First, a few facts about the issue: There is no “Obama plan”. Unlike the 1994-94 “Clinton health plan,” which famously turned Hillary Clinton into the caricature the Right loves to hate, President Obama made an early decision to leave the development of the plan’s specifics to Congress. Obama laid out what he wanted in health reform (a public plan, various new regulations on insurers, a new health care “exchange”, etc.), but rather than create a plan for which he would be directly accountable, he gave that responsibility to the House and Senate, many of whom are up for re-election next year. The result of that decision has been two separate bills that are different from each other in a number of ways – and a lot of back-and-forth on the financing and the reforms. The House plan is ready for a floor vote and (as of this blog) the Senate plan is still stuck in the Finance Committee.

On one side of this debate you have the opponents of health care reform. We have all seen them on tv and YouTube this past week, showing up at town hall meetings and turning discussions into rallies against reform. Though it is true that some of these folks are being turned out by the Republican establishment (conservative “tea party groups” and groups funded by insurance companies) most of the anger and fear being expressed at these town halls is genuine. Misinformation is being spread on talk radio, cable tv news shows and the internet; this bad info ranges from the ridiculous notion that the elderly will be forced to choose how to die, to the claim that liberty itself is at stake. Who wouldn’t be afraid of that if you didn’t know any better? With the government taking larger-than-usual steps to handle the financial and economic problems of the last year and getting little return, the public is offering a slimmer-than-usual margin of error on health care reform. Add in some horror stories about big government and “socialized medicine,” and you have a lot of genuine fear.

But just because something is genuine, doesn’t mean that it is legitimate. Let’s face it, health policy is very complicated and most people do not understand the basics of our health care system – not to mention the extent to which government is already involved in the system. This has been illustrated by a scenario which has played out at numerous town halls already – the senior citizen shouting that “the government needs to keep its hands off my Medicare.” (Medicare, of course, is a government insurance program that covers tens of millions of people.) For the members of Congress holding these town halls, it is a difficult challenge – how does one deal with a constituent who clearly does not understand the issue, but do so without coming off as an elitist?

The Republicans and conservative groups understand all this too well and are taking full advantage of it. And they are shameless in their spread of misinformation because the political stakes are so high. They know that if the Democrats win health care reform, it will be yet another nail in the Republican coffin. Though we Americans tend to pride ourselves on our “can do” spirit, deep down inside we want a safety net available for when we need it. Once it is provided, Washington dare not try to take it away. That is why even the most passionate conservative Republican in the House supports keeping Medicare in place – the seniors in their district would vote them out of office in a heartbeat if their Medicare was threatened, let alone taken away. When it comes to health care reform, the same principle holds true, and whichever party solves the health care crisis will enjoy decades of political dividends.

But this is not a war of ideas. The Republican solutions to health care are far out of the mainstream (i.e. weak insurance plans with $5,000+ deductibles and weak consumer protections), so the only thing they can do is drown out the debate with fear and anger, hoping to kill the bills. The same tactic worked for the Democrats and progressive groups back in 2005 when Bush proposed to turn part of Social Security over to Wall Street. The Dems did not have a solution to the Social Security solvency issue, so it made sense to focus on the risks Bush’s plan would create for retirees. Progressive groups – myself included at the time – ran town hall meetings, did district office visits with Congress members and organized press conferences to highlight the fears people had with the proposal. It was just a matter of time before Bush’s plan imploded. No alternative ideas were needed – all you need to do is rile people up, and organize them in a fashion that puts the proponents running for cover. It is a fairly simple concept that happens to work.

On the other side of the health care reform debate, there isn’t so much misinformation – but there is plenty of denial. President Obama is not calling for a Canadian-style single payer system – but he has called for a public plan that would compete with private insurers. Opponents of the public plan say that this is a trojan horse for single-payer -  and they’re correct. I worked for seven years for an organization that supports single-payer, and the public option was always understood to be a way to get your foot in the single payer door. This is supported by recent YouTube video clips of President Obama and Senator Barney Frank admitting that the public plan would eventually lead to the private insurers being forced out of the system and the evolution of a Medicare-style health insurance program that would take over. It is difficult if not impossible to honestly argue that you’re just looking for more “competition” by introducing a public plan in the face of video evidence like that, but yet that’s what the Dems are doing.

