Monthly Archives: May 2011

Drug Companies: Perfecting the Information Virus

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The Guardian’s Elliott Ross has been mucking around in Big Pharma’s never-ending quest to make sure that research is slanted their way. It isn’t pretty.

When doctors are deciding which drug to prescribe a patient, the idea behind evidence-based medicine is that they inform their thinking by consulting scientific literature. To a great extent, this means relying on medical journals.

The trouble is that pharmaceutical companies, who stand to win or lose large amounts of money depending on the content of journal articles, have taken a firm grip on what gets written about their drugs. That grip was strong way back in 2004, when The Lancet’s chief editor Richard Horton lamented that “journals have devolved into information laundering operations for the pharmaceutical industry.” It may be even tighter now.

Drug companies exert this hold on knowledge through publication planning agencies, an obscure subsection of the pharmaceutical industry that has ballooned in size in recent years, and is now a key lever in the commercial machinery that gets drugs sold.

The planning companies are paid to implement high-impact publication strategies for specific drugs. They target the most influential academics to act as authors, draft the articles, and ensure that these include clearly-defined branding messages and appear in the most prestigious journals.

Big Pharma has been using the strategy for a while, and they’re getting increasingly brazen. Take the case of Merck, one of the biggest pharmaceutical companies in the world:

In a flow-chart drawn up by Eric Crown, publications manager at Merck (the company that sold the controversial painkiller Vioxx), the determination of authorship appears as the fourth stage of the article preparation procedure. That is, only after company employees have presented clinical study data, discussed the findings, finalised “tactical plans” and identified where the article should be published.

Perhaps surprisingly to the casual observer, under guidelines tightened up in recent years by the International Committee of Journal Editors (ICMJE), Crown’s approach, typical among pharmaceutical companies, does not constitute ghostwriting….

“We’ve never done ghostwriting, per se, as I’d define it”, says John Romankiewicz, president of Scientific Therapeutics Information, the New Jersey firm that helped Merck promote Vioxx with a series of positive articles in medical journals. “We may have written a paper, but the people we work with have to have some input and approve it.”

So the next time some college kid gets caught plagiarizing, maybe instead of kicking them out of college they ought to get him an internship in Big Pharma.

DoD: Hoorah for Defense Industry Profits!

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Via Felix Salmon:

The Pentagon is very encouraged by Wall Street’s response to aerospace companies and arms makers, even as U.S. defense spending flattens, the top U.S. weapons buyer said on Tuesday. [...]The median stock price for the industry’s to 20 aerospace and defense contractors is about 92.5 percent of their 52-week trading highs, he said.

Trading at this level, Carter said, shows “continuing confidence in the health of our industry that is higher than it is for global information, automotive, steel, energy, telecom and information technology sectors.”

As Salmon says, this is bonkers:

Carter is the man in charge of spending a huge chunk of the Pentagon’s mind-bogglingly huge $750 billion budget. It’s his job to get value for money; if defense-contractor stocks are rising even in the face of defense spending which is purportedly flattening, alarm bells should be ringing. But Carter seems to be mistaking them for some kind of congratulatory jingle.

If that doesn’t depress you, a few stats on how much we’re spending compared to the past (inflation-adjusted):

In 1960, when President Dwight Eisenhower was leaving office, military spending in today’s money totaled just $350 billion…. In 1970, when the Vietnam War was raging, we spent $450 billion. The most Ronald Reagan spent on defense was about $550 billion. Even in 1942, the year after Pearl Harbor, we only spent $350 billion.

Today, $750 billion.

Actually, the figure is much higher if you include veterans’ benefits, the cost of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the interest on the debt to fight those wars.

Yeah, we’re definitely spending too much on social programs.

Robin Hoods Crosses the Moat and Storms the Castle at the JP Morgan Chase Shareholder Meeting

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Now this is how to do a protest! Having Robin Hoods breach a marsh/”moat” using a portable bridge and demanding justice at JP Morgan Chase’s Shareholder Meeting — you gotta admire their style.

To understand what these protests are targeting, here’s the story of one of the protesters:

Virginia Holwell, a 59-year-old shareholder from Peoria Heights, Illinois, even brought her own mortgage paperwork to the meeting to request help. Speaking to the gathering of shareholders, Holwell said she went to Chase to ask for a loan modification after losing her job a year ago. Howell said the company has lost her paperwork five times but has urged her not to go seek legal aid, housing counseling or advice from other parties. In March, after stringing her along for over 10 months, Chase advised her to “liquidate the property.”

