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>> Tax Wall Street! End AIDS!
>> Tax Wall Street! End AIDS!
>> Tax Wall Street! End AIDS!
>> What does Occupy Wall Street have to do
with the ***/AIDS crisis? In The Life followed
a protest in lower Manhattan to find out.
>> Act up!
Fight back!
Fight AIDS!
>> Today is an action to honor the 25th anniversary
of ACT UP in which we're joining forces with
the Occupy movement to call for a
financial speculation tax.
>> Some say direct action AIDS advocacy
was born on Wall Street.
It was here in 1987
that the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power,
or ACT UP, held its first march
to protest corporate greed
as well as the high price and
lack of availability of *** medication.
>> The AIDS activist movement has always been
very much based in social justice issues.
The people who aren't able to get jobs,
who are most deeply impacted
by the financial crisis
are people living in poverty...
It's people of color.
Similarly the *** response impacts
people living in poverty, African American,
Latino, young gay men.
>> Housing works!
>> Housing works!
>> That shared commitment to social justice
brought together a coalition of health care,
AIDS advocacy and Occupy Wall Street groups
to fight for healthcare issues.
>> We believe health care...
>> We believe health care...
>> is a human right!
>> is a human right!
>> Those industries, the financial industries,
aren't paying their fair share of the costs
for supporting public health.
>> We know where the money is!
>> It's on Wall Street!
>> It's on Wall Street!
>> Together these groups demanded
a financial transaction tax
on Wall Street to fund public initiatives,
including global warming, universal healthcare
and job creation and an end to the AIDS crisis.
>> There's this misconception that
the *** crisis is under control.
Last year we had 1.8 million deaths,
2.6 million new infections.
We've seen in the last 2 years
the amount of funding available
for global AIDS decreased
when we needed it to be increasing.
>> With this very small tax,
we could generate over 400 billion dollars
for health care, the fight against AIDS
and a safety net.
It could totally change the outcome of AIDS.
It could turn the tide.
>> First proposed by famed economist
John Maynard Keynes in 1936,
a financial transaction tax is a small tax
on trades of stocks, bonds, currencies and derivatives.
>> The tax would be automatically applied
to any of those transactions.
The simplest would be a flat tax of around 5 cents
on every 100 dollars worth of transactions.
>> Over 30 countries worldwide have
enacted financial transaction taxes.
It remains to be seen whether
there is political will in the United States
for a tax on banks. But the people we spoke to
were optimistic that just as with the early AIDS crisis,
direct action today can bring change.
>> I consider ACT UP sort of the mother ship.
A lot of the tactics and the way of organizing
that Occupy is currently using
came out of direct action
activism that was happening
in response to the AIDS crisis.
>> Over the years we've learned
that by doing demonstration,
by drawing media and public attention to issues,
you get the voting public interested and you also,
in a way, embarrass politicians
for not supporting just causes.
We're hoping that this will be
the first in a number of joint actions
that Occupy and ACT UP will do in the future
to draw attention to the need
for a financial transaction tax.
>> It's been amazing to be able
to work with them,
ACT UP to work with occupy,
to educate those folks who didn't know
about the AIDS crisis, what's happening now,
what happened in the past. We're basically,
we're returning to the scene of the crime.
ACT UP was here 25 years ago.
They came back 24 years ago and shut down trading
on the stock market. We're here again,
still fighting the same fight.