Given the failure of private insurance over the decades to make quality coverage affordable (nearly 15,000 people lose their insurance every day), I personally think that real reform cannot happen without a public option of some sort. Health care is so expensive that much of the private coverage is already subsidized in one way or another. Employer-sponsored health insurance would not exist if the government did not help employers by giving them a generous tax break for doing so. “Medicare Advantage” plans (which are private plans) could not offer benefits without relying on taxpayer dollars. Even Mitt Romney’s so-called “free market” health reform in Massachusetts feeds heavily from the public trough. The “free market” people demanding that the “government should stay out of health care” do not know what they are talking about. It is as simple as that.

At the same time, the conservative critics are correct about the state of Medicare funding – it is in horrible shape, and needs to be addressed. Democrats and progressives keep punting the ball because the answer is going to have to involve some combination of raising taxes and cutting benefits, and that is poison even in a non-election year. The Democrats’ hope is to deal with this issue in part by passing health care reform. Include some changes to Medicare and raise some taxes as part of the overall package, and the blowback is muffled by the gains.

Given how things are going, what is likely to happen is that either health care reform will die a very public death or the public option is going to be dropped from the final bill. It currently does not exist within the Senate bill, and it is so controversial in the House that, if it were put to a vote today, it wouldn’t pass. But even if the public option is dropped it would still be an uphill battle for Democrats and other proponents, as the misinformation campaign of the Right has branded everything and all things “health care reform” as poison. Reform may be damaged goods at this point; and if entertainers like that idiot Glen Beck could convince people that the House plan mandated euthanasia for the elderly, then they can convince them of just about anything. Until the bill is finally dead.

In 2008 and into 2009, large banking institutions looked to the government  to take a step further, and insure economic stability by providing direct government support to banks, insurance companies and financial institutions; all of this in order to avoid what was widely believed would be a complete economic meltdown. Government assistance extended beyond these institutions to large corporations, which received direct subsidies from the United States Government.

In October 2008 Clinton Administration Secretary of Labor Robert Reich stated what many were thinking about the manner in which these billions of dollars in government funds were being allocated:

“We have socialism for the rich, and capitalism for everyone else.“

But as the large corporations apply for government aid to survive, the nation’s attitude towards so-called “socialism” has begun to change. Less than a generation ago, the idea of universal government healthcare was opposed by many who called it “socialized medicine.” They cited concerns about the quality of care, the availability of treatment options, and the costs of funding a first-payer government funded health care system. When this ideology – publicly funded by professional doctors organizations and large pharmaceutical companies – won, Americans suffered.

Now, every 30 seconds a person in America goes into bankruptcy due to their inability to pay heath care costs. In almost every European country as well as Canada, Japan, Cuba and Iraq – where health care is subsidized by the government – no one is ever forced to make a decision choosing between bankruptcy and lifesaving medical treatment. Here, medical problems are estimated to cause over 60% of all personal bankruptcies.

78% of those people had medical insurance at the start of their illness or medical issue. Even more surprising is that most of these people were living a middle-class lifestyle before their lives were changed by medical bills; over 60% were people that owned homes and had college educations.  Laissez-faire Reganomics and the selective politics of personal responsibility – for the struggling working and middle classes only with bailouts for the rich – have literally had a crushing effect.

The prospects of the next generation re-growing the middle class are dim.  People who are now in their twenties who bought into the myth of middle class prosperity by borrowing student loans from educational funding services, with high interest rates and impossible demands, face an unfavorable job market and with no health insurance and mountains of debt that their parents and grandparents can only imagine.

Young students who attempt college come away with student loans the size of home mortgages.  A whole generation of former students, saddled with a capitalist system of education, have come away owing the prior generations who created and endorsed the system – and will pat with years of salary from their early working lives.  The Republicans endorsed this system, actively looking the other way while the student loan industry was rife with corruption.  As early as 2001, the incoming Bush Administration was warned that lenders were trying to improperly influence college financial aid offices.

The American Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers’ Barmak Nassirian put it this way:

“The day Bush was elected was the beginning of the gilded age for the loan industry.”

After years of the financial services industry donating heavily to the campaigns of Republican members of the House Committee on Education and Labor – including leading donor Sallie Mae – who donated a staggering but not surprising three-quarters of its campaign contributions to Republicans.  Ohio Republican Congressman John Boehner – who served as a chairman of the Committee on Education and Labor – has received over $170,000 in combined campaign contributions between direct donations and donations to his “leadership” PAC.  While buying a home can’t be a 10-year goal for young people who are already saddled with repayment of enormous loans, Boehner told a group of Sallie Mae executives a 2004 fundraiser to “Know that I have all of you in my two trusted hands.”

