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Specifically, weak-IP environments are hospitable for large, integrated firms that maintain internal markets for financing and conducting R&D and then embed the resulting intellectual output in goods and services for the end-user market. By contrast, strong-IP environments enable entry by smaller firms that specialize in R&D and monetize the resulting intellectual outputs through external relationships with third parties. This organizational distortion matters because larger firms tend to excel in incremental and process-related innovation that refines existing technologies while smaller firms tend to excel in product innovation that challenges existing technologies.

The most striking examples are found in the biotechnology and semiconductor industries, in which patent-dependent business models have facilitated significant entry by R&D-specialist firms and a vertical disintegration of the market supply chain. Counterintuitively, a strong-IP environment can lower entry costs by relieving firms from having to assemble a production and distribution infrastructure in order to earn returns on R&D investments. This may explain why in 1966 (during the postwar weak-IP regime) small firms accounted for only about 5% of business R&D spending, but they accounted for almost 24% in 2006 (during the strong-IP regime starting in the early 1980s).

In 2023, Amazon, Meta, Google parent company Alphabet, and Microsoft each spent more than $10 million on lobbying, according to data provided by OpenSecrets. The Information Technology Industry Council, a trade association, spent $2.7 million on lobbying. In comparison, civil society group the Mozilla Foundation spent $120,000 and AI safety nonprofit the Center for AI Safety Action Fund spent $80,000.

Given that the definition of lobbying only includes speaking with staffers about specific laws, these figures likely underestimate the amounts of money that tech companies are spending to influence lawmakers, says Hamza Chaudhry, a U.S. Policy Specialist at the Future of Life Institute, a nonprofit that focuses on risks posed by advanced technologies.

Silicon Valley giants use powerful reactive and proactive methods of social manipulation to shift public opinion and influence election outcomes. Reactive methods usually involve censoring or deplatforming voices out of step with progressive values. One of the most infamous examples is Facebook and Twitter’s suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop story ahead of the 2020 presidential election. According to a McLaughlin and Associates poll, that suppression almost certainly influenced the outcome of the election. That’s just the tip of the iceberg. Other companies like Google use secret blacklists to suppress targeted websites and communications. Facebook even has a covert whitelist called “XCheck” it employs to give certain favored high-profile users a pass on its content policies. Large platforms also use proactive methods to push users toward content or actions that further Big Tech’s political agenda. A leak from Google in 2018 revealed that the company can personalize search results and feeds to reinforce its values. Google, along with other platforms, appears to be doing just that in the name of voter “education and mobilization.” While this might sound benevolent, it hides a dark secret: These platforms control which users receive election-related information through their services and can even target certain users with go-vote reminders. Per research by Robert Epstein, Google targeted go-vote reminders to liberal users during the 2020 Georgia U.S. Senate runoff—presumably to boost turnout for Democrats. Facebook has also sent out targeted go-vote reminders since at least 2008. The platform found that reminders increased the overall number of votes cast by 340,000 in 2010. Taken together, Epstein finds that political bias reinforced through search algorithms, “suggested search” features, AI chat bots and targeted go-vote reminders has a significant cumulative effect on user attitudes and voting behavior. If observed levels of liberal bias are present on major platforms ahead of an election, they could shift millions of votes to Silicon Valley’s preferred candidates.

WASHINGTON, July 23 (Reuters) - A potential Democratic administration led by Vice President Kamala Harris would likely advance President Joe Biden's agenda of tough financial rules, an unwelcome prospect for Wall Street banks, crypto companies and other players that have chafed under the current administration.

Harris is the frontrunner to win the Democratic nomination after Biden exited the presidential race on Sunday and endorsed her.

