Hillary to meet with AIDS/HIV Activists; Sanders won't return their repeated calls
An eye-opening segment from today's Joy Reid show on MSNBC:
http://www.msnbc.com/msnbc-news/watch/hiv-aids-activists-to-meet-with-clinton-681625155684
= new reply since forum marked as read
President Bill & Hillary Clinton wrre the first to bring national attention to the HIV/AIDS epidemic when no one in the political world would even acknowledge it.
The Clintons have gone on to successfully expand care & research on a worldwide scale through the Clinton Global Iniative.
Human Rights, once and for ALL.
FROM A PBS INTERVIEW WITH PRES BILL CLINTON:
After leaving office in 2001, the former president started the Clinton Foundation, whose HIV/AIDS Initiative has helped reduce the cost of antiretroviral drugs and improve prevention and treatment efforts in many countries. Here he talks about fighting the epidemic at home and abroad during his presidency, including why his administration didn't pursue needle-exchange programs to help reduce the spread of HIV among injection drug users. "A lot of people wanted needle exchange ... but the opposition to it was simply overwhelming." Clinton also discusses his efforts to change attitudes toward the disease in India and China, two of the so-called "next-wave" countries, and the moral imperative of rich nations in leading the fight against the pandemic worldwide. One of the biggest challenges remaining, he says, is to get medicine to the people who need it. "One of my big arguments about putting medicine out everywhere is that it's necessary for the prevention to work. Because if young people believe that going in and getting tested is just going to tell them they've got a death sentence ... they're highly unlikely to get tested. But if they know if they get tested it means they've got a chance to live a normal life because medicine will be there."
(This is from an edited transcript of an interview conducted on April 26, 2005)
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SNIP
Question:
"What happened in China when you had wrapped up a speech and were answering some questions? A young man stood up in the audience, is that right?"
President Clinton:
"I was at Tsinghua University in Beijing, and I gave my speech on AIDS. There were three deputy ministers of the relevant government departments with me at the head table. After I answered a couple of predictable questions, this young man -- I later learned he was HIV positive and an activist by the name of Song [Pengfei] -- stood up. And you could have been in America: He had, like, a spiky hairdo, and he asked me a really sassy question, and so I said, "Come up here." Just on instinct I said, "Come up here," because I knew it was being televised nationally. He came up on the stage, and I put my arm around him and hugged him and shook his hand, and I took him over and introduced him to the vice ministers. And the Chinese showed the whole thing on television. They showed this man, a real person, shaking hands with these government ministers.
None of them had ever shaken hands with anybody who was HIV positive before. Within 10 days, the prime minister had 10 AIDS activists in his office. Then before you knew it, President Hu [Jintao] was out visiting hospitals of people who were HIV positive. ... I knew that the picture could be powerful.
When I went to Nigeria and President [Olusegun] Obasanjo brought a woman up on stage who was HIV positive with her husband and embraced them both because of the struggle they had gone through to get the medicine to keep their daughter from being born HIV positive, when Nigeria saw the pictures of their president holding these two people with AIDS or who were HIV positive, it made a huge difference. So that's what happens.
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A Great informative interview, that tells us of the Human Rights Campaign the Clintons have always considered their duty to fulfill.
By the opportunity & gifts of power & influence they have been entrusted with through their lifetime of public service, they have both become icons of Global Human Rights.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/aids/interviews/clinton.html
SNIP
"The pain and anger of all that loss will never leave me. I was in San Francisco covering a different story in the mid '80s when I met Cleve Jones, who was starting something called the NAMES Project, now known as the AIDS Quilt. I would see that quilt several years later, displayed at the Capitol in Washington, D.C. and it would take my breath away. Panel after panel after panel of the dead. Our collective dead.
SNIP
"2016, three decades later, when the two Democrats each lost sight of that history and each praised someone who made life much, much harder for people–my people–who were dying of AIDS. People–my people–with no one to help them but those of us in the then-gay and lesbian community who were living like the world was on fire while people in power, like President Ronald Reagan, did nothing.
At the March 9 Democratic debate in Miami, sponsored by the Latin@ network Univision, a videotape of Bernie Sanders praising Cuban dictator Fidel Castro played. The outrage over Sanders’ inability to reject his praise of Castro caused anger within the Latin@ community. But it should also have caused outrage in our own.
SNIP
"Because no one in the Western Hemisphere has oppressed LGBT people and people with HIV/AIDS like Castro did. The revisionist history of Castro’s forced quarantine of HIV-infected people into sanatorios is that "it saved lives." But decades of people being forcibly tested for HIV and placed in quarantine is a double-edged sword. Do we praise a dictator for excising a huge segment of the population from their friends and family and imprisoning them, or do we say, "Well, lives were saved."
