Make BoBono History: Confronting the Geldof-Bono Obsenity

Gavin

booty bass intellectual
True accountability rests on authenticity of action and openness of purpose, as well as results. When the mass of discriminating consumers are also acting as donors by proxy, they'll demand to know where the money goes. And that's a powerful new tool of transparency.

:mad:

I read the whole report -- most is regurgitated AIDS statistics -- easily available from other sources. There's lots of nebulous acclaim -- the number of lives "touched" by (RED). Nowhere does it reveal the percentage of profits donated to the Global Fund, which would be something closer to transparency. Closer than "authenticity of action," whatever the fuck that means -- photo ops for models, spectacle concerts for corporate brands?

Ah, I see that Armani donates a whopping 40% of the profit margin from its (RED) brands to the global fund. What wholehearted, or at least almost half-hearted, generosity! Gap donates 50% of their (RED) profits. Sustainable development indeed! Hallmark donates a paltry 8%.

So much hilarity, I'd laugh if I weren't so angered -- "Converse is one of the most democratic brands in the world" -- what the fuck does that mean?

I see they have a (RED) store here in Chicago... might be worth doing some reconaissance!
 
:mad:

I read the whole report -- most is regurgitated AIDS statistics -- easily available from other sources. There's lots of nebulous acclaim -- the number of lives "touched" by (RED). Nowhere does it reveal the percentage of profits donated to the Global Fund, which would be something closer to transparency. Closer than "authenticity of action," whatever the fuck that means -- photo ops for models, spectacle concerts for corporate brands?

Ah, I see that Armani donates a whopping 40% of the profit margin from its (RED) brands to the global fund. What wholehearted, or at least almost half-hearted, generosity! Gap donates 50% of their (RED) profits. Sustainable development indeed! Hallmark donates a paltry 8%.

So much hilarity, I'd laugh if I weren't so angered -- "Converse is one of the most democratic brands in the world" -- what the fuck does that mean?

I see they have a (RED) store here in Chicago... might be worth doing some reconaissance!

Yes. It reads - and looks - like any other product brochure, with 'consumer blackmail' brands to make you feel guilty for not consuming hard or 'responsibly' enough.

And Shriver, in his Guardian spin, can't help but fall over himself with contradictory babble, even in the same paragraph: "It is a not-for-profit business ...It's a unique, but simple business model: our partners' products take on the (PRODUCT) RED mark and donate up to 50% of the profit from the sale of these products directly to the Global Fund." A not-for-profit business based on a for-profit 'business model'? Indeed.

What's also disturbing here is the sudden unannounced, fundamental change in Product Red policy ('business model'): when Red was launched, it was announced that donations were to be based on fixed percentages of turnover on sales of Red brands; now they're implying that this was never the case, that donations are, and have always been, based on profits! As the profits for these multinationals, as with all MNCs, are calculated at their own discretion (based on intra-company transfer pricing practices**), the donations they choose to make to the Global Fund are no longer directly related to the consumer's purchases ie. power once again has moved from the consumer/charity-giver back to the multinational.

**Here's how it works: A multinational like Gap establishes a subsidiary in Africa (it has one in South Africa, for instance) to avail of cheap sweathouse labour, government subsidies, and tax-haven status. This subsidiary company then builds, buys, rents or subcontracts a factory that, among other things, manufactures Product Red Gap T-Shirts (designed in Ireland by Bono's self-appointed fashion-designer wife, Ali Hewson). The output is then 'sold' at hugely inflated 'prices' ( transfer prices) to Gap's sales & marketing subsidiary companies in Western countries, Britain, the US etc, a purely off-market intra-company transaction. By doing this Gap maximizes its tax-free profits at the African subsidiary, while then minimizing its taxable profits in Western countries, enabling the MNC to arbitrarily choose (with the help of 'creative accounting') what (deflated) profits to report on its Product Red sales. The narrative is the same for all other MNCs, from Apple to Armani.


