By Rachel Sandalow-Ash

On Friday, October 21, around 60 students from Harvard College and Harvard Medical School gathered outside the Boston headquarters of Merck & Co., one of the largest pharmaceutical companies in the world. Dressed in swimsuits, flip-flops, and sunglasses—and, in the case of the medical students, white coats—they set up camp on the sidewalk. They lounged in a small inflatable swimming pool and played volleyball and soccer with beach balls. Passersby stared, but as the group gathered up their last straggling members and moved onto Merck’s land to begin their protest, it was clear that their pool party was not just a game; they had a very serious message to deliver.

The Global Health and AIDS Coalition, the student group that organized the event, was pushing Merck to join the Medicines Patent Pool. The Medicines Patent Pool, a UNITAID project, is a market-based program designed to increase access to lifesaving HIV/AIDS drugs in the developing world. Normally, pharmaceutical companies such as Merck are granted exclusive patents over their drugs. In this case, Merck’s monopoly drives up the prices of several key AIDS antiretroviral (ARV) medicines—efavirenz, raltegravir, and ISENTRESS—to such an extent that these lifesaving treatments are unavailable to millions of people in need. The statistics are sobering; there are currently 33 million people living with HIV/AIDS, and nearly two thirds of them do not have access to the drugs necessary to survive. Not only do ARV drugs transform AIDS from a death sentence to a chronic, manageable condition, they also serve an invaluable preventive function; according to a HIV Prevention Trials Network study, starting antiretroviral therapy immediately after diagnosis leads to over a 90% reduction in HIV transmission.

The Patent Pool is intended to remedy the gap between the scientific capacity to provide AIDS treatment to everyone in need and the socially constructed situation in which AIDS drugs are treated as a scarce, expensive commodity rather than a human right. The pool provides an opportunity for pharmaceutical companies and other organizations to share their patents for AIDS drugs to allow for generic drug production and sale in developing countries. Such competition decreases prices by at least 70%, and the companies still get a royalty. Gilead and the National Institutes of Health have already joined the Patent Pool, and many major companies are in the process of negotiations, yet Merck refuses to even negotiate with the Pool. To add insult to injury from a Harvard student’s perspective, Merck boasts of its research and lab partnerships with Harvard Medical School and the Harvard School of Public Health. Merck is essentially using Harvard’s resources to boost its own bottom line at the expense of millions of people in the developing world.

While Merck claims that it already has a tiered pricing system that gives poor countries a discounted price, this system is insufficient to make its drugs truly affordable. Furthermore, according to Doctors Without Borders, this past July Merck halted its price reductions for 49 countries that it termed “middle-income.” Many of these countries, including India, Vietnam, and Colombia, are actually quite poor and suffer from particularly large HIV/AIDS burdens. It is clear that relying on Merck’s private corporate benevolence will not get people the medicines that they need. The Pool would prevent such arbitrary decisions and would make AIDS drugs more universally affordable and accessible. Joining the Pool would not even cause great financial problems for Merck. The company took in $45 billion in revenue in 2010, mostly from its operations in wealthy countries, (according to the US Securities and Exchange Commission), and it had nearly a 25% profit margin. Merck’s refusal to join the pool is one example among many of a corporation that refuses to give an inch for society to gain a mile.

The student protest began in earnest when the pool party moved from the sidewalk to Merck’s lawn, as several Merck security guards looked on with unease.  Carrying signs and beach balls, the students marched around the pool, chanting: “Hey Merck, help us fight; health care is a human right!” “People with AIDS are under attack; what do we do? Stand up! Fight back!” and similar slogans. Several students briefly dropped a banner from the Merck parking lot, but they were forced to take it down. A few college and medical school students spoke about their experiences and the importance of the campaign, and the protest concluded with each participant writing a letter to Merck. A small group then delivered 500 petition signatures to Merck’s door. By the time the protesters left, five police cars were parked outside the building, and a row of officers watched as the students walked back to the shuttle.