This while Chase made $17 billion in profits.

In reaction to this entertaining but nonviolent protest, police responding by assaulting demonstrators, some of whom were elderly with mace, and also threatened some protesters with dogs. Stephen Lerner – aka Mr. It’s Time for Homeowner Strikes — said it was a sign that the protests were starting to get under somebody’s skin:

“The period where they were ignoring us is over, I think,” Lerner said of today’s police activity.

To learn more about what’s going on, check out Showdown in America as well as the website for National People’s Action, which is Showdown’s lead organizer.

DIY Computerized Manufacturing: Getting a Little Closer to Becoming a Reality

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A great article in the New York Times about the burgeoning world of DIY manufacturing. Because prices of machines that let you build things have been dropping steadily, we’re getting to a point that feels a lot like the early days of PC hobbyists. And eventually it could have an equally powerful impact on the economy.

Makers, as they call themselves, can’t compete with the long, orderly rows of workers from the poorer provinces of China or India who cut, stitch and solder bras, shoes and cellphones for pennies — or even with the hundreds of billions of dollars a year worth of stuff that continues to pour out of large, old-fashioned American factories. Their method involves creating “hacker space” cooperatives, where a few dozen members share a 3-D printer, a laser cutter and an oscilloscope and engage in collaborative manufacturing projects. Makers have created companies like Shapeways and CloudFab, which for a fee will manufacture small runs of products that you design. They are becoming kit makers like Bdeir, manufacturing building blocks that allow others to create things.

Neil Gershenfeld, an M.I.T. physicist who is an intellectual godfather to the maker movement, suggested to me that the new tools would over time change global industry as we know it. He predicts a wave of new competitors for the megacorporation that designs, makes and sells products all under one brand. Instead, Gershenfeld imagines a consumer of the near future downloading a design for a mobile phone through an iTunes-like portal; buying an add-on from another firm that tweaks the design; and having it printed at a neighborhood shop in a plastic shell of your choice.

For now, the tech is still in the early stages – and there are still lots of obstacles to overcome and bugs to work out. The reporter asked one small shop if he could try building something using their “CupCake CNC, a so-called 3-D printer that spits out small plastic wares,” which costs only $699.

He guided me to the Web site Thingiverse.com, which abounds in digital models — three-dimensional files that the CupCake can print out. I browsed and chose an iPad stand …

The CupCake began to print. First the nozzle moved back and forth smoothly, dropping black plastic in neat rows. It was building a base for my object. Then it began to jitterbug, dashing unpredictably this way and that, depositing bits of the melting goo one layer at a time. Slowly it formed an iPad stand. But then, 19 minutes in, the machine lost the plot and began to squirt everywhere, and we had to start over.…

Andrew said that the design I picked might have been flawed.

In the long run, how will this tech shape the economy? For example, will it create lots of good jobs in the US? Or is that a fantasy? We are as likely to figure that out now as folks were when they first made predictions about the impact of computers on society. But definitely worth keeping an eye on.

Three Weeks Sanity Break

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Working on my theory’s emotional resonance turned out to be a lot more complicated than I thought. Between that and the higher than normal level of crazy at work and in my personal life, I’m going to cut myself some slack. For the next three weeks, I’m going to be banging my head against the theory wall but I won’t be posting the results.

I’ll still publish the occasional interesting tidbit that comes my way. But Theory Wrestle Mania Mondays? They’ll return in three weeks.

Cutting Oil Subsidies Won't Raise Gas Prices

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Big government is Socialism, government bureaucrats never do anything right, keep the government out of the market – all that goes out the window when we start talking about the price of gas at the pump. So when Democrats from Kucinich to Obama suggest we end some of the subsidies oil companies – who are making record profits – get from us taxpayers, the Right goes ballistic. At the truth of the matter is that gas prices are pretty hard to move; oil subsidies can’t make a big dent one way or the other. Courtesy of Daily Kos, a few choice quotes:

Claims this week from Fox News, National Review Online, RedState and other right-wing media that ending tax breaks would boost gasoline prices was disputed by, among others, Michael Canes, a distinguished fellow at the Logistics Management Institute and former chief economist of the American Petroleum Institute. In an e-mail to Media Matters, he wrote that ending subsidies to oil companies would have “very little” effect on oil prices. He said that there could be:

“Some small effect if at the margin domestic production is adversely affected, but I suspect that effect would be very small indeed. Personally, I’d like to see an end to ALL energy subsidies, but that’s another issue entirely.”

