Thread: American Government - Lobbyist's wet dream

Mixing health and commerce
Aldis, a US national and permanent WHO staffer, was known among his colleagues for privately airing views critical of the Bush administration and its policy toward the WHO, particularly in relation to the US government's alleged tendency to mix its commercial and public-health agendas.

Aldis reportedly chafed at WHO regional headquarters' instructions to receive representatives from US corporations and introduce them to senior Thai government officials to whom the private company representatives hoped to sell big-ticket projects and products.

In recent months, major US companies such as pharmaceutical giant Pfizer and technology company IBM have asked the WHO in Thailand to facilitate access to senior Thai officials. In turn, some senior WHO staff members have expressed their concerns about a possible conflict of interests, as the requested appointments were notably not related to any ongoing WHO technical-assistance program with the Thai government.

It's not the first time that the US has played hardball with the WHO and Thailand. In 1998, when member nations proposed that the WHO be granted more power to monitor international trade agreements and their effects on global public health, particularly in relation to the access to patented medicines in developing countries, the US government threatened to withhold funding to the organization.

Under that financial threat, the WHO has since largely refrained from commenting critically on the drug-patent issue. International and independent non-governmental organizations (NGOs) such as Oxfam and Medecins Sans Frontieres have filled the WHO's leadership vacuum on the issue by filling the information gap with highly critical research reports.

From the United States' perspective, Aldis, and by association the WHO, had publicly sided with Thailand on the pivotal drug-patent debate during a crucial stage in the FTA negotiations. Washington reportedly hopes that the comprehensive deal it is pursuing with Thailand will serve as a template for other bilateral trade pacts in the region, including soon-to-be-negotiated deals with Malaysia and Indonesia.

Thai civil-society groups, meanwhile, have complained about the lack of transparency surrounding the negotiations, which caretaker Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra has unilaterally conducted without consultations with parliament.

The US and Thailand have in the past sparred over the Thai government's decision to use its WTO-approved compulsory licensing rights to produce certain generic antiretroviral drugs for HIV carriers and AIDS sufferers. In 2001, for example, Washington threatened retaliatory trade sanctions, including curbs on sensitive Thai export products, if the Thai government allowed the production of certain generic antiretroviral drugs.

Thai activists, meanwhile, have given certain US pharmaceutical companies legal fits. In 2001, for instance, they challenged the legality of US pharmaceutical company Bristol Meyer Squibb's patent over the antiretroviral drug didanosine, or DDI, because it was originally developed by a public US agency, the National Institutes of Health.

In 2002, a Thai court cited international statutes when it ruled that Thai HIV/AIDS patients could be injured by patents and had legal standing to sue if drug makers holding patents restricted the availability of drugs through their pricing policies.

The verdict was upheld in January 2004, and as part of an out-of-court settlement Bristol Meyer Squibb decided to "dedicate the [DDI] patent to the people of Thailand" of that particular version of the drug by surrendering it to the Thai Department of Intellectual Property.

The dedication, however, did not carry over to third countries. Under the provisions of a US-Thai FTA, future legal challenges to US-held drug patents would be nearly impossible, Thai activists and international NGOs contend.

WHO at the crossroads
Lee's unexpected death has already engendered some serious soul-searching inside the WHO. Lee was widely lauded after his death, but his final legacy to the organization he served for 23 years is very much in doubt.

US President George W Bush said, "Lee provided tremendous leadership to the international community as it confronted the challenges of the 21st century." UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, Microsoft founder Bill Gates and former US president Jimmy Carter all made similar eulogies to Lee's long commitment to improving global public-health standards.

Lee frequently denied allegations that US political pressure influenced his decision-making, most notably perhaps during a recent television interview with the British Broadcasting Corp. However, it is just as likely that Lee will be remembered for the many times he caved to US pressure on crucial public-health issues, frequently in areas where WHO positions and commitments required that he take a stronger stand, some WHO officials contend.

Moreover, the secretive way that Lee sometimes conducted WHO business, apparently in some instances at the United States' behest, already has some officials inside the UN agency talking about the need for greater transparency and accountability under the next director general. "It will be very rough waters ahead for the new [director general]," said a Geneva-based WHO official, speaking on condition of anonymity.

As the United States' strong influence over Lee comes into posthumous light, the selection process for his replacement will almost certainly be politicized along rich- and poor-country lines, and if the US openly pushes its favored candidate, that divide could widen into a full-blown schism inside the traditionally cohesive organization. Those sharp lines are already emerging.

