i got that on my google alerts and it's so annoying

truthbeknown wrote:

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As the former poster says read the article, do the research and draw your own conclusions then.  These are serious issues and if Geldof is using this as a vehicle for self-promotion he should be called on it. Remember it should be about the people who need help, not the aging former rock star trying to reinvent himself.

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I think the article makes good points. Promises have been broken and it was unlikely that Africa will get too much out of it. 

I have heard this critique of Geldof a lot (even on this site!) that he doesn't understand the causes and thinks he is the only one who knows the answers.  I think Geldof is well-intentioned but not always right (in pretty much everything!).  As for the self-promotion, I suspect that every act on the respective bills in Edinburgh and London who saw their record sales increase are more guilty of that than Geldof.

OK, there are a few slavish groupies, but writing as someone who thinks Geldof hasn't written a great song for 15 years or so, I wouldn't see myself as one! 

Ultimately, I'd say it's another opinion rather than the truth.

neworlddisorder wrote:

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Now... where is that tw*t Bono...  

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in the same vein....

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2088-1678543,00.html

With a song in their heart and not much at all in their heads
SIMON JENKINS








How is a sensible person to react to last night’s Live 8/G8 extravaganza? It defies hyperbole. It steamrollers scepticism. The money swilling, the masses migrating, the greenhouse gases combusting, the publicity bingeing, are beyond all reason.

Live 8 claims political status, but the politics is totalitarian, using celebrity to mobilise a crowd. The crowd has a noble place in politics, but it is a transient one. Tomorrow it is gone and its punch leaves no bruise. Small wonder Tony Blair is playing Pope Innocent to Bob Geldof’s Francis of Assisi. He co-opts him into power.

NI_MPU('middle');
Geldof is to fast politics what McDonald’s is to fast food. He is simply good at it. How can you do nothing, he screams, “watching people live on TV, dying on our screens!”. Fill up on McCartney and Madonna and you will feel much better.

How can anyone blame Bob single handedly for betraying the poor? Bob did more than his bit and then he handed over to the G8 . No decisions were his, no action or inaction were his. Here is a follow up article on the subject: G

8's historic Africa deal

Thursday September 8, 2005 The Guardian

 George Monbiot, as ever, exaggerates to make a point, but on the Gleneagles summit he becomes misleading (And still he stays silent, September 6). He lists aid agency criticisms but omits other verdicts: "the greatest summit for Africa ever" (Kofi Annan); "an important, if incomplete, boost to the development prospects of the poorest countries" (Professor Jeffrey Sachs); or "a major breakthrough on debt" (Kevin Watkins, until recently head of research at Oxfam).

Article continues

franna wrote:

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neworlddisorder wrote: The USA is not in the business of helping poor people, it is in the business of death and destruction.         No.  I think it's much more accurate to say that the USA is in the business of doing business, and any "death or destruction" that happens along the way, as well as any "helping poor people" is simply the cost of doing business.

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Death and destruction are simlpy the cost of doing business, eh! you make it sound as if it can't be helped - is that what you are saying!

edit for typo

So have you found a name to your band tango 

ADMIN: camilladk, Cazzy, Tango - Please keep to the point in a thread.  If you wish to go off on a tangent, start a new one elsewhere.

Geldof Speaks

Three months ago Bob Geldof declared Live 8 had achieved its aim. But what really happened next?

Oliver Burkeman
Monday September 12, 2005
The Guardian

I haven't heard anything on the news about the UN summit, with the exception being that Bush is scheduled to speak today and what a traffic nightmare it creates.  Then again, I haven't been watching much news lately, and what I have seen has primarily been local NYC election coverage, continuing fallout from Katrina, and Judge John Roberts' confirmation hearings in the US Senate.  The latter two will be of far more immediate interest to most US citizens than the goings-on at the UN, so I'm not really surprised if there hasn't been much media coverage.  Not good for keeping up any sort of domestic pressure on MPH/ONE/DATA/Live8 (whatever you want to call it)'s goals.

I did see these recent New Tork Times editorials, which lead me to believe the opportunity for substantial change has passed, at least for the moment.

Do I think BG is to blame?  No.  I do think he has a responsibility to publicize that the mission was NOT accomplished after Gleneagles.  It simply wasn't a "done deal" - at least not to the extent most of the public thought (assuming that these reports are true and the G8 is backing away from their promises).  After that, whatever work he chooses to do or not do regarding Africa is, in my opinion, a purely personal choice.

A once-in-a-generation opportunity to reform and revive the United Nations has been squandered even before the opening gavel comes down this morning for the largest assemblage of world leaders ever brought together in a single location. The responsibility for this failure is widely shared. But the United States, as the host nation and the U.N.'s most indispensable and influential member, bears a disproportionate share.

