Global Kiosk

Pine Tree.

Originally uploaded by webBev48.

Every Christmas season in Mexico City brings the same cheery sight – hundreds of pine trees, their trunks nailed with a big, wooden X’s like cartoon drawings of Christmas trees, on sidewalks for sale or tied to the roofs of cars like dead game.

It never seems to occur to anyone that they will be vacuuming up needles for weeks – or maybe they don’t care because their maids have to do it.

And should you want to remove the planks and put your tree in water, break out the chainsaw. Two years ago we tried to pry them off and ended up having to saw the trunk itself, they were so difficult to remove.

Apparently, 1.7 million trees get axed – and X’ed — every year, (a million imported from Canada) before being unceremoniously dumped on the street or down a ravine. But this year, there’s a great new idea to the rescue: a rented tree from Siempre Verde.

The company will not only deliver the tree to your house, but pick it up again and replant it after Three Kings Day in January. They actually put a substance in the ground around the tree several months beforehand that slowly loosens the soil, carefully dig it up and then replant it in a pot where it is treated with organic fertilizer.

Juan Cortina is the environmentally aware young man who came up with the idea. He works for a company that looks for sustainable alternatives for big companies, and thought about renting out live trees for Christmas two years ago. “The objective,” he says, “was to save the largest quantity of trees possible.” They have already found homes for all 2000 of their stock, an indication, says Juan, “that people were eagerly waiting for this kind of option.”

Has anyone else noticed the difference between the treatment meted out to Wiki- Leaks founder, Julian Assange, and that to Andy Coulsen, erstwhile editor of low-brow hack-sheet News of the World – a job which seemed to lead naturally to him becoming a Tory flack? Because it is, to say the least, rather stark.

A daily affront to human intelligence, NoW engaged in phone hacking in order to dig up dirt on everyone from royalty to soccer players to movie stars – a crime which has landed one of its reporters, Clive Goodman, and his technical support, Glenn Mulcaire, in jail. The pair had amassed more than  4000 phone numbers, PINs and tapes of what were supposed to be private conversations. In one case that has recently come to light, Mulcaire even contacted actress Sienna Miller’s service provider, Vodaphone,  and actually got them to change her PIN code for voicemail retrieval. And we are supposed to believe that Goodman’s boss knew absolutely nothing about this.

At least, that what both the British police and Press Complaints Commission are telling us – that Coulsen is a mere innocent, unaware of what his staff were doing to feed the tabloid’s scandal machine.

Assange on the other hand, in offering details of the corrupt doings of the world’s governors, is a criminal, even “a terrorist,” according to the more rabid examples of modern media like Fox News. Now out on bail, he has not been accused of  a crime in leaking information provided to him by a yet-as-unnamed source. But there are many calling for his arraignment on criminal charges and the presumption of guilt on the part of credit card companies, Paypal and the Wiki-Leaks server, is clear. Exposing the powerful is wrong, but exposing the peccadillos or whatever of celebrities through illegal means is no big deal.

In fact, both NoW and Fox News belong to the same man, Rupert Murdoch, an individual who has done more to damage the notion of the public’s right to know what is going on than Stalin.

Now new evidence has come out that Coulsen and other top editors at NoW knew of and approved of using illegal means to gather gossip, and that Scotland Yard were not only aware of it, but refused to either investigate or alert the victims. They are currently seeking payback through other methods, by suing Murdoch’s creepy publication for damages. Maybe a new inquiry will be forthcoming as well.

Meanwhile, for Britain’s Conservative government, police and Crown Prosecution Service, the difference between blowing the whistle and breaking the law remains confused.

It’s been almost two weeks now that we’ve been treated to continuing coverage of the Wiki-Leaks saga, from the trials and tribulations of its unnaturally pale founder, Julian Assange, to the plethora of – leaks? – more like cascades — of information about US diplomats and global governments.

The favoured media trope is that, like those highly unflattering magazine photos of movie stars caught without the make-up and air-brushing, this information shows us the real face of the system.

But really, what if anything are we learning that’s new? That the US thinks Mexico is ineffectual in its battle against organized crime, that it must coddle the evil president of Uzbekistan because they run supplies from there to Afghanistan, or that China is frustrated by the intransigence of the North Korean ruling regime? Is any of this surprising? Aren’t most of us already aware that ruling elites talk one way amongst themselves and another way to the rest of us?

What’s more, so much of  what we’re hearing is just gossip. Someone thinks Kim Il Jung is a “flabby old chap,” and someone else cruelly notes that the first lady of Azerbaijan has over-indulged in plastic surgery, while Hilary Clinton wonders if Argentine president Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner is a bit unhinged – who cares?

The rough-looking, unvarnished pictures of reality have always been there for anyone who cares to look. Take a recent article in the business section of the New York Times. In it we are told the story of a 73-year-old Lilla Roberts, a retiree in Queens, who refinanced her modest house to make a few repairs only to end up with an eviction notice on her front door because, well, because banks can do that kind of thing to people like her. Robo-signing, back-dating mortgage transfers, outright fraud – their techniques are various – and extremely difficult to counter. Mrs. Roberts, said the Times, “is one of the many Americans, mostly poor and lower-middle-class, who have been devastated by a system that is as rapacious, uncaring – and sloppy – in tossing people out of their homes as it once was in foisting predatory mortgages on them.”

