Bono is literally a rock star. With U2 and others, he has earned 22 Grammy Awards for songs that have conquered the globe. He writes and rocks with an eye for both the immediate and the spiritual, and, in my mind, voiced his generation’s deepest religious and existential doubts in the ballad “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For.”
But he is a rock star (in the recent, nonliteral sense) in progressive politics as well. Beyond the inevitable criticisms of someone fabulously wealthy and politically outspoken, he is revered for international work to alleviate hunger and disease, especially in Africa. He headlined the Live Aid concert in 1985 (viewed by 1.9 billion people worldwide) and created organizations that raised about $650 million to combat AIDS there. He has met with leaders of multiple nations in Europe, Asia, North and South America, and Africa to enlist their aid. Called “the most politically effective celebrity of all time” and “the face of fusion philanthropy,” he has unified government, entertainment, religious, business, NGO, and media leaders in support of humanitarian causes.
So he set a lot of people hopping — both progressives and conservatives — with callout quotes from a New York Times Magazine interview in October 2022. Questioned about being out-of-touch with younger activists, because he met and wrote glowingly about Presidents George W. Bush and Bill Clinton, he explained, “I ended up as an activist in a very different place from where I started. I thought that if we just redistributed resources, then we could solve every problem. I now know that’s not true … The off-ramp out of extreme poverty is, ugh, commerce, it’s entrepreneurial capitalism.”
He continued down the same path, noting that globalization, using capitalism, has “brought more people out of poverty than any other -ism,” citing the worldwide reduction in extreme poverty from 38% to about 8% since 1990. “If somebody comes to me with a better idea, I’ll sign up.” He implies that entrepreneurial capitalism is an example of the proverb, “If you give a man a fish, you feed him for a day. But if you teach a man to fish, you feed him for a lifetime.”
One conservative organization wrote that “we are officially standing in our chairs, jumping up and down, and screaming over here.” Another headlined, ” … Bono is Right and the Anti-Capitalists Are Wrong.”
And if Bono’s quotes and the conservative gloating weren’t hard enough to swallow for critics of capitalism, he attacked the Che Guevara T-shirts worn by some anarchists and protesters (“#&%* Che Guevara!”) and discounted the term “activist” in favor of “actualist,” explaining that he favors actually getting “#&%* done” rather than remaining on the outside and criticizing, like some activists.
I have frequently criticized the results of American capitalism. I’ve watched the income gap expand consistently through my adult life, realized its adverse effects on health care and cultural areas like sports and creative arts, and seen corporations constantly fight measures to protect the environment, resist paying what was previously their fair share of taxes, and gut local communities by shutting facilities and moving them to areas where they can get cheaper labor. Parents and children have given up the cherished American dream that the children would be better off than their parents. It is American capitalism that has redistributed the wealth — from the bottom and middle to the top 10%, 1%, and .1%.
Bono’s comments prompted me to look in the mirror and examine my beliefs about capitalism, but not before researching the actual text and context of his remarks. It turns out Bono is not a gung-ho supporter of unfettered capitalism. Along with praising capitalism’s effects worldwide, especially for “the bottom billion,” he has stated, “Capitalism is a wild beast. We need to tame it” because without direction, ” … it can, and has, chewed up a lot of lives … [it] isn’t immoral, it’s amoral. It requires our instruction.”
In support of the massive shift of wealth from bottom to top beginning in the 1980s, many conservatives, and those even further to the right, suggest that business regulation and oversight are problems, not solutions, and that free markets can do no wrong.
But there’s also no controversy about the lives capitalism has chewed up in America and elsewhere. Today, many of the strongest Republican supporters are victims of their party’s policies rather than beneficiaries. Capitalism needs to be guided by moral, social choices that balance private profits with public good.
Allen Woods is a freelance writer, author of the Revolutionary-era historical fiction novel “The Sword and Scabbard,” and Greenfield resident. His column appears regularly on a Saturday. Comments are welcome here or at awoods2846@gmail.com.