The net result is an entire generation that has only known war and debt, and is ready to accept the virtues of a government-provided health care system.  For every Meghan McCain living on a cloud, spouting rhetoric but never having to worry about money, responsibility or going without, there are thousands of young people who are well educated but who have nothing else – including the prospect of one day living without debt. For many, it will have been more profitable to be less educated and less burdened with high interest loans. Average Americans who are not heiresses now have a financial incentive to avoid being educated or educating their children. That’s the capitalist form of education.

They are living in another world, or living in denial. In the same Rasmussen Poll where 20% of those polled said that socialism was superior to capitalism, adults younger than 30 were essentially evenly divided between socialism and capitalism.

As of 2007, the economic inequality in Atlanta, New Orleans Washington and Miami is similar to that of Nairobi, Kenya and Ivory Coast. The “civil unrest alert line” is used by the United Nations to warn governments when economic inequality is likely to have a “destabilizing effect on societies.”

Republican policy, Reganomics, and Bush-Era Deregulation – which fought against government intervention, and for the financial industry, big business and the rich who got richer – has locked America’s children into debt. Not just the debt that the teabag-swinging screamers echo through the Republican party, but personal debt in a way that the wealthy among us will never understand; and which those who claim concern for the debt load on young people have completely and totally ignored.

Beyond the bankruptcies; beyond the alienated and ignored youth; in America, where over 10% of the population (more than 40 million people) have no medical insurance -  that 10% contains absurdly disproportionate numbers of minorities. That number also ignores the 12 million undocumented people within the U.S. who face real fear of deportation and open hostility should they seek care at a hospital. For uninsured people, every preventable illness or accidental injury represents a potential economic life sentence to poverty.

20% of African Americans and 30% of Hispanics in America have no health insurance. Both of these groups comprise the fastest growing demographics of the American population despite the fact that the life expectancy of African American people in the United States is roughly equal to the rates in much poorer countries where premium health care services are not available – places like China, and certain states in India.

American minority women have higher rates of diabetes, heart disease, AIDS and obesity, and in general are more likely to be in fair or poor health.

If Census Bureau projections are correct, by 2050 the number of Hispanics in the United States will double proportionally to the rest of the population.  Where Latinos comprise 15% of the population now, that number will grow to 30%. In two generations, as the population of Hispanics and other minorities, including African-Americans, grows, non-Hispanic whites will be a minority.

As these demographics change, an educated and hopelessly indebted class emerges. And widespread dissatisfaction with the quality and availability of medical care in the U.S. has already soured the country to arguments advanced by doctors and insurance companies that “socialized medicine” will not work.  This dissatisfaction is well founded when the United States’ ranking in areas like infant mortality is 29th in the world in 2008 – well below Japan, Sweden, Netherlands, France, and Canada where medical care is provided by the government.

It is clear that “for profit” medical treatment has not kept the country healthy.  Strong lobbying groups funded by doctors, insurance companies and multinational pharmaceutical corporations are less concerned with the overall health of the nation and patient care than they are with the health of profits. The very idea that insurance companies which exist because of capitalism are relied on to provide the basic human necessity of medical treatment for an entire country is untenable. Not only is it untenable, it is irresponsible. Medical care should not be subjected to a capitalist model, where the rich can afford the best care, and the poor rely on minimal emergency care or treatments which plunge them into debt and bankruptcy.

When 10% of the country has no medical insurance coverage, the emergency treatment centers bear the brunt of unpaid services. Hospitals around the country are closing, leaving fewer options for people in need of care; this weighs most heavily upon those neighborhoods of poor who receive their medical care solely from emergency rooms. The net result is an increase in unemployed and uninsured people who must rely on emergency rooms for all of treatment they receive.

From a pragmatic standpoint, it would seem that the best way to keep one’s massive wealth would be to protect it by sacrificing some wealth to promote widespread growth, economic equality and social stability rather than by hoarding wealth and promoting civil unrest.  While the UN understands that high levels of inequality lead to “negative social, economic and political consequences that have a destabilizing effect on societies,” they do not see this.