[Naomi Klein, I see, has also joined the critique of Bobonoism: The Bono-ization of Activism]
 

vimothy

yurp
Probably not the right thread for this, but whatever, it's a really interestingt idea:

Here’s the normal story. Picture you are in a room with 10 people. Each of them has a slice of cake. How much you are willing to pay for a slice of the cake is the ‘marginal utility’ of having it, and the more cake you have the less any more cake is worth to you. You’d be willing to pay a $1 for the first slice of cake, but you’d only be will to pay 90 cents for the second slice. You’d only be willing to pay 10 cents for the 9th slice, and a penny for the 10th slice. Eating the 10th slice of cake in that room would probably make you sick, hence you want it a lot less than the first slice, which is delicious. That’s declining marginal utility.

Now picture you are in a room with 10 people screaming. You hate it when people scream, and you can pay a person to get them to stop screaming. Would you pay in a similar way to the cake example? Would you pay a $1 to get the first person to stop screaming, and a penny for the 10th person to stop screaming?

No. Getting one person to stop screaming would make very little difference in how much you dislike being in the room. Modern psychology tells us you might not even notice it. You’d probably only pay a penny to get that first guy to stop screaming. However getting the second guy to stop screaming might be worth 10 cents. And the last guy, the difference between some screaming and no screaming, might be worth the full dollar to you. The more quiet it got, the more a marginal difference in how quiet it is would be worth to you. There’s increasing returns to this good; the 10th guy not screaming is worth more than the first guy not screaming, which is the exact opposite dynamic of the 10th cake being less delicious than the first.

For those not involved with economic theory this might just elicit a shrug, but this mechanism turns everything on its head. Let’s say that instead of money, you are given 20 tokens to be used over 4 days, and each token gets you one slice of cake in room #1, and one person to stop screaming in room #2. In the cake room, the optimal decision is to consumption smooth – eat five slices of cake each day, so you use the tokens {5,5,5,5}. In the screaming room, all the enjoyment is not in getting a room with half screaming but in getting a quiet room, and instead of consumption smoothing the optimal choice is to binge – pay 10 people to stop screaming the first two days, and deal with a loud room the last two days – {10,10,0,0}. This will hold even with ‘nudges’, say offering two extra tokens if you have people consumption smooth, since the marginal utility isn’t increasing that much. The utility of {10,10,0,0} is greater than that of {5,5,5,7}.

(And most interesting, instead of tokens, let’s say you could work an hour for 1 token or take 65 cents in leisure over a 5 hour day. In the cake room, you’d probably work 3 hours, and relax 2 hours, as around that time you’d have the marginal return from cake equally the marginal return from relaxing. In the screaming room, you probably wouldn’t work at all – it’s impossible enough to make enough to stop the screaming to the point where it is worthwhile to try. Hence the persistence of poverty.)

His other point is that many goods have both characteristics. Let’s say you have 5 children. In a large house, where each child has his or her own room, a child leaving the house to go out into the world gives you diminishing marginal utility. The first room turns into an entertainment center, the second into a hobby room, and the third just sits empty. But if you are in a cramped, small 2 bedroom place for all of you, the first child leaving might only make a slight bit a difference compared to the second child leaving. By the time the 5th child leaves the home, you get the most marginal enjoyment of having your small place less cramped. Karelis point is that this inflection point is where we should be thinking about poverty, because as the token example above mentions, normal policy mechanisms based on neoclassical microeconomic theory won’t necessarily hold.

Intellectual History

Karelis takes a moment to do some intellectual history digging and finds that the current economic obsession with decreasing marginal utility comes from Jeremy Bentham’s equating happiness with the absence of unhappiness. Bentham, and the Mills, thought of happiness as reciprocal to unhappiness, like the relationship between tall and short. So to increase happiness is the same exact thing as to decrease unhappiness. Maybe, maybe not. But the problem is that this relationship is carried over to the goods that effect happiness and unhappiness.

Bentham: “utility [is] that property in any object whereby it tends to produce…pleasure…or happiness..or (what comes to the same thing) to prevent the happening of mischief, pain, evil, or unhappiness.” Stanley Jevons cites that passage 80 years later when he lays the foundation of what Alfred Marshall will later use to create modern economics.

