The Frontman

by Harry Browne

  When [King] said ‘I have a dream’, people think he was talking about the American dream, and it’s really not true. It was a dream big enough to fit the whole world. And then I mentioned that it was also an Irish dream, it was a Mexican dream, it was an Israeli dream, it was a Palestinian dream. And I got into terrible trouble for the ‘Palestinian dream’ piece. That’s when they got fed up. That’s when they said, ‘go home!’ And I’m thinking, how could you not regard the figure of Dr King as standing for universal human rights, whatever the geography? There was no problem in the new administration – but in the media there was some real push-back.91

  It’s interesting that Bono misremembered himself as saying ‘Mexican dream’, which would probably have been slightly controversial and even a little bit brave, had he actually done so, in the context of US immigration policy. But the notion that his Palestinian ‘piece’ led to his being scorned, abused, told to go home – that’s an exaggeration, at the very least. A small number of mainstream reports of the concert suggest that Bono ‘courted controversy’, or words to that effect, but the controversy itself, the ‘real push-back’, is conspicuous by its absence from the online record.

  This appears to be another example of Bono’s version of himself as an activist, making dangerous noise and banging on doors, speaking truth to power. The reality is that he has not said anything that even begins to discommode Washington’s powerful elite in at least two decades. Why would he, when he is part of that elite?

  It is an elite that has been instrumental in suppressing the ‘Palestinian dream’, even while periodically alluding to its sort-of legitimacy. The phony neutrality of some American rhetoric about the Israel–Palestine conflict is crucial to the maintenance of the oppressive status quo, and Bono has been a part of that phenomenon. A year after the inauguration, Bono was again paying lip-service to Palestine, this time without mentioning Israel. In that decade-preview column for the New York Times, in a section headed ‘Viva la (Nonviolent) Revolución’, Bono lovingly quoted Obama, wished ill on the regimes of various official enemies – Iran, North Korea, Myanmar – and then said he was ‘placing his hopes on the possibility … that people in places filled with rage and despair, places like the Palestinian territories, will in the days ahead find among them their Gandhi, their King, their Aung San Suu Kyi’.92 The patronising ascription of raw, thoughtless emotions such as rage and despair to subordinate peoples was straight out of the imperial playbook; the same can be said for the hint that he blamed the Palestinians themselves – thousands of whom languished in Israeli jails without any proven connection to violent resistance – for failing to produce a nonviolent leader, and therefore blocking their own release from rage and despair.

  Bono was not finished dreaming sweet dreams for Israel and Palestine. In April 2012 he paid what was described in the press as a ‘private visit’ to Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. One Palestinian report said he visited Bethlehem’s Church of the Nativity and other sites on the West Bank.93 In his suite at Jerusalem’s King David Hotel – site of an infamous 1946 Zionist bombing that killed ninety-one people – he left behind a note, with a sketch of a rather vicious-looking ‘dog called Hope’. Signed by him – and, it appears, Ali on her own behalf and that of their two young sons – it looked like a piece of poetic prose.

  In Jerusalem hope springs eternal. Hope is like a faithful dog sometimes she runs ahead of me to check the future, to sniff it out and then I call to her: Hope, Hope, come here, and she comes to me. I pet her, she eats out of my hand and sometimes she stays behind, near some other hope maybe to sniff out whatever was. Then I call her my Despair I call out to her. Heh, my little Despair, come here and she comes and snuggles up, and again I call her Hope.

  Beside his signature, Bono added: ‘with great thanks for great room in great hotel in great city’. The note was widely reported, especially in Israel, and seemed to be something along the lines of ‘Bono’s hope for the Middle East’. It took a U2 fan blog to spot on the note, in tiny writing, the words ‘reading Amichai’, and then to discover that Bono was merely quoting, from an English translation, the late Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai.94

  The Israeli website Ynet reported that Bono had hired a top Israeli security firm for his trip – as used by Bill Gates and Warren Buffett – and turned down a meeting with President Shimon Peres, citing his promise to his children that it would be a low-key visit, but promising to have a pint with Peres at some future time. Ynet quoted a note from Bono to the president praising Peres’s ‘special mind’ and the tourist attractions of Tel Aviv, noting that ‘history is written in the Holy Land every day’, and signing himself ‘your admirer’.95

