Politics

Intellectual Property Rights Gone Wild

Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=19108">Joseph Stiglitz, Project Syndicate</a>

Sunday, 12 May 2013 12:40

Stiglitz writes: "Should someone essentially be permitted to own the right, say, to test whether you have a set of genes that imply a higher than 50% probability of developing breast cancer?"

Joseph Stiglitz speaks at the World Economic Forum annual meeting, 01/26/11. (photo: Getty Images) ]

Intellectual Property Rights Gone Wild

By Joseph Stiglitz, Project Syndicate

12 May 13

�

he Supreme Court recently began deliberations in a case that highlights a deeply problematic issue concerning intellectual property rights: Can human genes - your genes - be patented? Put another way, should someone essentially be permitted to own the right, say, to test whether you have a set of genes that imply a higher than 50 percent probability of developing breast cancer?

To those outside the arcane world of intellectual property rights, the answer seems obvious: No. You own your genes. A company might own, at most, the intellectual property underlying its genetic test; and, because the research and development needed to develop the test may have cost a considerable amount, the firm might rightly charge for administering it.

But a Utah-based company, Myriad Genetics, claims more than that. It claims to own the rights to any test for the presence of the two critical genes associated with breast cancer, and it has ruthlessly enforced that right, though their test is inferior to one that Yale University was willing to provide at much lower cost. The consequences have been tragic: Thorough, affordable testing that identifies high-risk patients saves lives. Blocking such testing costs lives. Myriad is a true example of an American corporation for which profit trumps all other values, including the value of human life itself.

This a particularly poignant case. Normally, economists talk about trade-offs: weaker intellectual property rights, it is argued, would undermine incentives to innovate. The irony here is that Myriad's discovery would have been made in any case, owing to a publicly funded, international effort to decode the entire human genome that was a singular achievement of modern science. The social benefits of Myriad's slightly earlier discovery have been dwarfed by the costs that its callous pursuit of profit has imposed.

More broadly, there is increasing recognition that the patent system, as currently designed, not only imposes untold social costs, but also fails to maximize innovation - as Myriad's gene patents demonstrate. After all, Myriad did not invent the technologies used to analyze the genes. If these technologies had been patented, Myriad might not have made its discoveries. And its tight control of the use of its patents has inhibited the development by others of better and more accurate tests for the presence of the gene. The point is a simple one: All research is based on prior research. A poorly designed patent system - like the one we have now - can inhibit follow-on research.

That is why we do not allow patents for basic insights in mathematics. And it is why research shows that patenting genes actually reduces the production of new knowledge about genes: The most important input in the production of new knowledge is prior knowledge, to which patents inhibit access.

Fortunately, what motivates most significant advances in knowledge is not profit, but the pursuit of knowledge itself. This has been true of all of the transformative discoveries and innovations - DNA, transistors, lasers, the Internet, and so on.

A separate legal case has underscored one of the main dangers of patent-driven monopoly power: corruption. With prices far in excess of the cost of production, there are, for example, huge profits to be gained by persuading pharmacies, hospitals, or doctors to shift sales to your products.

The U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York recently accused the Swiss pharmaceutical giant Novartis of doing exactly this by providing illegal kickbacks, honoraria, and other benefits to doctors - exactly what it promised not to do when it settled a similar case three years earlier. Indeed, Public Citizen, a consumer advocacy group, has calculated that, in the United States alone, the pharmaceutical industry has paid out billions of dollars as a result of court judgments and financial settlements between pharmaceutical manufacturers and federal and state governments.

Sadly, the U.S. and other advanced countries have been pressing for stronger intellectual-property regimes around the world. Such regimes would limit poor countries' access to the knowledge that they need for their development - and would deny life-saving generic drugs to the hundreds of millions of people who cannot afford the drug companies' monopoly prices.

The issue is coming to a head in ongoing World Trade Organization negotiations. The WTO's intellectual-property agreement, called TRIPS, originally foresaw the extension of �flexibilities� to the 48 least-developed countries, where average annual per capita income is below $800. The original agreement seems remarkably clear: The WTO shall extend these �flexibilities� upon the request of the least-developed countries. While these countries have now made such a request, the U.S. and Europe appear hesitant to oblige.

Intellectual property rights are rules that we create and that are supposed to improve social well-being. But unbalanced intellectual-property regimes result in inefficiencies - including monopoly profits and a failure to maximize the use of knowledge - that impede the pace of innovation. And, as the Myriad case shows, they can even result in unnecessary loss of life.

