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August 1, 2002
Alexander Cockburn
Drivel and Squawk:
Angelina Jolie, the NYT
and the Attack on McKinney
July 31, 2002
Amelia Peltz
Inside
Ramallah:
How Can the World Witness Such Suffering and Do Nothing?
M. Shahid Alam
The Academic
Boycott of Israel
Bernard Weiner
20 Things
We've Learned Since 9/11
Philip Cryan
Discourse
and War in Colombia
Neve Gordon
A Feast
of Bombs:
Sharon's Endgame for Palestine
July 30, 2002
Pierre Tristam
Branding September 11
PS Burton
Financial
Journalism:
A Very Small Cog
Tom Stephens
Hypocrites in the House:
Fast Track After Midnight
Dave Marsh
Censorship
Goes Global
July 29, 2002
Linda Belanger
Why Do They Do It?
Alfredo Castro
Colombia's
Disappeared
Anne Brodsky
Inside Pakistan and
Afghanistan with RAWA
Andrew George
The Fires
of Summer:
Don't Blame the Greens
David Vest
A Blind Mule and
a Box of Medals
July 28, 2002
Bob Geary
Our Dinner
with Fidel Castro
July 27, 2002
Ian Daoust
The New
Mahler, Seattle Style
Gavin Keeney
Zizek
and Lenin
Ralph Nader
Citigroup
Heal Thyself
M. Shahid Alam
American
Presidents (Poem)
Mokhiber / Weissman
Push Back: Women Take
on the Corporate Beasts
July 26, 2002
Jerre Skog
American
Dictatorship:
It Couldn't Happen...Could It?
Philip Farruggio
Lie,
Rob and Steal
Rep. Ron Paul
Monitor
Thy Neighbor
Ron Jacobs
Thinking
About the
Weather (Underground)
Walt Brasch
Ashcroft's War on Bookstores
July 25, 2002
Norman Madarasz
Paul
Krugman's Howl:
Populism, War and
the Melting Economy
Gavin Keeney
Van Morrison: In September
Rep. Cynthia McKinney
War
on Terrorism or
Police State?
July 24, 2002
Gary Leupp
An Islam Primer
July 23, 2002
Jeffrey St. Clair
The Battle
for Zuni Salt Lake
Ansar Ahmed
Am I with You, George?
Bill Christison
The
Disastrous Foreign Policies of the US: Oppression Abroad Means
Repression at Home
July 22, 2002
Rick Giombetti
Glaxo Raises White Flag
in Paxil Case
Wayne Madsen
Forbidden
Truth
The Press, Bush, Oil
and the Taliban
July 21. 2002
Francis A. Boyle
The Rogue Elephant
Jennifer Harbury
Why are
the FBI & CIA Targeting Me?
Joan Claybrook
Time
for a Special Prosceutor
for Thomas White
Gloria Bergen
The Struggle
of Workers
in Palestine
Dave Marsh
Mr. Big Stuff:
Alan Lomax, Great White Fraud
James T. Phillips
"I'll
Tell You No Lies"
The Human Rubble of War
July 20, 2002
Gavin Keeney
The Grave
New Urbanism
World Trade Center Burlesque
Jacob Levich
"I
Was Schooled in Hate"
Confessions of a
Summer Camp Terror Tot
Thomas Croft
Augusta,
GA
Growing Up in the Deep South
Alexander Cockburn
The
Market Hogwallow:
Popgun Populism Isn't Enough
July 19, 2002
Abe Bonowitz / SueZann
Bosler
A Discussion
with Jeb Bush on the Death Penalty
Jonathan Power
No Need
for War Against Iraq
Rick Giombetti
Qwest
Death Watch
Kurt Nimmo
Of Mice,
Bullets & Bombs
M. Shahid Alam
Through
Racist Eyes:
Is Eurocentrism Unique?
July 18, 2002
Mokhiber / Weissman
Business
As Usual
Jerre Skog
I Spy: Now
Let's be Fair,
the USA Ain't East Germany
Ralph Nader
The CEO
Crimewave:
Corporate Socialism
Mahbubul Karim (Sohel)
The Rising Tensions
Between Spain and Morocco
Alexander Cockburn
Drivel
and Squawk:
Can the Times' Jeff Gerth
Save the White House?