Managing the United States’ relationship with China isn’t about decoupling, Vice President Kamala Harris said following her trip to Indonesia for a summit of Southeast Asian countries in Jakarta. “It is about de-risking. It is about understanding,” Harris said during an interview airing on CBS’ “Face the Nation” on Sunday. “It’s not about pulling out, but it is about ensuring that we are protecting American interests, and that we are a leader in terms of the rules of the road, as opposed to following others’ rules,” Harris told CBS host Margaret Brennan. Tension between the United States and China increased early this year, after the U.S. shot down a Chinese spy balloon off the Carolina coast; there’s also been continued tension over Taiwan and trade. The icy relationship between the countries has been slow to thaw, though U.S. leaders have emphasized a desire to keep lines of communication open between the two countries. During Harris’ trip, she criticized China’s efforts to take control of the South China Sea, calling the actions “bullying” by China. Though the U.S. does not “invite conflict” with China, “we absolutely are prepared to and engaged in what is necessary to compete,” Harris said in Sunday’s interview. China’s President Xi Jinping could end up traveling to Harris’ home state for the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation leaders’ meeting that’s will be held in San Francisco in November. But a meeting between Xi and President Joe Biden during the APEC summit is far from a given; China’s top security agency has said a meeting between the leaders hinges on the U.S. “showing sufficient sincerity.” “I think he is absolutely an important player in this region of the world. And if he comes, then that will be, I’m sure, something that could be productive,” Harris said of Xi. Though there is still tension between leaders of the two countries, Harris attributed the strain on the relationship to the competition between the U.S. and China. “Yes, there’s tension when you are in a competition of any sort. But that does not mean that we are seeking conflict,” Harris said.

Medicare for All opponents repeatedly claim that Medicare for All is “too expensive” by presenting misleading numbers without the proper context of our unsustainable health care spending. Here are the facts: We can’t afford NOT to implement Medicare for All. Our health care spending is estimated to continue rising and will reach nearly $6 trillion a year by 2027. That means according to the federal government, we will spend around $42.9 trillion on health care over the next decade if we maintain the status quo. Medicare for All will cost LESS than our current system. A recent study by Yale epidemiologists found that Medicare for All would save around 68,000 lives a year while reducing U.S. health care spending by around 13%, or $450 billion a year. Medicare for All spending would be approximately $37.8 trillion between 2017 and 2026, according to a study by the Political Economy Research Institute (PERI) at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. That amounts to about $5 trillion in savings over that time. These savings would come from reducing administrative costs and allowing the government to negotiate prescription drug prices. Other studies by think tanks and government agencies have analyzed single-payer proposals at the state and federal levels. Most found Medicare for All would reduce our total health care spending. Even a study by the Koch-funded Mercatus Center found that Medicare for All would save around $2 trillion over a 10-year period. With Medicare for All, most families would spend less on health care than they do now on premiums, copays and deductibles. ​​​​​​​Some additional taxes would be needed to pay for Medicare for All, but most Americans would spend less on health care than they do right now. Overall, working families that make around $60,000 a year would pay up to 14% lesson their annual health care costs. As the debate grows on how to overhaul the health care system, Medicare for All is being pitted against a public option. It’s important to highlight the differences between the policies. A public option would: Cost even more than the wasteful status quo, around $175 billion more per year. And because it wouldn’t have comparable savings from efficiencies and negotiating power, it would cost $600 billion a year more than Medicare for All without providing as generous coverage; Leave millions uninsured or underinsured and subject to unnecessary out-of-pocket costs, including copays and deductibles; Leave more than 100 million Americans at the whim of private for-profit insurance, so they would be under constant fear of disruption when their employer changes plans or they lose or change jobs; Force employers to continue to struggle with whether they can afford to provide insurance to their employees; and Enable for-profit insurers to cherry-pick healthier Americans, threatening the financial solvency of the public programs. However, Medicare for All would: Provide guaranteed health care to everyone; Provide access to home and community-based care for all who need it; Guarantee coverage for dental, vision and hearing services; End medical debt and medical bankruptcies; Reduce administrative waste by $500 billion per year; End price gouging by pharmaceutical companies; and Put an end to corporations profiting off the sick.

