Palast on Bill Gates and TRIPS

http://www.gregpalast.com/

BILL GATES’: KILLING AFRICANS FOR PROFIT AND PR. MR. BUSH’S BOGUS AIDS OFFER
Monday July 14, 2003

Bring back Jayson Blair! The New York Times has eliminated the scourge of plagiarized journalism by eliminating journalism altogether from its front page.
Check this Sunday’s edition: “Bill Gates is no ordinary philanthropist,” gushes a Times reporter named Stephanie Strom, re-writing one of the digital diva’s self-loving press releases. Gates has saved 100,000 lives by providing vaccines to Africans, gushes Stephanie, according to someone on the payroll of … Bill Gates. And he’s making drugs for Africans, especially for AIDS victims, “cheaper and easier.” Stephanie knows because she asked Bill Gates himself!

Stephanie, let me let you in on a little secret about Bill and Melinda Gates so-called “Foundation.” Gate’s demi-trillionaire status is based on a nasty little monopoly-protecting trade treaty called “TRIPS” – the Trade-Related Intellectual Property Rights rules of the World Trade Organization. TRIPS gives Gates a hammerlock on computer operating systems worldwide, legally granting him the kind of monopoly the Robber Barons of yore could only dream of. But TRIPS, the rule which helps Gates rule, also bars African governments from buying AIDS, malaria and tuberculosis medicine at cheap market prices.

Example: in June 2000, at the urging of Big Pharma, Bill Clinton threatened trade sanctions against Argentina for that nation’s daring to offer low-cost drugs to Southern Africa.
(article continues at website)

None note that the money held out to the continent’s desperate nations has strings attached or, more accurately, chains and manacles. The billions offered are mostly loans at full interest which may be used only to buy patent drugs at a price several times that available from other nations. What Africans want, an end to the devastating tyranny of TRIPS and other trade rules, is dismissed by the Liberator of Baghdad.

We are all serfs on Microsoft’s and Big Pharma’s ‘intellectual property.’ If Gates’ fake philanthropy eviscerates the movement to free Africans from the tyranny of TRIPS, then Bill and Melinda’s donations could have the effect of killing more Africans than then even their PR agents claim they have saved. And for our own Republic, we can only hope that when the bully-boy billionaire injects his next wad of loot into the Bush political campaign, he uses a condom.

(thanks Greg, and don't get into little airplanes if you
don't know the pilot)

Palast never fails to nail 'em, does he?

Eloriel

Key to vault for the code on Microsoft operating systems (that has Access database software as part of it) that the Diebold voting machines are operating with?
P.S.trying write a post that is even more simpleton than me, is kind of hard, I was almost ready to write in some grunt sounds :spank:

.

on station (Kpfk.org)talking about this

http://www.gregpalast.com/
(snip)
PETITION: STOP THE FLORIDA-TION OF THE 2004 ELECTION
Tuesday May 27, 2003 Today, there is a new and real threat to voters, this time coming from touchscreen voting machines with no paper trails and the computerized purges of voter rolls.
You can join SCLC President Martin Luther King III and investigative reporter Greg Palast in opposing the "Florida-tion" of the 2004 Presidential election by signing this petition. A complete copy of the petition will be delivered by Working Assets to Attorney General John Ashcroft.

Click here to sign the petition!
Dear Attorney General John Ashcroft,
Today, there is a new and real threat to voters, this time coming from touchscreen voting machines with no paper trails and the computerized purges of voter rolls.
In 2002, Congress passed the wrongly-named "Help America Vote Act" which requires every state to computerize, centralize and purge voter rolls before the 2004 election. This is the very system which the state of Florida used to remove tens of thousands of eligible African-American and Hispanic voters from voter registries before the Presidential election of 2000.
(snip)

Everyday i just see more and more that makes me think an apocalypse would be an okay thing. Just joking - but something drastic has to happen. Change has to come.