Death of American Innovation

For 220 years the old legends were true. But they are dead as a dodo today. And all those supposedly “evil” Russians, Chinese, and Islamists had nothing to do with it. The wealthy, privileged, arrogant, and technologically plain ignorant elites of the United States did it all to themselves.

Rosneft CEO Igor Sechin (pictured) recognized and exposed the reality of the new 21st century world in his December 5, 2024 address to the Verona Eurasian Economic Forum conference in Ras Al-Khaimah in the United Arab Emirates, devoted to the topic of fostering innovation in industry and advanced technology. “The dramatic economic progress of Russia, China, and the other major industrial economies of Asia and the Persian Gulf over the past 20 years expose the US myth, still universally believed by American policymakers and pundits, that the United States and its social and political systems beat the rest of the world in technological and industrial innovation and progress,” Sechin stated in a speech universally ignored in the US and British media, including its specialist journals. However, “the Chinese and Russian models have already far outgripped the United States in all the crucial areas of industrial development, advanced technology, and the military applications of them,” Sechin flatly stated.

He was, of course, absolutely correct. In the crucial fields of hypersonic glide vehicles and first strike weapons, Artificial Intelligence (AI), industrial shipbuilding, air defense missile systems, pebble bed nuclear reactors (PBRs), mining and industrial processing of the rare earth minerals indispensable for advanced technologies and so much else, China and Russia have long since far outstripped the United States, as the US Congress has been repeatedly briefed in multiple hearings. And far from closing those fateful gaps, the United States continues to fall further behind than ever.

Even in the field of renewable energy, so obsessively urged by Thomas Friedman and Greta Thunberg, as Sechin so undiplomatically also pointed out, “Today, it is China, not the United States, that holds over 70 percent of the world’s alternative energy equipment manufacturing capacity.” In this Brave New World of 2025, it is indeed now obvious that the United States “has allowed the loss of leadership in the scientific, technological, industrial, and financial spheres, which was hard to imagine yet 20-30 years ago. It resulted in the decrease of the United States dominance in the economy and trade,” Sechin pointed out.

How could this be? And how could it happen so fast?

In fact, very specific government, legal, bureaucratic, and technological processes within the United States forced this implosion or self-suicide of innovative superiority on the domestic US economy. And two groups of high, tech, hyper-energetic, destructive, idealistic, supposedly “visionary” fools were responsible. The Open Internet enthusiasts spearheaded by farcical but lethally destructive Vice President Al Gore in the Clinton (pictured) administration in the 1990s and then the arrogant, ignorant hair slitting lawyers of the Obama administration partnered with cheerfully feckless and corrupt Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada 20 years later.

Ironically, there was a fearful symmetry (to use the vivid imagery of 18th century English poet William Blake) to Gore’s work of destruction on his own country. For also during his eight dire years as Bill Clinton’s vice president, Gore along with utterly hapless then Russian Prime Minister Viktor Chernomyrdin inflicted a host of flat world, open borders, unregulated free market supposed “reforms” on the Russian economy. They only served to generate uncontrollable, limitless chaos causing the worst industrial depression in history, in which up to 27 million people, especially the old, the very poor, and the very young, died of hunger, cold, destitution, and hardship. I was there. I saw it.

None of Gore’s enlightened measures, of course, extended to the basic common sense of ensuring that all public sector employees across the country were paid as much as a ruble for many years on end. Their salaries were simply stolen or lost through chaos and monumental incompetence. Gore did not know or care, his visionary “ideas” were all that mattered. However, in a simultaneous example of ideological and bureaucratic blowback, Gore inflicted the same worthless, stupid, infantile, and destructive ideas back in America to utterly destroy the patent system that had motivated hundreds of thousands of humble engineers, mechanics, and tinkerers to develop new inventions and relentlessly improve and advance older ones for more than two centuries.

I documented this process and its catastrophic results for the wellbeing of a third of a billion Americans in my 2012 book, That Should Still Be Us: How Thomas Friedman’s Flat World Fantasies Are Keeping Us Flat on Our Backs. My book was insufficiently reverential towards The Revered False Prophet Thomas Friedman of the New York Times, the high priest of flat earth, open borders, unlimited free trade liberal imperialism. I was indeed scathingly dismissive of him. Therefore, my book was to all intents and purposes banned in The Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave.

