Quote:Yes, because the government is the one who has had anything to do with stopping or slowing down AIDS. Once again, private business with an eye on profit is the one who has stemmed the effects of the disease.

Quote:And Union Busting was one of his greatest works. Unions suck ass. They breed laziness

Quote:And Union Busting was one of his greatest works. Unions suck ass. They breed laziness.

Galt Wrote:You are a fucking retard. "Keeping it quiet"? Give me a fucking break. It's all I heard about for a decade. Just because the president doesn't talk about it doesn't mean that everyone else in the country isn't.

Galt Wrote:The belief that Regan "ignored AIDS" in the 80s is not a phenomenon that was created after left office, people thought it at the time, and they were wrong. They thought it at the time because everyone was deluged with how AIDS is just a massive killer, and its an epidemic that was going to wipe out the planet and the Government wasn't doing anying to stop it.

Quote:The political system in the United States divides powers between federal and state governments and among executive, legislative, and judicial branches at both levels. The presidency, part of the executive branch of the federal government, is the institution most capable of providing domestic and foreign policy leadership. The presidency, broadly defined, includes not only the person of the president himself but also the vice president, the First Lady, and other senior advisers in the executive office of the president, as well as members of the Cabinet and heads of other government departments and agencies.

Presidents frequently maintain a low profile with newly identified public health hazards. They often perceive that such concerns offer little political gain and many risks. Gerald Ford's 1976 announcement of the swine flu program was an exception. The response of Presidents Ronald Reagan and George Bush to AIDS fits the more general pattern of presidential caution in addressing public health concerns.

For Reagan, AIDS presented a number of potentially serious political risks. As a presidential candidate, Reagan promised to eliminate the role of the federal government in the limited American welfare state, as well as to raise questions of morality and family in social policy. When AIDS was first reported in 1981, Reagan had recently assumed office and had begun to address the conservative agenda by slashing social programs and cutting taxes and by embracing conservative moral principles. As a result, Reagan never mentioned AIDS publicly until 1987. Most observers contend that AIDS research and public education were not funded adequately in the early years of the epidemic, at a time when research and public education could have saved lives.

In the early 1980s, senior officials from the Department of Health and Human Services pleaded for additional funding behind the scenes while they maintained publicly, for political reasons, that they had enough resources. The Reagan administration treated AIDS as a series of state and local problems rather than as a national problem. This helped to fragment the limited governmental response early in the AIDS epidemic.

AIDS could not have struck at a worse time politically. With the election of Reagan in 1980, the "New Right" in American politics ascended. Many of those who assumed power embraced political and personal beliefs hostile to gay men and lesbians. Health officials, failing to educate about transmission and risk behavior, undermined any chance of an accurate public understanding of AIDS. The new conservatism also engendered hostility toward those with AIDS. People with AIDS (PWAs) were scapegoated and stigmatized. It was widely reported, as well, that New Right groups, such as the Moral Majority, successfully prevented funding for AIDS education programs and counseling services for PWAs. At various points in the epidemic, conservatives called for the quarantining and tattooing of PWAs. Jerry Falwell, the leader of the Moral Majority, was quoted as stating: "AIDS is the wrath of God upon homosexuals."

This larger conservative climate enabled the Reagan administration's indifference toward AIDS. The administration undercut federal efforts to confront AIDS in a meaningful way by refusing to spend the money Congress allocated for AIDS research. In the critical years of 1984 and 1985, according to his White House physician, Reagan thought of AIDS as though "it was measles and it would go away." Reagan's biographer Lou Cannon claims that the president's response to AIDS was "halting and ineffective." It took Rock Hudson's death from AIDS in 1985 to prompt Reagan to change his personal views, although members of his administration were still openly hostile to more aggressive government funding of research and public education. Six years after the onset of the epidemic, Reagan finally mentioned the word "AIDS" publicly at the Third International AIDS Conference held in Washington, D.C. Reagan's only concrete proposal at this time was widespread routine testing.

Reagan and his close political advisers also successfully prevented his surgeon general, C. Everett Koop, from discussing AIDS publicly until Reagan's second term. Congress mandates that the surgeon general's chief responsibility is to promote the health of the American people and to inform the public about the prevention of disease. In the Reagan administration, however, the surgeon general's central role was to promote the administration's conservative social agenda, especially pro-life and family issues.

At a time when the surgeon general could have played an invaluable role in public health education, Koop was prevented from even addressing AIDS publicly. Then, in February 1986, Reagan asked Koop to write a report on the AIDS epidemic. Koop had come to the attention of conservatives in the Reagan administration because of his leading role in the anti-abortion movement. Reagan administration officials fully expected Koop to embrace conservative principles in his report on AIDS.

When the Surgeon General's Report on Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome was released to the public on October 22, 1986, it was a call for federal action in response to AIDS, and it underscored the importance of a comprehensive AIDS education strategy, beginning in grade school. Koop advocated the widespread distribution of condoms and concluded that mandatory identification of people with HIV or any form of quarantine would be useless in addressing AIDS. As part of Koop's broad federal education strategy, the Public Health Service sent AIDS mailers to 107 million American households. Koop's actions brought him into direct conflict with William Bennett, Reagan's secretary of education. Bennett opposed Koop's recommendations and called for compulsory HIV testing of foreigners applying for immigration visas, for marriage license applicants, for all hospital patients, and for prison inmates.

