"The religiosity of this country is offensive to a lot of people in Europe because they see hypocrisy in the heart of it. They see that for all their talk, prayer breakfasts, and overt religiosity, these people are giving the least to the least of these."

Amen to that.

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imagine if we had leadership in this country that took human rights and justice as seriously as bono. it's really embarassing that we do so little to help. to put it in such stark, real terms: that every month the african continent loses thousands of people whose deaths are completely preventable. it's just shameful.

what a wonder it would be if americans could feel truly proud of their humanitarian greatness--to feel the humanitarian good that would be done because we are such a wealthy and powerful nation. what a wonder it would be if we were REALLY a nation of christian values instead of using christianity to justify hatred, homophobia and inequality. what a wonder it would be if this great nation were loved and revered for being a force of good in the world, instead of hated and feared for our horrible foreign policies, economic imperialism and exploitation of the poor and weak.

bono deserves our admiration for using his celebrity to do good in the world.

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*Nothing* shames this prez.

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I went to the C-SPAN link at bottom of this piece and found the video clip of Bono's speech, which in the watching was deeply inspiring. I'm still not crazy about his music, but this guy is formidable as a human being and as a spokesman for real spirituality. However, when I searched on C-SPAN's video search under "Bono", this speech did not come up...repeat, DID NOT come up. When I searched on "National Prayer Breakfast", that did come up....but amazingly, in the 1 hour and 3 minute clip of the entire breakfast program, Bono's speech, or any mention of him, DOES NOT APPEAR.

Other more conventional speakers are all there, including the ignominious and charisma-challenged Norm Coleman (as a Jew watching another Jew impersonating a Christian in order to butt kiss the president, my stomach turned 180 degrees), the equally nauseating Labor Secretary Elaine Chao leading everyone in prayer (maybe she can do that for the 60,000 auto workers losing their jobs in Detroit, at a special "What the hell am I gonna do now?" prayer breakfast for them), and of course our beloved president Nero, who while thanking many people for attending before launching into his Dick&Jane prepared remarks, conspicously excluded Bono, who from the sanitized evidence of this clip, wasn't even in attendance, let alone gave a speech.

What's going on here? Could it be that someone decided that Bono's provocative and challenging comments, delivered right to the president's puss, were not in keeping with the usual warmed-over PAX-channel atmosphere associated with this event? Bono was magnificent, not only in his words and ideas but in his raw courage speaking to this self-absorbed, self-congratulatory, world-class group of hypocrites and asking them in polite but blunt tones to eat some religious crow and put their budget money for the world's poor and sick where their triumphalist mouths are.

C-SPAN, which is usually an oasis of unvarnished truth in an ever shrinking media world of omnipresent BS and spin, is to be commended for including the Bono video clip as a standalone, but how was he excised from the longer breakfast clip? What sinister process allowed that to happen? Where's Brian Lamb when you need him?

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Tony Blair arrived recently in Washington to ask President George Bush to increase substantially U.S. aid to Africa. His visit came a few months after Columbia University Professor Jeffrey Sachs unveiled his own plan to end extreme poverty around the world by 2025. "In The End of Poverty," Mr. Sachs argues rich countries should commit themselves to transferring some $1.5 trillion over the next decade to the poorest nations -- primarily in Africa. But, in truth, foreign aid is unlikely to succeed, because most of Africa's problems are internal.

In the 1960s, many developmental economists believed in the "vicious cycle of poverty" theory, which argued poverty in the developing world prevented accumulation of domestic savings. Low savings resulted in low domestic investment and low investment was seen as the main impediment to rapid economic growth. Foreign aid, therefore, was intended to fill that apparent gap between insufficient savings and the requisite investment in the economy.

And so, between 1960 and 2005, foreign aid worth more than $450 billion, inflation adjusted, poured into Africa. Result? Between 1975 and 2000, African gross domestic product (GDP) per capita declined at an average annual 0.59 percent rate. Over the same period, African GDP per capita fell from $1,770 in constant 1995 dollars adjusted for purchasing power parity (PPP) to $1,479.

In contrast, South Asia performed much better. Between 1975 and 2000, South Asian GDP per capita grew at an average annual 2.94 percent. South Asian GDP per capita grew from $1,010 in constant 1995 dollars adjusted for PPP to $2,056. Yet, between 1975 and 2000, the per capita foreign aid South Asians received was 21 percent that received by Africa. The link between foreign aid and economic development seems quite tenuous.

Foreign aid to Africa has also enabled government officials to embezzle large amounts of money and misspend much on loss-making projects. In total, Nigerian President Olusegun Obasanjo estimated, "Corrupt African leaders have stolen at least $140 billion from their people in the [four] decades since independence." Large debt is all most Africans have been left.

As a result of the widespread corruption among politicians in Africa and other parts of the developing world, development economists began emphasizing good governance as a solution to underdevelopment. The focus on internal conditions in poor countries was not welcome news for the foreign aid lobby in Western capitals, which relies on foreign aid to keep it afloat.

Thousands of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) derive their funding from aid. Many NGOs, therefore, focus on "externalization" of African problems, blaming Africa's poverty on an unfair trade system and colonial legacy. Ian Vasquez of the Cato Institute observes that calls to massively increase foreign aid look like "giant conflicts of interest."

Mr. Sachs, however, seems to dismiss thorough internal reform as a prerequisite for African economic growth. As he recently said in a New York Times interview, "The poor are blamed for their problems. We say the poor are poor because they are corrupt or because they don't manage themselves. But in the past two years I've seen exactly the opposite. ... The idea that African failure is due to African poor governance is one of the great myths of our time."

But evidence is not on Professor Sachs' side. African corruption has been getting worse, not better, over the last few years. Each year, Transparency International publishes its Corruption Perception Index (CPI). The CPI defines corruption as "abuse of public office for private gain." It is measured on a scale from 0 to 10. The higher the number, the lower the corruption. In 2000, the average African CPI was 3.24. By 2004, the African CPI fell to 2.87.

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With the African CPI score on the decline, how can Mr. Sachs claim to have "seen exactly the opposite"? Perhaps he confuses the growth of African democracy with the reduction of corruption. Indeed, Africa today has more democracy than ever before. Between 1960 and 2004, Africa had 198 leaders. Only one, the prime minister of Mauritius, was voted out of office between 1960 and 1989. Things changed thereafter. Between 1990 and 2004, 23 African heads of state were voted out of office.

The spread of democracy enables more Africans to vote corrupt governments out of office, and that surely is a step in the right direction. Unfortunately, elected officials' behavior in power has not appreciably changed. Many Africans continue to see participation in the government as a means of becoming wealthy, and weak institutions allow them to succeed.

"Very few people believe that it is possible to reform the system," says Robert Guest, Africa editor of The Economist. "They do not believe that they can ever have a clean government. And because they do not believe it, they think the rational thing to do is to try to get their own people into office and then try to get them to steal as much money as possible and distribute it among their kinfolk."

The truth is there are no quick fixes to African poverty. Like so many times in the past, the grand utopian visions of well-meaning Westerners are likely to crash on the hard rocks of African reality. In the end, Africans will get it right and prosper, but they will not succeed by seeing foreign aid as a panacea or hoping someone else will solve their problems for them.


This article originally appeared in the Washington Times on June 19, 2005.

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