Bentham usually showed a more ambiguous approach, noting that there are often ranges of postive experiences and negative experiences that don’t necessarily net, but that ambiguity hasn’t transfered to the current theory where the marginal rate at which pleasers please is information on the rate at which relievers relief. And this approach, to see a cross-section within time and see that a baseline income can change incentives in a dramatic way, is a whole new dimension to think through. And one with very testable hypotheses.
 
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vimothy

yurp
Also, this useful analogy this was in the comments:

Yes, Karelis’ ideas are vitally important and have simply not gotten enough attention (because our neo-classical model really doesn’t work to take ideas of individual despair into account). This is almost exactly what we have found in working with homeless. Using the bee sting analogy, which I believe is by far the easiest to understand – if you get one bee sting you want to take care of it immediately, but if you get a hundred bee stings it really doesn’t make any difference to treat a single bee sting, you are stil in the same amount of difficulty. Now think about a homeles individual. He does not have a place to live, but because he doesn’t have a place to live he probably also doesn’t have a job, has very poor nutrition, has no health care, has emotional problems – as well as issues with dignity and a willingness to show yourself in public. If you find this person a job he still has all of the other problems, so while he will start off happy with the job it will slowly dissolve because of the othere issues, so job counseling or even providing a job really doesn’t do that much good. The deficit model of poverty that has dominated poverty research has been very, very destructive. But poverty research, just like health care, is an industry where people are not willing to give up perquisites even though it has not lead to any greater understanding of poverty.
 

Attelaawabe

Member
Make BoBono History Confronting the Geldof Bono Obsenity

oh so if my friends go an lose a leg, they have to front the money to get a falsy? sounds like a great plan. or when my friends come back with "issues" they have to get their own treatment. effin bs. if i have to put my life on the line, i better reciever medical when shit does go down.
 

massrock

Well-known member
What a great idea.

A script bot that takes random posts from one forum and sticks them in a random thread in another.
 

Sectionfive

bandwagon house
http://www.counterpunch.org/2013/03/19/factivism-and-other-fairytales-from-bono/

So what on earth is the Beshaded One talking about this time? Only the TED blurb (almost certainly penned by the man himself) can begin to do justice to Bono’s message: “Human beings have been campaigning against inequality and poverty for 3,000 years. But this journey is accelerating. Bono ‘embraces his inner nerd’ and shares inspiring data that shows the end of poverty is in sight… if we can harness the momentum.”

Bono, who is accelerating humanity toward the end of its long anti-poverty journey, allegedly loves data. He called his first lobbying organisation DATA (Debt Aids Trade Africa), and told the appreciative California audience that he’s a “factivist” who gets sexually aroused by numbers. But Bono’s “inner nerd” really needs to meet my outer skeptic, because in fact his optimistic message about the trajectory of poverty eradication, and the reasons for it, is a flimsy tissue of truths, half-truths and statistics, conveniently skewed to suggest that he and his Western partners in Africa (governments, corporations, foundations) have been doing a great job entirely.
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
In all fairness, taxes do not automatically equal foreign aid. The UK govt could spend far more on aid without increasing anyone's tax if it spent less on heinously inefficient PFI schemes, disastrous 'humanitarian' military interventions, MPs' expenses and god knows what else. Contrarily, it could tax multi-millionaires at 99% but that wouldn't do anyone in Africa any good if they spent it all on ivory back-scratchers. With the possible exception of ivory poachers, I guess.

Of course, crazy Marxist revolutionary types might suggest we could spend tax money more wisely *as well as* taxing huge corporations and very wealthy individuals a bit more. Or at all, in many cases.
 
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Leo

Well-known member
Tough week for Bono. First, the door on his private jet blew off in mid-air and his luggage went flying out, then he got in a bike accident this weekend in Central Park and broke his shoulder. Of course, his shoulder was already considerably weakened from bearing the weight of the world for so many years.

RE: the luggage, Stephen Colbert reported "His bags fell out of his private plane and after three days of intense searching, Bono still hasn't found what he's looking for."
 

firefinga

Well-known member
I remember reading somewhere that U2 had a new album in the making in 2016, but got so disturbed by Brexit and Trump they had to stop working on it.

Brexit and Trump are good for something after all :D
 
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