There are burdens to a free society, of course. Cuba and New York City–the epicenter of the AIDS epidemic in the U.S.–have roughly the same population, just under 9 million. NYC lost more than 75,000 people to AIDS over three decades while Cuba alleges they only lost about 3,000 outside the quarantine.
But those numbers present a false equivalency, since PWAs were taken off the streets and kept in quarantine for decades in Cuba. And while it’s easy to say fascism breeds order, it’s still fascism.
Those praising Cuba on AIDS neglect to note how they established quarantine: through mandatory testing which the U.S. and other democracies do not have, through mandatory notifications, which U.S. privacy laws like HIPPA would disallow, and through, well, the government coming and taking you away if you tested positive. I have friends who are HIV+ yet their longtime partners are not. If those men had been living in Cuba, they would have been forcibly removed from their homes and taken away from their partners to live out their lives in quarantine.
SNIP
"Their statement was succinct: "Fidel Castro is responsible for some of the greatest human rights abuses Hispanics in the Western Hemisphere have faced, and his harsh dictatorial rule sent hundreds of thousands of Cubans fleeing to this country."
The statement goes on to excoriate Sanders for standing by his support of Castro when questioned during the Univision debate. Other articles on the sites of Salon, The Hill, MSNBC and others all noted how problematic Sanders’ stance was.
SNIP
"The Clinton Health Access Initiative (CHAI) has helped over 8 million people living with HIV/AIDS obtain medication.
CHAI strives to make treatment for HIV/AIDS more affordable and to implement large-scale integrated care, treatment and prevention programs. Its activities have included AIDS care and treatment in Africa, including the brokering of drug distribution agreements.
Over the course of the past year, CHAI has expanded its partner countries and members of the Procurement Consortium to over 70 including 22 governments, who are now able to purchase AIDS medicines and diagnostic equipment at CHAI's reduced prices.
SNIP
HILLARY & the NANCY REAGAN GAFF
"The good news–and I prefer to have politicians learn from their mistakes rather than entrench themselves in those errors–is that Clinton apologized immediately and in detail. She tweeted out an apology, which she followed with some more extended mea culpas, including a list of her own work on HIV/AIDS awareness and concerns."
http://www.curvemag.com/News/Hillary-Clinton-Bernie-Sanders-AIDS-1030/
This is one of the very best articles I have read as far as Politics, HIV/AIDS History and what is expected as well as hoped for in the 2016 race.
Bernie Who? Hillary’s Been There For LGBT
Here’s Hillary Clinton reminiscing about visiting the AIDS Memorial Quilt in a speech at the 2012 International AIDS Conference.
SNIP
Thank you Keith and Robert and Bill and Hillary Clinton and the countless others who worked not only for our rights but who also fought for the very lives of our LGBT brothers and sisters!
BREAKING NEWS!
Bernie Sanders supporters tout his 1983 Gay Pride proclamation as proof of his LGBT bonafides over Hillary’s actual record of fighting for the LGBT agenda. Well, guess what Bernie Bots and Bros, Sanders also signed a Mayoral proclaimation declaring marriage “a union between a man and a woman”. Cue the cognitive dissonance!
"In 1996, for the very last time, the AIDS Memorial Quilt in all its entirety was laid out across the Washington Mall. It has since grown too large to be displayed all in one place.
My friend Keith Molter shares his story of being at the Quilt in Washington DC in 1996 when by chance he witnessed Bill and Hillary Clinton visit the Quilt seeking out a specific quilt made in honor of a longtime friend of hers. Keith recalls:
It was stone silent on the vast Washington Mall. No fanfare. No hoopla. They simply went and we had stumbled upon it.
Silence. Stillness. They got out of their motorcade hand in hand and walked through the Quilt.
It was THE first time it was ever acknowledged by anyone of any higher level in government. They stood. They prayed. They looked at a few other panels. They wiped tears. We were 100 feet away. As they turned to leave, the still silence was broken by a squelching sound, like an animal in deep pain. It was me screaming “Thank you!” through my sobs, my voice cracking. They both turned. He put his hand up in a still wave and nodded his head -his mouth doing that mouth/chin thing he does. They turned and left.
I was there. They were there – maybe too late for some that we lost. But they were there as soon as they could – once the country elected two people who actually cared."
and Joy Reid posted this:
https://twitter.com/JoyAnnReid/status/729425474531823618
!!!
Not surprised, though...