Resources:
100s of Links
About 9/11
CounterPunch:
Complete
Coverage of 9/11 and Its Aftermath
Five
Days That
Shook The World:
Seattle and Beyond
By Alexander
Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair
Photos by Allan Sekula
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Robust Heroin Market and Helped to Finance the Rise of the Taliban
and Osama bin Laden
Whiteout:
CIA, Drugs & the
Press
by Alexander
Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair
The Memphis Blues Again:
Six Decades of Memphis Music Photographs
Photos by Ernest Withers
Text by Daniel Wolff
The New Intifada:
Resisting Israel's Apartheid
Edited by Roane Carey
A Pocket Guide to
Environmental Bad Guys
by James Ridgeway
and Jeffrey St. Clair
The
Phoenix Program
by Douglas Valentine
Al Gore:
A User's Manual
by Cockburn
and St. Clair
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Reviews of Gore:
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|
August
1, 2002
AIDS, Africa
and Selective Vision
Invisible Children
by Zeynep Toufe
In a July 11th article, the British weekly The
Economist recounts the latest grim statistics on AIDS, noting
emphatically that the 9,000 people who die each day from AIDS
represents three times the number killed in the World Trade Center
attacks. "If all men are created equal, all avoidable deaths
should be regarded as equally sad," says the editorial,
adding that "common decency suggests that the rich world
should do whatever it can to help." The editorial concludes
ominously: "Cynics in the West might write Africa off. Are
China, India, Indonesia and Russia to be written off as well?"
Translation?
Africans are poor and black. Thus we
(the Economist) realize, dear reader, your greed for profits
is not whetted by viewing them as consumers. Nor is your compassion
stirred sufficiently by viewing them as fellow human beings.
However, be mindful that the fire that has scorched that continent
is spreading and is now threatening places populated by people
who are prosperous enough -- barely, but still above the threshold
-- to count as potential consumers and pale enough -- barely,
but still above the threshold -- to awaken your caring.
Two daring moves in a world with a cold
heart: the bold assertion that all life should be valued equally
and the implicit recognition that it is not.
The Economist was responding to the AIDS
Conference in Barcelona, held in July 2002, which witnessed protests
targeting both the U.S. government and "big Pharma."
The substantial influence wielded by the
deep pockets of big Pharma, a fear of setting a precedent
that human rights might trump intellectual private property rights,
and callous indifference to poor, especially African, life have
combined to lead both the Clinton and Bush administrations to
attempt to block every reasonable effort by poor countries to
obtain generic drugs.
The international disdain for U.S. policy
has grown so great that not only was Secretary of Health Thompson
booed by protestors the
audience gave the protestors a standing ovation -- an occurrence
made all the more remarkable when one considers that those attending
the session were not people from the slums of Soweto or landless
Brazilian peasants but included largely government officials
and representatives of the elite. While thousands of officials
from governments and NGOs, scientists and activists flocked to
Barcelona, CNN
duly reported a notable absence : "Zackie Achmat, of
South Africa's Treatment Action Campaign, was too ill to attend
the conference but, in a video address, he said that despite
price cuts the drugs that have drastically reduced deaths from
AIDS in wealthy countries were still too expensive for people
in developing countries."
CNN neglected to mention the fact that Achmat is too ill to travel but because, putting
his body on the line for his beliefs, the HIV positive Achmat
refuses to take anti-retroviral medicines until they are available
to all South African HIV/AIDS patients through the public health
system.
Achmat's not hard to reach -- I dug up
his home phone number in about 10 minutes. Though I knew better
than to ask about his sacrifice or ask too much about his ailing
health -- he would simply point out that he was replicating the
experience of millions of poor, mostly black or otherwise not-white
people on his continent -- I asked anyway, and he said just that.
The
most personal he got was saying that it was a decision of conscience
and that he remains quite comfortable with it.
In the movie version of John Grisham's
novel, "A Time to Kill," a young white attorney from
the "deep South", Jake Brigance, defends a black man,
Carl Lee, who killed the two white men who raped and left his
daughter for dead. Carl Lee turns down the hot-shot NAACP attorney,
deciding to go instead with Jake. He explains that he needs a
white attorney if he is to have a chance to connect with the
jury: "See Jake, you think just like them. That's why I
picked you. ... When you look at me, you don't see a man, you
see a black man." In his closing arguments, an inspired
Jake asks the jury to close their eyes and to imagine a little
girl, raped, beaten, mutilated and left for dead. The jury is
visibly moved, some are openly crying. Then, very deliberately,
Jake asks them to imagine that she is white.