America's intellectual property regime - and the regime that the US has helped to foist upon the rest of the world through the TRIPS agreement - is unbalanced. We should all hope that, with its decision in the Myriad case, the Supreme Court will contribute to the creation of a more sensible and humane framework.

7 comments

FOCUS | "Now That the SOB is Dead..."

Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=13834">Greg Palast, GregPalast.com</a>

Sunday, 12 May 2013 11:27

Palast writes: "'Now that the sonovabitch is dead, why is the US still angry with us?' 'Us', in this conversation, are the Taliban. The SOB in question is Osama bin Laden."

File photo, deceased Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan. (photo: AP)

"Now That the SOB is Dead..."

By Greg Palast,�GregPalast.com

12 May 13

�

ow that the sonovabitch is dead, why is the US still angry with us?"

"Us", in this conversation, are the Taliban. The SOB in question is Osama bin Laden.

The Taliban's frustration was relayed to me by Yahya Maroofi, Counsellor to Afghanistan's President Hamid Karzai - Karzai's Kissinger, if Kissinger had a soul.

The Silk Road nation of Kazakhstan is an excellent place to encounter the dervishes of the Great Game for control of the camel-and-pipeline routes of the Central Asian steppes. Here we can witness the diplomatic-military idiocies of new empires pathetically attempting to ignore the dried skeletons of the imperial forces that went before them.

Maroofi was spending the day in Kazakhstan's capital on his way to little-noticed peace negotiations - little noticed because neither Uncle Sam nor Great-Uncle Britain were invited. Attendance is limited to those frontline states that will be left holding the grenade when the US and UK pull out the pin with the removal of their troops in 2014. The lineup includes Kazakhstan, Russia, Kyrgyzstan (birthplace of the Boston Bombers) and the big new swinging dick on the block, Turkey, as well as Iran, the nation most feared and despised by the Taliban. The unannounced guests, of course, are the Taliban themselves.

I am moved to recount a bit of my lengthy talk with the Afghan minister after reading reams of meretricious bunkum about Afghanistan from the pens of US propaganda repeaters pretending to be reporters. My favourite is, "Hope Seen for Afghanistan After Coalition Leaves," in the New York Times. To give us an expert view, two American reporters used their 20-column inches to take down the words of General Joseph F Dunford Jr, commander of all "international forces" in Afghanistan.

Dunford just arrived in Afghanistan for the first time about 12 weeks ago. He may not know a Tajik from a camel fart, but he does speak fluent Pashto. (I made that last one up because I'm tired of Europeans making fun of Americans for being ignorant of foreign languages.) Notably, the Times article about the future of Afghanistan includes not one word from an Afghan.

But the General does have lots of medals (see?), so I suppose he's as good a source as any.

I did wonder why the Times flew reporters all the way to Kabul to speak to a bewildered US general when they could have saved time and painful immunisations by just copying the Pentagon press releases in Washington. The Times asked "Fighting Joe", as he's called in his official bio, the only question of concern to the US press: "Will the Afghan troops be able to resume lead responsibility" in killing Taliban? "Yes!" asserted the tourist-general.

So I figured, what the hell, let's ask an Afghan about Afghanistan's future. Maroofi, the minister into whose hands this future falls, takes a different tack entirely. He has no time for the American fixation on whether Afghans will fight the Taliban. He makes it clear that Afghans don't want to fight the Taliban at all. And the Taliban don't want to fight fellow Afghans.

But General Joe wants the Afghan army to prove its mettle in "fighting fellow Muslims and countrymen", as the Times puts it. It appears the US has a great fear that, without US boots on the ground and drones in the sky, the war will end, and with it, the Great (and very lucrative) Game.

However, it is the hope of most Afghans, and the goal of the Karzai government, not to kill Taliban, but to bring them into the government.

Or, as Maroofi explains, to recognise publicly that "the Taliban are already in the government, in the Parliament, in control of governorships" - but not openly. The talks among the frontline nations are to bring the Taliban back to its roots as a political organisation, not an armed insurgency.

Maroofi notes that there are some kinks to work out: Currently, female members of the Afghan parliament are fearful of attending with their not-yet-public Taliban colleagues.

"Taliban are Pashtun. They are citizens of Afghanistan. They have to have a place in our democracy." That's not what Uncle Sam wants to hear. President Barack Obama, the Drone Ranger, wants to convert Afghan forces into a kind of drone army, remotely controlled killers keeping the pot boiling.

