http://www.hangthebankers.com/bono-exposed-as-a-complete-fraud/

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. 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, 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. The alliance is pushing African countries into agreements that
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. But the ONE campaign, co-founded by
Bono, stepped up to defend it. 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. The
second thing I discovered is that much of the ONE campaign’s
primary funding was provided by the Bill and Melinda Gates
Foundation, two of whose executives sit on its board. The foundation
has been working with the biotech company Monsanto and the grain
trading giant Cargill, and has a large Monsanto shareholding.
Bill Gates has responded to claims made about land grabbing in
Africa, asserting, 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“. (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”.
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 become “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 and awards from Queen Elizabeth II

Bono claims to be “representing the poorest and most vulnerable
people“. 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. 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 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. 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?

As Bono and his bandmates took to the Pyramid
Stage, activists from direct action group Art Uncut
inflated a 20ft balloon emblazoned with the
message “U Pay Your Tax 2?” exposing U2′s
offshore tax avoidance.

If, as ONE does, an organisation keeps telling you that it’s a
“grassroots campaign”, 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. 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 that 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.

Bono hanging out with some other NWO criminals:

Obama…the teleprompter reading president who bombs kids for a
living and gets a peace prize.

The inconvenient lie that is Al Gore.

Bill Clinton…where do I even start with this guy?

Wanted war criminal George W. Bush Jnr.

War mongering senator John McCain.

Mr Eugenics himself Bill Gates.

Wanted war criminal Tony Blair.

Madame evil and best friend of Jimmy Savile, Queen Elizabeth II