This was not an “Occupy Merck” protest, per se. But the presence of the police officers showed that Merck was scared—scared of being publicly exposed for its role in preventing millions of people from accessing essential medicines. It is easy to think of the main “Occupy” issues, income inequality and corporate greed, as primarily American ones. But in many ways, the worst corporate abuses occur beyond our borders, in the most vulnerable countries, and income inequality is far greater on a global scale than it is in this country alone. The fight for the patent pool and access to AIDS drugs also has international traction; for instance, earlier in the month, students at Dundee University in Scotland staged a pool party of their own outside a Johnson & Johnson building. Efforts such as these are invaluable, and as the Global Health and AIDS Coalition continues its campaign, Merck will hopefully agree to join the pool.

Yet, the pool is not the ultimate solution to the systems of corporate influence that greatly harm human health around the world. There is a common belief, enshrined into international law in the World Trade Organization-administered Agreement on Trade Related Aspects of International Property Rights (TRIPS), that corporations are entitled to exclusive patent rights due to their right to property or as a necessary incentive for research and development. However, a large amount of basic research that leads to understanding diseases and developing medicines is actually funded by governments; therefore, this research should serve the public, rather than the private, good. While there are certainly instances in which patents are necessary, the basic laws of supply and demand indicate that allowing for free competition leads to increased quantities and lower prices, two desirable outcomes in the case of AIDS drugs. Unfortunately, TRIPS and other intellectual property laws tend to enrich established corporate interests in the Western world at the expense of emerging economies in places such as India (a center of generic drug production) and, more importantly, the health and welfare of poor people around the globe. So while the Patent Pool is an immensely valuable short-term solution, we can’t rely on corporations choosing to join the Pool. Rather, international patent law must be changed significantly to support, in the words of the Occupy protesters, “human need, not corporate greed.”

There are currently several hundred people camped out in Boston’s Dewey Square, in solidarity with the Occupy Wall Street demonstrators in lower Manhattan’s Zuccotti Park. There have been demonstrations involving thousands of protesters marching through the streets of downtown Boston, stopping traffic and bringing the city to a standstill. Scores have been arrested for acts of civil disobedience, as the campsite has grown and been forcibly constrained once more. And these events show little indication of ending any time soon. What are we to make of this?

The media—along with the politicians and economic potentates the “occupy” protests are addressing—seem to be quite keen on comparing the demonstrations to those of the “tea party” movement. Yes, the movements do share certain centrally important grievances, among them the United States’ startlingly uneven distribution of wealth, and the injustices perpetrated by the political institutions that promote these disparities. But while galvanized by similar—or even the same—causes, the similarities end there.

To begin with, the two movements differ in their origins, which go a long way toward explaining the overall motivation and direction of each. The tea party, though marketed as a grassroots popular uprising—and, in truth, for many it is—was manufactured with the organizational and financial help of large corporations, lobbyists, and the support of Fox News. The Occupy Wall Street movement, on the other hand, was organized by a Vancouver-based not-for-profit magazine, responding to popular resentment among Americans and contemporaneous international movements of similar scope and purpose. Billing itself as “the ninety-nine percent” (which, according to organizers, includes members of the other one percent who support economic justice and equality), Occupy Wall Street and affiliated protests in Boston and nationwide could hardly be more of a movement of the people.

Another major difference lies in the purpose of the protests. The goal of the tea partiers would appear to be getting the government to make life easier—by creating more jobs with higher wages, and improving the value of the dollar, but not by directly providing jobs or money to those in need; government hand-outs are “socialism.” This could be characterized as something of a half-hearted welfare state, in which the government is basically supposed to provide everything, but the citizen can still feel as though he or she is an independent and valuable individual in the American system. As such, according to tea partiers, the wealthy and corporations should not be penalized with higher taxes just because they have done well for themselves.

Those taking part in the Occupy Wall Street protests, on the other hand, believe the extremely wealthy and corporations should be taxed more, because they have made their money thanks to economic policies and regulations that have allowed that money to be made at the expense of the American people. And once the financial crisis hit, according to the Occupy protesters, these corporations and individuals were bailed out, taking still more money from the coffers of the people. If it is on the backs of the overwhelming majority of Americans that this money is made, the Occupy movement argues, why is it wrong that it be taxed for the people’s benefit?

