Capitalism Can’t Help Showing Its Ass These Days

I hadn’t been to an AIDS demonstration so far this year (my bad) but the prerecorded announcement from the ACT-UP phone tree last night haunted my sleep and got me out of bed and headed for midtown this morning. The demo here in NYC was part of an international week of actions (including Arizona, Thailand, France, Switzerland and more) targetting pharmaceutical giant Roche. The demand was simple: Roche must negotiate with the South Korean government to lower prices on bulk orders of lifesaving AIDS drug Fuzeon for its national healthcare system.

What got me going was hearing the quote from Urs Fluekiger, marketing director for Roche Korea, who explained the company’s refusal to budge on their $22,000 price tag for one patient/year of this vital medication:

We do not do business for saving lives but for making money. Saving lives is none of our business.

I thought to myself, okay, that tears it. It’s getting harder and harder to find anyone saying a kind word about good old freemarket capitalism, what with the mounting wreckage that is the global economy these days and the hurt that will be put on everyday working people here in the US and around the world in order to rescue the bloodsuckers who have benefited from this system.

There’s every reason we should make a point of kicking ‘em while they’re down.

So I did my little bit today, leafleting at a characteristically lively and imaginative action by ACT-UP’s New York and Philly locals and other AIDS groups. Scores of people grabbed fliers as they rushed to work in the skyscraper housing LifeBrands, Inc., the ad agency that Roche employs to promote Fuzeon.

There’s plenty more detail to deepen your rage at Roche--how they bought out the company that was given the rights to this drug by the government, which sponsored the original research, how their executives have shut down all AIDS and HIV research, how their profits last year exceeded 30%. But that one quote tells the story, about Roche and about the whole system they have made themselves such a success in.

We do not do business for saving lives but for making money. Saving lives is none of our business.

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Pilot Pay Proves Capitalists Unfit to Rule

Today's NY Times. Business section. Front page.

I'm going to be flying to Milwaukee soon on Iraq Moratorium business. Articles like this I don't need. Do you know that a pilot starting out at a regional airline can expect to make about $21,000 in the first year on the job?

$21,000! That's half what a US Postal Service mail processor with a bit of seniority (to pick a union job totally at random) makes.

This is an outrage. We are talking about an individual who has sole responsibility for dozens of human lives--most importantly, my human life--stuffed into an aluminum tube zipping along at 600 mph, eight miles above the surface of the earth.

Listen up! I do not want my pilot worrying about how to pay for the kid's braces. I do not want my pilot a little spacey after moonlighting on the midnight shift at the local 7-11 to keep the car payments up.

What I want is a pilot who's pulling down at least 80 large--make that an even hundred thou, who takes nice relaxing vacations a couple times a year, and whose only worry is the funny noise the Evinrude on the bass boat has started making.

If the invisible hand of the capitalist market (in the form of airline CEOs who make millions in salaries and bonuses) is handing airline pilots checks for around $420 a week, before taxes, mind you, that's just one more reason to ditch this system. Pronto.

And on the subject of responsibility for human lives, don't get me started about mandatory overtime that forces exhausted hospital nurses to put in 80 hours a week and more on a regular basis.

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