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Time for Bono to Shut Up and Sing
By Cliff Kincaid
Actor and scientologist Tom Cruise has gotten his comeuppance for spouting off on the evils of psychiatry. His exchange with Matt Lauer of the NBC Today Show showed that Cruise was an ill-informed zealot. Lauer put Cruise in his place, noting that psychiatry has helped people, and that certain drugs have proven beneficial to people with mental illnesses. But being subjected to Cruise’s rhetoric was the price of media figures getting interviews with him about his new movie.
Rock star Bono, on the other hand, has escaped the kind of pounding that Lauer gave to Cruise. Bono, a multimillionaire rock star, has somehow emerged as an expert on foreign aid and was even interviewed on NBC’s prestigious Meet the Press program. He was described by host Tim Russert simply as an “activist,” in order to mask his dubious or non-existent academic credentials, who runs something called DATA, standing for debt, AIDS, trade and Africa. When you sign up at the group’s website, you are urged to send a message to Congress urging more foreign aid spending and cancellation of foreign countries’ debts. This is what passes for expertise in today’s media world.
Bono should stick to singing. His advice is even worse than that being offered by the hapless Cruise. While he pays lip service to the problem of foreign corruption, Bono’s prescription is still the same-throw more good money-ours-after bad. Yet a comprehensive new study concludes that foreign aid has mostly been counterproductive because it crowds out private sector investment, undermines democracy, and perpetuates poverty. When foreign aid rises, economic growth falls, the report says.
This 28-page study was published on June 10, 2005, by the International Policy Network, a London-based development charity, in association with think tanks from several countries. To my knowledge, the International Policy Network study hasn’t been covered by one major media organ in the U.S. In a reference to the July 2 Live8 concerts, one of which featured Bono, Julian Morris, executive director of International Policy Network, said that “rock star economists” have a “misguided” world view and fail to see that foreign aid actually hurts the poor. Live8 was designed to put pressure on the Group of Eight most industrialized countries, meeting in Scotland from July 6-8, to spend more on foreign aid.
To read the full article, please visit:
http://www.nationalledger.com/artman/publish/article_2726172.shtml
By Cliff Kincaid
Actor and scientologist Tom Cruise has gotten his comeuppance for spouting off on the evils of psychiatry. His exchange with Matt Lauer of the NBC Today Show showed that Cruise was an ill-informed zealot. Lauer put Cruise in his place, noting that psychiatry has helped people, and that certain drugs have proven beneficial to people with mental illnesses. But being subjected to Cruise’s rhetoric was the price of media figures getting interviews with him about his new movie.
Rock star Bono, on the other hand, has escaped the kind of pounding that Lauer gave to Cruise. Bono, a multimillionaire rock star, has somehow emerged as an expert on foreign aid and was even interviewed on NBC’s prestigious Meet the Press program. He was described by host Tim Russert simply as an “activist,” in order to mask his dubious or non-existent academic credentials, who runs something called DATA, standing for debt, AIDS, trade and Africa. When you sign up at the group’s website, you are urged to send a message to Congress urging more foreign aid spending and cancellation of foreign countries’ debts. This is what passes for expertise in today’s media world.
Bono should stick to singing. His advice is even worse than that being offered by the hapless Cruise. While he pays lip service to the problem of foreign corruption, Bono’s prescription is still the same-throw more good money-ours-after bad. Yet a comprehensive new study concludes that foreign aid has mostly been counterproductive because it crowds out private sector investment, undermines democracy, and perpetuates poverty. When foreign aid rises, economic growth falls, the report says.
This 28-page study was published on June 10, 2005, by the International Policy Network, a London-based development charity, in association with think tanks from several countries. To my knowledge, the International Policy Network study hasn’t been covered by one major media organ in the U.S. In a reference to the July 2 Live8 concerts, one of which featured Bono, Julian Morris, executive director of International Policy Network, said that “rock star economists” have a “misguided” world view and fail to see that foreign aid actually hurts the poor. Live8 was designed to put pressure on the Group of Eight most industrialized countries, meeting in Scotland from July 6-8, to spend more on foreign aid.
To read the full article, please visit:
http://www.nationalledger.com/artman/publish/article_2726172.shtml