Ha, sorry Kickstand. I've just encountered your attitude about Bono too many times. You didn't explain why Bono's a hypocrite, you just keep talking about it like it's a fact.
Here's what a few minutes of Googling will get you on this subject. What Googling won't turn up is a lot of preaching about the evils of capitalism, why we are all going to hell, why Bono thinks he's Jesus, etc. Sorry to do the cut and paste routine (which normally I despise) but I just wanted to throw out some of the stuff of which my high horse is built.
Bold font for those who hate my long posts! I've tried to bold those statements that are relevant to accusations made about Bono in this thread.
Here are some soundbites and other news items about this abominable fraud, Bono, and his all talk/no walk charity work:
"[In 1986 my wife and I] went to work in Ethiopia for a month," Bono recalls. "We worked in an orphanage, in one of those awful camps, and we'd wake up in the morning to the sight of thousands of people walking through the mist in the hopes of getting some food. My experience there was very hard to forget but...I did. We went back to our daily life in Ireland and me being in a band, but we'd always hoped we might be able to look at the structure of the problem. There's a certain kind of poverty that is structural, not just misfortune, and so when I heard about this plan to use the millennium as an opportunity to give the poorest countries a chance to start again, I thought, 'This is major, and it's the right thing to do.'"
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"We may be the worst examples of the excesses of the West but in these meetings we represent the poor and take that job very seriously. I try to use my celebrity as a loudhailer for those who have lost their voice."
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"For what was once called foreign assistance, we now need two names: one you can call mercy and response to pandemic-type aid and you can’t hold people ransom to their governments on that. Then there is other aid called investment."
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"Doing business is sexy. Trade is sexy. Aid is not sexy if you’re an African. Africans don’t want aid but they need aid. What they really want and what their heart desires and what they truly deserve is trade as a way out of their present circumstances; to do business and the dignity of doing business together on an even playing field.
So, the thing I will come away with at the end of this trip, apart from some of the more tragic moments that are hard to forget, is this rather intoxicating ‘can do’ attitude that we’ve just discovered in this new Africa, like the A to Z textile company we visited that makes bed nets and polo shirts for its next door neighbor. There are new burgeoning African businesses about to break through if we give them the right breaks."
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"Product RED, a project created by Irish musician Bono and Bobby Shriver that that aims to raise money for the Global Fund To Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria by donating a portion of profits from a range of branded products, raised more than $10 million in the United Kingdom from February through September, according to Global Fund Director Richard Feachem, the New York Times reports ... The funds generated from U.K. sales will be allocated to HIV testing and treatment services for HIV-positive women and children living in Rwanda and to supporting AIDS orphans in Swaziland, Feachem said (New York Times, 10/4)".
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"On Monday U.S. mobile giant Motorola unveiled a series of cell-phone handsets specifically created to help eliminate the epidemic as part of an initiative launched by Bono earlier this year. Specifically, about $18 (10 pounds) from sales of the Red MOTOSLVR series that are sold in Britain will be allocated to the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, in addition to 5 percent of monthly revenue generated by the sales or use of the Red model.
Bono has succeeded not only in getting Motorola to design a handset to cater specifically to the cause, but he has also gotten telecommunications providers and retailers BT Mobile, Carphone Warehouse, Fresh, O2, Orange, Tesco Mobile, T-Mobile, Virgin Mobile and Vodafone to take part in the campaign and donate part of their earnings from the business the Red series generates to the fund as well."
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"[Bono] first became interested in Africa's economic plight in the 1980s, after the Live Aid concerts that raised money for Ethiopian famine victims. "My wife Ali and I ended up going to Ethiopia for some time doing relief work. We were so high on the idea that Live Aid raised $100 million—and then you discover years later that that's what Africa pays every couple of weeks on old loans. It's kind of a shock. I thought we'd never forget what we'd been through in Ethiopia, but you go back to your life and then those images just fade away."
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'"I think that politicians are attracted at first by the celebrity," says Harvard economics guru Jeffrey Sachs, who has huddled with Bono and the Pope on the debt issue. "But once they meet him, they find that he is an outstandingly capable interlocutor."
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"Bono says he has been thinking for years about the need to market his ideas for helping the poor in a less "misty-eyed, bleeding-heart" way, more like a "sports-shoe company does or, dare I say it, a cigarette company does"."
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"The real surprise is that Bono turns out to be a card-carrying capitalist. He wants companies selling Red products to make a profit by helping the poor - doing well by doing good.
"Many of the world's greatest minds are in commerce," he says. And if there is something in it for them, he thinks, companies will spend far more money promoting Red than Bono could ever hope to mobilise through charity. ... He wants "Red to have a certain sex appeal, smartness: it doesn't talk down, or attempt to guilt trip people."
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And here are some quotes from the hypocrite himself:
"As a rock star, I have two instincts, I want to have fun, and I want to change the world. I have a chance to do both. "
"Distance does not decide who is your brother and who is not. The church is going to have to become the conscience of the free market if it's to have any meaning in this world - and stop being its apologist."
"I'm not a whinging liberal. I'm no hippie with flowers in my hair."
"I'm tired of dreaming. I'm into doing at the moment. It's like, let's only have goals that we can go after."
"U2 is about the impossible. Politics is the art of the possible. They're very different, and I'm resigned to that now."
"Here's some good news -- [looks at President Bush] -- for you, Mr. President. After 9-11 we were told America would have no time for the World's poor. We were told America would be taken up with its own problems of safety. And it's true these are dangerous times, but America has not drawn the blinds and double-locked the doors. In fact, you have doubled aid to Africa. You have tripled funding for global health. And Mr. President, your emergency plan for AIDS relief and support of the Global Fund -- you and Congress -- have put 700,000 people onto life-saving anti-retroviral drugs and provided 8 million bed nets to protect children from malaria."
'Bono, co-founder of DATA and lead singer of U2, said yesterday afternoon, "Senator Mike DeWine has pulled off something special in the Senate today. Thanks to his leadership, this extra money for the Global Fund will mean a lifeline for somebody's mother, somebody's father, somebody's sister, somebody's son. It's no surprise to me that he, Senator Rick Santorum and Senator Richard Durbin have once again rolled up their sleeves in defense of the most vulnerable on the planet against AIDS, TB and Malaria."
The Global Fund is a Geneva-based foundation that supports locally-designed programs in 130 countries. An analysis from Friends of the Global Fight suggests that this $100 million could support an additional 630,000 bed nets to fight malaria or treat 80,000 people suffering from tuberculosis.
Overall, the Committee approved $3.4 billion for fighting global HIV/AIDS."
So, to sum up: hate U2's music if you want, criticize Bono's efforts, assume he's being used, but, please-- the man is neither "evil" nor a "hypocrite". His work does real good in the world, however many mistakes are made, and more to the point he has never presented himself as anything but transparently capitalistic and tainted by worldliness. He has gone with the flow of capitalism in order to live up to a more pragmatic idea of Christianity, and always always always accepted the fallibility of others as well as his own.
I have spoke with the tongue of angels
I have held the hand of a devil
I thought i was at u2 forum again when i saw this thread! It would be just tooo easy to say things like hypocrite about Bono. Although i am also sick of his face, as an hardcore fan for years i just need to say something about them. First off - i dont want to go into discussion about his charity work. But, apparently, he is trying to do something. I dont like the way he is doing it nowadays. I prefer Alis way (his beautiful wife). Most of you probably dont know that his wife is trying to help victims of Chernobyl for 15 years in a very quiet way. She is very intelligent, nice and beautiful woman. The fact that he has chosen her over some supermodel says a lot to me about Bono. (they are childhood sweethearts).
