(no subject)
These idiots were sponsored by the American Heritage Foundation to crash the Global AIDS Conference in Bangkok two weeks ago. Now, we may have conflicting political ideologies, and that's fine. I've no opposition to your masturbatory extolment of free market capitalism's virtues, nor your kitchy promo t-shirts with the word "capitalism" emblazoned across the chest in Coca-Cola font.
But please, get your facts straight prior to spending thousands of dollars on plane tickets, plus thousands of dollars in registration fees to protest a group who you've mistakenly construed as "socialist." Are we socialists because we request that international patent laws be relaxed in order to make way for cheaper generic AIDS drugs that cost far less than the $20,000+ per year per person that Pfizer and other drug companies want to charge the 3rd world? I thought that that was just practical. Are we socialists because we run a decidedly non-partisan group united in anger at the U.S. AIDS policy? Are we socialists for calling free trade into question when the policies that maintain, indeed, undergird it are leaving the 30 million people with AIDS in sub-Saharan Africa untreated? I can go on.
The interesting thing here is that in their "protest" strategies (which weren't nearly as effective as they'd like to believe; their group was made up of six people and the conference speakers were overwhelmingly conservative -- ACT UP members who came from around the world staged a number of effective protests) pretty much completely co-opted ACT UP's typical strategies in a rather ineffectual manner. If you're going to do it, homie, do it up right. But what really bothers me is that with all their "capitalism heals" jargon, they have neither platform, nor ideas about how to ameliorate the situation. That's just depressing. Tens of thousands of dollars wasted.
But please, get your facts straight prior to spending thousands of dollars on plane tickets, plus thousands of dollars in registration fees to protest a group who you've mistakenly construed as "socialist." Are we socialists because we request that international patent laws be relaxed in order to make way for cheaper generic AIDS drugs that cost far less than the $20,000+ per year per person that Pfizer and other drug companies want to charge the 3rd world? I thought that that was just practical. Are we socialists because we run a decidedly non-partisan group united in anger at the U.S. AIDS policy? Are we socialists for calling free trade into question when the policies that maintain, indeed, undergird it are leaving the 30 million people with AIDS in sub-Saharan Africa untreated? I can go on.
The interesting thing here is that in their "protest" strategies (which weren't nearly as effective as they'd like to believe; their group was made up of six people and the conference speakers were overwhelmingly conservative -- ACT UP members who came from around the world staged a number of effective protests) pretty much completely co-opted ACT UP's typical strategies in a rather ineffectual manner. If you're going to do it, homie, do it up right. But what really bothers me is that with all their "capitalism heals" jargon, they have neither platform, nor ideas about how to ameliorate the situation. That's just depressing. Tens of thousands of dollars wasted.