It became samizdat – forbidden literature whose very existence was denied. Because it was a lethal text. To actually read it and consider its documentation and assessments would erode the fantastic, arrogant, simplistic, and plain ridiculous open border, liberal imperialist fantasies that were destroying the United States before the eyes of the American people at the time. Therefore, my book was systematically ignored, smothered, and suppressed totally across the United States. Although it was published by a supposedly mainstream publishing house, not a single review of it, not even any hostile ones, were allowed to appear anywhere. Not a single reference was allowed to appear anywhere. None of the big, bold, even allegedly “fearless” media outlets, including Fox News, permitted a single reference, even to poke fun at it. To attack my book would be to advertise its very existence, and that might give a handful of Americans, still theoretically capable of autonomous thought, the germ of that awful, most-feared of heresies: The World Is Not Flat.

What did I document in my book that was so ludicrous and contemptible, so obviously absurd, that it was not worth the bother of reading? Yet so subversive and corrosive, that even a handful of Americans had to be protected from being exposed to reading it? I documented in my book how in the 1990s, Gore, as vice president, “modernized the US patent system by ensuring that every proposed new innovation presented to the US Patent Office had to be fully reported and documented immediately for universal access on the Internet.” Every witless asshole in Congress, the scores of thousands of parasite congressional staffers, and the lobotomized, braindead pundits of the US media mindlessly applauded this “bold” and “visionary” new move.

But what Gore in reality had done was to destroy the system of confidentiality, ownership of intellectual, practical, and applicable technological innovations that had been brilliantly created by Thomas Jefferson, later Third President of the United States, when he was secretary of state under President George Washington in the early 1790s. Nothing like Jefferson’s system had ever been established anywhere before in world history, and it proved an instant success.

In the chapter entitled “The Fools Who Lost the Secrets,” I pointed out how destructive Gore’s “enlightened reform” truly was. “Patent laws are crucial to ensuring an atmosphere of invention and innovation,” I wrote. “You can have all the White House strategies in the world that you like, but if inventors and innovators believe that their great ideas and improvements are going to be stolen from them, they aren’t going to really invest in bringing their invention to market.”

US patent law lay behind all the discoveries of applied electrical technology by Thomas Edison and Nikola Tesla. It lay behind the founding of the modern steelmaking industry by Andrew Carnegie, the oil industry by John D. Rockefeller, and the modern mass-production auto industry by Henry Ford. The first patent law was passed by the US Congress, I then noted, in 1790, less than a year after it had been elected. In the first three years that the act was in effect, only 55 patents were granted under it, but over the next 43 years, 10,000 more patents were approved, an average of 233 per year. Finally, the tariff walls protecting industrial America came tumbling down in the 1960s, that High Noon of liberal imperialist madness and arrogance. However, US patent laws continued to encourage domestic innovation and enterprise for another 40 years.

Then came Gore, thanks to his reforms and the other suicidal free trade, open border policies of the Clinton administration through the first decade of the 21st century, the United States lost a staggering 32 percent of its manufacturing jobs. And more than 42,000 manufacturing facilities closed down. Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama were both also business, industrial, and economic illiterates, and the self-inflicted annihilation of US industry and innovative capabilities, all these pathologies continued to be unaddressed under them as well.

For 220 years, the patent system created by Thomas Jefferson propelled the United States and the American people into the railroad age, the Age of Steel, the Age of Skyscrapers, the Age of Automobiles, the Age of Aircraft, the Nuclear Age, the Space Age, the Age of Biotechnology, and the Age of Information Technology. However, in 2011, Barack Obama completed Al Gore’s lifelong mission of destroying patent law protection for ordinary workers, engineers, and the small companies they usually worked for. It was, of course, called the America Invents Act. Yet another Big Lie. In truth, it should have been accurately labeled the We’re Going to Stop Americans Inventing Act.

It didn’t work. None of it worked. The US Congress spills over with badly trained hairsplitting, procedure-obsessed lawyers who believe quite literally they are smarter than God Almighty and can transform reality and the destiny of nations by how many amendments they can cram into any obscure piece of legislation. But it just ain’t so.

To cite Igor Sechin once again: “The much-ballyhooed Inflation Reduction, CHIPS and Science Acts were also supposed to save the situation. However, as they say in such cases, the ship has sailed!” According to the investigation by the Financial Times, during the first year of the Inflation Reduction Act operation, 40 percent of declared projects were paused or canceled.

It is time for Americans to wake up from their decades-long dream: Their global leadership and mastery of invention and technological Innovation is gone. They destroyed it themselves. And they let other fools, dupes, and crooks do it. It’s gone forever. It’s not coming back. This generation of Americans simply is not capable of Making America Great Again. They can and should stabilize the situation, restore sane relations with Russia and China, and work to heal and revive their self-ravaged society and economy. But to do that, they need to abandon all their old pipedreams.

It is time for America to wake up. And grow up. At last.