Eyes pop open, as the jury members are
jolted by the awareness that, even while they thought they had
reached the depth of the horror they could feel, in fact they
had held back. The people in the jury box, as well as the people
in the courtroom, come to the painful recognition that they still
had an extra reserve of horror for a white little girl.
Yes, that's fiction. But Jahi
Turner and Alexis Patterson are not. Alexis, 7, disappeared
on May 3rd and Jahi, 2, on March 25th of this year. To this day,
Alexis has been mentioned only six times outside the Milwaukee
Journal Sentinel and those were all after June 19th, when Elizabeth
Smart's abduction in Utah made national headlines. One of the
mentions is in a paper in Singapore and five out of the six are
more about the disparities in the coverage between Elizabeth
and Alexis -- she still functions and appears to us primarily
as a black child rather than a missing child. (Oh, did I forget
to mention that both Alexis and Jahi are black? And unless you
never watch TV or read any newspapers, you already know what
Elizabeth looks like.) Similarly, Jahi, who disappeared from
a playground in San Diego barely makes the national news, garnering
very few mentions outside of California papers.
The disparity in the resources is strikingly
clear from even a cursory glimpse of the web pages dedicated
to the equally tragic, equally heartbreaking cases. Elizabeth's
page lists two toll-free tip hotline numbers, one toll-free
information number, one toll-free fax number, one toll-free number
for the search center and one toll-free number for the tips.
Alexis'
page, hosted on a freeserver with a pop-up ad, urges you
to call the Milwaukee police department while Jahi's
page directs you to the San Diego Police Department. Only
Elizabeth's family has managed to garner the resources to offer
a reward -- $250,000. Alexis' page doesn't mention a reward,
and the only offer on Jahi's page is a gesture to their common
tragedy with a prominent link to Elizabeth's page.
In his statement to the Barcelona Conference,
Zackie Achmat said in plain black and white terms: "Just
because we are poor, just because we are black, just because
we live far from you, does not mean that our lives should be
valued any less." He appealed once again, as activists have
been doing for years now, for pharmaceutical companies and the
rich governments to stop blocking poor countries from producing
cheap drugs. The
rich world hasn't just been miserly and callous, watching
a tragedy unfold; we've been blocking efforts by the governments
of those poor countries and by popular movements to alleviate
the situation. The editorial in the Economist exhorts poor countries
to emulate Brazil , "which has made good use of the fact
that anti-AIDS drugs can now be bought fairly cheaply outside
the rich world, thanks to a liberal interpretation of international
treaties on patent law (and also to decent behaviour on the part
of many drug companies)."
That "decent behavior," or
more accurately behavior that is slightly less egregious than
normal for Big Pharma, came only after a
sustained and often militant campaign by activists around
the world -- and it was only last year that the U.S. dropped
its complaint with the WTO against
Brazil's insistence on producing its own cheap drugs to fight
AIDS and Big Pharma dropped its lawsuit
against generic drug imports in South Africa. These lawsuits
and threats contributed significantly to delaying the availability
of AIDS drugs -- which means more deaths, more orphans, and,
incidentally, bringing Zackie closer to death.
In a striking example of selective attention
of the media, the Dow Jones archival service, which includes
the top 50 U.S. Newspapers, many major news publications as well
as the the wires, returns 84 hits for the month of July for the
word "Toumai" -- the name given to the seven million
year old humanoid fossil skull that was recently found in East
Rift Valley, Chad. Type in "Angola"
and "famine", the
keywords for another story from Africa that also broke mainly
in July: 57 returns. There were 27 more newspaper stories about
a skull than about widespread malnutrition and starvation so
grave that Doctors Without Borders referred to it as the worst
African crisis in the past decade.
Toumai means hope of life in the local
Goran language, a hope that is fading for millions of children
in many places around the world. They are barely clinging to
a precarious existence while the rich world seems to tenaciously
cling to selective blindness and selective compassion.
Zeynep Toufe
is a doctoral student in Austin, Texas. She can be reached at
zeynep@tao.ca.
Today's
Features
Alexander Cockburn
Drivel and Squawk:
Angelina Jolie, the NYT
and the Attack on McKinney
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