| Number 265 | July 30, 2004 |
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This Week:
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Greetings, Another double issue this week. And you should see how much I cut out! Last week I talked about the U.S. media’s coverage of the recently-concluded International AIDS Conference in Bangkok, Thailand. This week I take off from there to highlight what I see as the real issues – the “untold stories,” if you will – that were raised by the Conference and that would have been front-page news if I were the editor of the New York Times. I hope these two issues together will help people understand and think about the ongoing AIDS crisis and what they can do about it. But, perhaps even more importantly, I hope readers will get from these two issues of Nygaard Notes a better understanding of the difference between a “charity” approach – one where “those poor people” need “our” help – and a social justice approach that looks at the structures and systems that bind us all together in a complex mix of intertwined perpetration, victimhood and, if we do it right, liberation. The latter approach is one that most people do not, and will not, get from a media that is devoted primarily to profit. NOTICE: I will be on vacation for the next two weeks, so the next issue of Nygaard Notes will not come your way until August 27. I’ll be out of the country, so don’t even TRY to contact me. (Or, if you do, don’t expect any response until I get back.) See you in a month or so, Nygaard |
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Three “quotes” this week, all from a single article in the Advertising section of The New York Times of July 30th . Headline: “Madison Avenue Takes Some Cues from Reality TV Shows, But Not All of it Is for Real.” The article was about so-called “reality advertising.” In this case, “reality” means using non-actors performing in the ads. (I know, this makes them “actors,” but forget that for now.) 1. The first one has Thomas Hayo, creative director at Bartle Bogle Hegarty ad agency in New York, speaking of “a growing consumer demand for authenticity.” Hayo said:
I hope he’s right, but I have my doubts. 2. Here’s Ron Berger, chief executive for the New York and San Francisco offices of Euro RSCG Worldwide, who said:
3. At the end of the article, the Times tells us about “a popular commercial for Select Comfort mattresses... The spot was so popular that people wrote in about it... But while the character was selected for his authenticity and he was not an actor, his story was not real. It was scripted by the ad agency.” Here’s what one Mr. Rich Roth, a Euro RSCG creative director, said about this ad:
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The most fundamental distortion to be found in the coverage of the International AIDS Conference is the assumption that the AIDS policies of the U.S. government have as their guiding force the best interests of people with AIDS. This is not a view that is universally shared, as we shall see. A good example is an editorial that ran in my local newspaper the Star Tribune on July 13. It was an editorial called “AIDS Conference: Moving Beyond Discussions,” and it called for conference attendees to “keep the pressure on developed nations to fully support the United Nations-sponsored Global AIDS Fund.” The paper also called for “the United States and other wealthy nations” to spend more money, and said that “both affected nations and the world community must double their efforts” at fighting HIV/AIDS. The implication was that the U.S. is already working to stop the spread of AIDS, but that it really must do more. The Star Trib revealed an inability to suggest that U.S. AIDS policy might itself be one of the major impediments to the global struggle against AIDS – an argument made by many AIDS activists around the world. This inability is not unique to the Star Trib. As another example, there was one article in the NY Times that clearly summarized the problems that most of the world has with U.S. AIDS policy. Yet it was headlined “Early Tests for U.S. in Its Global Fight on AIDS.” Can you see the problem there? The global protests are mentioned as “tests” for our “global fight,” rather than as near-universal rejection of the moralistic ideology that forms the basis of the Bush administration’s AIDS policy. The remainder of this issue of Nygaard Notes takes a look at that ideology and how the current administration is attempting to use U.S. power to impose it on a reluctant world. |