Medicare for all: Harris signed onto Sen. Bernie Sanders’ Medicare for All bill — which would eliminate private insurance and transfer everyone to a single-payer, government-run program — and introduced her own competing plan that would allow private plans to compete with public ones. She also cosponsored an array of more modest alternatives, including making it possible for more people to opt in to either Medicare or Medicaid. Harris’ all-of-the-above approach drew criticism from her primary rivals, including Sanders and Biden, with some accusing her of going too far, others not far enough and still others as inconsistent and untrustworthy. Biden’s campaign, which was then pushing a plan to expand Obamacare to include a public option, said Harris’ “have-it-every-which-way approach” showed “a refusal to be straight with the American middle class.” Cost of care: In her seven years as California attorney general, Harris repeatedly used legal tools to try to bring down the cost of health care, tackling anticompetitive behavior in the hospital, insurance and pharmaceutical industries. She also won multimillion-dollar settlements from major health care corporations like Quest Diagnostics and McKesson after whistleblowers filed lawsuits claiming fraud in the state’s Medicaid program. This record signals an interest not only in defending and building on the drug price negotiation framework enacted by Biden but also in using antitrust laws more aggressively to tackle consolidation in the health care sector. Lindsay Bealor Greenleaf, vice president and head of state and federal policy at consulting firm ADVI Health, whose clients include biopharmacy groups, told Pulse she will watch how Harris talks about the Inflation Reduction Act, which the vice president is likely to herald as an achievement of the Biden-Harris administration. “She has had very strong views on drug pricing. She pushed on march-in rights,” Greenleaf said, referring to an administration action to seize the patent of certain high-priced medicines.

Over the past three years, Vice President Kamala Harris has taken a leading role inside the White House on artificial intelligence as the technology is taking off.

As A.I. czar, she brought the chiefs of OpenAI, Microsoft, Google and Anthropic to the White House to agree on voluntary safety standards for the technology. She led a White House executive order mandating how the federal government would use and develop A.I. And she pushed Congress to adopt regulations to protect individuals from A.I. killing jobs and other harms — although little legislation has emerged and the companies have so far faced few roadblocks.

Vice President Kamala Harris’ campaign rejected what it called “false” accusations by former President Donald Trump that she would ban fracking if elected president. Details: The response by the Harris campaign came after Trump at a Minnesota campaign rally on Saturday brought up statements Harris made during her 2019 primary run pledging to ban fracking. “Trump’s false claims about fracking bans are an obvious attempt to distract from his own plans to enrich oil and gas executives at the expense of the middle class,” the Harris campaign said in a statement. “The Biden-Harris Administration passed the largest ever climate change legislation and under their leadership, America now has the highest ever domestic energy production.” Fracking technology has helped U.S. drillers reach record oil and gas output. The campaign highlighted data from the Energy Information Administration showing that the United States produced more than 13 million barrels a day of oil in 2023, the highest level ever. Trump at the campaign rally accused Harris of trying to hide her stance on the issue. “She said, ‘I‘d never said [that] about fracking,’” Trump said at the rally. “Then we played 90 tapes — ‘There will be no fracking.’” Trump also repeated several falsehoods about the Biden administration’s energy policy, including that it put in place a mandate forcing all Americans to buy electric vehicles. No such mandate exists although an EPA regulation aims to spur higher adoption of electric vehicles. Background: Trump’s allegations come as Harris is expected to moderate her positions on energy issues after she had been one of the more liberal candidates running for the party’s nomination for the 2020 election.

Biden has sent Harris to represent him at many of the biggest international conferences, including the Munich Security Conference and the Ukraine peace summit. Harris doesn’t have Biden’s trans-Atlantic record, but three years in a row at Munich, one of Europe’s top talking shops and a place where officials go to calm their nerves on U.S. policy, she’s hit all the expected notes as America’s reassurer-in-chief. America’s commitment to NATO is “unwavering” and “ironclad,” she said in a February 2022 speech in Munich, just five days before Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. She also said that NATO’s Article 5 self-defense pledge—which Trump has threatened not to honor for allies who aren’t meeting the alliance’s 2 percent of GDP spending mark—is “sacrosanct.” In 2023, she returned to Munich with similar talking points on NATO but tougher language about Russia’s invasion, then a year old. The Biden administration had concluded that Russia had committed crimes against humanity in the war, she said. And about two weeks before the debate that would effectively end Biden’s presidential campaign, Harris filled in as Biden’s surrogate at the Ukraine peace summit in Switzerland, where she called for a “just and lasting peace.” The Kremlin has stayed mostly quiet on Harris’s presidential bid so far, with presidential spokesperson Dmitry Peskov noting the vice president’s “unfriendly rhetoric” but adding that Russia could not yet formally assess her candidacy. Russian state media, however, immediately began to attack the Democratic Party’s new standard-bearer. “Kamala with the nuclear button is worse than a monkey with a grenade,” said Andrei Sidorov, Moscow State University’s dean of global politics, speaking on Russian state TV’s weekly talk show.

