Bono Goes to Washington
This article was originally published in RS 825, November 11th, 1999.
It’s a quintessential Bono moment. The singer has found his flow, his blue eyes are blazing, and he leans into the microphone. “The way I feel about it is this,” he says. “If we don’t get this, all these millennium celebrations, it’s going to be like Louis XIV. . . . It’s just going to be: Up drawbridge, we’re all in the castle, and we’re pissing over a moat of champagne on the poorest of the poor. And I don’t want to be part of that.”
When he finishes, the riveted audience bursts into applause. But this isn’t an uplifting riff during a U2 stadium show — Bono spoke these words to perhaps seventy-five people at a two-day conference in Washington, D.C., devoted to the crisis facing the world’s most impoverished Third World countries, which are staggering under the weight of $200 billion in debt. Bono has joined forces with the Jubilee 2000 Coalition, an international activist group, to have that debt forgiven as a way to mark the new millennium.
Admittedly, Bono had one eye fixed on the reporters gathered in the back of the conference room when he lit on his rhetorical flight. But bringing passion and moral conviction — and, to be sure, publicity — to an issue that is, at least on the surface, dry as dust and buried in economic complexities is part of the job he took on eighteen months ago, when he first began to explore the quagmire of debt relief. The economists, politicians and academics he has been speaking with incessantly can sort out the hows and the whys. Bono’s beat is the musts.
To convey the urgency of his message, Bono and his long-standing partner in activism, Bob Geldof, have, together or separately, met with President Clinton, British prime minister Tony Blair, United Nations secretary general Kofi Annan, U.S. secretary of the treasury Larry Summers, World Bank president Jim Wolfensohn and a host of other international movers and shakers. Long gone are the days of the early Nineties, when, from stadium stages across the U.S. on U2’s Zoo TV tour, Bono would phone the White House, ask to speak to President George Bush and be breezily blown off to hilarious effect. Now Bono’s calls to the White House are routinely put through or promptly returned.
“Those phone calls during Zoo TV started our relationship with Clinton,” Bono says. “We got a phone call from his people, saying, ‘We’ve heard that you’ve been calling the White House every night and George Bush won’t speak to you. Our guy will.’ We knew it was a stunt — we’ve done a few of those ourselves! But he didn’t just take the call. The line was left open. That’s been proven in the last few months, but we were also able to help [during the peace process] in Ireland. They’d call us in a quiet way to try to take the temperature.” Bono also met with Clinton’s national security adviser, Sandy Berger. “He was incredible,” Bono recalls. “It was the morning that [the Kosovo crisis] had just come to an end. He had maps of Kosovo all over his floor. He looked like he hadn’t had any sleep. Coffee stains on his suit jacket. He was listening to us, and I was saying, ‘You know that I know it’s absurd, a pop star explaining this to a proper politician.’
“But it’s an advantage sometimes, being an exotic creature,” he continues. “People let you in — until they regret it.” In those brass-tacks political circles, Bono has earned high marks for his lobbying efforts. In a statement issued through the secretary of the treasury’s office, Summers, who met with Bono over the summer, describes the singer as “a persuasive and knowledgeable advocate who brings insight as well as passion as he makes his case.”
“Larry Summers was tough on me when we met,” Bono says with a chuckle. “We met at the White House with his staff, and he was giving me the hairy eyeball, like, ‘Don’t make me the bad guy — I’m dealing with the real world.’ I tried to encourage him to see the opportunity that the millennium afforded him to break some rules and get a jump on this gigantic problem — that this moment would enable him to carry the American people and, therefore, Congress.
“That’s been my whole job: the performer’s sense of the moment. Neither he nor [former U.S. Treasury Secretary] Bob Rubin patronized me, but they were tough on the idea. And I was tough back because I know we’re right. But you have to look up from the numbers to see that.”
Bono’s blend of pragmatism and idealism has borne results. Clinton economic adviser Gene Sperling, director of the National Economic Council, says, “When Bono talks to me about conversations he’s had with, say, Bob Rubin or Jim Wolfensohn, he doesn’t say, ‘They didn’t get it.’ He says, ‘I really have come to understand their perspective, but couldn’t we try it this way? What can I do to help?’ And he’s much more effective for that reason. I can tell you that not just myself but the president and Larry Summers have both been impressed by the homework he has done. I’d be a liar if I said that I don’t feel more inspired after I’ve talked to him.”