The Reagan administration did little to prohibit HIV/AIDS discrimination. The administration placed responsibility for addressing AIDS discrimination issues with the states rather than with the federal government. In the face of federal inaction, some states and localities passed laws that prohibited HIV/AIDS discrimination. It took the Supreme Court, in its 1987 School Board of Nassau County, Fla. v. Arline decision, to issue a broad ruling that was widely interpreted as protecting those with HIV or AIDS from discrimination in federal executive agencies, in federally assisted programs or activities, or by businesses with federal contracts.

Reagan did appoint the Presidential Commission on the Human Immunodeficiency Virus Epidemic in the summer of 1987; it was later renamed the Watkins Commission, after its chair. With the appointment of this commission, Reagan was able to appease those who demanded a more sustained federal response to AIDS. He also answered the concerns of the New Right by appointing an AIDS commission that included few scientists who had participated in AIDS research and few physicians who had actually treated PWAs. In addition, the commission included outspoken opponents of AIDS education.

In retrospect, it is clear that the commission was created to deflect attention from the administration's own inept policy response to AIDS. The Watkins Commission's final report did recommend a more sustained federal commitment to address AIDS, but this recommendation was largely ignored by both the Reagan and Bush administrations. None of the commissions studying AIDS over the years has recommended a massive federal effort to confront AIDS at all levels of society

Quote:AIDS was first reported in the medical and popular press in 1981, it was only in October 1987 that Reagan publicly spoke about the epidemic in a major policy address. By the end of that year 59,572 AIDS cases had been reported and 27,909 of those women and men had died. How could this happen, they ask? Didn’t he see that this was an ever-expanding epidemic? How could he not say anything? Do anything?


But the public scandal over the Reagan administration’s reaction to AIDS is complex and goes much deeper, far beyond the commander in chief’s refusal to speak out about the epidemic. Reagan understood that a great deal of his power resided in a broad base of born-again Christian Republican conservatives who embraced a deeply reactionary social agenda of which a virulent, demonizing homophobia was a central tenet. In the media men such as Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell articulated these sentiments that portrayed gay people as diseased sinners and promoted the idea that AIDS was a punishment from God and that the gay rights movement had to be stopped. In the Republican Party zealous right-wingers such as Rep. William Dannemeyer of California and Sen. Jesse Helms of North Carolina hammered home this message. In the Reagan White House, people such as Secretary of Education William Bennett and Gary Bauer, Reagan’s domestic policy adviser, worked to enact it in the Administration’s policies.


What did this mean in practical terms? Most important, AIDS research was chronically underfunded. When doctors at the Centers for Disease Control and the National Institutes of Health asked for more funding for their work on AIDS, they were routinely denied it. Between June 1981 and May 1982 the CDC spent less than $1 million on AIDS and $9 million on Legionnaires’ disease. At that point more than 1,000 of the 2,000 reported AIDS cases resulted in death; there were fewer than 50 deaths from Legionnaires’ disease. This drastic lack of funding would continue throughout the Reagan years.


When health and support groups in the gay community were beginning to initiate education and prevention programs, they were denied federal funding. In October 1987, Helms amended a federal appropriations bill to prohibit AIDS education efforts that “encourage or promote homosexual activity”—that is, efforts that tell gay men how to have safe sex.


When almost all medical experts spoke out against mandatory HIV testing—since it would drive those at risk away from being tested—and groups such as the American Civil Liberties Union and Lambda Legal Defense Fund were attempting to combat discrimination against people with HIV/AIDS, Republicans such as Vice President George Bush in 1987 and Dannemeyer (in a California state referendum) in 1988 called for mandatory HIV testing.


Throughout all of this Reagan said nothing and did nothing. When Rock Hudson, a friend and colleague of the Reagans, was diagnosed with AIDS and died in 1985 (one of the 20,740 cases reported that year), Reagan still did not speak out as president. When family friend William F. Buckley, in a March 18, 1986, New York Times opinion article, called for mandatory testing for HIV and said that HIV-positive gay men should have this information forcibly tattooed on their buttocks (and IV drug users on their arms) Reagan said nothing. In 1986 (after five years of complete silence), when Surgeon General C. Everett Koop released a report calling for AIDS education in schools, Bennett and Bauer did everything possible to undercut and prevent funding for Koop’s too-little, too-late initiative. Reagan again said and did nothing. By the end of 1986, 37,061 AIDS cases had been reported; 16,301 people had died.


My students ask me how all of this could have happened. They are all smart, they understand politics, they understand the fear of AIDS, and they understand how complicated—and confusing—history and life can be. But they cannot understand such indifference, even when politically motivated. I told one of my students that the most memorable Reagan AIDS moment for me was at the 1986 centenary rededication of the Statue of Liberty. The Reagans were there sitting next to French president Francois Mitterand and his wife, Danielle. Bob Hope was onstage entertaining the all-star audience. In the middle of a series of one-liners, Hope quipped, “I just heard that the Statue of Liberty has AIDS, but she doesn’t know if she got it from the mouth of the Hudson or the Staten Island Fairy.” As the television camera panned the audience, the Mitterands looked appalled. The Reagans were laughing. By the end of 1989 and the Reagan years, 115,786 women and men had been diagnosed with AIDS in the United States, and more than 70,000 of them had died.