Former President Donald Trump hasn’t said much publicly about the war in Gaza, despite implementing hardline pro-Israel policies while he was in office. But what he has said has put him squarely in line with a GOP base that is beginning to lose interest in the war, even as it maintains support for Israel.

And recently, he’s begun taking an increasingly hostile stance against Palestinians and their supporters in the US.

Experts warn that if Israel’s war on Gaza does not end, the conflict could spill over, bringing in new players.

“Without a ceasefire in Gaza, it’s hard to see how this gets better. And I think the simmering pot is now boiling over, and it’s just going to get worse and worse as time goes on. It’s really a very dangerous moment,” Hassan El-Tayyab, legislative director for Middle East policy at Friends Committee on National Legislation, a Quaker advocacy group in Washington, DC, told Al Jazeera earlier this month.

In the shadow of this biological weapons are less well understood. Syria’s biological weapons programs run out of the Syrian Scientific Research (SSRC) in Damascus have not been the focus of much media attention. That despite these weapons are far more dangerous and more likely to be deployed. Perhaps less clear is Syria’s close relationship and support of Hezbollah and Hezbollah’s arsenal of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles. The merging of Syria’s biological weapon program with Hezbollah and/or Iran’s UAV programs could create an international public health emergency more catastrophic than a natural outbreak. In an article by Arie Egozie entitled “Israel F-16 downs another Hezbollah UAV,” Egozie notes:

An Israeli air force F-16 has shot down an unmanned air vehicle launched from Lebanon by Hezbollah militants. The threat was detected over the Mediterranean Sea on 25 April 2013 and was destroyed shortly after by an air-to-air missile. The encounter occurred at 13:30 local time, and an air force helicopter transporting Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for an official visit to the north of the country landed as fighters scrambled. Israel's latest interception of a UAV is the fifth such action to have been performed by its air force in the past decade.

"Today, many write clever forecasts about the Samson Option (Israel's use of nuclear weapons) or the full cleansing of Gaza. They switch from Ukraine to the Palestinian-Israeli crisis, but the question is much broader. What we can see now is part of the grandiose redivision of the world that was formed after WWII," Georgy Rieper told Pravda.Ru.

Let us recall that Israel today has at least 200 nuclear warheads. The country also has a full-fledged nuclear triad. Israeli nuclear arsenal is believed to be the sixth largest nuclear arsenal in the world.

Ray Dalio, billionaire investor and founder of investment management company Bridgewater Associates, said that the Israel-Hamas and Russia-Ukraine wars should “raise revulsion and fear in everyone”. He said that these ‘hot wars' will cost the allies of these countries a lot and has the potential to spiral out of control to become an international war.

These wars reveal the “unimaginably terrible and revolting ways” people can treat other people, he said. No one anywhere can be sure that they won’t find themselves in the middle of a war, he stated in a blog titled ‘Another Step Toward International War’, where he also cites his book ‘Principles for Dealing with the Changing World Order’.

Rocket attacks on U.S. bases immediately ensued — two in Saudi Arabia and one in Syria. Also, Iran and Saudi Arabia, historically arch enemies, are now talking to each other. The genocide may unite all Islamic splinters into one scary solid mass.

Now, the U.S. is as much a target of Islamic anger as the Israelis. It was a knee-jerk diplomatic blunder by Biden, who could have played more of a referee by openly warning Israel to stop the genocide. Now, the U.S. is part of that genocide, the critical ingredient to a possible nuclear war.

As we approach the 100th anniversary World War I, we should remember that this colossal disaster escalated uncontrollably from what was intended to be a minor conflict. There is a danger that an attack on Iran would escalate into a large-scale war in the Middle East, entirely destabilizing a region that is already deep in problems.