Debt cancellation on the global scale that Bono and Jubilee 2000 are pursuing it is an ambitious, even a quixotic, goal. As opposed to, for example, Live Aid, which specifically addressed famine in Ethiopia, Jubilee 2000 is tackling a problem that affects more than forty nations — highly indebted poor countries, or HIPCs, in the alphabet soup of international economic parlance — as well as industrialized powers like the United States, Great Britain and Japan, and institutions like the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund.
It’s not an easy problem to put a face on. “It’s not apartheid; we don’t have Nelson Mandela behind bars,” says Ann Pettifor, the director of the Jubilee 2000 Coalition in the U.K., at the D.C. conference. “It’s a really hard issue to make visual.”
In recent years, fortunately, a loose consensus has been reached that debt relief is not only called for but essential to the survival of many countries. In Africa, which includes thirty-three HIPC nations, health catastrophes like AIDS, acute vaccine shortages and water contamination are devastating the continent. The notion of economic recovery under such ravaging circumstances is absurd. In the face of a humanitarian crisis of unspeakable proportions, African nations are servicing their loans by paying $200 million — the entire amount of money raised by Live Aid — a week to the richest countries in the world. Every day 20,000 children die in highly indebted countries.
At a June meeting in Cologne, Germany, representatives from the world’s richest nations — known as the G7 — agreed to alleviate up to $100 billion in debt. The original proposal had been $20 billion. Tens of thousands of people — including Bono and members of the Jubilee 2000 Coalition — demonstrated outside the meeting to protest the debt’s not being canceled entirely. But the G7’s Cologne initiative was largely seen as an important step in the right direction. “Eighty billion dollars is not a bad take-home,” jokes Bono, “even for a wealthy pop star like myself.”
Much more needs to be done, however. Part of Jubilee 2000’s strategy has been to emphasize debt relief’s moral dimension as fully as its economic aspects. Not only can full debt cancellation be accomplished, runs this line of thinking, but it should be done. “Don’t get confused by the complexities,” insists Geldof. “And don’t think, ‘Wow, this is wild, pop singers talking to economists.’ You do have to understand the issue — it is the economy, stupid. But you also have to rise above that and say, ‘Come with us, take the political risk.’ Once you understand it, let your anger rise!” Jubilee 2000, which is active in more than sixty countries, has sought to enlist the support of religious leaders throughout the world. The day before the debt conference in Washington, Pettifor, Bono, Geldof, Quincy Jones and Harvard economist Jeffrey Sachs met with Pope John Paul II at his summer residence near Rome. The pope took the occasion to issue a statement, to be read in all Roman Catholic churches throughout the world, that declares in part: “Debt relief is . . . a precondition for the poorest countries to make progress in their fight against poverty. . . . We have to ask, however, why progress in resolving the debt problem is still so slow. . . . It is the poor who pay the cost of indecision and delay.”
In addition to religious leaders, Jubilee 2000 has lobbied politicians of every ideological stripe. At the D.C. conference, Congressman Spencer Bachus, a conservative Republican from Alabama, told the press that debt relief is “the most important moral issue facing our country today. . . . The cost of full debt forgiveness for 700 million or 800 million people is $1.20 a year for three years for every American. . . . I think most Americans.would sacrifice an ice cream cone a year to save 10,000 people in these countries every day.”
Once pop stars are in the picture, of course, it’s hard to keep anything entirely serious. Geldof, for example, characterizes debt relief as the issue that turned “a couple of Paddy pop stars into economists.” To Geldof’s wry enjoyment, the British press has described him and Bono as the Laurel and Hardy of the cause — Geldof being tall and Bono being, well, less tall.
He’s also amused by the highfalutin company that he and Bono have been keeping of late. “The politicians are all baby boomers now,” says Geldof, explaining his and Bono’s newfound access to the powerful, “and they all want their daughters to have autographs. Bono and I are Irish, and we both can talk. We’re old friends, and our relationship flips easily between the flippant, the musical and the political.”
So when the two men met the pope, their awe at the gravity of the occasion did not prevent them from admiring the pontiff’s footwear, later described by Quincy Jones as “pimp shoes.” “I checked them out,” Geldof confesses, laughing. “He was wearing, like, bootleg Polish Gucci. Let’s be specific — they were oxblood slip-ons. I thought, ‘That’s cool.’ ” For his part, the pope took Bono’s sunglasses and tried them on, though the Vatican would not permit footage of his wearing them to be released. He also never returned the glasses to the singer. “The pontiff legged it with my Fly shades,” an incredulous Bono said the next day.
