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kanaka
Joined: 04 Jul 2003
Posts: 916
Location: roaming...
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Posted: Wed Apr 26, 2006 4:10 am Post subject: Bush administration's two faced approach to saving lives
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U.S. pushes to limit generic-drug rights in trade pacts
NEW DELHI: Under global trading rules, the inventors of medicines ordinarily have the right to a 20-year monopoly on their inventions. But five years ago, the United States joined 141 other countries in signing the Doha Declaration, confirming the right of poor countries to break drug patents and produce cheap generic drugs in the event of contagions like HIV.
At the time, Thailand was heartened. It had been trying everything in its fight against AIDS. It coined a jingle to promote safe sex. It placed condoms in massage parlors. Most important, it curbed deaths among the poor by giving them generic versions of medicines invented by multinational drug makers.
So it came as a jolt in January when the United States asked Thailand to sign a free trade agreement that would, on paper, dilute its right to break patents and use generics.
Washington said the agreement would save lives by spurring innovation and by making multinationals more confident to sell drugs in the country. But Thai officials saw the proposal as a morbid bargain: either refuse the U.S. offer and scuttle a trade deal with the United States worth billions of dollars, or accept it and lift the price of AIDS drugs beyond the reach of the poor.
Washington is stitching together a parallel global patents system.
The trade deals, negotiated in secret, attract little notice. But they have already been signed with developing countries battling AIDS, including six in Central America. And negotiations are beginning with several nations pivotal to the fight against the virus, from Thailand to five southern African countries, including South Africa and Botswana.
First-generation AIDS drugs reached the world's poorest people only when the use of generics cut their cost to $140 a year from more than $10,000.
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...full article
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I don't have much to add on the issue besides the following:
I am disgusted with the apathetic greed of the Bush administration
First, a handful of people who have never put on a military uniform, let alone stepped on a battlefield, send tens, hundreds of thousands of innocents to die in an unjust, illegal war. And people re-elect them for it. Then, the same handful of people who have never put on a white lab-coat, let alone set foot into a medical theatre, sentence tens, hundreds of thousands to die an unjust death by instrument of the immoral and illegal shenanigans described in the article above. This administration should be impeached not only for an illegal war, but also, in light of this, for genocide. Okay, I'll settle for mass murder.
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Magnolia
Joined: 26 Aug 2005
Posts: 1457
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Posted: Wed Apr 26, 2006 10:54 am Post subject:
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What is the benefit? I have to ask WHY would our country do this?
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Nofsdad
Joined: 06 Jul 2003
Posts: 7090
Location: Central CA
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Posted: Wed Apr 26, 2006 3:47 pm Post subject:
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Mags, I'm sure the Neothugs could explain that to you, at least to their own satisfaction (and probably will since they prowl this site looking for fodder for their own little tirades because nobody will post anything resembling an opposing view on any venue open to them anymore) but in the meantime, we less enlightened types will have to make do with our own muddled thinking. Here's my totally unsupported opinion.
The benefit, if any, is supposed to accrue to the drug companies, of course. They maintain a monoply on the medicines and if you want to live, you pay their prices. Pure and simple. If you can't get the generics, you'll just have to pay the full price and if you can't pay the full price, you don't matter anyway.
The administration is not guilty of sentencing these people to the decision described in the article for purely political reasons (what POLITICAL reason could there possibly be in allowing hundreds of thousands of peons in an allied nation to die slow and horrible deaths, after all) but simply to accede to the requirements of the major corporations who develop and produce these drugs. The idea of course is that, "If you can't get it anywhere else, you'll HAVE to come up with the bucks to buy from us.".
The corporations get this cooperation from our politicians the same way they purchase plush appointments to agencies that regulate their own businesses and ambassadorships to the countries in which their companies do or hope to do business and such. Government influence has become just another commodity to be bartered and traded amongst those with he power and money to pay for it. Those that can't afford to particiapate simply wind up sucking the hind teat, if there's a teat left for them.
I've said for years now that major diseases will be eradicated when the major drug companies can figure out a way to make more money from actually eradicating a disease (making money by selling a drug to a victim once) than they can for "fighting" it and selling a drug to a victim for even a foreshoretened lifetime. I know that's an extremely cynical view but if you look at the record of the drug companies over the past 20 years or so, it becomes easier to believe them capable of just about anything. Surely we don't believe that SHC is the only major corporation run by an Eddie Lampert type.