There are several casualties of this failure of leadership, including the need to reform the United Nations and to strengthen its role as a monitor of human rights. But the most tragic loss is a genuine opportunity to help the one billion people around the world who each live on less than $1 a day.

Last month, President Bush used a recess appointment to send his notoriously undiplomatic, and Congressionally unacceptable, choice for ambassador to the United Nations, John Bolton, to New York. He contended that contrary to all appearances and to common sense, Mr. Bolton was just the man to achieve the reforms the United Nations needed. Almost immediately, Mr. Bolton began proving Mr. Bush wrong by insisting on a very long list of unilateral demands. The predictable effect was to transform what had been a painful and difficult search for workable diplomatic compromises into a competitive exercise in political posturing.

With Washington jealously protecting the prerogatives of the Security Council, where it holds a veto, others chose to be equally jealous in protecting the prerogatives of the General Assembly, where the influence of poorer and weaker countries is greatest. And when Washington challenged the right of the secretary general to set specific development goals, others then contested his right to set standards for management or human rights. And so on.

That extinguished the idea that international security issues and international development issues are vitally linked, and can be most effectively tackled in tandem. By the time Washington retreated to a more realistic position, it was too late to retrieve much of the bold original agenda, as set out in earlier United Nations summit meetings on development, in the thoughtful recommendations of several high-level panels and in the constructive proposals of Secretary General Kofi Annan. The failure is even more poignant because the United States is clearly on the right side of some important arguments.

Washington, for example, strongly supported the idea of replacing the discredited United Nations Commission on Human Rights, on which nations like Sudan, Libya and Cuba regularly sit, with a new, reformed body that would exclude such notorious rights violators. The final document dilutes this crucial provision to the point of meaninglessness.

On this and other issues, the document offers little more than a fudge of feel-good phrases and pious wishes for future action that leave everyone off the hook from taking entirely practical actions that are needed right now.

This week's summit meeting should have strengthened international commitments to reach broadly accepted development benchmarks over the next decade that could avert tens of thousands of needless deaths from extreme poverty. It should have given the secretary general the power to bypass patronage and rely on merit in choosing and retaining senior officials, creating a crucial institutional safeguard against a replay of the oil-for-food fiasco. It should have reinforced vital international commitments and understandings on nuclear nonproliferation, including those that Mr. Bolton, in his previous job, did so much to undercut.

Although the ceremonial speeches by national leaders are just beginning, the serious negotiations over this summit meeting's outcome are now over. Every one of the more than 170 national leaders attending, starting with President Bush, should be embarrassed about letting this rare opportunity slip away.

And these Op-Ed pieces yesterday:

The biggest gathering of leaders in history unfolds this week at the United Nations, as they preen and boast about how much they're helping the world's poor. In short, it may be the greatest assembly in history - of hypocrites.

The fact is that with just a few exceptions, the presidents and prime ministers coming to the U.N. summit are doing a disgraceful job in helping the poor. That's one reason the world's richest 500 individuals have the same income as the world's poorest 416 million people.

We Americans set a dreadful example as hosts to the summit. President Bush has been trying to wriggle away from his 2002 endorsement of the principle that rich countries should try to provide 70 cents in official development assistance for every $100 in national income. (Mr. Bush has sharply increased foreign aid from the Clinton years, but it still stood at only 16 cents in 2004 for each $100 of national income.)

The Bush administration also tried to change summit documents to downplay references to the millennium development goals of overcoming poverty. Fortunately, the Bush administration backed off and now grudgingly joins the international consensus against infant mortality.

It's common to hear abroad scathing criticisms of U.S. stinginess, much of it deserved. But Japan is also a cheapskate, giving only a hair more than the U.S., and Italy gives even less.

The new Human Development Report 2005, recently issued by the U.N. Development Program, is blessedly undiplomatic in its willingness to point figures - at just about everybody. It notes that the U.S. and other rich countries seem unwilling to provide a total of $7 billion annually for the next decade to provide 2.6 billion people with access to clean drinking water. That investment would save 4,000 lives a day, and the cost is less than Europeans spend on perfume - or than Americans spend on cosmetic surgery.

Meanwhile, the report adds, AIDS kills three million people a year and devastates countries like nothing since the Black Death in the 14th century. Yet annual world spending to fight AIDS amounts to three days of military expenditures.

This U.N. summit is meant to review the millennium development goals, such as cutting child deaths around the world by two-thirds by 2015. All the goals, adopted with great fanfare five years ago, are feasible, and some countries - from Bangladesh to Indonesia, Brazil to Mongolia - are on track to meet them. Hats off to them. But most of the world appears likely to miss the goals.

