American Exceptionalism: Yes We Can Do Whatever We Want Wherever We Want..

In 1630, Governor John Winthrop, a leading figure in the founding of Massachusetts Bay Colony, in his famous sermon, said, “We must consider that we shall be as a city upon a hill. The eyes of all people are upon us." In other words, the New Jerusalem, or a Model of Christian Charity. Today, according to a fairly recent survey, "58% of Americans believe God has granted America a special role in human history."

From 1900...

“God has made us the master organizers of the world to establish system where chaos reigns. He has given us the spirit of progress to overwhelm the forces of reaction throughout the earth. This is the divine mission of America, and it holds for us all the profit, all the glory, all the happiness possible to man. We are trustees of the world's progress, guardians of its righteous peace." -- Senator Albert J. Beveridge in support of the annexation of the Philippines

To 2013:

“Some may disagree, but I believe that America is exceptional --in part because we have shown a willingness, through the sacrifice of blood and treasure, to stand up not only for our own narrow self interest, but for the interests of all." -- Presiden Barack Obama to the United Nations

The United States government continues to prey upon the weak while donning the wings of a savior. The beltway politicians proclaim "American Exceptionalism", implying America is ordained by God, as if this claim of a "sacred decree" places the U.S. above the law and justifies the right to impose whatever the U.S. wants, wherever it wants. Needless to say, as all empires before us, this claim is most certainly false.

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History Shows Copyright Monopolies Slow Down Innovation

Copyright and patent monopoly is supposed to encourage innovation and creativity, right? Well, that's what we're told. However, history shows the opposite is true. It's clear that the push for more severe laws and enforcement in the area of copyright/intellectual property is nothing more than a power move.

Let’s start around the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. In that day and age, copyright monopoly laws were in force in the United Kingdom, and pretty much the United Kingdom alone (where they were enacted in 1557). You know the “Made in Country X” that is printed or engraved on pretty much all our goods? That originated as a requirement from the British Customs against German-made goods, as a warning label that they were shoddy goods made in Germany at the time. It spread to pretty much global use.

But Germany didn’t have copyright monopoly laws at this point in time, and historians argue that was the direct cause of Germany’s engineering excellence overtaking that of the United Kingdom. In the UK, knowledge of handicrafts was expensive to come by. Books and the knowledge they carried were locked down in the copyright monopoly construct, after all. In Germany, however, the same knowledge was available at print cost – and thus, engineering skills proliferated. With every new person learning engineering, one more person started to improve the skill set for himself and for the country at large. The result is that Germany still, 200 years later, has an outstanding reputation for engineering skills – the rise of which are directly attributable to a lack of the copyright monopoly.

Everything is a Remix:

"All inventions are not so much original ideas but advances or tipping points along a continuous line of invention by many different people, but the most dramatic results can happen when ideas are combined. By connecting ideas together, creative leaps can be made producing some of history’s greatest breakthroughs.
[...]The interdependence of our creativity has been obscured by powerful cultural ideas but technology is not exposing this connectedness." -- Kirby Ferguson, creator of "Everything is a Remix"

"Nothing is original. Steal from anywhere that resonates with inspiration or fuels your imagination. Devour old films, new films, music, books, paintings, photographs, poems, dreams, random conversations, architecture, bridges, street signs, trees, clouds, bodies of water, light and shadows. Select only things to steal from that speak directly to your soul. If you do this, your work (and theft) will be authentic. Authenticity is invaluable; originality is nonexistent. And don’t bother concealing your thievery. celebrate it if you feel like it. In any case, always remember what Jean-Luc Godard said: 'It’s not where you take things from – it’s where you take them to.'” -Jim Jarmusch

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Deep Inside Monopoly Capitalism

The following video is an adaptation of a documentary filmstrip, made sometime in the 1960s, mostly based on the book, Tragedy and Hope, by Dr. Carol Quigley. It traces the history of a small group of powerful people who control the money systems of the world. It shows how this group is protected by governments and how its wealth is derived by creating money out of nothing. We see how this group wields power through government, foundations, education, and the mass media. It has aided such regimes as Russia and China, not because it is pro-Communist, but because a visible enemy and the threat of war have been useful in persuading the masses to embrace the group's ultimate goal: a one world government which they expect to control from behind the scenes.