  The Israeli authorities were happy to make use of Bono’s apparent friendship. In late 2012, when controversy flared up about the many Irish artists who had chosen to boycott Israel, that country’s eccentric deputy ambassador in Ireland, Nurit Tinari-Modai, told a newspaper not only that Riverdance had played in Jerusalem, Tel Aviv and Haifa, but that ‘Bono is a regular visitor to Israel with his family’96 – ‘regular’ being most likely a diplomatic exaggeration. (Unlike artists including Brian Eno, Roger Waters and Ken Loach, Bono has never backed a cultural boycott of Israel; but nor have he or U2 played there.)

  This diplomatic implication of a Bono endorsement of Israel appeared even while Israel was again bombing Gaza – but Bono didn’t see fit to make any public pronouncement distancing himself from it. And so, at the time of writing, the world still awaits – or it doesn’t – a Bono pronouncement on Israel, the occupation, and the resistance to it, in words that go beyond carefully balanced dreams.

  CUI BONO? PHILANTHROPY

  No one can be in any doubt that, whatever the character of his interventions, Bono has been generous with his words and with his time for the causes he supports. But it would appear that Bono does not set out to do good in the world with much (relatively speaking) of his own money. Trevor Neilson, a man who enjoys the peculiar job description of ‘celebrity philanthropy adviser’, recalled in a New Yorker article how, as they were seeking to get their DATA lobbying organisation funded in 2001, Bono and Bobby Shriver came to him looking for help raising $3 million, a sum that even then Bono would easily have had at his fingertips.97 (It is hard to imagine Shriver was not equally blessed.) Time magazine, ever-ready with a compliment and/or a rationalisation for its favoured public figures, said that Bono ‘refused to bankroll it’ to ‘ensure that DATA was divorced from the stigma of vanity’.98 Neilson, who was then working for the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, ‘helped to get DATA off the ground’ in 2002, said Bono, with Gates money, and other benefactors chipped in too. Presumably the Gates and Soros grants that funded DATA had never been married to ‘the stigma of vanity’.

  According to Neilson, who in the New Yorker article expressed his admiration and appreciation of the ‘sweat equity’ that Bono brings to causes, the singer ‘doesn’t spend millions of dollars of his own money. He rallies public opinion and lobbies governments.’99 One suspects that Neilson’s formulation is somewhat misleading, and that Bono has surely spent ‘millions’ of his own money on philanthropic causes – just perhaps not the same ones with which he is most publicly associated, nor on the same scale as some other rich celebrities. Nonetheless, Neilson’s line is the nearest we can get, in the opaque world of Bono and his finances, to a flat statement from someone reasonably knowledgeable on the subject about the volume of Bono’s charitable giving, and Nielson says it is not very large compared to some of his peers. Bono himself has said that U2 prefers to keep its philanthropy below the radar; the only amount that has been publicised recently in Ireland is €5 million, given by U2 as a whole, for an admirable music-education scheme for young people. At any rate, only the most crass and superficial observer would seek to judge someone’s commitment to ‘good causes’ with a dollar amount; the question ‘How much does he give?’ has trailed Bono more than most in recent years because of publicity around his investments and tax arrangem
ents, but he is perfectly entitled not to be drawn into answering it.

  DATA, the Bono-founded organisation funded by Gates and Soros, stands not merely for Debt AIDS Trade Africa, but also for Bono’s Sachs-bred devotion to hard, measurable facts when it came to poverty-reduction and AIDS treatment. With DATA as his lobbying arm, in 2004 Bono co-founded another US non-profit, ONE: The Campaign to Make Poverty History, to do the ‘rallying [of] public opinion’; the short form, ONE, comes from the title of one of U2’s best songs, and has stuck. ONE was initially a coalition of mainly US-based organisations, including Oxfam America, Save the Children, World Vision and (confusingly) DATA itself, and it also invited members of the public to join. Like DATA before it, it got a significant lump of its first money from the Gates Foundation.

