Author: jameswagner

Clinton says he’s accountable!

Clinton, the master of missed opportunities and political cowardice [ok, there have been and will be worse, but few from whom we could have expected as much], said friday in Barcelona that he did not know how anyone could explain how the world had let a preventable disease infect 40 million people and threaten to infect nearly 100 million in a few more years.
We know William Jefferson Clinton is perfectly capable of explaining it all by himself. He had every opportunity to make a difference while he was the most powerful man on the planet.
It’s not as if he wasn’t warned, by myself personally in 1992 before he was even nominated, and thereafter by others more articulate and with far better credentials, by ACT UP of course and eventually by the entire AIDS establishment, continuously and sometimes loudly, thoughout his administration. He neglected AIDS issues in the U.S. and abroad as much as he could possibly could without incurring the condemnation of the commercial media he performed to. Nothing more was done than was absolutely necesssary for appearances, which is to say in that very complacent environment that almost nothing was done. Even talk, while certainly cheap enough, was regarded as too dear for Clinton’s cynical team.

Mr. Clinton said in an interview on Thursday that he regretted not having done more about AIDS as president. Today, he said he is making AIDS his main interest as he seeks to raise money for the International AIDS Trust, of which he is cochairman with Mr. Mandela.
Mr. Clinton told the audience to “hold me accountable.”
But Shaun Mellors of South Africa, a representative of people infected with H.I.V. and the vice president of the conference, said he was not sure how, now that Mr. Clinton is a private citizen, “we will hold him accountable.”

Precisely. Pandora’s box. While he’s not the one who opened it, he could certainly have tried slamming it shut before now. Note to posterity: Don’t let him off the hook.

Cold coke but not medicines?

Now that’s a sound bite! Can we package this guy? Dr. Joep Lange reduced the problem to its essentials with an analogy he made in addressing the Barcelona AIDS Conference just ended:

He said that expanding treatment for infected people in third world countries required a country-by-country inventory and plan. “We need to go about it like a military operation,” he said.
“If we can get cold Coca-Cola and beer to every remote corner of Africa, it should not be impossible to do the same with drugs,” Dr. Lange said.
“Of all the ills that kill the poor, none is as lethal as bad government,” he said. “Bad government and lack of leadership has actually killed more people with H.I.V. than anything else.”

Hey girlfriend boyfriend!

This from a blog (belonging to a beautiful woman who writes as Bazima) which I clearly visit with not enough regularity:

Friday, July 12, 2002
An Important Message from My Gay Boyfriend
I noticed that my two “straight” male friends now also refer to each other as *girl*. On the cab ride downtown: “Girl. Is this crazy cabbie gonna take 5th Avenue all the way down?” Answer: “Girl. I don’t know.”

Just where do we go from here?

something for everybody

Great art for you, emergency medical relief for a beleagured Palestinian population, and a little recognition for some brilliant and courageous artists and the people who organized an extraordinary event at White Box gallery over the last several weeks:
The “Come to Life” benefit auction ended last evening, and we were fortunate to be able to help a woefully undersolicited charity at the same time we were able to take home a fantastic art thing, but there are still great pieces in all media available for purchase.
The reason that not everything was snatched up last night is simply the fact that there was virtually no publicity. The works were all donated by the artists (the list should accordingly be considered a roll of honor), and only one curator, but not one gallery and not one representative of the media had both the desire and the courage to be connected with the event in any way. Some had expressed sympathy or support privately but confessed they could not afford to announce the fact or do anything which might connect them to the benefit, because of fear of repercussions.
This is appalling, but I suppose it should not have been a surprise.
What, are the Palestinians all lepers now?
If you have anything of an art budget and any interest in bold new work,
you can affirm your own commitment to justice at the same time by running to the phone as soon as you can and calling Noritoshi Hirakawa, who is handling the remains of the event, at (718) 302-4199, or talk to me for more background.

Hope?

Yes, I think so!
Not since the last almost-presidential election have I been so hopeful about the ability of our polity to turn itself around, or correct (at least part of) itself, as I am tonight!
Except that I’ve been feeling this good thing all day long, I would look for its origin in the wonderful meal and good cheer Barry and I shared this evening. [No, Jim, must remember to be less self-referential.]
So many people seem to be absolutely fed up, and so many are speaking out when they would have shut up, or been shut up, especially in the past ten months. These are people at every level and in almost every part of our society. They are not a party; they are not a faction; they are the people. I think.
[This just might be the beginning of the end.]
Look at the stories we are seeing hourly even in the commercial press (they do want to sell their stuff, after all, and they can’t do it with only a continuing campaign of sycophancy)! I can’t even begin to link here all the evidence of the shift I believe I am seeing. Am I just kidding myself, or does it not really look like they (you know who I mean) aren’t going to be able to hold on?
I mean, they look very very bad, like total fuck offs! [I never used to use this language, but then I never had such provocation.]
Even their little minds can’t be unaware of what’s happening, and this means were still in real danger. They may still deploy the ultimate weapon, a *real* war improvised to save their skins, but at the expense of ours, and of the future of the entire planet.
Don’t let it happen [or it really will be the end].

trial by junta, in the storied land of the free

So, it’s up to the person posing as president to decide who is an American and who has a right to a lawyer, so long as he says he’s protecting us!