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In an article published during the International AIDS Conference, the New York Times quoted Deborah Dortzbach of World Relief International, the “humanitarian arm of the National Association of Evangelicals,” reminding the world that “the only guarantee for protection [from AIDS] is abstinence.” She means abstinence from sex, which the Times points out “is the Bush administration’s message.” Ms. Dortzbach went on to say that “We teach abstinence as an opportunity, as a way to delay the gift of sexuality and its pleasures until they can experience it with responsibility.” By “they,” she means the poor benighted souls in Haiti, Kenya, Rwanda and Mozambique, where World Relief does some of its work. A more offensive and ignorant comment would be hard to find. To understand why, look at this comment from the Feminist Daily News Wire of June 29, 2004: “Of particular significance is the emergence of young monogamous married women as a fast-growing demographic of AIDS sufferers. This group, formerly thought at low risk for the disease, are being infected with HIV by promiscuous husbands, the Associated Press reports.” Lucita Lazo, program director for East and South East Asia for the United Nations Women’s Fund, cites a “culture of patriarchy” as being at the heart of the problem, telling the Associated Press that “More than 90 percent of the HIV cases that we have been providing assistance to…are infected by their partners or husbands. Unequal gender relations place women at a more vulnerable position.” Lazo says that young women are particularly vulnerable to the disease in many developing Asian nations, in which “extra-marital affairs for men are the norm, while women are expected to enter into marriage as virgins, thus limiting their sexual knowledge,” according to Agence France-Presse. It was thus no surprise to read in an Associated Press report at the opening of the International AIDS Conference (held in SE Asia), that “President Bush's policy of fighting AIDS by promoting abstinence ran into strong opposition yesterday from scientists, activists and policy-makers who touted condoms as a trusted weapon in the fight against the disease.” CNN versus ABC The difference in the approach to HIV/AIDS between the current administration in Washington and most of the rest of the world is summed up in the title of a debate held at the Conference: “CNN versus ABC.” No, this debate was not about fights between news networks. In the AIDS context, “ABC” stands for Washington’s official AIDS policy of “Abstinence, Being faithful and Condoms” (in that order). Most of the rest of the world supports “CNN,” which stands for “Condoms, Needles, and Negotiating Skills.” This is much more than a nit-picking quibble among policy wonks. What could be seen at the Conference – but was largely unreported in this nation’s press – was a pretty serious fight over ideology. The Bush ideology of “compassionate conservatism” seeks to frame the HIV/AIDS crisis as a matter primarily of personal moral failure; if people would have sex only within a monogamous marriage, they would not get AIDS. Most of the rest of the world sees the issue quite differently. Bill Smith, public policy director for the Sexuality Information and Education Council of the United States, puts it this way: “Some of [the Bush administration’s] programs teach women they are dirty and damaged if they have sex. They reinforce gender stereotypes, as well as a fairy tale approach to marriage that doesn't exist in [many] countries.” If anywhere. |
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In contrast with the Bush administration and its evangelical allies, most of the world understands human sexuality as more than simply a “gift” to be “experienced with responsibility.” Many people understand that sex is also a complex expression of human power relations, embedded in systems of social and economic inequality underlaid by patriarchy and other forms of oppression. For those who do understand this, the pushing of “abstinence” as the first response to the AIDS crisis is wrong-headed, at best. As U.S. Representative Barbara Lee put it in a recent statement, “In an age where 5 million people are newly infected [with AIDS] each year and women and girls too often do not have the choice to abstain, an abstinence-until-marriage program is not only irresponsible, it's really inhumane.” (Ms. Lee, the only member of Congress to attend the Conference, has put her power where her mouth is: She has introduced a bill in Congress that would end dedicated federal funding for international abstinence-only programs. Lee’s bill – H.R. 4792 – would remove the 33 percent dedicated funding for abstinence-only programs, requiring instead that the president “establish a comprehensive, integrated, and culturally appropriate HIV prevention strategy that emphasizes the needs of women and girls for each country for which the United States provides assistance to combat HIV/AIDS.”) By approaching AIDS as a public health problem, AIDS activists the world over seek to help people prevent infection by providing the tools – Condoms, Needles, and Negotiating Skills – that they need to protect themselves. The Bush administration sees the problem as a massive global moral failing, and thus pursues its “ABC” policy virtually alone, although it has cobbled together a sort of “coalition of the willing,” led by Uganda, to help push its approach. From Prevention to Treatment Prevention is one thing, and it’s an important thing. But the reality is that about 40 million people in the world are currently living with HIV. The situation is bad in wealthy countries; the 2004 Report on the Global AIDS Epidemic, put out by the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS, “finds that infections are on the rise in the United States and Western Europe,” and that “half