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Google and Facebook: Two Largest Big Brother Entities?

Google's top executives, CEO Larry Page and Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt have dodged requests to testify   at a hearing by the Senate's antitrust subcommittee for over a year; however, it appears that's about to come to an end. The Wall Street Journal claims the FTC is planning to issue subpoenas to both Page and Schmidt, who are getting prepared by turning to none other than a former Microsoft prosecutor.

As Google tries to fend off a U.S. probe of its multibillion-dollar search business, it has been quietly adding to its stable of antitrust advisers, which, Reuters has learned, includes a former Microsoft prosecutor.

At the same time, Google is proving itself extraordinarily useful to the US government, who has filed more than twice as many demands for data about Google users than any other other country in the past six months, and Google has complied 94% of the time. Google's cozy relationship with the government is a little disconcerting, considering there is no doubt that the government wants to censor the Internet as much as possible.

Google Transparency Report

Google CEO Eric Schmidt claimed that Google “will know so much about its users that the search engine will be able to help the government them plan their lives.”

And, Facebook is the greatest spy vehicle ever created according to Julian Assange.

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Big Pharma or Us?

Generic drugs make up 70% of all prescriptions, and according to House Energy and Commerce Committee chairman Henry Waxman, "in the last decade alone, generic drugs have saved consumers, businesses and state and federal governments $734 billion." Despite that savings, the cost of drugs continues to escalate. In large part this is due to what is regarded as the future of health care: biotechnology drugs, or "biologics".

Simply put, biologics are protein based drugs made from living organisms - hamster ovaries, mare's urine, pig intestines, blood - grown inside living cells, as opposed to chemicals, normally showing better efficacy and safety than conventional drugs. Used to treat everything from cancer to multiple sclerosis to psoriasis, biologics currently make up about 20% of the pharmaceutical market - predicted to make up half the market by 2015 - and are the fastest-growing class of medicines, with more than $40 billion in annual sales in the United States.

However, the FDA has no authority to approve lower-cost, generic versions, biosimilars or “follow-on biologics” (“FOBs”) so, these drugs very rarely face competition from generic copies. FOBs (generic form of biologics) could save patients, insurers and our government anywhere from $67 billion to $108 billion during the first decade, and between $236 billion to $378 billion over the next two decades according to the Generic Pharmaceutical Association.

The contentious issue here is the length of time that brand names can hold a monopoly before the FDA can approve the entry of generic competitors. Competition from generic drugs has substantially reduced prescription drug prices and overall prescription drug expenditures, increased access to therapeutic drugs for more Americans, and hastened the pace of innovation.

The provision in proposed health care legislation would allow pharmaceutical companies to extend monopolies to 12-years exclusivity once the product is licensed by the FDA. Even after 12 years, this legislation would allow a pharmaceutical company to extend market protection for its biologic by making minor modifications to the drug to effect dosing, for example.

Generic brand medications only make up for 17 percent of all profits, and generic prescription companies are more focused on the hit that consumers will take financially if longer terms of exclusivity are given to brand-names and biologics. Brand names and biologics, however, are more focused on their profits.

So, why do biologics need a 12-year instead of a 5-year monopoly?

The answer is, of course, profit, and not just a little profit...a lot of profit. According to the pharmaceutical trade association, the average research and development costs are approximately the same for biologics as they are for conventional drugs. Not only that, generics face higher than normal barriers to entering the market. The FTC recently released a report entitled, “Follow-on Biologic Drug Competition” which addressed questions that have arisen about whether the price of biologics might be reduced by competition if there were a statutory process to encourage biosimilars or FOBs to enter and compete with pioneer (brand name) biologics once a pioneer drug’s patents have expired. The FTC did not recommend biologics any years of exclusivity protection.

Based on these findings, the Report concludes that patent protection and market-based pricing will promote competition by FOBs, as well as spur biologic innovation. It states that legislation to put a process in place for the abbreviated FDA approval of FOBs is likely to be an efficient way to bring FOBs to market, because of the time and cost savings it would provide.

In addition, the Report states that the 12- to 14-year regulatory exclusivity period is too long to promote innovation by these firms, particularly since they likely will retain substantial market share after FOB entry. The Report concludes that special procedures to resolve patent issues between pioneer and FOB manufacturers before FDA approval, which are not needed,
could undermine patent incentives and harm consumers. Finally, the Report states that FOB manufacturers are unlikely to need additional incentives – such as a 180-day marketing exclusivity period – to develop interchangeable FOB products.

