweatshops – there are no human rights behind the prison walls. Gopal Dayaneni, environmental justice and human rights campaigner, and Aaron Shuman, coordinates prison support at Prison Activist Resource Center, Urban Habitat, Spring 2007, Vol. 14, No. 1, http://urbanhabitat.org/node/857 [Zhuang]

Meanwhile, a new form of e-waste processing has emerged in the United States in the last decade that can successfully compete with these dismally low wages and working conditions: Prison Recycling Programs. Sheila Davis, executive director of Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition, a high-tech industry watch-dog group that has been challenging Unicor on environmental justice and human rights grounds, describes Unicor as “A toxic high-tech sweatshop hidden from view behind prison walls.” And since the captive laborers in prison are required to work, Unicor maintains a steady stream of workers by using a sweatshop strategy, paying pennies more an hour than other work programs within the prison. Unicor wages range between $0.23 and $1.25 per hour. In its 2001 annual report, Unicor proclaims “the right to work is a human right,” but, their operations do not comply with any of the rights codified in several international covenants, including the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights. In fact, the right to work includes the right to be paid a living wage, the right to occupational health and safety protection, the right to organize, freely associate, and collectively bargain, the right to be protected by labor laws, the right to gain redress for grievances, and freedom from intimidation, harassment, or retaliation for lodging grievances, and the right to freely choose work. None of these rights exists behind prison walls.

c) The penal system is short of major war – the prison industrial complex racially marginalized and exploited the capital of oppressed populations. Angela Davis, prof University of California, Santa Cruz, ColorLines, 1998 http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Prison_System/Masked_Racism_ADavis.html [Zhuang]

Prisons thus perform a feat of magic. Or rather the people who continually vote in new prison bonds and tacitly assent to a proliferating network of prisons and jails have been tricked into believing in the magic of imprisonment. But prisons do not disappear problems, they disappear human beings. And the practice of disappearing vast numbers of people from poor, immigrant, and racially marginalized communities has literally become big business. The seeming effortlessness of magic always conceals an enormous amount of behind-the-scenes work. When prisons disappear human beings in order to convey the illusion of solving social problems, penal infrastructures must be created to accommodate a rapidly swelling population of caged people. Goods and services must be provided to keep imprisoned populations alive. Sometimes these populations must be kept busy and at other times -- particularly in repressive super-maximum prisons and in INS detention centers -- they must be deprived of virtually all meaningful activity. Vast numbers of handcuffed and shackled people are moved across state borders as they are transferred from one state or federal prison to another. All this work, which used to be the primary province of government, is now also performed by private corporations, whose links to government in the field of what is euphemistically called "corrections" resonate dangerously with the military industrial complex. The dividends that accrue from investment in the punishment industry, like those that accrue from investment in weapons production, only amount to social destruction. Taking into account the structural similarities and profitability of business-government linkages in the realms of military production and public punishment, the expanding penal system can now be characterized as a "prison industrial complex." The Color of Imprisonment Almost two million people are currently locked up in the immense network of U.S. prisons and jails. More than 70 percent of the imprisoned population are people of color. It is rarely acknowledged that the fastest growing group of prisoners are black women and that Native American prisoners are the largest group per capita. Approximately five million people -- including those on probation and parole -- are directly under the surveillance of the criminal justice system. Three decades ago, the imprisoned population was approximately one-eighth its current size. While women still constitute a relatively small percentage of people behind bars, today the number of incarcerated women in California alone is almost twice what the nationwide women's prison population was in 1970. According to Elliott Currie, "[t]he prison has become a looming presence in our society to an extent unparalleled in our history -- or that of any other industrial democracy. Short of major wars, mass incarceration has been the most thoroughly implemented government social program of our time." To deliver up bodies destined for profitable punishment, the political economy of prisons relies on racialized assumptions of criminality -- such as images of black welfare mothers reproducing criminal children -- and on racist practices in arrest, conviction, and sentencing patterns. Colored bodies constitute the main human raw material in this vast experiment to disappear the major social problems of our time. Once the aura of magic is stripped away from the imprisonment solution, what is revealed is racism, class bias, and the parasitic seduction of capitalist profit. The prison industrial system materially and morally impoverishes its inhabitants and devours the social wealth needed to address the very problems that have led to spiraling numbers of prisoners. As prisons take up more and more space on the social landscape, other government programs that have previously sought to respond to social needs -- such as Temporary Assistance to Needy Families -- are being squeezed out of existence. The deterioration of public education, including prioritizing discipline and security over learning in public schools located in poor communities, is directly related to the prison "solution." Profiting from Prisoners As prisons proliferate in U.S. society, private capital has become enmeshed in the punishment industry. And precisely because of their profit potential, prisons are becoming increasingly important to the U.S. economy. If the notion of punishment as a source of potentially stupendous profits is disturbing by itself, then the strategic dependence on racist structures and ideologies to render mass punishment palatable and profitable is even more troubling.