Bono (11 page)

I'm available to be used, that is the deal here. I'll step out with anyone, but I'm not a cheap date. I know that I'm being used, and it's just at what price.

So what's the price?

Well, as an example, so far, from the work DATA has been involved in with others, we got in late 2002 an extra five billion dollars from the United States for the poorest of the poor, and a commitment for another twenty billion over the next few years in a combination of increased aid to countries tackling corruption and a historic AIDS initiative. From a conservative administration, that was unthinkable in the development community. Even a year ago [2004].

Would it have been possible if you hadn't represented that organization?

A lot of people were involved, but I think most would agree that we helped dramatize in a new way as justice rather than charity, as something the Left and Right could work on together, getting radical student activists to work together with conservative church groups. We had rock stars, economists, popes, and politicians all singing off the same hymn sheet.

Did this start with the Drop the Debt campaign?

I was talking about DATA in the U.S., but you're right, the model was formed by Jubilee 2000 in Europe in their campaign to eliminate Third World debt. In 1997, I was asked to help out in a campaign to use the occasion of the millennium to cancel the chronic debt burdens of the poorest countries on the planet to the richest. Politicians were looking for something dramatic to mark that moment. It would be the abolition of an economic slavery. Some of the countries like Tanzania or Zambia were spending twice as much of their national income servicing old Cold War loans than they were on the health and education of their populace. It was obscene.

But what is it exactly that made them borrow so much in the first place?

Well, you can say it was irresponsible borrowing, but it was also irresponsible lending. In the sixties and the seventies, the West was throwing money at any African country who wasn't siding with the Communists. The Cold War was being fought in Africa. People like Mobutu, the dictator in what was then called Zaire, stashed this money in Swiss bank accounts and let his people starve to death. It is completely unacceptable to make the grandchildren of those bad decisions pay the price for that. As I say, this was not about charity, this was about justice.

How much have you succeeded in canceling?

About one-third of all such debts, which adds up to a hundred billion dollars' worth.

And you feel you were an important part of that success.

In truth, I think the place where I had the most impact was the United States. The movement already had a lot of momentum in Europe and especially the U.K., but in the U.S., Jubilee 2000 had been a lot slower to catch on. We were running out of time to grow the grass roots. I had to go straight to the decision-makers, or at the very least the people who knew those decision-makers.

Who were they?

The best phone call I ever made in my opinion was to the most extraordinary woman in the world: Eunice Shriver Kennedy, sister of John F. Kennedy, the woman who in her forties, after having changed the world once advising to elect JFK to president, changed the world once more by starting the Special Olympics. A legend and a lesson in civic duty. All the Kennedys are, and I'm not just saying that because they're Ireland's Royal Family, but because I've seen how hard they work.

What advice did Eunice Shriver give you?

She told me to ring her son Bobby, which I did. And he immediately put the family Filofax to work for me. Remember Filofax?

In a different lifetime, yeah.

Well, it was contacts. And more than just giving me numbers, he called them and often accompanied me to those appointments.

Would a member of the most famous Democratic family have influence with Republicans?

Actually, some. But there were more than a few meetings where he would hide in the corridor outside. Mind you, his brother-in-law Arnold Schwarzenegger had a lot of Republican friends. Arnie called a congressman from Ohio called John Kasich, who became an important guide through the Republican side of the Congress.

So you feel that without you, the American side of the Drop the Debt campaign would not have been as effective.

Myself and Bobby Shriver. I think that if you asked President Clinton how he got a hundred percent of the bilateral debt canceled for twenty-three countries, he would say that DATA's forerunner Jubilee 2000 more than helped. If you asked him how it made it through Congress, he would say: “A lot of footwork by a few people.” And I'm certainly one of them. Bobby Shriver and I, Larry Summers, the then treasury secretary, we were dead in the water without John Kasich. President Clinton believed in it, but we had to fight hard to get his way. It's funny, I thought the president of the United States was the Big Cahuna, the Boss. But he's not. In the United States, the Congress is in charge. When President Clinton announced his commitment to full cancellation, we thought we cracked it, we were jumping up and down. But then I started getting calls: this isn't gonna get past Congress. And that's how I found myself inside the body politic, trying to figure out how it lived and breathed, how it behaved—a rock star wandering around the corridors of power rather than placarding at the gates outside. Strange. Every few weeks I had to travel to Washington, D.C., to go and meet all kinds of unexpected people, in an attempt to get debt cancellation accepted in the United States. It was uphill. Myself and Bobby Shriver were entering a world not just of ideologue politicians, but one of bankers and economists, and a certain elite who guard America's piggy bank. For most
of these people, especially the bankers, it's against their religion to cancel debts. Bobby had a background in finance, but I was way out of my depth.

So what was your line in that part?

I had one answer and two questions.

I'm not surprised you'd start off with an answer. What was it?

Go back to school. Bobby fixed me an appointment with Professor Jeffrey Sachs at Harvard, which completely changed my life. He emboldened me. He turned the math into music. I spent a lot of time with him on and off campus. He's a man who sees no obstacles to a great idea.

But did you also meet people who didn't think that way?

Yes. I also asked and got to meet very conservative economists like Robert J. Barrow, for example. I wanted to get to know the people who might oppose the idea.

What was he like?

I liked him. In the end he wrote an article for the
Wall Street Journal,
offering us “Two Cheers.”

OK. Now tell me about the two questions.

And the second?

