"My job was to be in charge of the intellectual property policy of the United States . . . if you go to a shopping mall in this country you cannot buy anything made in the United States anymore. It all comes from China or some other place like that. Well, the reason for that is we've completely opened up our markets. It was a conscious decision to basically abandon low-wage manufacturing jobs, and the idea is that we would compensate for that with higher wage high tech information more intangible based jobs." - Bruce Lehman.

 Making copyrights and patents, not things, produced a few winners and many losers. Inequality skyrocketed. Politics polarized. Small towns hollowed out, while in major cities house prices went through the roof. It was not China's fault. China was made an offer they couldn't refuse: making and breaking the deal was the only rational choice for the Chinese people. In America's new winner-take-all economy, a few Americans won - but America lost. It was a deliberate choice by the winners.

See the documentary, RiP: A Remix Manifesto. Next week: Hitler's Students
See the documentary, RiP: A Remix Manifesto.