A report by a WHO-mandated independent commission recently recommended that as a general rule governments should avoid bilateral free-trade treaties that reduce access to medicines in developing countries. An annex to that report, signed by mainly Western experts who adhered to positions held by big pharmaceutical companies, highlighted the glaring differences in opinion emerging among WHO member states.

For its part, the US has long advanced the argument that without strong intellectual-property protection, the pharmaceutical industry will not have the commercial incentive to conduct research and development for crucial new medicines.

However, Brazil and Kenya recently claimed that about 90% of total global health-related research and development of Western pharmaceutical companies went toward addressing the medical needs of about 10% of the world's population. Those two countries have since called on the WHO to adopt systems for intellectual-property protection that would increase developing countries' access to health innovations and medicines.

.....

WHO staffers say they resent what they view as the United States' political agenda toward vital public-health concerns, ranging from reproductive-health issues to promoting good dietary standards.

At the 2004 World Health Assembly (WHA), the US broke with the meeting's proposed resolution that reproductive and sexual rights should be considered human rights, and strongly protested the meeting's focus on the public-health risks of unsafe abortions.
Lee had earlier that year held up a list of essential WHO-recommended medicines drafted by an independent expert committee for more than two months because of US objections about two listed abortifacient drugs that could be used to induce abortions in emergencies.

The US delegation to another recent WHA took issue with a WHO-proposed diet and health resolution, particularly concerning the acceptable level of sugar content in foods, which by the WHO's expert assessment would have cast US fast-food and soft-drink companies in an unfavorable light. Lee famously bent to the US objections and signed off on a significantly watered-down version of the original resolution.

US interference with UN personnel and policy decisions, of course, isn't an entirely new phenomenon. The US is the largest donor to the UN and by association to the WHO, and in light of the US-inspired events in Bangkok, senior WHO representatives throughout the organization are likely to be more guarded when commenting on public-health issues that Washington considers sensitive.

The Bush administration's tactics, often cloaked as reform measures, in reality aim to bring UN agencies like the WHO more in line with US commercial and political interests.

At the WHO, at least, that process has come at the expense of the UN agency's stated mission, commitments and, perhaps most significant, its global credibility as an impartial and apolitical actor.

Dylan C Williams is a Bangkok-based correspondent.

(Copyright 2006 Asia Times Online Ltd

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Clearly you have no respect for private property and free enterprise.
Try removing your tongue from karl marxs' ass!

Capitalism like witnessed in this article will bring cahos and our own destruction just so a few self-centered yanks can enjoy their luxury and SUV

Disgusting

The Food and Drug Adminstration (FDA) is supposed to test and make sure the drugs that enter the market to us consumers are safe, and will not harm nor kill us.

But the companies that present their new pharmaceutical products (pills & medicine) have overwhelming influence over the 9 member of the FDA board.

A good example is cholesterol lowering medicine.

Product that can help us are not allowed on the shelves; products that harma and kill us, are allowed.


Too much big bucks.....


And it is true that if you claim that Vitamin C cures or prevents scurvy, you are breaking the law in America.

It has to be a drug, and a drug that is tested and approved by who?

The good ol' FDA.

The hijacking of American society by Corporate America will be the reason of capitalism collapse. Like communism, the current system can't last because it will exhaust all our resources. Question of time. Communism collapsed on its own, Capitalism from America will be no exception as it will produce the exact same effects.

Communism collapsed on its own,

http://www.mosnews.com/news/2004/09/23/shuttle.shtml

According to the article. A soviet space shuttle left earth atmosphere once unmanned. The project was ended due to lack of funds. They couldn't keep up and went broke. We trolled the hell out of them. They just had to have a shuttle too.

Originally Posted by Butterfly

The hijacking of American society by Corporate America will be the reason of capitalism collapse. Like communism, the current system can't last because it will exhaust all our resources. Question of time. Communism collapsed on its own, Capitalism from America will be no exception as it will produce the exact same effects.

Flutter-butter you are such an optimist. Does that come naturally or is it an acquired skill!

Actually you are pooping off MM verbatim. My what an original thinker you are!

ha, it's always someone's fault, or someone else to blame. Never put the blame on good old America, it's so perfect. Never address the issue, blame MM, liberals, the media, any messenger of the truth or even partial truth.

Are you an Ostrich, Mr Earl ? can you lay eggs ?

Originally Posted by attaboy

We trolled the hell out of them

What do you mean here ? I find this a little bit simplistic ? what has the space shuttle to do with the collapse of Communism in Europe ?