Even in difficult times they see growth through inequality, the consolidation of massive wealth, and the continued growth of massive corporate institutions.  The rich get richer, get education, get health care and get access to congressmen to have a say in how the government administers the social programs and regulations for everyone else.  They fight against raising the minimum wage, expanding the availability of healthcare and creating restrictions on the maximum rate that credit card companies can charge.  They believe they deserve this control because their hard work is more valuable than the hard work of everyone else.  It should not be surprising that their response to calls for “change” has been paternalistic vitriol damning any solution incorporating economic balance as “utopian delusions”.

The real delusion is held by a group of people who believe that, by clinging to “values” which are on the verge of extinction, they can revive the influence of failed and outdated ideas. The real delusion is believing that the public call for change represents a “shift,” rather than what it really is: social and political evolution.

Twitter and Facebook take a lot of shit from old-timers who don’t like or want to understand the new ways in which people communicate. I once taught with a “senior” teacher who berated a seventh grader for wanting to go into the video game industry when he grew up. In her antiquated disgust, she blabbered about how the kids these days just waste their time with video games. No future, etc. Little did this old gas-bag know that the video game industry had already been growing faster than the film industry for a few years.

Technology is a language. It also defines the way the people of Earth look at and understand their surroundings. If we want to be able to communicate in ways other than speaking, yelling, whispering or singing to anyone close enough to hear, we need technology. A feather dipped in ink. A woodcut ink-press. A typewriter. A fax. A blog. And most recently, text messsages, Twitter, and social networks.

The guys who invent these cool internet gadgets must be pretty blown away. I’ll bet they never imagined that their ideas could affect the outcome of world events. Congrats to them.

In 2009, the “anti-war candidate” who campaigned against and defeated fellow Democratic Primary candidate Hillary Clinton on the basis of his opposition to the invasion of Iraq vowed to substantially increase American military presence in that country. It was reported that 2,100 Afghani civilians were killed as a result of American military action in 2008. The election of an anti-war President was supposed to remedy the senseless loss of human life caused by “Bush Doctrine” policy.

What are the lessons of Iraq? Has America learned that 9/11 should not be used as a justification for aggression against a foreign national population? Have Americans learned that attacking a small radical potion of a population with air strikes which also kill innocent civilians results in a net growth and the spread of Anti-American ideology and terrorism?

Afghan Parliamentarian Shukria Barakzai, founder and editor of Kabul’s Aina-E-Zan (a newspaper for Afghan women), and also a co-drafter of the Afghanistan Constitution, is engaged in the difficult battle for women’s rights in her country. Barakzai responded to Obama’s plan to increase American military presence in her country:

“Send us 30,000 scholars instead. Or 30,000 engineers. But don’t send more troops – it will just bring more violence.”

The growth of anti-American groups is indirectly but inexorably tied to poverty, lack of food, lack of drinkable water, lack of medicine, regional American occupation and violence. It rises from regions dominated by American military forces seeking to install governments capable of subduing its own population, but powerless against outsiders. These political conditions, tied to longstanding feelings of indignity and a lack of political freedom, drive terrorism. Terrorists are not poor, not undereducated, not desperate. The demographic is closer to middle class, above average education and subject to a repressive regime.

There remains a massive segment of the population that not only supports military aggression in Afghanistan, but also the failed war in Iraq. John McCain, who received over 50 million votes from Americans to preside over both wars, stated that he believed that the War in Iraq was “necessary and just”, as told to cadets at the Virginia Military Institute:

“I understand the frustration caused by our mistakes in this war. I sympathize with the fatigue of the American people. But I also know the toll a lost war takes on an army and a country. It is the right road. It is necessary and just.”

If the 2008 American Presidential election was a referendum on war policy, the ideological turn the country was seeking was for the responsible use of the military. There was a recognition that “Supporting the Troops” meant supporting responsible engagement of the troops, not just blind support for killing and imperialism.

The war in Afghanistan is not about the so-called “War on Terrorism”. Obama’s administration has ceased using the term. Though several months into office, his administration’s policy is essentially identical to that of his predecessor.

The criticism that has emerged against this war is that the real battle will not be won with bullets and missiles; that the ignored lesson of Iraq is that military presence does not secure a country so much as it projects imperialism and occupation. In Afghanistan – a place filled with poverty and subjected to foreign military powers for decades – the future depends on a change in policy. In Afghanistan and America, the future depends on real change, and the Administration depends on a resolute public that demands it. If the only voices of dissent are those of people waving teabags, demanding more tax cuts for the rich and more military solutions to foreign policy issues, the country will move in that direction, despite a growing acceptance of socialism in America (likely tied to the voices on the right screaming “Socialism” at every form of social government assistance program).