One example: "Mircale" pills that come on the market and make billions for the companies until some one little person, independent of the companies or maybe someone within the companies but with a sliver of conscience or maybe a grudge, blows the whistle and informs us that the pill may be doing more harm than good. Then they pull it from the market and use part of the billions they've made from it to fight or settle the lawsuits and another part to introduce a new miracle drug that they can do the same thing with. The rest of course, disappears into one of those enormous corporate black holes where 95% of the country's wealth is expected to finally wind up.
Big corporations are simply not known for their humanity and concern for society as a whole. Read the philosophy as expressed by one of the major corporate pom pom wavers and on the forums, paraphrased here, "If you worry too much about the human side of the equation, you won't make any money.".
Of course then the contrary view should also apply. "If you worry too much about the money side of the equation, you won't have any humanity.". The neothugs would have you believe that they have somewhow struck a happy balance but I happen to disagree with that. My opinion is that anytime someone has to suffer or die, especially in major numbers, to put a buck in their pockets, they've gone way over any sensible line that could be drawn.
The fact that the current administration is one of the most pro-business and therefore anti-consumer, anti-worker and downright anti-human administrations in history should not surprise anybody given the doors that have been opened between our government and major corporations and through which the same old people circulate freely, and the doors that have been slammed firmly shut between our government and we ordinary peons who circulate nowhere, (often because we can no longer afford the gas to get there among other things).
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Magnolia
Joined: 26 Aug 2005
Posts: 1457
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Posted: Wed Apr 26, 2006 6:17 pm Post subject:
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| The corporations get this cooperation from our politicians the same way they purchase plush appointments to agencies that regulate their own businesses and ambassadorships to the countries in which their companies do or hope to do business and such. Government influence has become just another commodity to be bartered and traded amongst those with he power and money to pay for it. |
Thanks for that, Nofs. So, in other words, pharmaceutical companies 'own' politicians... just like the oil companies do.
It's really sad that our current administration can't hold anything harmless.
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Nofsdad
Joined: 06 Jul 2003
Posts: 7090
Location: Central CA
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Posted: Wed Apr 26, 2006 7:41 pm Post subject:
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Once again, in all fairness, I don't think any party or any administration over the past 20-25 years has a monopoly on that kind of thinking and those kinds of actions. It just seems to me that the current administration has been a lot more open to it and has shown the willingness to engage more openly in it than any of its predecessors and it's become a matter of seeing just how much they CAN take before someone stands up and says, "Hey! That's enough!".
They seem much more willing to openly spit in the eye of those who have nothing of significance to contribute to the Wall Street welfare fund and to openly embrace the take what you can get tactics of big business at the expense of the majority of the population.
I think a lot of that perception stems from statements like "I'm the decider..." and the willingness to persevere in attempting to shove something down the throats of the citizenry when the citizenry is at least making it clear that it's not all that willing to swallow it.
There's kind of an arrogance about this bunch that is more out there and discernible than with any since the Nixon days. It's like they no longer even feel a need to give lip service to the term, "serving the public" and that they think the public is simply here to justify (and pay for) their own existence and maintenance of their own lifestyles.
Been a while since I felt the need for this but since some people feel the need to pad other forums based on what they read here I decided to reserrect it.
Disclaimer: The above is not put here to offend, intimidate, outrage or otherwise have any particular effect on anyone or to do anyone any form of gross willful harm or in any way indicate that I WANT Sears or America to fail. It is simply my own spin on certain subjects in which I have an interest. If you disagree, feel free to offer your own views but please, allow me my right to offer mine. Thank you.
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Magnolia
Joined: 26 Aug 2005
Posts: 1457
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Posted: Wed Apr 26, 2006 9:21 pm Post subject:
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| Nofsdad wrote: |
| Once again, in all fairness, I don't think any party or any administration over the past 20-25 years has a monopoly on that kind of thinking and those kinds of actions. |
I agree.
| Nofsdad wrote: |
| It just seems to me that the current administration has been a lot more open to it and has shown the willingness to engage more openly in it than any of its predecessors... |
I agree even more.
| Nofsdad wrote: |
| .... someone stands up and says, "Hey! That's enough!". |
I think WE have to do that, and it is waaay past time.
I personally will be looking closely at all political points of interest before I vote in the upcoming elections. I'm not talking about just the Presidential elections, but all the way across the board.
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