Valmonte Sprout (SMASH STREET BOYS FESTIVAL, JULY 1 2012, NYC)
Posted to NPR: The Question is Who is Going to Pay beyond the afflicted. The pricing of HIV drugs is organized crime.
Big Pharma will never be satisfied. The profits are enormous. They already keep jacking the prices up. Big Pharma will just keep the chain around our necks and they will jerk it whenever they want more. HIV is also a financial disease. Humanity has nationalized banks. Humanity has nationalized copper mines. Humanity has nationalized war. Humanity has nationalized oil. Humanity needs to nationalize Big Pharma. The current system is tantamount to organized crime. Big Pharma’s behavior is organized crime against humanity. The CEO’s of Merk, Hoffman-La Roche, Abbott, Viiv, Bristol-Myers Squibb, Gilead, Janssen, Boehringer Ingelheim, Trimeris, Isentress along with the rest of this Cosa Nostra should be tried in the Hague for crimes against humanity. They have colluded, they have organized, and they have extorted. They are all very rich and powerful while the rest of us cower like mice. We dare nothing. We are pathetic. We accept the status quo. We are as guilty as them. It is not a question of squeezing an evolving middle-class new to the world. It is a question of squeezing crime. Big Pharma, and the suits, are committing murder. Why should they care. There are no consequences. We treat them like they are sacred. Enough. It’s TIME. — Tim Barrus
I would continue but NPR won’t let me.
Another thing we need to do is line up the members of the World Trade Organization and execute them. Surorise (!) They’re bankers. Even bankers don’t understand the complete mess they’ve made. They pretend and get all puffed up. It’s comic. But we tolerate it. Or barring outright firing squads (firing squads are too good for them), we could theoretically give their children HIV. Just like we line children up in public health for their immunization shots. Maybe their tune would change if they were personally affected but I doubt it. Trust me, they would let their children die. They let your children die. Why should they react any differently to their own children. A child from Mexico City who lives in a sewer and is addicted to glue and whose brain is mush is just another burden to these men. America’s grubby little hands are dirty as stinking shit in this trough of it. In fact, America IS the problem beyond the European Nazis (I kid you not, take a look at the names on the boards and take a look at the names of the cities the corporate headquarters are in), the American Nazis know where the money is. It’s in credit. The world doesn’t turn because of cash on the line. The world turns on credit. We have bet the future and there is none. Where is the accountability to the children of Africa. There is NONE. Why is it that the members of the American Trade Delegation (Commerce Dept) hold stock in Big Pharma.
Because they like making money from death. Big money. Big profits. How DARE they hold stock in Big Pharma. Because it’s completely legal to own stock in companies you regulate.
Even the term BIG PHARMA implies they are bigger than entire governments because they are. Let us look at India. Where is the accountability to Indian children. There is none. Big Pharma has sued the Indian government and won. They WON. They now get a negotiated settlement because the Indian government was making HIV drugs for a dime. And Big Pharma was not getting their cut.
The result is that now they get their cut and the price of HIV drugs is going up (in some cases way up) and people will die. A lot of people will die.
Why should a few men in Lucerne give a fuck.
They WON.
And you, the stupid people, not only paid for WW2, you now get to pay for Big Pharma. You think the Nazis lost because your history books say so.
The winners write the history, and the American middle-class, ever dwindling, struggles poor babies. They are going to squeeze you dry, you stupid fucks. They already have.
The Nazis won.
Go educate yourselves. Ask questions and don’t stop asking questions.
But no. You don’t even comprehend what questions to ask or who to ask them to.
I am always amazed at how people think the human traffickers are Big Men With Guns.
They’re low life goons with IQs of about 60. You don’t believe me. Ha!
Half the planet thinks AIDS is the wrath of god.
Turn that around to maybe Big Pharma gets what they deserve. For once.
The other half of the world is just trying to make it through the day and take the subway home. They need beer and television. Their children need Sesame Street and the Count to teach them how to add the numbers.
It’s political. It’s economic. Because the political is the economic.
Maybe Karl Marx was a bad guy (what a stupid thought) but bad guy or no bad guy, he was right.
The pills Bristol-Meyers Squibb makes for a month’s supply costs them eight dollars. They charge $3,500.00
Do the math.
Would the “common” man rise up and do fucking anything.
We can’t even go after human traffickers.