While the basis for the tea party’s vague demands seems to lie outside the realm of the rational, the Occupy Wall Street movement’s demands are logical and altogether possible. They want higher taxes for the wealthiest citizens and for corporations; they want transparency in government and in private economic institutions—which, thanks to taxpayer bail-outs, now ought to be held to the highest standard of accountability; they want reforms that would further separate politics from finance. Occupy Wall Street and associated occupations’ demands have been validated by visits from distinguished academics and thinkers such as Noam Chomsky, Cornel West, and Slavoj Žižek. The strength of the Occupy Wall Street movement, which has enabled it to draw these notables along with thousands of new protesters from all areas of American society, is the desire to end the American culture of corporate greed. Idealistic? Absolutely. Possible? We shall see.

By Ian Kumekawa

This past week, Democratic leaders took increasingly supportive stances on the protests going on in New York, Boston, and in dozens of cities around the nation. Obama administration senior advisor David Plouffe suggested that the frustrations that animate the movements are the same frustrations that are being vented “in living rooms and kitchens all across America.” Yet to its critics, the Occupy Wall Street movement has at its core values that are “dangerously out of touch with the broad mass of the American people.”

In a discussion with Tavis Smiley and Cornel West, one such critic, Fox News anchor Bill O’Reilly, suggested that the protesters want “the government to forcibly seize the assets of these oligarchs…and then distribute it to other people whom they deem worthy of the money the oligarchs have.” “That,” for O’Reilly, “is socialism.”

For better or worse, “socialism” is a dirty word in America, applicable only by those on the so-called fringe. And for better or worse (Perspective thinks for better), it’s true that many socialists have been very keen on economic redistribution. But so, too, were many of the distinctly mainstream economists of the early 20^th century, perhaps most strikingly A.C. Pigou, the founder of Welfare Economics.

The curious thing about Welfare Economics is that its pedigree is as far from radical as possible. Pigou, its founder, was a Cambridge academic who, unlike his teacher Alfred Marshall or other reformers of the day, preferred not to visit slums, even on missions of charity. Pigou was a cautious believer in social Darwinism and, like many of his colleagues, was quite hesitant to close the door on eugenics.

Indeed, Pigou seems like an unlikely hero for the left. In his General Theory, John Maynard Keynes, whose legacy now enjoys the affection of the liberal and begrudging respect of most others, singled Pigou out for epitomizing the outdated, Polyannaish optimism that the market would self-regulate and return to a full-employment equilibrium by itself.

These days, Pigou’s name is most associated with greenhouse gas emissions, but not in an Earth First! activist sort of way. Instead, it’s Pigou who is invoked by highly credible, widely respected center-right economists like Harvard’s own N. Greg Mankiw. Mankiw went so far as to form a “Pigou Club” in 2006.

But Pigou and Pigou’s thought have a great deal to offer those calling for redistribution. In his magnum opus, The Economics of Welfare, Pigou wove a theoretical framework in which individual and societal wellbeing were fundamentally at odds. The rich, once rich, Pigou argued, had no rational reason to help the poor, just as a factory owner had no rational reason to stop polluting in the face of profits.

There seems to be a misconception that to embrace traditional economic theories, one must return to the simplicity of Adam Smith’s optimistic dictum that acting in self-interest ultimately provides the greatest possible benefit for society. Pigou’s view is, of course, more realistic than Smith’s. Competition, when the cards are stacked, can hurt losers more than it benefits winners. Some regulation, Pigou thought, was necessary for maximizing economic growth.

But growing the pie, for Pigou, was not the ultimate end. Like generations of Utilitarians before him, he was concerned with effecting “the greatest happiness for the greatest number,” as Bentham described the principle. If the rich weren’t even able to spend all their money, why should the poor not use some of the excess? To that end, distribution was a necessary consideration of any good government. The free market worked well in providing incentives, in calibrating needs, in allowing people to choose within constraints. But it did not necessarily effect the most happiness for the most people.

