[Ip-health] Andrew Leonard in Salon: Democrats.com's strange neocon bedfellow

[Thiru Balasubramaniam]

http://www.salon.com/tech/htww/2007/04/25/ken_adelman/index.html

Democrats.com's strange neocon bedfellow

Why is Democrats.com co-founder Bob Fertik endorsing arch neo-con Ken
"Iraq will be a cakewalk" Adelman's campaign to protect the profits of
transnational pharmaceutical companies?

"Stop the Outsourcing of U.S. Jobs to Thailand" screamed the
Democrats.com "Activist Alert" message sent out Wednesday, and signed
by Fertik. "Thailand has been taken over by a military regime hostile
to good American jobs in our science industries."

Huh?

Beneath Fertik's name, the message continued with a screed from the
Washington-based lobbying organization USA for Innovation:

     The military has stolen money from Americans through the imposition
of capital controls, has passed new discriminatory business laws
against Americans working in Thailand, and is now stealing American
medical innovations -- a direct attack on hundreds of thousands of
American scientists, doctors, teachers and researchers....

USA for Innovation is a non-profit advocacy group whose primary purpose
is to lobby for maximum strength intellectual property protection for
American corporations. Its founder and executive director is Ken
Adelman, a current member of the Defense Policy Board and long time Don
Rumsfeld crony.

USA for Innovation's beef has to do with the decision by Thailand's
Ministry of Health to issue compulsory licenses breaking the patents on
a couple of AIDS drugs made by multinational pharmaceutical companies,
including Merck's Efavirenz and Abbott Laboratories' Kaletra. The
showdown has nothing at all to do with the outsourcing of jobs; it is,
instead, ground zero in a globally intensifying struggle over making
state-of-the-art drugs affordable for sick people in developing
countries. Abbott Laboratories was initially so enraged by Thailand's
effrontery that the company has threatened to stop introducing any of
its new drugs in Thailand, but it has since backed down and offered to
sell Kaletra at a greatly reduced price.

A good argument can be had over exactly what kind of intellectual
property protections are necessary to ensure that research and
innovation in the pharmaceutical industry continues forward, while at
the same time ensuring that poor sick people in the developing world
can afford the medicines they need to stay alive. One can also be
rightfully leery of what direction Thailand's military junta is taking
the country. But that doesn't make it any less bizarre to see
Democrats.com jumping on the Adelman bandwagon, and aligning itself
with the reactionary views of the Wall Street Journal's editorial page.
Indeed, Democrats.com is setting itself against the Democratic Party's
most recently unveiled trade platform, which includes a plank
advocating fairly priced drugs for developing nations. And to give this
whole incongruous spectacle a final scoop of irony on top, consider
this: the democratically elected government of Premier Thaksin
Shinawatra was the pro-globalization regime anxious to sign exactly the
kind of free-trade deal with the U.S. that Democrats are traditionally
uncomfortable with, and spent a good part of the last election cycle
successfully bashing Republicans for pushing.

The most charitable explanation one could make for Fertik's endorsement
of Adelman's corporate front group propaganda is that he just wasn't
paying attention, and bought into the bogus framing of the issue as a
"outsourcing" outrage. If so, he might want to think about sending out
a follow up. Whose side does he want the Democratic Party on? Doctors
without Borders, and poor people suffering from AIDS, or Ken Adelman,
Big Pharma, and the Wall Street Journal's editorial page writers?

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Thiru Balasubramaniam
Geneva Representative
Knowledge Ecology International (KEI)
voice +41.22.791.6727
fax +41.22.723.2988
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thiru@keionline.org