Because we are mostly comfortable and scarred shitless. Why should anyone give a fuck about the cost of HIV drugs or human trafficking.
The people at the DC AIDS convention cower and want to squeeze it out of taxes because they are clueless and afraid. They’re most mid-management bureaucrats who are lucky to have their little jobs. Do you really think they make the decisions.
Please.
Bankers make the decisions.
Why.
Who do you think these governments on the verge of default owe the money to. How are governments on the verge of default going to pay an extra 22 billion to get antiretrovirals to third world populations.
The people at the AIDS convention are walking around in a mental fog. Duh. Get a clue. No government (and no bank) takes them seriously, and yet they think their assessments are valid. They can’t even cound the numbers of people on the planet who are infected but do not know it.
Newsflash. Those numbers are bigger than the numbers of the infected we know are infected. OMFG. What will we do.
Nothing. We will do nothing.
The Clinton Foundation Execs get paid big salaries and yet they get meds to less than a million people. It’s like dipping a shot glass into the ocean and articulating the thought that it’s meaningful.
It don’t mean shit. The suits had it by the balls before it got organized. Same with Elton John. Get this. The Elton John Foundation in Russia gives out grants to AIDS groups of twenty-five dollars.
Twenty-five dollars doesn’t buy you a ticket to one of their fashion fundraisers.
The people at the AIDS convention in DC are stupid. They know their proposals are patently absurd. Can you imagine telling the German government it is going to have to shell out billions for AIDS.
The germans would laugh all the way to China. What’s sad about the AIDS conventions is that stupid people think if they get on the rah rah sis boom bah (we have made such progress with AIDS) bandwagon it means anything more than comic relief.
These people are meaningless. Throw them a bone They will gratefully chew on it.
Give Big Pharma a taste of what they understand.
It’s called power.
As a species, humanity is pathetic.
So what has changed in the 35,000 years homo sapien has walked upright.
Not a fucking thing.
Tim Barrus and NPR’s AIDS Coverage
Tim Barrus: From NPR:
R. Cranberry writes: I’m a hospice volunteer; I spend time every week with people ending their journeys on earth. I haven’t yet been assigned an AIDs patient - my patients so far are dying from heart disease, cancer, dementia, cancer, cancer and cancer.
I understand that every life is precious and that AIDs patients have been vilified at times. But why, oh why, the fetishism with AIDs? I am seeing a lady in her last days on earth, I try to see her daily. She has no family, no documentary film makers hovering around her, no special interest groups volunteering to spend time bcause she has a sexy and news-worthy disease. She’s just a little 95-year-old black lady who has seen and experienced monumental cultural changes in her life, dying of cancer, all alone.
Pardon me while I remain unmoved about special-interest-disease death stories. We all come in naked and howling and leave the same way.
Tim Barrus responds: AIDS is hardly a sexy disease. In America, I teach adolescent males with HIV. In Kenya, I dug graves. Eventually, we had to use bulldozers because men with shovels couldn’t dig fast enough; there were open pits filled with bodies. David Binder’s work is important because it is a record of individuals in a pandemic. A pandemic is quite a bit more awesome than one hospital, one hospice, one country, or any single focus. It is not a question of which disease is the more deserving. It is not a question of gravitas. It is a question of what any culture chooses to see. It is not a question of whose suffering is really suffering. It is all suffering. All such a record does is say: this happened here. It is a witnessing. From such witnessing there often comes a voice: I have arrived to tell you. It is up to the culture whether it chooses to see and to hear. It is the job of the camera to see. it is the job of the voice to tell the story. One photograph can do all of that. A collection of them is invaluable. Especially in terms of what comes next. As a result of this and this and this. It’s called art.
NPR did a piece on Elton John who insists that stigma is still very much an issue.
Numerous people responded with the we do not believe it syndrome.
tim barrus wrote:
Stigma is everywhere you look. I teach adolescent boys who have HIV/AIDS. The level of stigma and sheer hatred is breathtaking. Stalkers. Bullies. Internet terrors terrorizing, religious nuts who preach sin and damnation. And people who threaten violence. I do not know how my students do it. I do know this. Suicide among them is a real issue, and not one that we dare deal with as if it’s an abstraction. Elton has seen all of this and more. HIV/AIDS reaches into human culture in so many subversive ways. You might think you are not affected. Everyone is affected.
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