Afghans, however, have had enough of playing proxy in someone else's war. And they see an opportunity to end the killing. It was taken as a matter of fact by all the Asian diplomats I met that, "The Taliban have been defeated" - militarily, that is; like the US army, they can't advance or hold ground. They are facing fellow Pashtuns (Karzai is one, of course), not the Northern Alliance of minorities that once controlled their opposition. The Taliban can't party like it's 1999.

Plus, the Taliban know there's a four-trillion-dollar carrot awaiting those who sign on to a peace agreement. The US Air Force has conducted a complete aerial survey of Afghan resources and released Russian assays measuring the nation's untapped mineral wealth in gold (in Badakshan), copper (Balkhab), iron (Haji-Gak), cobalt (Aynak), carbonatite (Khanneshin), tin (Dusar-Shaida) and more. Afghanistan could be the Saudi Arabia of rich rocks.

Left out of the published US reports (but something I dug out of old paper CIA files not purged from computers) was the most valuable stash of all: uranium, possibly the world's largest deposit.�The Soviets secretly mined the uranium, using only imported Russian workers, until they were chased back home in 1988.

Uranium�mining beats the hell out of the opium trade (which is slipping to Myanmar, anyway). The Karzai government's hope is to leave a path to wealth as its legacy, but that wealth can't be dug out until the soil above is free of land-mines and maniacs.

Chinese state companies are lining up in Kabul with shovels and signing bonuses. Maroofi likes Chinese companies - they're more likely to provide jobs than baksheesh. Unlike Western companies.

Baksheesh. Bribes. Corruption. It was this topic that set Maroofi on a long rip. Yes, Afghans have been showered with billions in bribes, backhanders and corrupt deals, but who's paying those bribes? Who's doing the corrupting?

"Karzai told defence contractor Lockheed Martin, �You give hundreds of millions of dollars in contracts to my family and to my minister's families because you expect to buy influence. You're not getting influence, and you're not getting your money back, either.'"

Lockheed�s response is that it is required by US law to give contracts to the �most qualified� bidder, regardless of familial relationships with government. Any government, it seems: Lynn Cheney, Dick�s wife, was once on Lockheed�s Board of Directors.

(Maroofi gave me details of questionable contracts that are poisoning the entire system of governance. I intend to hunt down the facts, so watch this space.)

America�s front pages have been splashed this past week with the CIA�s admission that it has been sending bucket-loads of US currency to President Karzai�s office. No one suggests that Karzai has dipped his own hand into the buckets: the loot is for his dispersal among warlords who need a little TLC. For example, Uzbek berserker Abdul Rashid Dostum boasts of billing the CIA $800,000 per month to stay on the government�s side.

But Karzai simply can't control the buckets of�system gone wild. Maroofi is particularly incensed that, "These US companies give millions to governors they know are splitting the money with the Taliban." One favourite racket is for the Taliban to take millions in bribes (via the governors) to let through shipments of material used to supply US forces in remote areas who are fighting the Taliban.

Right now, the Taliban are ready - if reluctantly - for the peace deal, in order to get a piece of the resource action. And they're astonished that, with that sonovabitch Osama dead, the US still holds a grudge.

Why? Face it: if Karzai can end the war, then the winner of the Great Game is� China. After all, the US has almost all the ore it needs under its own soil�or within easy grabbing distance from Canada and Latin America. And unlike China, desperate for those gas pipelines from Kyrgyzstan and oil lines from the Caspian, the US has fracked natural gas and oil coming out its arse. Indeed, unleashing Afghanistan's resource riches will only crash the price of commodity reserves held by US companies.

Afghanistan's peace is China's economic life-line and America's commodity price recession.

General Joe is not worried about a sudden outbreak of peace. �You can accuse me of being an optimist and I�ll plead guilty,� as he looks forward to an Afghanistan trapped in a war without end.�For US corporations, that means a profit centre without end. That's because, even after US troops go, the military-industrial gravy train - boarded by contractors, special ops mercenaries, �development� agencies and their fixers - will continue to roll.

40 comments

How Whole Foods Is Destroying All Other Urban Supermarkets

Sunday, 12 May 2013 07:59

Yglesias writes: "If competitors lose business to Whole Foods, not only does their revenue decline but their margins go down too."

Whole Foods is dominating the competition. (photo: Whole Foods)

How Whole Foods Is Destroying All Other Urban Supermarkets

By Matthew Yglesias, Slate Magazine

12 May13

�

hole Foods had a stellar earnings announcement (PDF) yesterday evening announcing 8.5 percent identical-store sales growth and 13.6 percent overall sales growth. Strong growth was, to an extent, to be expected as the company had announced a deliberate strategy of lowering profit margins to try to expand sales outside their stereotyped high price "whole paycheck" niche. Except gross margins actually went up slightly.