Pigou lived in a time when income inequality was recognized as a growing trend, but he would likely have been shocked by the concentration of capital in the hands of the wealthiest one percent today. How, in a system ostensibly designed to benefit society, so few should be endowed with so much, would have been hard for him to justify., even from his fairly conservative point of view.

This is not to say that we all ought to adopt a Utilitarian framework. Indeed, for complicated reasons, Pigou himself would probably argue that not all should think in those terms. It is, however, to assert that feeling positively inclined towards redistribution need not be conceived of as a “fringe” position, but a mainstream one. Indeed, redistribution should be considered a tenet of economic thought in the mainstream—by critics, by economists, and by policymakers. It is certainly convenient for the wealthiest one percent, along with those who benefit from that one percent’s continued prosperity, to consider redistribution to be the merely folly of irrational idealists. If, however, we desire a culture that promotes social and economic justice, we must begin to recognize redistribution as an economic concept with roots not in socialist thought, but also in the beliefs of the mainstream, and no less applicable in our day than in Pigou’s.

By Alli Welton

Over twelve hundred people have been arrested. Nine Nobel Peace Prize laureates, The New York Times, state governors, members of Congress from both parties, and hundreds of his own grassroots organizers are urging Obama to say no.

What issue could spark unrest so strong and widespread?

A pipeline that, in essence, signals our admission of failure and refusal to continue to fight in the face of climate change. A pipeline that may kill more jobs than it creates; a pipeline whose approval process unveiled serious corruption within the Obama administration.

Keystone XL (KXL) is an export pipeline proposed by Transcanada, a Calgary-based energy infrastructure developer, which would carry oil from the tar sands in Alberta, Canada down to the Gulf of Mexico. Beyond its serious implications for climate change in its continued dependence on fossil fuels, it threatens the source of drinking water for 20 million Midwesterners, the health and livelihoods of indigenous communities, and several important ecosystems. Building KXL would, at best, create only a few thousand temporary jobs and might even increase overall unemployment, despite Transcanada’s attempts to portray it as a boost for the economy.

It is up to President Obama to decide whether or not it is in the nation’s interest to grant the presidential permit required for the construction of KXL. In the past months he has been the target of widespread protests, with environmental organizations resorting to civil disobedience tactics on a scale not seen since the environmental activism of the 1970s.

KXL would transport tar sands oil, which is the world’s most greenhouse-gas-intensive source of fossil fuels.  Bitumen (crude oil) is mixed up with sand; companies pump steam underground to liquefy and extract it in a highly inefficient process requiring large quantities of natural gas. Tar sands are the reason that Canada—with only 0.5% of the world’s population—is the world’s eighth-largest greenhouse gas emitter. The Albertan tar sands are the world’s second largest carbon store, and KXL is seen as the gateway to their further development, making it essentially a proxy for the fight against climate change.

KXL would furthermore run through the aquifer supplying drinking water to 20 million people in the Midwest—a BP-style oil spill could mean disaster in America’s agricultural heartland, and the likelihood of such a spill is frighteningly high. Transcanada’s existing Keystone pipeline is leaking at a rate that is 84 times higher than predicted by its operators, with 22,000 gallons spilled last year alone.

The Environmental Impact Statement, which assesses the project’s effect on the environment, does not consider KXL’s effect on wildfires, though it runs through high risk zones, including parts of Texas devastated by fire last summer; it also threatens several important ecosystems. Toxic runoff from the tar sands has led to abnormally high rates of cancer in the already marginalized First Nations indigenous communities downstream. KXL would undeniably aggravate the problem further.

Transcanada works hard to promote KXL, claiming it will create 250,000 to 550,000 jobs. However, Cornell University published a study revealing these numbers to be astoundingly incorrect. The job projections are based on false data, including a $7 billion budget of which only $3-4 billion is relevant to US job figures, $1 billion spent on an already-built pipeline that’s not part of KXL, and an unsubstantiated claim of 20,000 direct construction and manufacturing jobs for Americans. Accounting for these errors, Cornell found that KXL would create no more than 2,500-4,650 temporary jobs within the USA.

