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

[Yoshie Furuhashi]

On 2/13/07, Wojtek Sokolowski <sokol at jhu.edu> wrote:
> Cmde Bond:
>
>
> 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.

With all due respect, Wojtek, there's no evidence that compelling the
Clinton administration to issue an executive order pledging not to
interfere with the SA attempt to reduce drug prices dimmed Al Gore's
electoral fortune in 2000, is there?
-- 
Yoshie
<http://montages.blogspot.com/>
<http://mrzine.org>
<http://monthlyreview.org/>