Originally Posted by Butterfly

Originally Posted by attaboy

We trolled the hell out of them

What do you mean here ? I find this a little bit simplistic ? what has the space shuttle to do with the collapse of Communism in Europe ?

The soviets through bureaucratic incompetence overspent themselves trying to keep up in the space and arms race with the US. This certainly lead to the collapse of the soviet union.

Butterflea trust me there is a world out there outside of the Michael Moore and Ted Rall rubbish you fill your head with.

Originally Posted by Mr Earl

Clearly you have no respect for private property and free enterprise.

Private property and free enterprise - Ok , so its all right with you if a country manufactures generic forms of drugs and sells them to its citizens .

Originally Posted by attaboy

They couldn't keep up and went broke

I bet it cost them less than the US one.

Have you heard of Corporate Welfare ? it's like communism but only corporations can benefit from it.

Originally Posted by baldrick

Originally Posted by Mr Earl

Clearly you have no respect for private property and free enterprise.

Private property and free enterprise - Ok , so its all right with you if a country manufactures generic forms of drugs and sells them to its citizens .

Certainly if the said drug has run the usual proprietary period required by appropriate law. The original manufactures/developers still make money licensing generic manufacture just not the with the high profit margins.
I'm not really an expert here so I could be wrong but this is generally how it works.
Drug companies wouldn't have any incentive to lay out the huge capitol investment required to develop new drugs if there wasn't money to be made.

Originally Posted by Mr Earl

Certainly if the said drug has run the usual proprietary period required by appropriate law.

and this is the point - US laws made by politicians who are heavily lobbied by the corporations to extend the period for as long as they can. why should US law take precedence over any other countries laws ? and then there are the other bullying methods - the US telling the UN and the WHO to do as they are told because the US supplies them with funding.

That's why the UN needs reforms, and needs to become a complete independant body like it used to be when the Soviet Union was still alive. The Euros need to put their act together and become a real counter power against the US dominant force. They have been getting a free ride since the fall of the Berlin wall.

Patents, medicines and lobbies
By M Javed
According to a recent Asia Times Online report (World health: A lethal dose of US politics, June 17), the World Health Organization's country representative to Thailand, William Aldis, was removed for expressing views contrary to Western corporate interests. Such arm-twisting is neither new to international organizations nor unbelievable - nor even unexpected.

Many global organizations, including the United Nations, offer "freedom of speech" without guaranteeing "freedom after the speech". If the report is correct, Aldis I salute you. Poor people in the Third World need more advocates like you. I wholeheartedly endorse the view that corporate interests have obstructed the global poor's access to medicines. The mechanism that works against the poor and in favor of the rich multinationals is more of an invisible arm-twisting rather than a problem of reaching an agreement at the negotiating table.

What is important to realize is that this is just a part of a bigger problem. The reality of today's globalization is that in trade negotiations, governments - whether in the developed or the underdeveloped world - are steered both by strong domestic lobbies and by pressure groups, which include multinational companies, agriculturists' and industrialists' groups, trade unions, and other politically powerful entities whose particularistic interests don't necessarily represent the broad national interest.

On an intellectual plane, rich countries argue that protection of the patents is necessary to enable them to continue research and development to produce better medicines. On a "situation on ground" basis, however, the interests of millions of patients suffering from lethal epidemics cannot just be ignored.

The statistics are uncomfortable from a humanitarian perspective. Total consumption of medicines in the Third World constitutes just a small fraction of the total global pharmaceutical market. The main consumer market of pharmaceutical products lies in the United States, the European Union and Japan. And it is only a few medicines that save and critically affect the lives of hundreds of millions of people in the poorer parts of the globe.

What is vital from a welfare point of view represents only a small slice of the world pharmaceutical industry's revenues and sales. People starving in Africa and South Asia do not demand anti-wrinkle creams or fancy weight-reducing pills, which constitute a major share of pharmaceutical sales in the US or EU.

The WTO's Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) agreement provides ample flexibility to poor countries to safeguard their vital public-health interests. While the agreement had its own inadequacies, it notably gave strength and protection to the Third World through not only the right to grant compulsory licenses but also the freedom to determine the grounds on which such licenses could be granted.

That is, individual countries rather than the World Trade Organization (WTO) had the latitude to determine what constituted a national public-health emergency, including outbreaks of "HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis, malaria and other epidemics". That is not to say that TRIPS was all rosy for the poor. The agreement - like many other Uruguay Round agreements - had several issues that needed to be resolved.