On a more serious note, Bono and economist Jeffrey Sachs, an adviser to Jubilee 2000, have played a kind of good cop/bad cop routine with the World Bank, whose role in the debt crisis is controversial, to say the least. Sachs is unrelenting in his drumbeat attacks on the IMF and the World Bank for its decades-old policies that he believes have kept the HIPCs in debt bondage. Wolfensohn’s view that forgiving the debt might harm the future creditworthiness of the HIPCs is, Sachs states, “the voice of institutions that don’t want to ever let go of their control. Is it a conspiracy? Yes. Is it visible? Yes. . . . [The IMF and the World Bank] want to run these countries. . . . You can’t run Rwanda from Washington. You can’t, and you shouldn’t try. . . . The presumption is that these are countries that can’t help themselves. They need us to run them. This is the sinister, underlying view.”
Bono, however, enjoys a particularly good relationship with Wolfensohn — who, he mentions several times, plays the cello — and believes that he is “a reformer” with “the heart for change.” Wolfensohn, on his end, has no patience for critiques of the institution he heads. “For years the World Bank bore the brunt of everybody’s attack,” he says. “But no one seems to have caught up with the fact that we invented the HIPC initiative. I invented debt relief years ago. It’s a bit ridiculous to keep criticizing the people who got the whole thing started.” He also regards the aims of Jubilee 2000 as naive and unfeasible. Bono, though, he likes. “Bono is extremely intelligent,” he says. “He’s approached this professionally. It’s a serious, heartfelt involvement. He can attract great support because of his personal reputation and standing.”
“It’s been an interesting foray into what wasn’t such enemy territory as I’d thought,” Bono says of his contacts in the realms of politics and finance. “These people let us in.”
As its name would indicate, Jubilee 2000 has set the year 2000 as the deadline for debt forgiveness. “It is a time-limited campaign,” Pettifor has said, and its potential success rests on the ability of politicians and financiers — people not especially known for acting spontaneously — to seize the symbolism of the moment. Still, the effort for debt cancellation got a dramatic lift when, just four days after the Washington conference ended, President Clinton stated that he was going to commit his administration to “making it possible to forgive 100 percent of the debt” that the world’s poorest countries owe to the United States. As a sole condition, the countries would have to demonstrate that they were going to use the money for social programs like health and education. Addressing the annual meeting of the IMF and the World Bank, Clinton declared, “I don’t believe we can, in good conscience, say we support the idea that [poor countries] should choose between making interest payments on their debt and investing in their children’s education. It is an economic and moral imperative that we use this moment of global consensus to do better.”
Clinton’s statement surprised even veteran debt activists. On the last day of the conference, Bono had met with a White House adviser and was disappointed to be told that no new initiatives were in the wind. But Bono’s efforts were hardly in vain: A few days later, Clinton dropped the bomb. “It’s inspirational to me that the administration can be so fast on its feet,” an obviously delighted Bono said after Clinton’s announcement. “He saw the spotlight and took out his saxophone. The job of rock & roll is often just complaining, but you’ve got to give people applause when they do what you’re always whining that they don’t do. And this is it. This gives you faith.”
The fight is far from won, of course, in the United States, let alone the rest of the world. Clinton’s budget has to be approved by Congress, and there is no sign that it is going to be an easy fight. But if a “warmth” develops among the American people for this idea, Bono says, it will be tough to resist. “This is the kind of medicine the American people need on New Year’s Eve,” Bono says. “They want to see both sides of the aisle come together after a rotten eighteen months on Capitol Hill.”
And the United States could provide an example for other affluent countries. Both Clinton’s statement and the pope’s have framed the debt issue in moral terms, and doing what just seems right may gather its own inexorable momentum. “Ideas are like melody lines,” Bono says. “They have an instant appeal or not. This idea, when you really come to grips with it, you can’t walk away from it. When you think about the contributions of music culture, like helping to stop the Vietnam War — this is that big. This is a billion people. How many lives are being lost in Africa every day?
“As a pop star. I want to have fun, and I want to change the world,” he continues, dead serious and laughing hard. “It’s the kind of megalomania that appeals to me.”