The reason for this is particularly interesting, because it suggests that in Whole Foods' stronger markets its downscale competitors may be facing a real cycle of doom.

Whole Foods didn't raise prices. Instead, the improvement was "driven by an improvement in occupancy costs as a percentage of sales." That's to say that Whole Foods has a lot of fixed costs associated with keeping its stores open. So when more people shop, that not only improves sales it improves profit margins because now the fixed costs are spread across a larger number of items sold. And at least judging by the experience of the Whole Foods near my house, the company is very good at hiring cashiers who move the line quickly and effectively, so they have the ability to process tons of customers if the demand is there. The flipside of this is that if competitors lose business to Whole Foods, not only does their revenue decline but their margins go down too. And groceries are not a very high margin business. You can tip over the edge into a kind of death spiral where falling sales lead to falling margins which forces you to either raise prices or reduce the quality of the shopping experience.

Traditional supermarkets in big cities are in particular trouble because not only is Whole Foods succeeding like gangbusters, Walmart has reached saturation in its traditional markets and is increasingly building urban format stores.

26 comments

Less Reaction, More Action

Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=7118">Carl Gibson, Reader Supported News</a>

Saturday, 11 May 2013 08:13

Gibson writes: "Now imagine if, instead of angrily reacting to the horrible things these corporations and their bought and paid-for congressmen do to us on a daily basis, we started taking radical action that made them angrily react to us on a daily basis. When we go from reacting to acting, our power grows exponentially and all the entrenched powers can do is huddle under a table in fear of the awe-inspiring populist wave crashing upon them."

(illustration: Shutdownthecorporations.org)

Less Reaction, More Action

By Carl Gibson, Reader Supported News

11 May 13

�

love Wisconsin, and the fighting spirit of the people who live here. As Ed Schultz said during a show in Madison, "It's called the Badger State because you fight like hell." But the one thing that's been paralyzing us here in the Deep North more than anything else isn't the cold, but the reactive nature of the left. When Wisconsinites showed up by the hundreds of thousands in spite of the achingly cold weather in the Winter of 2011 to stand up for workers, both Scott Walker and his corporate puppet masters hid in the shadows, terrified of what the people would do in large numbers. Since the unsuccessful recall attempt, the movement, somewhat deflated, has likewise remained in the shadows, terrified of what Walker, a gerrymandered GOP legislature, and the well-heeled corporate power circle running the show will do next.

Occupy Wall Street experienced something similar. At the peak of the movement's power and influence in the Fall of 2011, Mayor Bloomberg and the NYPD backed down from a threat to evict the thousands occupying Zuccotti Park for alleged "cleaning." Occupiers took up brooms and mops, cleaned the park themselves, and vowed to clean up the mess on Wall Street rather than leave the space they occupied. Though we had our victory that night, eventually the police would move in during the cover of night, sequester credentialed journalists into an obfuscated corner, and forcibly arrest over 200 nonviolent protesters after rousing them from their sleep. Municipalities soon followed suit all over the country, and the movement lost its central organizing spaces. Since then, we've largely been reacting to politicians, their corporate owners, and their horrific actions with our protests, while they plug their ears and pretend not to hear us.

Now imagine if, instead of angrily reacting to the horrible things these corporations and their bought and paid-for congressmen do to us on a daily basis, we started taking radical action that made them angrily react to us on a daily basis. When we go from reacting to acting, our power grows exponentially and all the entrenched powers can do is huddle under a table in fear of the awe-inspiring populist wave crashing upon them.

Students in NYC are occupying Cooper Union demanding their education remain free. Fast food workers have been on strike in St. Louis, demanding their employers treat them like human beings and pay them a living wage. Students and teachers alike are in the streets of Chicago, protesting the closing of the schools that define their communities and a corrupt mayor who's lying to them. Students in Philadelphia walked out in protest of budget cuts that are cheapening their education. A massive student-led movement spanning over 400 campuses is actively pressuring university administrations to divest their school endowments from the fossil fuel industry, with recent success at the Rhode Island School of Design. And in Madison, Wisconsin, students occupied their chancellor's office demanding the school cut their contract with a food vendor known for willfully abusing its employees.