The unstable government of Pakistan might be overthrown, and the revolutionary Pakistani government might enter the war on the side of Iran, thus introducing nuclear weapons into the conflict. Russia and China, firm allies of Iran, might also be drawn into a general war in the Middle East. Since much of the world's oil comes from the region, such a war would certainly cause the price of oil to reach unheard-of heights, with catastrophic effects on the global economy.

I was here last week to interview Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at the Tikvah Israel Security Conclave. The interview, available on the Journal’s website, combined a tour d’horizon of Mr. Netanyahu’s view of world politics with some candid reflections on the history of Zionism. As for the rest of the conference, I came away thinking that the U.S. is much closer to getting involved in another Middle East war than most in Washington understand, and that minimizing this danger requires rapid and sweeping policy change from an administration still struggling to comprehend the most serious international crisis since the late 1930s.

The Biden administration came to office with an elegant and cohesive geopolitical strategy. It would address the China challenge by driving wedges between China and its fellow revisionist powers. It would park Russia by accommodating Vladimir Putin and stabilize the Middle East by reviving the nuclear deal with Iran even as it pursued aggressive trade and security policies to limit China’s rise.

After meeting with Israel’s prime minister this week, Vice President Kamala Harris said she “will not be silent.” She was referring to her concerns about Palestinian suffering in the Gaza war, but in a way it was a larger declaration of independence. For nearly four years, she has been the quiet understudy, relegated to the role of the supportive deputy while President Biden made pronouncements. Now she has suddenly been thrust to the fore as the new presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, and neither silence nor agreeable head nods are sufficient any more. The challenge for her over the next 100 days will be to find her own voice without overtly breaking with Mr. Biden, a delicate political high-wire act without a reliable net. Every statement she makes, every sentence she utters, will be scrutinized to determine whether it is consistent with the president she serves. Yet even as she wants to demonstrate loyalty to Mr. Biden, she also hopes to show the public who she is. She is fortunate in that she and Mr. Biden do not diverge all that much, according to people who have worked with them. While friction between presidents and their vice presidents is common, there have been few notable instances where Mr. Biden and Ms. Harris have been reported to be at odds. So for her, it may not be as difficult to suppress contrary instincts in the truncated election campaign she faces as it has been for other vice presidents eager to differentiate themselves. But this is a balancing act being figured out on the fly. Because Mr. Biden was running himself until less than a week ago, neither he nor Ms. Harris has had much time to figure out how to coordinate their messages. It was notable that Mr. Biden left it to Ms. Harris on Thursday to be the public voice of the administration during the White House visit by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel, taking the silent role himself. Mr. Biden cares deeply about keeping former President Donald J. Trump out of the White House and therefore has reason to be invested in Ms. Harris’s success. He also knows that because, until he was forced to quit the race, he had insisted on running again despite concerns about his age, many will blame him for not ceding the stage earlier if Mr. Trump wins. “Given the unique circumstances of the present situation, I believe Harris will have more room to maneuver in this tricky terrain,” said Richard Moe, who was chief of staff to Vice President Walter F. Mondale. “It all depends on the nature of the issue, and whether it is one that Biden feels strongly about, but it’s apparent nonetheless that Biden is prepared to give her a good deal of latitude.” Joel K. Goldstein, a longtime specialist on the vice presidency at St. Louis University School of Law, said an incumbent vice president running for president faced three challenges. The opposition will tag the vice president with any baggage the administration has. The vice president must step out of the president’s shadow to establish her own identity. And the vice president needs to pivot from subordinate to leader — “and do so while someone else is still president.” “It seems to me that Vice President Harris has done remarkably well this first week in presenting herself as an effective new leader of the Democratic Party,” Mr. Goldstein said. “She has skillfully managed to remain loyal to President Biden and the accomplishments of the administration while presenting herself as an independent, vigorous new leader from a different generation with a different style.” “When Hubert Humphrey desperately