U2 band leader exemplifies progressive politics

The leader of a popular rock band named U2, Bono (Paul Hewson, aged 41) 
is fighting hard for Third World debt relief. Republican Senator and 
arch-reactionary Jesse Helms has helped Bono receive publicity by giving 
him a meeting with 10 senators to pitch forgiveness of debt in the 
Third World.(1)

The fact that Jesse Helms will let Bono gather front page publicity in 
the likes of USA Today shows that the reformist struggle to relieve 
debt for the Third World is not entirely hopeless. MIM suspects that the 
financial institutions characteristic of imperialism have already let 
Helms know that debt relief is good for them.

In truth, Hollywood agents representing stars say that it pays for the 
stars to take up some altruistic cause. The favorable impression of 
altruism repays the star in increased sales. One fan named Laura Barnes, 
26, says, "'He's using his celebrity to drive an important issue. That's 
why I don't mind paying a lot of money to see his shows.'"

In 1985, Bono helped raise $200 million for food aid to Africa, but he 
says he learned his lesson on how that was a drop in the bucket. 
Nonetheless, despite Biblical injunctions to relieve debt at the end of 
millennia like the year 2000, there has been only $34 billion pledged for 
relief in 22 countries, with strings attached.

As a result of coverage Bono receives in the press, U.S. House 
representative, Republican Spencer Bachus said the right thing: "'In the 
poorest countries of the world, 40,000 people die each night from starvation 
or preventable diseases.'" Meanwhile in Africa, he also points out that 
the poorest countries pay $200 million a week in interest payments in 
the midst of starvation and an AIDS epidemic.

Bachus aided the effort to forgive $435 million owed to the U.$. 
government last year. The world's poorest 41 countries owe almost $200 
billion in debt to the imperialist countries.

For those who do not understand the dynamics of class struggle, it will 
come as a surprise that Republicans are taking a public role in 
building public opinion --however muted and confused--- in this debt relief. 
In reality, what determines progress is the intensity of the struggle 
and crisis of imperialism, not the membership in the Democratic Party or 
Republican Party factions of the bourgeoisie.

Even President Bush who also just said he wants the Navy to leave 
Boricua's Vieques island by the end of 2003 says he supports further debt 
relief, but he has not specified how he is going to get the World Bank 
and IMF to act. One of the reasons that debt relief is not a dead issue 
is that the relief may mean payment by the U.S. Government to U.S. 
corporations -- banks. Furthermore, even relief of public debts owed to 
public institutions means that U.S. private banks can make new loans to 
poor countries, something they are always itching to do because of the 
oversupply of capital in the imperialist world that cannot turn a profit, 
something Marx called the crisis of overproduction.

MIM is in favor of mitigating the imperialist countries' crisis of 
overproduction in favor of private banks through debt relief to the Third 
World, both public and private. The U.S. Government should pay off that 
$200 billion in debt of the 41 poorest countries immediately. For 
comparison, the White House expects to have a yearly budget surplus between 
$200 and $300 billion from 2001 to 2005.(2) If in fact the money for 
debt relief comes out of the hides of the middle-class taxpayers of 
imperialism, so be it.

Any allegedly communist organization that does not speak of reparations 
owed to the Third World for imperialist exploitation is a phony 
communist organization and any organization too afraid to alienate the 
middle-class taxpayers of imperialism to say so adds the crime of opportunism 
on behalf of social-imperialism to the list of its crimes.

Note: 
1. USA Today 15June2001, p. 2a.
2. OMB, Fiscal Year 2002 Budget, 
http://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/budget/fy2002/budget.html.