Activists in Baltimore are celebrating the anniversary of Martin Luther King's Poor People's Campaign by marching all the way to Washington to protest the cruel, intertwined systems of mass incarceration, police brutality and private prisons. The weekend after, a group of long-term unemployed activists are marching 150 miles from Philadelphia all the way to DC to go after the corporate lobbyists and special interests that have taken our government hostage. On May 25, people in over 30 countries are participating in the March Against Monsanto, shining light on the corporation that's poisoned food supplies and bribed politicians to keep quiet about their crimes.

Documentarians like Crystal Zevon of Searching for Occupy and Vicky Bruce and Karin Hayes of We're Not Broke are capturing this powerful movement on camera and sharing it on the big screen. Livestreamers are bringing it to our screens in real-time. Citizen journalists like Dustin Slaughter, Allison Kilkenny, and Steve Horn give us second-by-second updates of our movement's progress on social media. The tacticians of our movement like Citizens for Tax Justice and the Center for Media and Democracy are assembling and distributing new knowledge that enriches our words and provides sustenance for our arguments. Bold and fearless elected officials like Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders are crafting the policies that will be the bedrock of the new society we dream of and fight for.

The politicians, the corporations and the media they own want us to believe we're all alone, that the movement is dead, that there's no hope, that all we can do is helplessly scream at our screens and buy more crap to make us feel better about the horrible ways of the world. What they desperately don't want is for the fed-up populace to take their anger to the streets and demand radical change.

It's time to make them react to us for a change.

Carl Gibson, 25, is co-founder of US Uncut, a nationwide creative direct-action movement that mobilized tens of thousands of activists against corporate tax avoidance and budget cuts in the months leading up to the Occupy Wall Street movement. Carl and other US Uncut activists are featured in the documentary "We're Not Broke," which premiered at the 2012 Sundance Film Festival. He currently lives in Madison, Wisconsin. You can contact him at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it , and follow him on twitter at @uncutCG.

Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader Supported News.

19 comments

400 Parts Per Million: Climate Milestone on Road of Idiocy

Saturday, 11 May 2013 07:58

Monbiot writes: "The difference between 399ppm and 400ppm is small, in terms of its impacts on the world's living systems. But this is a moment of symbolic significance, a station on the Via Dolorosa of environmental destruction. It is symbolic of our failure to put the long-term prospects of the natural world and the people it supports above immediate self-interest."

400 parts per million is a milestone we should never have reached. (photo: ZME Science)

400 Parts Per Million: Climate Milestone on Road of Idiocy

By George Monbiot, Guardian UK

11 May 13

�

he data go back 800,000 years: that's the age of the oldest fossil air bubbles extracted from Dome C, an ice-bound summit in the high Antarctic. And throughout that time there has been nothing like this. At no point in the preindustrial record have concentrations of carbon dioxide in the air risen above 300 parts per million (ppm). 400ppm is a figure that belongs to a different era.

The difference between 399ppm and 400ppm is small, in terms of its impacts on the world's living systems. But this is a moment of symbolic significance, a station on the Via Dolorosa of environmental destruction. It is symbolic of our failure to put the long-term prospects of the natural world and the people it supports above immediate self-interest.

The only way forward now is back: to retrace our steps and seek to return atmospheric concentrations to around 350ppm, as the 350.org campaign demands. That requires, above all, that we leave the majority of the fossil fuels which have already been identified in the ground. There is not a government or an energy company which has yet agreed to do so.

Recently, Shell announced that it will go ahead with its plans to drill deeper than any offshore oil operation has gone before: almost 3km below the Gulf of Mexico. At the same time, Oxford University opened a new laboratory in its department of earth sciences. The lab is funded by Shell. Oxford says that the partnership "is designed to support more effective development of natural resources to meet fast-growing global demand for energy." Which translates as finding and extracting even more fossil fuel.

The European Emissions Trading Scheme, which was supposed to have capped our consumption, is now, for practical purposes, dead. International climate talks have stalled; governments such as ours now seem quietly to be unpicking their domestic commitments. Practical measures to prevent the growth of global emissions are, by comparison to the scale of the challenge, almost nonexistent.

The problem is simply stated: the power of the fossil fuel companies is too great. Among those who seek and obtain high office are people characterised by a complete absence of empathy or scruples, who will take money or instructions from any corporation or billionaire who offers them, and then defend those interests against the current and future prospects of humanity.

This new climate milestone reflects a profound failure of politics, in which democracy has quietly been supplanted by plutocracy. Without a widespread reform of campaign finance, lobbying and influence-peddling and the systematic corruption they promote, our chances of preventing climate breakdown are close to zero.

So here stands our political class at a waystation along the road of idiocy, apparently determined only to complete the journey.

9 comments

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