Furthermore, the economic impact of KXL might actually be harmful. Because KXL will divert oil now supplying the Midwest, it would likely raise the price of oil in the Midwest by 10 to 20 cents per gallon—a  serious blow to the agricultural economy.  Consequently, KXL may actually kill more jobs than it creates.

The environmental movement has kicked into high gear over KXL. In August, 1,252 people, including several Harvard affiliates, were arrested at the largest nonviolent civil disobedience protests in 30 years, organized by Tar Sands Action Network.  Anti-tar sands fervor has increasingly spread across the country since the protests.  Spontaneous protests against KXL have even arisen wherever President Obama or his aides go, including two at Harvard during IOP events with Jim Messina (campaign manager) and David Axelrod (senior strategist). As mentioned above, nine Nobel Peace Prize laureates, several state governors, and dozens of members of Congress have written to Obama, urging him to reject KXL. Occupy Houston and Occupy Atlanta have marched against KXL, and thousands of people rallied at the final State Department hearings in Washington, DC on October 7. Another rally is planned for November 6 in Washington.

There is speculation that KXL may turn out to be a crucial electoral question. More important to the overall campaign effort than losing the green vote for Obama would be the loss of those same activists with skills and enthusiasm for grassroots organizing, many of whom worked for him in 2008. To what extent would environmentalists actually abandon Obama over KXL?  At the protest during the Institute of Politics event with Jim Messina in September, 30 of the 60 protesters had volunteered for Obama in 2008; only five of them said they would work toward his reëlection if he allowed KXL to move forward.

Now, for the obvious question:  given the strong and well-founded opposition and the implications for his reëlection, why hasn’t President Obama rejected KXL?

One possible—though disappointing and troubling—answer is corruption, which Obama had promised would never exist in his transparent administration.

Cardno Entrix, the company hired by the State Department to complete an environmental review and the public hearings on KXL, is a contractor for Transcanada, which it publicly considers among its major clients.  Senators Bernie Sanders (I-VT), Patrick Leahy (D-VT), and Ron Wyden (D-OR) have all written letters to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton expressing “serious concerns” about the objectivity of the environmental review due to the inappropriate relationships between Cardno Entrix and Transcanada.

This is only part of the story—the corruption runs deeper. Emails reveal that the State Department cheered on Paul Elliot, Transcanada’s top lobbyist for KXL, even gave advice on how to win support for the pipeline. The investigation by Friends of the Earth, a national environmental organization, has uncovered very close ties between the State Department and several other Transcanada lobbyists—many of whom worked previously for the State Department or were major fundraisers for Hillary Clinton’s 2008 election campaign.

President Obama will announce his decision sometime before the end of the year.  Will he risk perpetuating damaging climate change and the loss of hundreds of dedicated campaign organizers for a pipeline with no real benefit to the country?  We hope not.

By Sabrina Gharib Lee

I first began writing about final clubs because I thought they were on their way out. As a young, hopeful sophomore still new to the ways of Harvard, I believed that once male final clubs were exposed for what they are, they would quickly fall out of fashion. And so I began writing, denouncing the rape-permissive attitudes that pervaded male final clubs, and I held my breath as I waited for the revolution.

Needless to say, I was wrong. Two years after I began writing about final clubs and two hundred and twenty years after the first club was founded in 1791, the clubs are still here in all of their gender-exclusive glory. At some point over the last two years, I stopped holding my breath: I arrived at the realization that final clubs aren’t going anywhere anytime soon because they derive power from larger social structures that condone gender exclusivity and offer long-standing patterns of male control over social space and networks. It is, in other words, no coincidence that Harvard students have largely failed to mobilize around initiatives that protest the male-dominated nature of our social spaces and all the social dynamics that come with them. Final clubs are reflections of the imperfect, unequal world we live in, and as long as those larger social dynamics persist, so, too, in all likelihood, will heteronormative and male-dominated spaces on our campus.

