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.
[WS:] This looks more like a model of solidarity that is penny-wise but dollar-foolish. Screwing up Gore paved the way for Bush, and we all know how that advanced the cause of international solidarity. In that context, the Big Pharma profits were really small potatoes vs. the global threat created by Bush adventurism.
Wojtek