  By the end of 2007, it seemed the two organisations belonged together, and so they merged into ONE. The new body’s first chief executive officer, David Lane, came straight from the Gates Foundation, where he had held various senior policy positions.100 But Lane was no mere charity case: a Washington insider, he had also served in the Clinton administration and as a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, and when he left ONE in 2011 he slid back into government under Obama as an ‘ambassador’ to the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation in Rome.101 When he did so, ONE replaced him with an Englishman, Michael Elliot, who had been editor of Time International, the global version of Time, when Bono had all those nice things written about him, and was named the magazine’s Person of the Year (along with his benefactors Bill and Melinda Gates) in 2005. Elliot had also worked as a journalist and columnist at such hotbeds of radical thought as Fortune and Newsweek. As of late 2012, ONE’s board of directors is largely a parade of middle-aged white men, mostly Americans from the mingling worlds of business, government and philanthropy. Exceptions to the dominant race and gender include Condoleezza Rice and – the only one of the nineteen who actually lives and works in the developing world – Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, Nigerian finance minister and a long-time Bono favourite.102 She was, you may recall, the sole living, thinking African whose ‘voice’ was readable in Bono’s 2006 edition of the London Independent (see Chapter 2). Her Harvard degree and spell at the World Bank no doubt render her suitable to sit beside, say, former US treasury secretary and Harvard president Laurence Summers at a ONE board meeting. A charitable view of the board is that its members were chosen for their powerful connections.

  It is easy to mock the level of activism ONE encourages among its 3 million or so ‘members’ – ‘joining’ is as easy as entering a name and email address. Indeed U2 concert-goers have been given a chance to sign up on the spot, as an Irish journalist observed at a 2009 gig, when after the song ‘One’,

  Bono urged the crowd to take out mobile phones and sign up to the advocacy organization of the same name, which he co-founded, the number of which appeared on the giant screen. When only a sprinkling of phones lit up, he suggested that we take out our phones anyway, to show the power of one. It was an odd moment, one of a few in the show that gave it the sense of a sanitized branded experience rather than a rock show, something tweaked and streamlined to generate the optimal consumer reaction…103

  However, despite such bland provenance and promotion, it is surprising that some of ONE’s public work is actually reasonably spirited and engaging. The one.org website encourages ‘ONE Act a Week’. In late August 2012 the act for the week was to send a tweet – the text was provided – to three US senators to thank them for helping to improve transparency about the lobbying efforts of US-based oil and gas companies in the developing world. (A perfectly decent campaign, by the way.) ‘Time: 5 minutes. Level of difficulty: Easy.’ Five minutes was a generous allotment for this act, presumably allowing for the member to ‘Read more’ and thus begin to understand why they were being asked to do this. Beside this injunction to action is a nice little cartoony video featuring Bill and Melinda Gates explaining in numbingly simple, studiously uncontroversial terms why the right sort of aid works a treat for making things better in the developing world, from building schools to improving soil fertility.

  Nonetheless, anyone regularly reading the blog on ONE’s website – judging by the number of comments, there are very few who do so – would actually learn a thing or two about global poverty, including even some things that don’t entirely fit with the Bono world-view: a link, for example, to a story (albeit on the official Voice of America website) about an academic study showing that the vast majority of the world’s poorest people live not in very poor countries – in other words, the ones consistently targeted by Bono’s campaigning over the years – but in middle-income countries, where the problem is not desperate national poverty but enormous internal inequality.104 It is hard to imagine ONE will take this information on board, but at least it helped to disseminate it.

  ONE clearly employs (in both paid and volunteer capacities) a lot of energetic young people skimming merrily along the surface of the serious issues that confront the world. Its publicity is full of images of shiny-faced workers in black ONE T-shirts gathered for a tiny ‘demonstration’, or stretched along the steps of the US Capitol with their fact-filled clipboards, or at the Republican convention with their iPads. Those young people and their activities on three continents are, to a huge extent, what ONE ‘does’, how it spends its money, what it is, largely within the limits set by its narrow and neoliberal leadership. What ONE isn’t is a charitable foundation.