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., in his famous 1967 “Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence” speech, said that a nation which “continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.” Dr. King argued that “America, the richest and most powerful nation in the world, can well lead the way in this revolution of values.” America, who has not lead the world in this revolution, now has the opportunity to do so. Obama wasn’t elected to make concessions to the right wing – he was elected to lead and bring change. But when the anti-war movement does nothing but hope for a revolution of values, without demanding action, there comes a time when that silence is betrayal to those values. That time is now.

Many “progressive” voices have failed to provide any leadership. Moveon.org, whose membership was largely built on opposition to the war in Iraq, has not taken a position opposing the Afghanistan War. The Iraq Veterans Against the War (IVAW) has not taken a position on the war in Afghanistan. Even the War Resisters League has qualified its opposition to this war. The Out of Iraq Congressional Caucus in the House of Representatives (chaired by Representative Maxine Waters) has been silent on the escalation.

The Dixie Chicks, the Pope, and anointed liberal-cause leader Bono have failed to publicly express the outrage that characterized much early opposition to the Iraq War. In fairness, Bono has never publicly opposed the War in Iraq or Afghanistan. The Dixie Chicks endured severe popular backlash for lead singer Natlie Maines’ 2003 stage banter:

“Just so you know, we’re on the good side with y’all. We do not want this war, this violence, and we’re ashamed that the President of the United States is from Texas…”

The Dixie Chicks were pulled from radio station play rotations and record store shelves. “Patriotic” listeners publicly burned their records and, in some cases, ran them over with tractors to express their disgust with the Chicks. The band received death threats and were publicly boycotted. Lipton Ice Tea dropped its sponsorship of the band. And in June of 2006, American Idol Chris Daughtry returned to Greensboro, NC for a homecoming celebration sponsored by Classic Rock 92FM. A DJ announcement regarding free tickets for an upcoming Dixie Chicks concert was met with substantial booing from the crowd.

The planes which crashed into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on September 11, 2001 have been used as a political tool – from George Bush standing on a pile of rubble and human remains with a megaphone, stirring up bloodthirst (declaring to New York that “the people who knocked down these buildings will hear all of us soon”), to Rudy Giuliani’s single-minded presidential campaign. Despite the Bush administration’s lie saying so, the war in Iraq had nothing to do with what happened on 9/11. Iraq was not invaded to liberate a country, bring civil rights to women, or stabilize tremendous economic imbalance. Iraq was invaded, on its face, to eliminate the threat of a nuclear attack.

Bush himself addressed an angry, grieving country that had just been attacked, as its leader; explaining the need for military action in Iraq despite scant evidence which was largely manufactured and/or misrepresented, declaring that evidence was there, warning, that ”the smoking gun that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud.”

There were rallies where people adamantly opposed anti-war sentiment, strongly supporting the War effort in Iraq. Signs at so-called “Support the Troops” rallies read:

“Freedom is not free”

“Arrest the traitors”

“Peace is the result of victory”

“We love Bush”

“Make love after war”

“Hey, Boeing! Ignore these other idiots and keep the missiles coming!”

“Kill, kill, kill. Annihilate Iraq”

“Ending the Iraqi war will drag it back to our door”

“Veto France”

“God hates fag terrorists”

“If you don’t stand behind our troops why don’t you stand in front of them”

“Gitmo rocks”

“Got freedom? Thank the military”

They traveled to New York City where they organized and chanted “U-S-A! U-S-A!” in Times Square, explicitly to show support for the war.

Estimates of Iraqi civilian deaths in the war have ranged as high as 655,000 as reported in a 2006, according to an MIT study. For comparison’s sake, in 2006, the population of Alaska was 670,053. There were no weapons of mass destruction. There was no justification for the invasion or killing of anyone in Iraq.

There is a tendency on the East Coast to dismiss the politics of fear that led to the advent of “Freedom Fries” and the opportunistic Republican-hatched enactment of the USA PATRIOT Act on October 26, 2001 (officially the “Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act of 2001”). In the 2004 presidential election, the first wartime election in America since 1972, the one state and the District that were attacked by “terrorists” voted in large numbers against George W. Bush and his policies.

