I have been writing about US corporate foundations for some time, most recently in Foundations of the American Century. The Ford, Carnegie and Rockefeller Foundations in the Rise of American Power.
Below is a column from today's Guardian newpspaer by Mr George Monbiot who, as a good journalist, communicates the message better than I.
Back in February, when Bill Gates delivered the Dimbleby Lecture on BBC TV, and claimed he was doing 'God's work', to near-universal praise, I was in no position to offer a critique. A couple of months later, a few colleagues and I met on an academic conference panel to discuss the Gates Foundation, concluding that the public image of the man and his foundation were far removed from the corporate, philanthrocapitalist mentalities and programmes being promoted as designed to save mankind. We had invited the Gates Foundation to send a speaker but none was available. We had a good audience, as these things go, but nothing like the audience reached with his lecture and media management machine.
Thankfully, George Monbiot has produced a critique that sums up the picture very well. His article is reproduced below.
Elevation
June 17, 2013
Who do
Bono and the ONE campaign really represent: the very poor or the very rich?
By George
Monbiot, published in the Guardian 18th June 2013
It was
bad enough in 2005. Then, at the G8 summit in Scotland, Bono and Bob Geldof
heaped praise on Tony Blair and George Bush, who were still mired in the
butchery they had initiated in Iraq(1,2,3). At one point Geldof
appeared, literally and figuratively, to be sitting in Tony Blair’s lap.
African activists accused them of drowning out a campaign for global justice with
a campaign for charity.
But this
is worse. As the UK chairs the G8 summit again, a campaign that Bono founded,
with which Geldof works closely(4), appears to be whitewashing the G8’s policies
in Africa.
Last week
I drew attention to the New Alliance for Food Security and Nutrition, launched
in the US when it chaired the G8 meeting last year(5). The alliance is pushing
African countries into agreements which allow foreign companies to grab their
land, patent their seeds and monopolise their food markets. Ignoring the voices
of their own people, six African governments have struck deals with companies
such as Monsanto, Cargill, Dupont, Syngenta, Nestlé and Unilever, in return for
promises of aid by the UK and other G8 nations.
A wide
range of activists, both African and European, is furious about the New
Alliance(6). But the ONE campaign,
co-founded by Bono, stepped up to defend it(7). The article it wrote
last week was remarkable in several respects: in its elision of the interests
of African leaders and those of their people, in its exaggeration of the role
of small African companies, but above all in failing even to mention the
injustice at the heart of the New Alliance – its promotion of a new wave of
land grabbing. My curiosity was piqued.
The first
thing I discovered is that Bono has also praised the New Alliance, in a speech
just before last year’s G8 summit in the US(8). The second thing I
discovered is that much of the ONE campaign’s primary funding was provided by
the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation(9), two of whose executives sit on its
board(10). The Foundation has been working with the
biotech company Monsanto and the grain trading giant Cargill, and has a large
Monsanto shareholding(11). Bill Gates has
responded to concerns raised by land grabbing in Africa by claiming, in the
face of devastating evidence and massive resistance from African farmers, that
“many of those land deals are beneficial, and it would be too bad if some were
held back because of Western groups’ ways of looking at things.”(12) (Africans, you will note, keep getting
written out of this story).
The third
thing I discovered is that there’s a long history here. In his brilliant and
blistering book The Frontman: Bono (in the Name of Power), just released in the
UK, the Irish scholar Harry Browne maintains that “for nearly three decades as
a public figure, Bono has been … amplifying elite discourses, advocating
ineffective solutions, patronising the poor and kissing the arses of the rich
and powerful.”(13) His approach to Africa is “a slick mix of traditional
missionary and commercial colonialism, in which the poor world exists as a task
for the rich world to complete.”
Bono,
Browne charges, has becoming “the caring face of global technocracy”, who,
without any kind of mandate, has assumed the role of spokesperson for Africa,
then used that role to provide “humanitarian cover” for western leaders. His
positioning of the West as the saviour of Africa while failing to discuss the
harm the G8 nations are doing has undermined campaigns for justice and
accountability, while lending legitimacy to the neoliberal project.
Bono
claims to be “representing the poorest and most vulnerable people”(14). But talking to a wide range of activists
from both the poor and rich worlds since ONE published its article last week, I
have heard the same complaint again and again: that Bono and others like him
have seized the political space which might otherwise have been occupied by the
Africans about whom they are talking. Because Bono is seen by world leaders as
the representative of the poor, the poor are not invited to speak. This works
very well for everyone – except them.
The ONE
campaign looks to me like the sort of organisation that John le Carré or Robert
Harris might have invented. It claims to work on behalf of the extremely poor.
But its board is largely composed of multimillionaires, corporate aristocrats
and US enforcers(15). Here you will find
Condoleezza Rice, George W Bush’s National Security Adviser and Secretary of
State, who aggressively promoted the Iraq war, instructed the CIA that it was
authorised to use torture techniques(16) and browbeat lesser
nations into supporting a wide range of US aims.
Here too
is Larry Summers, who was chief economist at the World Bank during the darkest
days of structural adjustment and who, as US Treasury Secretary, helped to
deregulate Wall Street, with such happy consequences for the rest of us. Here’s
Howard Buffett, who has served on the boards of the global grain giant Archer
Daniels Midland as well as Coca-Cola and the food corporations ConAgra and Agro
Tech(17). Though the main focus of ONE is Africa,
there are only two African members. One is a mobile phone baron, the other is
the finance minister of Nigeria, who was formerly managing director of the
World Bank. What better representatives of the extremely poor could there be?
If, as
ONE does, an organisation keeps telling you that it’s a “grassroots campaign”(18), it’s a fair bet that it is nothing of the
kind. This collaboration of multimillionaires and technocrats looks to me more
like a projection of US and corporate power.
I found
the sight of Bono last week calling for “more progress on transparency” equally
revolting(19). As Harry Browne
reminds us, U2’s complex web of companies, the financial arrangements of Bono’s
Product RED campaign and his investments through the private equity company he
co-founded are all famously opaque. And it’s not an overwhelming shock to
discover that tax justice is absent from the global issues identified by ONE.
There is
a well-known if dubious story which claims that at a concert in Glasgow Bono
began a slow hand-clap. He is supposed to have announced: “every time I clap my
hands, a child in Africa dies”. Whereupon someone in the audience shouted “well
fucking stop doing it then.” It’s good advice, and I wish he’d take it.
www.monbiot.com
References:
9. Eg
Harry Browne, 2013. The Frontman: Bono (in the Name of Power). Verso, London.
13. Harry
Browne, 2013. The Frontman: Bono (in the Name of Power). Verso, London.
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