Two countries that should be the leaders of the developing world, China and India, are both off track and should be ashamed of their records. In India, among children 1 to 5, girls are 50 percent more likely to die than boys, meaning that each year 130,000 Indian girls are discriminated to death.

Bangladesh has now overtaken India in improving child mortality, and Vietnam has overtaken China. If India had matched Bangladesh's rate of reduction in child mortality over the last decade, according to the U.N.D.P., it would have saved 732,000 children's lives this year.

Likewise, China has largely ignored its poor interior, so it still loses 730,000 children each year. China has also taken diplomatic positions that hurt the world's most vulnerable populations, by supporting Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe and by implicitly endorsing Sudan's genocide just as it once endorsed Pol Pot's.

And African leaders? Perhaps this is naïve, but it strikes me as racist for them to have complained about brutal white rule in South Africa or Zimbabwe while excusing black rule that is even more brutal.

Readers often ask if I find it depressing to visit African slums or mud-brick villages. On the contrary, it's exhilarating to see how little it takes to make a difference. Ancient scourges like river blindness and leprosy are being controlled, and a clever initiative by Bill Gates and others to promote vaccinations (the Global Alliance for Vaccinations and Immunization) saved more than one million lives just between 2001 and 2004.

That makes it maddening to see leaders posturing for the cameras at the U.N. while, as the U.N.D.P. report notes, "the promise to the world's poor is being broken." The report adds that the gap between the current trendline on child mortality and the one the leaders committed themselves to amounts to 41 million children dying before their fifth birthday over the next decade.

Rather than toasting themselves, these leaders should apologize for this continuing holocaust.

Ottawa

Five years ago, about 150 world leaders gathered at the United Nations in New York and tried to move the mountain of global poverty. They adopted eight Millennium Development Goals - quantifiable measures of progress on problems like malaria, tuberculosis and child and maternal mortality. The achievement of those goals by 2015 would lift more than one billion people out of extreme poverty.

The trouble is that progress toward these benchmarks often cannot be measured. And if their achievement cannot be measured, the goals are not only a letdown for the world's poor, but also a time bomb for the credibility of the United Nations. As world leaders gather in New York again this week, the United Nations will have to grapple with the question of whether progress is on track to achieve the goals by the 2015 deadline. So far, this inability to measure progress has meant that the United Nations has either guessed or remained silent.

Consider the hazard of dying in pregnancy or childbirth, a fate that befalls more than 500,000 women annually, according to the World Health Organization. The Millennium Development Goal on maternal mortality is to "reduce by three-quarters, between 1990 and 2015, the maternal mortality ratio." Measuring that ratio requires an accurate count of both safe births and maternal fatalities.

But according to the United Nations Millennium Project, only a "handful of countries" can really prove the maternal mortality ratio is improving; poor, rural countries where obstetricians are scarce, home births are common and the dead are mourned privately simply do not have the data. That is why in 2000, their most recent assessment, scientists from the United Nations warned that "it would be inappropriate to compare the 2000 estimates with those for 1990," or to "draw conclusions about trends."

Malaria is another example where United Nations goals hinge on something immeasurable. In 2000, the organization's scientists warned that "it will not, in general, be possible to measure the overall incidence rate of malaria." Yet barely two months later, the United Nations placed bets on doing exactly that and persuaded the world's leaders to endorse a new Millennium Development Goal to start lowering the incidence of malaria by 2015.

Having ignored the advice of its own scientists and fashioned its goal unwisely, the United Nations today studiously avoids having an opinion on whether the malaria crisis - the disease is the No. 1 killer of children in sub-Saharan Africa - is getting better or worse. And yet, nobody who studies malaria doubts that it is getting worse.

Probably the most useful discussion the United Nations could plan for this week's meeting would be one that asked world leaders to endorse new goals against which they could truly measure progress. This is feasible: there are alternative ways to track malaria's toll or to assess the safety of pregnancies. For instance, dozens of demographic surveillance sites could be set up in the poorest countries to document births, deaths, illnesses and social services. This has already been done in countries like Tanzania and Ghana.

How disappointing it is that the United Nations leadership went to great lengths to ensure that no such discussion could happen this week. Last September, Louise Fréchette, the United Nations deputy secretary general, instructed the organization's scientists that she didn't want the summit meeting being "distracted by arguments over the measurement of the Millennium Development Goals," and ordered that they refrain from proposing any refinements to the goals. This is lamentable political censorship.

By putting that discussion off limits, and pretending the Millennium Development Goals are meaningful as they now stand, the United Nations has lost five years on a short timeline and sabotaged its own vital mission to help the world's most unfortunate and needy people.

Amir Attaran, a scientist and lawyer, is a professor at the University of Ottawa.