I read something quite horrifying today about the Bush Administration and their actions in what bodes as devastating for international AIDS policy. In an email from the most excellent international women’s grantgiving nonprofit, The Global Fund for Women, I read of how the Administration is quietly circumnavigating an agreement they signed to ease restrictions on the procurement of cheaper AIDS drugs in poor countries. From the political blog of former journalist Doug Ireland, DIRELAND:

...Back in 2001, after a long fight against Big Pharma's monopolization of the production of AIDS drugs, a World Trade Organization meeting in Doha, Qatar, agreed that poor countries should have the right to break the multinational drug companies' patent monopoly on those drugs if they declared a national health emergency due to the AIDS pandemic. The U.S. was one of the 142 countries that signed on to this breakthrough agreement, under which poor countries could make their own AIDS-fighting medications cheaply, or buy generic versions of them from a country that produced them, thus bypassing Big Pharma.

This was a huge victory, won after years of struggle by AIDS and non-governmental public health advocacy organizations from around the world. And the Doha agreement began to save thousands of lives, by getting cheap, life-prolonging AIDS meds into the hands of the HIV-positive in the poorer nations who so desperately needed them but couldn't afford them.

But the Bush administration is morbidly blackmailing poor countries into giving up their rights to make cheap AIDS meds under that international treaty if they want the benefits of so-called Free Trade Agreements with the U.S. Either the poor countries refuse to knuckle under and scuttle these bi-lateral and regional trade deals with Washington -- which are worth billions of dollars -- or they accept these deals and raise the price of AIDS meds beyond the reach of the poor.

I’m sick at this. I’m sick of so much money being made from so much suffering. I’m sick of not hearing about this from our media, and I’m sick of what we have become. I'm sick of working for social justice and human livelihood and having my own government, the most powerful and influential in the world, actively campaign against it. I think it’s, sadly, a human trait to use power to make money and fuck over those who are powerless; it’s been happening for millennia. But god, this isn't just affecting a small group of people (read: American military in Iraq, America's working poor, etc.) who are so often ignored anyway by these filthy vermin. This affects billions, and countless more who will be infected in the future. The health of our world, the viability of our global community, is at stake. How do they sleep at night?