This piece aims to reconceptualize the final club issue by grounding it in this realization. I begin with the question, “What do we do with the knowledge that final clubs’ power is coextensive with larger structures of exclusion?” In answering this question, I advocate for one of three possible courses of action. The first possible course of action, as articulated by Nataliya Nedzhvetskaya, is acceptance: students should accept and participate in final club culture in order to better prepare themselves for the competitive world beyond Harvard.  The second course of action calls for a deprivileging of social issues surrounding final clubs; it asks, “If final clubs are simply one entry point for activism around larger social issues, why not refocus our efforts on more prominent and influential discriminatory institutions?” The final course of action is resistance: it argues that students must engage in acts of resistance against final clubs and attempt to remodel larger social structures and dynamics through practices of everyday life. The remainder of this piece will advocate for this last course of action and argue that because dominant power structures are sustained and perpetuated through the repetition of deeply ingrained social rituals, students must abstain from punching final clubs this fall.

This argument is based in a theoretical framework that lends importance to everyday behaviors. One theorist whose work has shaped this framework is feminist philosopher Judith Butler, who argues that dominant power structures cannot reproduce and sustain themselves, but are both perpetuated and transformed through individual practices. Butler shapes her discussion of gender around the hypothesis that the repetition of certain rituals—wearing a dress, for example—may strengthen and ossify existing social structures, whereas subversive rituals, such as cross-dressing, may precipitate “a crisis of knowledge, a situation of not-knowing” that exposes existing dominant cultural definitions and ideals as tenuous, contested and ungrounded.  Importantly, Butler argues that these subversive practices of everyday life destabilize existing norms and hierarchies and encourage their revision.

Butler’s framework has important implications for the final club issue. Even if punching a male final club will not make or break the club itself, Butler shows us that the ritual of attending a punch event, and of eventually participating in final clubs as a member, helps sustain and ossify the larger social structures and the historical patterns that guarantee the survival and cultural supremacy of final clubs and other discriminatory institutions. On the other hand, not punching a final club by no means guarantees these institutions’ immediate demise; however, abstaining from the process—especially when that decision is made public—is productively disruptive and initiates a process whereby larger systems of exclusion become undermined and open to revision.

Why, then, should Harvard students subscribe to the framework offered by Butler and let it guide their behavior during this punch season? Substantiating Butler’s understanding of everyday life empirically would be difficult indeed, and even if there were a more abundant body of research attempting to explore the validity of Butler’s claim, that research on its own could never put to rest the question at the heart of the final club issue: is the personal political? We all are eagerly awaiting the development of an idea world that will answer that question with certitude, but in the interim, we face important ethical decisions, including the decision of whether or not we punch final clubs or participate in their various rituals. This piece takes the stance that, while we wait for the answer to this question to arise from our experiences, research, and meditations, we must assume that the personal is political, for there is too much to lose if we erroneously assume otherwise. We must, in other words, assume that we have political agency and influence even in our private lives because there is almost nothing to lose if we are wrong and because we stand to gain everything if we are right.

We therefore must not turn away from the final club issue by taking the first course of action (acceptance) or the second (deprivileging final club issues). We must guide our actions with the hope that engaging in acts of resistance against final clubs may disrupt and help redefine social patterns. And we cannot risk accepting or ignoring discriminatory institutions such as final clubs, even if we are addressing related social justice issues in other aspects of our lives, for it is possible—or, according to Butler, probable—that in doing so, we help sustain oppressive historical patterns and ossify existing systems of exclusion.

As a senior, therefore, I arrive where I began as a sophomore: Don’t punch. We must continue with the project of resistance in our everyday lives during the final club punch season, even with the knowledge that such resistance may not effect immediate or concrete changes in the institutions we boycott or practices from which we abstain. In The Practice of Everyday Life, cultural theorist Michel de Certeau observes that individuals, through rituals of consumption and participation, engage in “infinitesimal transformations of and within the dominant cultural economy in order to adapt it to their own interests and their own rules.”  By not punching final clubs this fall and by disrupting the rituals that surround them more generally, we aspire to engage in such transformations and to craft new patterns of behavior through everyday acts of resistance, thus shaping the institutions that define our social landscape instead of letting them shape us.