Severin Borenstein, co-director of U.C. Berkeley’s Center for the Study of Energy Markets, cutting subsidies to oil companies said:

“Gasoline prices are a function of world oil prices and refining margins. The oil companies are quick to point out that they are not to blame for oil prices because the price is set in the world market, or which they are a small share. That is all true. But one implication of that is that the incremental change in production that might result from changing oil subsidies will have no impact on world oil prices, and therefore no impact on gasoline prices.”

Greedy Bastards vs. Greedy Bastards

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Great article in the Huffington Post about the epic battle in DC between retailer lobbyists and bank lobbyists over the fee retailers pay when you use your credit card. My favorite quote:

One frustrated moderate Democratic senator asks to remain anonymous so he can speak freely about his legislative education. “I’m surprised at how much of our time is spent trying to divide up the spoils between various economic interests. I had no idea. I thought we’d be focused on civil liberties, on education policy, energy policy and so on,” the senator says. “The fights down here can be put in two or three categories: The big greedy bastards against the big greedy bastards; the big greedy bastards against the little greedy bastards; and some cases even the other little greedy bastards against the other little greedy bastards.”

You should definitely check out the full article; it’s a good read.

Have Conservatives Overplayed Their Hand? Not Unless We Play Ours Right

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On the Series-O-Tubes-o-Spheres and in conversations with some friends, I’ve been hearing the same theme – the Right has overplayed their hand. From Scott Walker’s Wisconsin crusade to wipe out public unions to the House Republicans jumping off the cliff by signing up to privitalize/gut Medicare ala Ryan, conservatives are pushing policies that go way, way beyond what the public wants. Even Republican voters aren’t into Ryan’s Way when it comes to Medicare. If Dems take full advantage of the present Republicans have given them, they should be able to give Republicans a shellacking in 2012.

But does this mean conservatives overreached? Not necessarily.

In the immediate aftermath of 2008′s financial meltdown, mainstream rags had headlines like The End of Capitalism? and Forget Adam Smith. They didn’t really mean it. But it was a sign of just how rattled the status quo was after the economy just barely stopped from falling off a cliff. Even the High Priest of Free Markets, Alan Greenspan, had partially recanted on national TV.

And now? With millions still out of work or working less than they want, corporations still hoarding cash because they don’t believe they’ll have enough customers, most states making terrible cuts with more to come, and jobs still polling as one of the top public issues, our national debate is over… how to cut the deficit. If you’d told me that in November 2008 I’d have thought you were nuts.

The reason: one part our side never really mobilized, and two parts the right’s brilliant all-out offensive. Rather than playing defense, the Right doubled down — and it paid off.

So yeah, odds are 2012 won’t be a good year for Republicans. Enough Republican politicians have very unpopular on-the-record votes, and the only candidates who stand a chance of winning the Republican Presidential nomination are either nuts or are fervently playing nuts. But will conservatives losses in 2010 really matter in the long run?

If our side keeps playing our hand the same way we have, conservatives may lose ground on a few small issues in 2013-15, but not by much. And by 2016, our activist base will have spent 8 years becoming progressively more disillusioned with Obama, there won’t have been much progress on the jobs front, Dems will have had some power for 8 years and won’t have gotten a lot done, and the Tea Partists will have had 4 years to burn themselves out to the point where the Pawlentey’s, Romney’s, etc. would have a shot at gaining the Presidential nod running on a non-crazy platform. If I were a conservative, I’d say that was a damn fine payoff from doubling down – especially compared to what might’ve happened if they hadn’t.

That history might get written very differently if our side gets its act together. If we turn overreachs like that of Scott Walker into a chance to not only overturn horrible policy but to also begin fighting for a broader vision of justice, folks in 2016 might look back on 2011 as a critical turning point. But only if we do what conservatives did and go on the offensive.

This isn’t the first time the Republicans have been said to have overreached. Back in the 90s, Gingrich made the same mistake. But the result was not a progressive renaissance. It was a few more years of Clintonian deficit obsession followed by 8 devastating years of Bush and zero progress for most working families. Another “overreach” like that and there may not be much of a New Deal legacy left to defend.