In 2008 in a speech in Greensboro, NC, Republican vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin displayed open hostility to the East Coast and, explicitly, Washingtonian D.C.-.ers:

“We believe that the best of America is not all in Washington, D.C. We believe…” (interrupted by cheers and applause) “…We believe that the best of America is in these small towns that we get to visit, and in these wonderful little pockets of what I call the real America, being here with all of you hard working very patriotic, um, very, um, pro-America areas of this great nation.”

The hostility was nothing new, and was largely reflected in the absence of any real Republican concern for the prevention of future terror attacks after 2001.

In per capita terms, by 2004, New York State ranked 49th out of 50 states in Homeland Security funding. Fox news was accused of fueling hysteria and fear in the people of the Midwest, the West and the “red states.” These states had not been party to the attacks or even likely targets for attacks. Yet, this was the constituency which drove public policy by re-electing the Bush Administration in 2004. In 2004, when the New York Fire Department was still asking for radios that worked, the fire department in Zanesville, Ohio was learning to use federally funded thermal-imaging technology to find victims in dense smoke and test kits for lethal nerve gasses. Per capita federal Homeland Security funding in Wyoming and Guam dwarfed spending in New York.

In 2006, with the pointless search for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq long over, and the Halliburton-Blackwater war-profiteering machine in high gear, Bush’s DHS actually cut federal funding for terror prevention in New York City and Washinton D.C., surging new funds into places like Omaha, Nebraska and Louisville, Kentucky. And while pro-war John McCain suggested, with no evidence, in 2001 on the David Letterman show, that the anthrax may have come from Iraq, the mailings all turned out to come out of New Jersey. The planes that hit the World Trade Center flew out of New Jersey as well. And New Jersey resoundingly voted against Bush in 2004 (and against McCain in 2008. The plain fact was that the anthrax, the planes and the terror were directly aimed – solely aimed – at those parts of the country that Palin and her constituency don’t consider a part of the “wonderful little pockets” of “real America.” Those wonderful little pockets were unwilling to accept that the war was based on a lie. That American soldiers were dying for motives that had nothing to do with the “mushroom cloud” Bush used to terrorize the living rooms of his own country.

While anti-war groups struggled to combat a popular U.S. war policy based on fear and the promise of revenge, champions like Bono failed to oppose the war in Iraq. The Associated Press reported in 2005, when he met with President Bush, that the reason Bono failed to oppose the war was because:

“the rocker admits that a certain diplomacy is necessary in order to accomplish his goals [of fighting poverty], which is why he keeps mum about the war in Iraq even though he disagrees with it.”

It’s clear that he has avoided the subject intentionally in order to gain access and photo appearances with world leaders like Tony Blair and George Bush. If one truly considers the merits of celebrity activism in the context of Bono’s failure to oppose war, it all appears as an ongoing unmistakably hollow publicity grab using the poverty and suffering of millions as the key to access. The 2005 Man of Peace award was given to a man who never demonstrated against any war and who owns a large stake of war-friendly Forbes Magazine.

Even Bono’s advocacy of helping the poor is belied by his personal tax avoidance behavior. While he advocates world governments spend millions to help the poor, the Irish singer has moved his publishing company from Ireland to the Netherlands to avoid paying a 12.5% tax rate to the Irish government and to avoid funding the projects he advocates to help the poor. Bono takes that money home. And Bono doesn’t understand. When he was criticized by a Christian Aid report in 2007 for ‘tax avoidance,’ he responded by saying:

“It hurts when the criticism comes in internationally. But I can’t speak up without betraying my relationship with the band – so you take the shit. People who don’t know our music – it’s very easy for them to take a position on us – they run with the stereotypes and caricature of us.”

It’s hard to imagine that someone who is a leading advocate for helping the poor could be so clueless concerning the damage done to “third world” nations by capital flight from their countries into schemes like he employs. Or as African law professor Issa Shivji, the former director of the Department of Constitutional and Administrative Law at the University of Dar es Salaam in Tanzania, put it:

“What the donors give is peanuts compared to the wealth that goes out.”

That wealth that goes out from the developing countries goes directly into tax avoidance centers, just like those used by Bono. A multi-millionaire cannot expect to be taken seriously when he advocates a worldwide moral obligation to fund aid programs to help the poor, but sees no moral obligation on himself to fund those programs though taxes.

Does an artist really want his or her political activism to be taken more seriously than, say, a cartoonish Elvis Presley meeting with President Richard Nixon?