The WTO Doha Declaration of November 2001 gave further assurances to poor countries. Global trade ministers recognized that members with insufficient or no manufacturing capacities in the pharmaceutical sector could face difficulties in making effective use of compulsory licensing under TRIPS. They instructed the WTO's Council for TRIPS to find an expeditious solution to this problem and to report to the General Council before the end of 2002.

Further, the ministers reaffirmed the commitment of developed-country members to provide incentives to their enterprises and institutions to promote and encourage technology transfer to least-developed countries. Above all, the declaration clearly and categorically stated that the TRIPS agreement can and should be interpreted and implemented in a manner supportive of WTO members' right to protect public health and, in particular, to promote access to medicines for all. Such an expression in the declaration gave primacy to ensuring access of the poor to cheap medicines over protection of intellectual-property rights.

With all those on-paper assurances, why does the issue still linger on, and linger on in such huge dimensions? For starters, there is no doubt that the developed world still needs to do a lot to fulfill its Doha commitments to the developing one. The important question is whether that's all that needs to be done.

There is an urgent need for soul-searching on the part of poor countries as well. Drug patents were one of the many issues that led to post-Uruguay Round friction between the WTO's developed and underdeveloped member states. Other important issues that fell in the category were those related to agricultural subsidies, cotton and textiles.

These and a bundle of other issues were reopened at Doha in 2001. Five years later, there have been endless discussions and raucous street protests by non-governmental organizations (NGOs) on agricultural subsidies and non-agricultural tariffs. Granted, a lot of actual progress on these contentious issues has been achieved. But it is still urgent for poor countries to achieve a more unified voice on issues that lack strong domestic lobby groups.

By contrast, how much emphasis have Third World governments put on drug patents? In today's Internet-connected world, readers can go straight to the WTO website and read the developing-world ministers' statements at recent WTO meetings in Cancun and Hong Kong. Compare the emphasis that they put on drug issues with that of agricultural subsidies and textiles. Improving access to patented medicines has not received even 5% of the attention that agricultural subsidies have. It would appear that developing-world commerce ministries are being steered by their own lobby groups, similar to the way the industrialized world's agenda is set.
It is clear that the issue of medicines to the poor is far more important - most certainly from a welfare point of view - for a larger number of developing countries than developed-world agricultural subsidies. Why is it that these subsidies have been a favorite of the developing-country governments, while the issue of drug patents has been raised only by NGOs and humanitarian organizations such as Oxfam and Medecins Sans Frontieres? There have been dozens of declarations made at various Third World forums on the issue of agricultural and non-agricultural tariffs, but one would be hard-pressed to unearth similar proclamation on provision of medicines for the world's poor.

While such issues as agricultural subsidies are tied to strong feudalistic lobbies, access to patented, life-saving medicines cuts across the world's poor without a strong unified voice or pressure group. Lack of domestic pressure on developing-world governments has contributed to the problem, similar to the way corporate lobby pressure against the Western governments has. It is not my objective to shift the criticism from industrialized to Third World governments, but rather to see the drug-patent issue in a wider view.

M Javed is a medical doctor and author of the book Chessboard of WTO.

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Southea.../HF24Ae01.html

Originally Posted by Mr Earl

Actually you are pooping off MM verbatim. My what an original thinker you are!

Are you actually going to add anything of value or just insult people? If you don't agree, at least say why, otherwise your opinions are worthless.

Originally Posted by Marmite the Dog

Originally Posted by Mr Earl

Actually you are pooping off MM verbatim. My what an original thinker you are!

Are you actually going to add anything of value or just insult people? If you don't agree, at least say why, otherwise your opinions are worthless.

I did say why. Perhaps I should have spelled out Michael Moore for you!
I see sarcasm is wasted on you.

^ Bad response, Mr. Earle.

I have never considered Marmite to think or believe in the likes of Michael Moore.

Michael Moore is a film/documentary maker.

No one follows him.


Only a fool would quote a film maker on all sides of the political spectrum.

Rush Limbaugh and Michael Moore are for people who can't read, think, and dissect issue for themselves.

They needs someone else to do it for them, and they just follow, like sheep.

Pretty convenient way to split the masses, put them into to two tents, while those with power and control continue to do what they want to do.

Originally Posted by Milkman

^ Bad response, Mr. Earle.

Maybe you should pay attention too!
Marmite was giving me shit for insulting Butterbutt by accusing him of being a Michael Moore ape.
I'm not sure where Marmite or you got the bugs up your asses!
Nothing more....so suck cheese milky!

Lol !!! :d