needed to separate himself from Lyndon Johnson on Vietnam, the president drew a line in blood — literally,” said James Traub, author of “True Believer,” a biography of Mr. Humphrey. Mr. Traub recalled that Mr. Johnson told Mr. Humphrey that more generous terms for peace would lead to the deaths of American troops, including Mr. Johnson’s own son-in-law, Charles S. Robb. “Kamala Harris can afford to deviate from administration policy in a way that Humphrey never could,” Mr. Traub said. Mr. Bush felt compelled to establish his independence after eight years serving under the popular President Ronald Reagan and did so by opposing a deal with Manuel Noriega, the dictator of Panama, who was facing drug trafficking charges. Mr. Gore distanced himself from President Bill Clinton because of the scandal over the president’s affair with Monica S. Lewinsky. Unlike Mr. Johnson, both Mr. Reagan and Mr. Clinton went along with their vice presidents’ stabs at separation, albeit grudgingly in the latter case, because they viewed the success of their deputies as important to the country and their own legacies. Mr. Goldstein said Mr. Biden might see it the same way. “I suspect that President Biden will embrace Vice President Harris’s candidacy as furthering his values and objectives,” he said. Abortion rights and the war in Gaza are the two most obvious areas where Mr. Biden and Ms. Harris have been perceived differently. They both favor a nationwide right to abortion, but Mr. Biden remains uncomfortable speaking about it, while Ms. Harris has leaned into the issue with passion and energy. She has stuck by his position on Gaza but has more emphatically addressed humanitarian concerns. During Mr. Netanyahu’s visit, Ms. Harris condemned pro-Hamas demonstrators as “despicable” and made it clear that she supports Israel’s right to defend itself against terrorism. But she talked forcefully about “the images of dead children and desperate, hungry people fleeing for safety” from Israel’s assault on Hamas in Gaza. “We cannot allow ourselves to become numb to the suffering, and I will not be silent,” she said. Ms. Harris’s office had no comment on Friday, but an aide speaking on condition of anonymity because of the internal sensitivities stressed that her remarks were consistent with the president’s policy and what she had said previously. Khaled Elgindy, the director of the program on Palestine and Palestinian-Israeli affairs at the Middle East Institute, however, said Ms. Harris’s statement “was a notable departure from Biden” in tone, if not in substance. “Whereas Biden typically centers Israeli needs, interests and trauma while treating Palestinian suffering mostly as an afterthought or talking point, Harris kind of flipped that formula by centering Palestinian suffering and humanity throughout her remarks,” he said. Ms. Harris delivered her statement after meeting with Mr. Netanyahu and without the prime minister by her side. Israeli officials were surprised by her comments, seeing them as much sharper than what had been said behind closed doors. They complained privately to reporters that she risked encouraging Hamas to resist a cease-fire deal by making it appear that the United States was not in lock step with Israel, a position Mr. Netanyahu echoed on Friday while meeting with Mr. Trump at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida. Mr. Trump weighed in as well. “I think her remarks were disrespectful,” he said. “They weren’t very nice pertaining to Israel. I actually don’t know how a person who’s Jewish can vote for her, but that’s up to them. But she was certainly disrespectful to Israel.” Mr. Trump did not explain how expressing concern for civilian casualties was disrespectful, much less how it was any more so than his own comments on Thursday insisting that Israel “finish up and get it done quickly,” referring to the war, “because they are getting decimated with this publicity.” But Ms. Harris, whose husband is Jewish, feels no need to prove that she is more supportive of Jewish people than Mr. Trump and is far more concerned about Mr. Biden’s reaction to her comments than the former president. She wants to exhibit respect for Mr. Biden, advisers say, without feeling boxed in. “I believe Harris should do everything she can to adhere to the Biden policy as long as she is still the vice president,” Mr. Moe said. “That need not be an absolute rule, because the public understandably will expect her to be her own person at some point, so it’s tricky. But essentially, she can distinguish herself as a matter of emphasis and style, as she did on Gaza and the Palestinians.”

Vice President Kamala Harris said “Israel has a right to defend itself ... and how it does so matters.” Harris’ remarks followed a meeting she held with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Washington Thursday.

“It is time for this war to end and end in a way where Israel is secure, all the hostages are released, the suffering of Palestinians in Gaza ends and the Palestinian people can exercise their right to freedom, dignity and self determination,” said Harris.