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Reporting on the fight against AIDS in poor nations

In Africa, 17 million people have already died of AIDS. In developing countries around the world, twice that many are now HIV positive. Such statistics are largely unfathomable. And news accounts rarely explore basic options for halting the deadly momentum.

But during the past several weeks, some major U.S. media outlets have taken bold and valuable steps in coverage of the global fight against AIDS. Mainstream journalists are making headway in reporting on a crucial issue: How can life-saving drugs get to poor people who need them?

Time magazine published a 20-page cover story in its Feb. 12 edition, combining stark photos with text about AIDS and its victims in Africa. "We have no medicines for AIDS," says a South African doctor. "So many hospitals tell them, 'You've got AIDS. We can't help you. Go home and die.'"

McKangaroo court in PanAm 103 stunner

Libya's Muammar Qaddafi said before the verdict on the two Libyans that the three Scottish judges had three options: to acquit, resign or commit suicide. In the event, the canny trio took a fourth course, which was to find one Libyan, Abdelbaset al Megrahi, guilty of the murder of 259 passengers on PanAm Flight 103 and 11 residents of Lockerbie in December 1988, and the other, Al Amin Fhimah, innocent.

Qaddafi is now thundering his outrage from Tripoli, Libya, to the gratification of many in the West, but Libya's leader has a point: The evidence the judges used to find Megrahi guilty is entirely circumstantial and extraordinarily weak. It is with good reason that Robert Black, professor of law at the University of Edinburgh and the man who persuaded Qaddafi to release the two Libyans for trial in Holland, denounced the verdict as "astonishing."

<I>How Capitalism Underdeveloped Black America</I> Updated Edition Now

Now available at independent bookstores!

How Capitalism Underdeveloped Black America, Updated Edition Volume 4, by Dr. Manning Marable, in the South End Press Classics Series

How Capitalism Underdeveloped Black America, a leading text for courses in African-American politics and history, has been central to the education of thousands of political activists since the 1980s, selling more than 30,000 copies in its first edition. In this updated edition, Marable examines developments in the political economy of racism in the United States and assesses shifts in the American political terrain since the first edition was published. Marable has updated all of the tables and charts on African-American poverty, health, employment, education, and spending, as well as other demographics.

You can't trade the cross for the cookie jar

AUSTIN, Texas -- Welcome to George W. Bush's world of fuzzy policy thinking. If you find yourself confused, befuddled or confounded by his recent proposals, don't worry about a thing. You understand them perfectly. They just don't make much sense.

Let me see if I can help with some of your questions:

What, you wonder, does drilling for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge have to do with solving California's energy crisis? Absolutely nothing, so don't waste time trying to find the connection. Less than 1 percent of California's electricity comes from oil.

Will allowing power plants in California to pollute more help solve the energy crisis there? No, Bush is just misinformed on that point, according to environmentalists, California state officials and energy-industry spokesmen.

Is there anything that the president can do about the California crisis? Yes, he might impose a temporary cap on wholesale electricity prices, but he has already announced that he will not, thus foreclosing (if nothing else) a useful threat.

From the global south side of the media looking glass

PORTO ALEGRE, Brazil -- The question, from a participant here at the World Social Forum, was polite and understated: "Sometimes, one wonders if the poor political consciousness and the lack of information about the world of the standard American is not one of the problems of the world today. Do you think we all could help in some way to get Americans more aware of the rest of the world?"

The question -- directed at me because I'd just given a speech -- hung in the air while my brain fumbled for a fitting response. Programming decisions by U.S. media executives loom large at home and abroad. A hundred years ago, when Queen Victoria died, the sun never set on the British empire. Today, around the world, the market shares are shimmering for AOL Time Warner, the Walt Disney Co. and Rupert Murdoch's News Corp.

Building new schools in Columbus: Debt financing is the wrong way to go

More and more Americans are seeing politicians use government-incurred debt as a vehicle for paying off contributors to political campaigns, raiding the public treasury, undercutting the personal income-tax base, stratifying the nation’s wealth, and, in general, wasting a lot of tax money. These treasury raids are occurring at all levels of government. Examples are:

National notes from San Juan Hill to Chengue

What else did Bill Clinton do in those final hours of his presidency? Let's see, he gave Teddy Roosevelt the Medal of Honor and boasted in the accompanying speech on Jan. 16 that in 1993 he'd broken with the usual policy of incoming Democratic presidents who would pull the portrait of T.R. off the wall above the mantelpiece in the White House's Roosevelt Room and put up Franklin D. Roosevelt's portrait instead. Then the incoming Republican Commander-in-Chief would reverse the process. Not our Bill. He kept T.R. up on the wall, triangulating right from the start.

On Jan. 16, Bill said it was high time to give T.R. the medal for which he had been recommended right after the charge up San Juan Hill. Exit Bill, enter the new team, including Secretary of State Colin Powell, who now has a chance to live up to those fine words of his to the Republicans massed in Philadelphia for their convention last August. Powell told the plump delegates they should not forget the poor and the afflicted.

Texas looking up while nation gets thumbs down

AUSTIN, Texas -- Now that Texas and George W. Bush have parted company, things are looking up deep in the heart. In fact, a positively astonishing number of good bills actually have a chance of passing this session, and I think we owe it in part to having the Texas record examined so publicly during the campaign. Some of us seem to have been startled by what we learned.

First, the Lege may actually do something about the infamous grandfathered plants. You'll be pleased to learn the Texas Natural Resource Conservation Commission has issued a report on how much progress in cleaning up air pollution has been made under George W.'s famous "voluntary compliance" program. The total amount of reduced emissions from grandfathered plants attributable to the governor's program is zero.

All our major cities are in danger of losing billions in federal highway funds if we don't move on the air pollution crisis, so the time is nigh.

One market under God

AUSTIN, Texas -- Haven't had so much fun reading a book since I was 12 and found "The Three Musketeers."

Thomas Frank's One Market, Under God is a populist romp over the most delicious idiocies of the past decade. The obligatory subtitle is "Extreme Capitalism, Market Populism and the End of Economic Democracy," which doesn't sound promising, but this is a ring-tailed tooter.

The book is a delicious chronicle of the hubris of capitalism in our time, and it contains some of the most savagely funny cultural criticism I have ever come across.

Of course, it's really not fair -- all Frank has to do is quote them: business as God, technology as divinity, the New Economy as the end of history. We live in a culture that produces books like "God Wants You to Be Rich" and "Jesus, CEO."

What's startling about this book is the extent to which we're so surrounded by this nincompoopery but don't even notice it. How many TV ads for stock brokerages do you suppose you've seen in the past 10 years? Anything about them strike you as funny?

Day five of the restoration

LUBBOCK, Texas -- I'm back where most of the world is sky, the people are wonderful, and the water tastes funny. We are on Day Five of the Restoration and, ooops, not looking good.

Of special concern out here is the confirmation of Ann Veneman as secretary of agriculture. Veneman worked for both Ronald Reagan and George Bush the Elder on farm issues; she was director of California's Food and Agriculture Department under Gov. Pete Wilson and was most recently an agribusiness lawyer.

According to John Nichols in The Nation, "Veneman has rarely missed an opportunity to advance the interests of food-production and processing conglomerates, to encourage policies that lead to the displacement of family farms by huge factory farms, to open public lands for mineral extraction and timbering, to support genetic modification of food and to defend biotech experimentation with agriculture."

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