Links:

Act and Myth of Exclusivity Incentive

Competition Counts

Frequently Asked Questions About Therapeutic Biological Products

Emerging Health Care Competition and Consumer Issues

See How Pay-for-Delay Settlements Make Consumers and the Federal Government Pay More for Much Needed Drugs: Hearing Before the H. Subcomm. on Commerce, Trade, and Consumer Protection, Comm. on Energy and Commerce.

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Amazon the Big Hypocritical Bully on the Block.

Amazon recently filed in opposition to Google’s landmark settlement with publishers and authors stating, "the settlement would violate antitrust laws by giving Google a monopoly over millions of so-called orphan works and create a cartel controlled by authors and publishers for setting prices for e-books". The Author's Guild fired back with the following statement.

Keep in mind, Amazon requires all websites, as a condition of getting any data from them, to have the primary page link to Amazon alone, prohibiting links to other booksellers, eliminating any type of competition, it seems their filing against Google is the epitome of hypocrisy as it monopolizes online bookselling and the e-book industry. If this seems unbelievable, ask Library Thing., amongst the multitude of victims of Amazon's bullying tactics.

Here's an article by Angela Hoy about the Amazon bullying:

Amazon Tightens Grip on Long Tail

Last week Amazon announced that it would be requiring that all books that it sells that are produced through on-demand means be printed by BookSurge, their in-house on-demand printer/publisher. Amazon pitched this as a customer service matter, a means for more speedily delivering print-on-demand books and allowing for the bundling of shipments with other items purchased at the same time from Amazon. It also put a bit of an environmental spin on the move -- claiming less transportation fuel is used (this is unlikely, but that's another story) when all items are shipped directly from Amazon.

We, and many others, think something else is afoot. Ingram Industries' Lightning Source is currently the dominant printer for on-demand titles, and they appear to be quite efficient at their task. They ship on-demand titles shortly after they are ordered through Amazon directly to the customer. It's a nice business for Ingram, since they get a percentage of the sales and a printing fee for every on-demand book they ship. Amazon would be foolish not to covet that business.

What's the rub? Once Amazon owns the supply chain, it has effective control of much of the "long tail" of publishing -- the enormous number of titles that sell in low volumes but which, in aggregate, make a lot of money for the aggregator. Since Amazon has a firm grip on the retailing of these books (it's uneconomic for physical book stores to stock many of these titles), owning the supply chain would allow it to easily increase its profit margins on these books: it need only insist on buying at a deeper discount -- or it can choose to charge more for its printing of the books -- to increase its profits. Most publishers could do little but grumble and comply.

We suspect this maneuver by Amazon is far more about profit margin than it is about customer service or fossil fuels. The potential big losers (other than Ingram) if Amazon does impose greater discounts on the industry, are authors -- since many are paid for on-demand sales based on the publisher's gross revenues -- and publishers.

We're reviewing the antitrust and other legal implications of Amazon's bold move. If you have any information on this matter that you think could be helpful to us, please call us at (212) 563-5904 and ask for the legal services department, or send an e-mail to staff@authorsguild.org.

Feel free to post or forward this message in its entirety.

Copyright 2008, The Authors Guild is the nation's largest society of published book authors.

Google's intentions should be scrutinized, as I'm sure their intentions are not pure, therefore it's not out of the question to suspect they too, are trying to establish a monopoly in the book world.

In the view of its critics, which includes the Justice Department:

"gives Google far too much of a role in determining the digital fate of an enormous trove of books; in effect, an immediate virtual monopoly and too much of an advantage going forward."

So, on October 7, 2009, a hearing will be held to consider objections to Google, the Authors Guild, and the Association of American Publishers in the matter of the "the accord reached a year ago that gave Google vast rights to scan books and devised a system for paying authors and publishers for the right to do so. The pact--actually the settlement of a suit filed by the authors and publishers to stop Google from what they saw as uncontrolled digitizing of their work--is a fundamental step in the world of letters' adjustment to all the new ways literature and information are distributed."

This determination will profoundly affect the digital future of books.

Amazon's BookSurge Information Clearinghouse

Judgment Day for the Google Book Pact

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