[lbo-talk] AIDS in the USA, AIDS in the World

[Yoshie Furuhashi]

On 2/13/07, Patrick Bond <pbond at mail.ngo.za> wrote:
> Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:
> > That some ACT UP chapters tried to do a lot for the poor hardly
> > contradicts the overall decline of ACT UP-type activism or the idea
> > that ACT UP-type activism can't be a model of activism that would
> > provide a solution to the problems that the poor confront...
>  > Global AIDS drug prices have much more to do with struggles over
>  > patent than with ACT UP and other US AIDS activist orgs,
>
> Hey comrade Yoshie, you have said some agro things about international
> solidarity recently, and here you seem to completely forget ACT UP's
> exceptionally powerful hits on Al Gore when in 1999 he started his
> presidential campaign and simultaneously was pushing intellectual
> property rights protections for Big Pharma. The South African activists
> asked ACT UP to mess him up because he and US State Department flacks
> were pressing SA rulers to drop the 1997 Medicines Act (State bragged to
> Congress they put a 'full court press' on Mandela's government). The
> campaign contributions from Big Pharma were anticpated in the $2 million
> range. By messing Gore in NH, PA, TN and one or two other places in
> mid-1999 (with picket signs saying 'Al Gore kills African babies'), ACT
> UP put enough pressure to force Gore and then Clinton to back down, and
> to permit antiretroviral medicines to finally go generic (not branded).
> That's a damn good model of solidarity with low-income people
> everywhere, I'd say.

But one of your articles, which discusses this very action, also
suggests that the Mbeki government failed to take the opportunity
created by international activism (cf.
<http://www.zmag.org/bondsaaids.htm>).  Really, ACT UP, et al. can't
be expected to fix the SA government.
-- 
Yoshie
<http://montages.blogspot.com/>
<http://mrzine.org>
<http://monthlyreview.org/>