Is there a gut-churning irony to the fact that banks almost felled by stupidity and greed got billions in bail-out money, while regular people who didn’t know what was going on are being put out on the streets in droves? I would say yes. More so than the fact that Saudi Arabia is scared of Iran’s nuclear ambitions or that the Pakistani government is corrupt or that Italian president Berlusconi is an idiot. These things are obvious and have been for a very long time already. It’s the blind eye being turned to injustices in our own nations that should be providing the shock factor here. And those are the stories that journalists should be digging up and exposing.

In my last post I mentioned this pharma-giant as an example of one that would prefer to capitalize on its patents rather than participate in a fund that could still make it money but provide low-cost drugs to the poor at the same time.

Now, the Wikileaks info tsunami has exposed an even darker side of the world’s largest pharmaceutical corporation: how it spent tens of millions on lawyers, lobbying and dirty-tricks investigators to avoid paying out claims to the families of Nigerian children who died during a drug trial.

Honestly. Doesn’t Pfizer know ‘The Constant Gardener’ was supposed to be a work of fiction, not an instruction manual?

John Lecarre’s novel told the story of a well-meaning British woman who is killed when she threatens to expose a drug company’s illegal experimentation on sick children in an African country. What Pfizer did was fly in a team of doctors to a sad, dusty place called Kano in southern Nigeria. It was 1996, and a terrible meningitis epidemic was sweeping the region, killing thousands. Doctors Without Borders was stretched thin treating crowds of families and could do nothing to stop the wholly unethical trial of a new oral antibiotic called Trovan on infected children.

According to Jean Hervé Bradol, former president of MSF France, “They were panicking in the hospital, overrun by cases on the verge of dying. The team were shocked that Pfizer continued the so-called scientific work in the middle of hell.”

In fact, Trovan wasn’t even designed for children. Pfizer – the maker of Viagra, Lipitor and Zoloft  — planned to introduce the drug in Europe, only for adults. It was later taken off the market because of indications of liver toxicity.

In 2001, families of the some of the children sought legal help in claiming damages from Pfizer. But as the Wikileaks cables show, the company did everything it could to dig up evidence of corruption against Nigeria’s attorney general to get him to drop the two cases, criminal and civil. Apparently, their machinations worked. Charges were dropped and the state of Kano accepted a meager $75 million pay-out, half of what it was seeking.

Sadly, Pfizer has merely proved once again that big corporations with no ethics but billions of dollars can get away with murder.

One of the comments on The Guardian story suggested a boycott of this egregious company. It certainly sounds tempting. If consumers can decide to buy or leave food products based on their lists of ingredients, wouldn’t it be great if we could see a list of Pfizer’s objectionable activities (one of the 10 worst polluters in the US, a repeat offender in false advertising) when we go to the pharmacy?

If you were a world-class scientist working in any one of the globe’s wealthiest nations, what would you rather spend your time doing? Searching for cures for serious debilitating diseases? Or developing drugs to help people lose weight, fight the signs of aging and prevent hair loss.

It seems counter-intuitive – not to mention ludicrous — that educational institutions spend years turning out brilliant thinkers and that the pharmaceutical industry uses them to work on these unnecessary yet lucrative inventions. Yet that pretty much describes the world of Big Pharma: intense research and investment on drugs for our first-world problems, such as laziness and over-eating, while ignoring malaria, dengue fever and river blindness, just a few of the common and all-too-often untreated scourges of the Third World.

Yale professor Thomas Pogge has come up with an idea that could turn this picture around. The Health Impact Fund would allow Big Pharma one of two choices. Sell the way they normally do with patent protection, or register with the HIF and sell medicines at cost globally. The Fund, supported by international governments, banks and so on, would then make additional payments to those companies based on the health improvements brought about by their drugs. So the more effective their medicine in, say, reducing the overall consequences of 207 million people suffering from schistosomiasis, or 50 million from Dengue Fever, the more the company who came up with it will earn. This could actually make it more profitable to do research on drugs that kills hundreds of thousands than on something like botox.

In fact, sometimes such drugs are already  available, but simply out of the reach of the desperately poor. According to Pogge, who gave a fascinating lecture at the UNAM that I attended, at least one third of all deaths around the world are attributable to poverty, what he called “injustice in the existing social order.” The illnesses that kill that one third exist either only in poor nations, or else could be cured with cheap medicines like the simple procedure for curing diarrhea in children.

What’s more, India –the world’s largest source of cheap generic drugs — is now being hampered in the production of life-saving medicines sold around the developing world by the European Union. According to Doctors Without Borders, “As a part of free trade agreement negotiations with India, the EU is pushing for policies such as ‘data exclusivity,’ which would act to restrict even further generic producers’ ability to put more affordable generic medicines on the market.  If the EU wins, access to affordable generic versions of newer medicines needed to tackle HIV/AIDS will be severely compromised.”

So far, Pogge is finding a variety of responses to his idea. Some pharmaceutical companies, like Pfizer, don’t even want to know, he said, others are “cautiously supportive,” and still others, like GlaxoSmithKline, are very interested in the project. And he pointed out that working on  cures for these major diseases, towards the kind of breakthrough that could see them win a Nobel prize, is the dream of many medical researchers, not the money-making treatments for the often trivial rich-country ailments they spend their lives developing.  “Innovation,” he said, “should not be rewarded with a monopoly but by the results of that innovation.”

So while access to cheap medicines won’t end poverty, it can most certainly play a role in helping fight it. Maybe we can all do something by alerting our congressional reps and members of parliament to take on the project and persuade our governments to put money into the HIF.

For more information, check out  www.healthimpactfund.org.

And to support Doctor Without Borders’ counterpunch to the attack on generic medicines, go to http://action.msf.org