of all new infections [in the U.S.] in recent years have been among African Americans.” It’s even worse in poor countries. The UN Report tells us that “Unlike the situation in other regions, the great majority of people living with HIV in high-income countries who need antiretroviral therapy have access to it, so they are staying healthy and surviving longer than infected people elsewhere.” That “elsewhere,” of course, is poor countries, especially in Africa and Asia, where only 7% of the people with HIV who need antiretroviral treatment have access to these life-saving medications. Why do so few have access to ARVs? The largest single obstacle is patent protection offered by the U.S. government to the big pharmaceutical companies. The policies put forward by the U.S. in response to the AIDS crisis appear to be aimed more at protecting the profits of “Big Pharma,”as the pharmaceutical industry is sometimes called, than at helping people with AIDS. This is where the U.S. media really failed its audience, since an informed populace in this country could quite possibly affect our government policy, saving untold lives as a result. But our populace remains uninformed on our nation’s culpability for this ongoing crime. The Bush AIDS Policy It was hard to read an article on the AIDS Conference in the U.S. corporate press without reading about the Bush administration’s $15 billion emergency AIDS initiative, which makes the U.S., as the Washington Post put it, “by far the largest donor fighting AIDS around the world.” The Bush administration's global AIDS coordinator, Randall Tobias, likes to remind people that the United States has assumed “the leadership role in this fight.” There is another side to the story, however. The development of effective antiretroviral drugs (ARVs) has been one of the truly remarkable stories to emerge from the two-decade-long struggle to deal with the AIDS epidemic. It’s not a cure; AIDS can only be treated with antiretroviral drugs that stop the virus from replicating but do not kill it. As I said last week, this has mostly benefitted HIV/AIDS sufferers in the wealthy countries. Why? Because, as the international aid group Doctors Without Borders (DWB) says, “The cost of these drugs is very high and 95% of infected people cannot afford them.” The reason that the cost is “very high” is simple: Monopoly pricing as a result of patent protection. Here’s economist Dean Baker, from a 2001 article entitled “Dying for Patents:” “At their patent-protected prices – which can exceed $10,000 per year – AIDS drugs are completely unaffordable to people in poor countries. However, generic producers can make the same drugs for $300 a year or less. This is still expensive for desperately-poor people, but it is a price that can be realistically met with international aid and support from private charities. In short, patent protection can sentence millions of people to death in developing nations.” Despite these uncontroversial facts, the Bush Administration has so far prohibited groups that receive U.S. money from using generic medicines – even generic medicines that have been “prequalified” by the World Health Organization (WHO) and shown to be safe. Doctors Without Borders has concluded that “The only possible explanation for the Bush Administration's position on WHO prequalification is that it is more interested in protecting the interests of the pharmaceutical industry than it is in expanding ARV treatment to the largest number of people possible.” Is it merely a coincidence that the Bush AIDS czar, Randall Tobias, is the former chairman and chief executive of drug maker Eli Lilly and Co., the 10th-largest pharmaceutical company in the world (2001 figures)? Or that the major pharmaceutical companies “were big donors to Bush's 2000 election campaign?” |
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In the case of HIV/AIDS, we see a unilateral mindset on the part of the U.S. similar to that exhibited in the ongoing attack on Iraq. One example is the insistence of the U.S. on proceeding with the Bush AIDS plan, which arbitrarily named 15 countries as eligible for assistance, excluding scores of equally-needy nations. Activists point out that this is bound to drain support from the already-existing “Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria,” organized by the UN, which operates in 128 countries. The NY Times quotes Dr. Paul Zeitz, executive director of the Global AIDS Alliance, as saying that advocates were baffled at this unilateral approach. “We thought the international community had come to a consensus that there needed to be a new way of doing business where we all worked together and helped strengthen national capacities,” Zeitz said. A consensus, indeed. But the U.S. opts out. The Times actually referred to this problem – sort of – in a July 13th article headlined “Duplicated Efforts Are Hampering AIDS Fight, Conferees Say.” The article clearly states that “waste and inefficiency from the duplication of efforts by donors are a major obstacle” to dealing with the global AIDS crisis. Still there is no mention of the U.S. role in the “duplication,” despite the release of a major report on the president’s initiative