Bush On AIDS: Smoke and Mirrors, and Broken Promises (by Matthew Kavanagh at HuffPost)

Matthew Kavanagh

Bush On AIDS: Smoke and Mirrors, and Broken Promises

"Bush Seeks to Double Spending for AIDS Program" blared the headlines this week. "President Bush should be commended," trumpeted one development organization, for his "vital leadership."

Great... except that Bush's plan ISN'T going to double funding and his press conference was essentially called to spin major broken promises into looking like leadership. Too bad so many took the bait.

In 2003, after a major campaign by activists across the US and around the world, Bush took a historic step in announcing the $15 billion, 5 year President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief or PEPFAR. The US went from spending a few hundred million dollars to putting up billions. And those billions have leveraged billions--countries around the world increased their funding for AIDS along with the US and we made a big leap toward truly addressing the pandemic.

Those billions matter--with literally millions of people who will live because of the treatment, prevention, and care that has been mobilized by the global focus on turning the tide against AIDS. But this week showed that when we aren't pushing them hard, the administration will fall back into big talk and glitzy announcements that do little to help poor people living with HIV and AIDS.

Bush's so-called "doubling" of AIDS funding actually reflects only a tiny increase that's hardly worthy of the world's wealthiest nation. By design the PEPFAR program has scaled up its spending each year--and is actually set to spent billions more than the original plan trying to keep pace with the AIDS pandemic. This year, for example, the White House requested $5.4 billion for global AIDS. Simply continuing this rate for the next five years would give us $27 billion--meaning Bush is asking for an increase of at most about $3 billion over 5 years (a rate that's actually dramatically slower than our current increases that are failing to keep up with the crisis).

Really, then, this week's headlines should have read, "Bush asks Congress to stop increasing AIDS funding so quickly." ......(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/matthew-kavanagh/bush-on-aids-smoke-and-m_b_50618.html

Gosh he's as big a comedian as limbaugh.