  Some of the negative coverage of ONE has not quite caught the distinction that Bono’s ONE is not a charitable organization, but rather one devoted to lobbying and public information campaigns. Thus, Britain’s Daily Mail screamed in 2010: ‘Bono’s ONE foundation under fire for giving little over 1% of funds to charity’. (This was one of those ‘under fire’ headlines in which the newspaper itself appears to be the only one firing.) In fact, US tax records showed 98.8 per cent of ONE’s $15 million intake for the year 2008 went on salary and expenses, with a negligible $180,000 slipping out to three charities.105

  However, since ONE is not in fact a foundation but an advocacy non-profit, and since it does not, exactly, solicit money from the public, but gets most of its dough from the bottomless pit that is the Gates Foundation, this was something of a non-story, at least in standard media terms. (As it happens, the ONE annual report for 2010 acknowledges that improvement was needed in communicating the ‘we don’t want your money’ message to the public. That report indicates that ‘contributions’, as opposed to ‘grants’, fell from more than $2.6 million in 2009 to less than $700,000 in 2010.106)

  Even the ONE salaries, apparently averaging out somewhere around $80,000 each in 2008, were not scandalous. What got the media’s attention in 2010, however, was an example of the sort of ‘expenses’ often incurred by a lobbying organisation. The UN was meeting in New York to discuss progress, or otherwise, on the Millennium Development Goals, and the New York Post reported that a string of couriers had dropped by the Murdoch newspaper’s office, bearing gifts from ONE:

  Nothing says, ‘Wipe out AIDS and poverty’ like Band-Aids and a black-and-white cookie …

  The items were part of a pricey pile of puzzling loot, which also included a $15 bag of Starbucks coffee, a $15 Moleskine leather notebook, a $20 water bottle and a plastic ruler.

  The stash came in four, oversized shoe boxes, delivered one at a time via expensive messenger …

  Kimberly Hunter, spokeswoman for DC-based ONE, declined to say how much money the organization shelled out for the publicity blitz.

  ‘Sometimes it’s pretty hard to get through to reporters with the information about the lives of the world’s poorest people,’ Hunter said. ‘We think it’s important enough to try and break through the clutter … That’s why we sent the boxes.’

  Poverty-stricken African kids live on less than $1.25 a day – ‘about the cost of the cookie in this box’, ONE contended [in a note in the box] …

  The Starbucks brew – made with Et
hiopian beans – came with a suggestion to drum up support for investing in African agriculture.107

  Bono’s name featured, inevitably and unflatteringly, in the headline.

  It was a story custom-made for media righteousness: why spend a buck and a quarter on a cookie for a journalist when you could have doubled the money available to some kid in Africa? Journalists didn’t, and don’t, tend to reveal all the other times they got a goody bag from a PR agency working for some business client.

  However, hidden behind the unsurprising story about ONE’s devotion to corporate-style public relations, and the non-story about its non-charitable purpose, was an unexplored story about ONE’s growing devotion to a particular form of ‘sustainable agriculture’ in the developing world, supposedly embodied in that Ethiopian coffee. Yet again, Bono’s agenda was working in the service not simply of ‘the world’s poorest people’ but of corporations seeking to depict what’s good for them as what’s good for the poor.

  GRASSROOTS: AN AGRICULTURAL AGENDA

  Bono’s ONE has got a tremendous amount of funding from the Gates Foundation: a total of $83 million between 2006 and 2009 to last until the end of 2012, with a little $1 million top-up in March 2012, according to the Gates Foundation’s own online records. (The campaign’s annual report is not required to be fully and transparently detailed about its sources of money.) Given that fact, and given that the first CEO of the united ONE organisation came in directly from that foundation, ONE can legitimately be seen not only as Bono’s main humanitarian vehicle of recent years, but also as part of the information and campaigning operation of the vast $30-plus billion Gates charitable fortune. That foundation is prepared to spend money in order to associate itself with allegedly credible voices on global issues: for example, in 2010 it began to part-fund (through a grant in 2011 of about $2.5 million, or less than 0.01 per cent of the Gates total endowment) an area of the British Guardian newspaper’s website devoted to global development. The foundation’s subtle logo can now be seen pasted onto legitimate journalistic stories in that section of one of the world’s most popular journalistic websites.108