[The judge] said the executive branch of the government is “best prepared” to exercise the military judgement regarding the capture of alleged combatants.
“According, any judicial inquiry into [the American citizen] Hamdi’s status as an alleged enemy combatant in Afghanistan must reflect a recognition that government has no more profound responsibility than the protection of Americans, both military and civilian, against additional unprovoked attack.”

Are we feeling safe yet, from our government and the world outside?

the national soul bought and sold

We are being misled, and all is not what it seems.

And it’s becoming increasingly difficult to find anyone but the truest I-believe-everything-Ari-Fleischer-says jingoists who actually believes this “war” has become anything but a grand excuse, a marvelously leveragable plaything which the Bush cadre can point to as their very own personal holy shroud, some sort of sacrosanct shield to protect them from criticism and claims of blatant impropriety and selling the nation’s soul for pennies on the barrel.
The more pleasant idea is that the war excuse is becoming thinner and thinner, the populace increasingly fatigued and wary of false terrorist warnings, fearmongering, lopsided Us-versus-Them posturing, the sucking dry of the budget in the name of accidentally bombing Afghan weddings.
Wary, in addition, of the idea that simply sending in troops and bombing caves and infuriating Middle Eastern countries even further will somehow solve the problem, stem the tide of terrorism, eradicate the numinous, germinating terrorist cells, make everyone look away as Bush Sr.’s sinister investment company the Carlyle Group rakes in millions from War on Terror defense contracts. Shhh.

Get out your (slash war) buttons now, before we bomb Iraq and the buttons, and those who would wear them, are banned forever.

making fools of ourselves over healthcare

Government in the U.S. today spends more per capita on health care than any nation on earth, including those with national health insurance.

Dr. Steffie Woolhandler, [an author of the Harvard Medical School study published in the journal Health Affairs] and an Associate Professor of Medicine at Harvard, noted: “We pay the world’s highest health care taxes. But much of the money is squandered. The wealthy get tax breaks. And HMOs and drug companies pocket billions in profits at the taxpayers’ expense. But politicians claim we can’t afford universal coverage. Every other developed nation has national health insurance. We already pay for it, but we don’t get it.”

Start asking why.

rights trashed for all

Good news! Our trusty fascist government is no longer holding most of those arrested in racist sweeps after September 11! Nope. The bad new is that we threw them out of the country without hearings or trials, ensuring they will not be able to rejoin school, work, friends, families, even wives and children.
The Bill of Rights applies to every person in America, whether citizen or not, but it has been trashed once again by the junta in Washington. None of these South Asian and Arab residents and visitors have been charged with anything relating to terrorism, and only about half of the some 1200 arrested were detained for any irregularity, notably immigration violations like overstaying a visa. All but 74 of those had been secretly expelled as of several weeks ago, and except for a small handful, those remaining are still in custody, their identities essentially hidden to the world.

[Some] expulsions of the Sept. 11 detainees have been so abrupt that family members did not know for days after the fact.
In the case of Ali Yaghi, a Jordanian detainee who had applied for residency, his American wife and three children in Albany were never told that he was deported to Jordan on June 24, after spending nearly nine months in the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn on an immigration charge.
Mr. Yaghi has not been heard from since, raising fears in his family that Jordan’s security services may have been so suspicious about his long detention that they arrested him upon arrival.

Even now, Washington refuses to disclose names or to open hearings on any of the past or continuing cases. Federal lawsuits brought by civil liberties groups working through the judicial system continue to be resisted with the full authority of the executive branch.
If visitors have no rights on American soil, we have no rights either.

We should want out, not in!

One of the founders of the modern British gay movement reminds us that in the first years after Stonewall we wanted to change society, not conform to it.

There would be sexual freedom and human rights for all – gay and straight. Our message was: “innovate, don’t assimilate.”

That dream has faded, and even the noisiest activists today are more likely to be content to settle for equal rights within the status quo than to question sociey as it is.

However, [equality] isn’t the panacea that many claim it to be. Equal rights for lesbians and gay men means parity on straight terms, within a pre-existing framework of institutions and laws. Since these have been devised by, and for, the heterosexual majority, equality within their system involves conformity to their rules. This is a formula for gay incorporation, not liberation.
….
Oscar Wilde once wrote: “We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.” Thirty years after the first Gay Pride march, the gay community needs to rediscover the vision thing. That means daring to imagine what society could be, rather than accepting society as it is.