on July 9th by the Government Accountability Office, which clearly stated that “the perception that the United States acts unilaterally is compounded by the fact that, unlike many other donors, U.S. agencies are not allowed to contribute money to other donors’ programs or to pooled host government funding ‘baskets’ for health and other sectors. [U.S.] staff noted that some donors therefore indicated that the United States is willing to create duplicative programs,” weakening all in the process. Maybe the participants in the conference session that was the subject of the story were reluctant to discuss the U.S. role in complicating matters. The session was moderated, after all, by Hank McKinnell, the chief executive of Pfizer, the world’s largest pharmaceutical company, and a donor of millions to the Republican party over the years. Isn’t it possible that this moderator might want to keep a lid on that touchy subject? |
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From its insistence on stressing abstinence over treatment, to its efforts to protect the patents of the big pharmaceutical companies, to its preference for “going it alone” with the president’s initiative as opposed to supporting existing multinational efforts, the Bush administration is alienating much of the world (and many AIDS activists in this country). Facing isolation and condemnation from most of the world for its AIDS policies, what does the Bush administration do? It resorts to extortion. A strong word? Maybe, but listen... “Extortion” is defined as “The act of obtaining something from a reluctant person by threat, force, importunity, etc.” Now here are three comments from the past month, drawn from three different sources: 1. Here’s the international aid group Doctors Without Borders, in their briefing document for the International AIDS Conference: “The US government, pushed by the powerful pharmaceutical industry, is systematically negotiating bilateral and regional ‘free trade agreements’ [that] will require countries from Asia to Africa to Latin America to change their national laws in ways that dramatically reduce their ability to provide low-cost quality medicines [for treatment of AIDS].” 2. Underlining the above, the London Guardian reported on a comment at the AIDS Conference by French President Jacques Chirac, who “said there existed a real problem of favourable trade deals being dangled before poor nations in return for those countries halting production of life-saving generic drugs.” In his statement, Mr. Chirac was quite blunt: “Making certain countries drop these measures in the framework of bilateral trade negotiations would be tantamount to blackmail, since what is the point of starting treatment without any guarantee of having quality and affordable drugs in the long term?” Blackmail? Or extortion? Well, it’s the same idea... 3. Finally this, from the Global AIDS Alliance, which said, “The Bush Administration has so far prohibited groups receiving U.S. money from using even generic medicines that have been approved by the World Health Organization and shown to be safe. In May the Administration announced a new approval process for generic drug-makers, but so far grant recipients must still buy the much more expensive brand-name drugs, leading to frustration and confusion in recipient countries.” |
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As soon as I began to look outside of the mainstream media for information on what really happened at the International AIDS Conference in Thailand earlier this month, I realized that there are many, many groups doing amazing work to address the ongoing worldwide crisis of HIV/AIDS. I want to share some of them here for those of you who wish to know more and/or take action on this issue. The group Doctors Without Borders (which goes by their French name “Medecins Sans Frontieres) has a project called the “Campaign for Access to Essential Medicines,” that works to assure access not only to medicines for AIDS, but to other killers such as malaria, sleeping sickness, meningitis, and more. Their website is: http://www.accessmed-msf.org/. Check out the basic, and amazing, MSF site also, at: http://www.msf.org/. HealthGAP (The Global Access Project) is an organization of U.S.-based AIDS and human rights activists and others who campaign to eliminate barriers to global access to affordable life-sustaining medicines for people living with HIV/AIDS as a key to “a comprehensive strategy to confront and ultimately stop the AIDS pandemic. We believe that the human right to life and to health must prevail over the pharmaceutical industry's excessive profits and expanding patent rights.” Find their excellent site at http://www.healthgap.org/. The Global AIDS Alliance is a nonprofit organization based in Washington, DC. and “dedicated to a collaborative, aggressive Campaign to Stop Global AIDS.” They say that “Your support and participation will make a difference. It's not enough to be well-informed. Do your part. Learn about the issue. Get involved... NOW.” Check them out at http://www.globalaidsalliance.org/. There are so many more resources! But I’m out of room. Contact me (after August 19th) if you want to know more. |