The first, I have just mentioned. “Who can stop this from happening?” I wanted to meet the people who could roadblock us . . . to roadblock them.
The second was: “Who's the Elvis here?” In whatever area I was, I wanted to know who's the boss, who's the
capo di tutti capi
here. “Who's Elvis,” I used to ask, at banking? And they'd say: “Well, in development, it's the World Bank, it's Jim Wolfensohn, it's the people running the International Monetary Fund.” So I used to go and meet them. It's Robert Rubin, who was the treasury secretary of the United States, his signature was on every dollar; it's Paul Volcker, who was the legendary chairman of the Federal Reserve, the Alan Greenspan of his age. I just went all the places they didn't expect me to turn up. I didn't go because I wanted to, I went because we had to, to get it through the Congress. It wasn't enough just to talk to President Clinton. Oddly enough, Bill Clinton's staff used to call him Elvis anyway. That was his nickname. The Southern twang, I guess. But it turns out Elvis wasn't enough. In the United States, the president is not the most powerful force—the Congress is. We needed a Colonel Tom
*
to get our bill passed. And Colonel Tom was the Congress.

So it was like a crash course in how power works.

That's what it was.

So how did you put that knowledge into practice? What were you able to achieve?

On debt cancellation we won the day. It was close, but with a lot of help from a few people, particularly John Kasich. He was incredible. He passionately made the case to the Republicans. In a floor fight in the House of Representatives, he shouted down opposition to the bill and we made it. It took him months, and me months traveling back and forth from Dublin. Internationally, it was no small victory. If the U.S. hadn't moved, everyone else would have gotten out. As I say, there was a
hundred billion dollars in play, and I'm very proud of our part, however small it was.

So you think your photo with these politicians paid off.

Well, there is three times the amount of children going to school in Uganda now, three times the amount of children as the result of debt cancellation. That's just one country. All over the developing world, you'll find hospitals built with that money, real lives changed, communities transformed. And if it didn't go through Congress, then the Europeans could have fudged there. You see, they move en masse. Would we have gotten there without people taking to the streets, banging the dustbin lids and raising the temperature of the debate? No. You need both. What the protesters are asking is to get in the room. So then, when you get in the room, occupy it, make your argument, and don't leave till you get the check.

It's another kind of power: star power.

You know, celebrity is ridiculous. It's silly, but it is a kind of currency, and you have to spend it wisely. And I've learnt that much.

In the U.S., you went from friend of Bill Clinton to flashing a peace sign in a photo op with George W. Bush . . . Please explain, because I'm getting confused here . . .

I was in a photo with President Bush because he'd put 10 billion dollars over three years on the table in a breakthrough increase in foreign assistance called the Millennium Challenge. It is an amusing photograph. I had just got back from accompanying the president as he announced this at the Inter-American Bank. I kept my face straight as we passed the press corps, but the peace sign was pretty funny. He thought so too. Keeping his face
straight, he whispered under his breath, “There goes a front page somewhere: Irish rock star with the Toxic Texan.”
[laughs]

What an amusing and self-effacing guy. It's hard to buy that, don't you think?

You know, I think the swagger and the cowboy boots come with some humor. He is a funny guy. Even on the way to the bank he was taking the piss. The bulletproof motorcade is speeding through the streets of the capital with people waving at the leader of the Free World, and him waving back. I say: “You're pretty popular here!” He goes
[Texan accent]
: “It wasn't always so . . .”—Oh really?—“Yeah. When I first came to this town, people used to wave at me with one finger. Now, they found another three fingers and a thumb.” Isn't that funny?
[laughs]

So you liked this man?

Yes. As a man, I believed him when he said he was moved to also do something about the AIDS pandemic. I believed him. Listen, I couldn't come from a more different place, politically, socially, geographically. I had to make a leap of faith to sit there. He didn't have to have me there at all. But, you know, you don't have to be harmonious on everything—just one thing—to get along with someone.

You put other stuff out of your mind: tax cuts for the rich and an up-and-coming war in Iraq?

You become a single-issue protagonist. You represent a constituency that has no power, no vote, in the West, but whose lives are hugely affected by our body politic. Our clients are the people who are not in the president's ear. My mouth, because it is, belongs to them. Our clients are the people whose lives depend on these Western drugs, whose lives will be radically
altered by new schools and new investment in their country. That's a position I take very seriously. They didn't ask me to represent them. Jubilee 2000 asked me to represent them, and, yes, Jubilee 2000 is a North-South, pan-African, pan-European, and pan-American operation, but those people didn't actually say: “Hey, Bono, would you do that?” The ball kind of fell to my feet, it's the truth, and I saw a way past the goalkeeper. What am I gonna do? I'm gonna do what I can. It's already preposterous to have that position. I'll let somebody else be war watchdog.

Speaking of watchdogs, was there uproar within the band when they saw you in some of these photos?

Yes, but they also know the strategy is effective. If it's not, they're going to torture me. They're results-oriented. They also push me to sharpen my arguments.

So being in a band prepared you for what you're doing now.

It turns out that a lot of the things that you learn from being in a band are analogous to politics. And not just politics, even the so-called nasty old world of commerce, anywhere you've got to get your message across. I know much more than you'd expect about these things, just from trying to keep on top of U2's business. We like to say our band is a gang of four, but a corporation of five. I understand brands, I can understand corporate America, I can understand economics. This is not at all so difficult. U2 was art school, business school. It's always the same attitude that wins the day: faith over fear. Know your subject, know your opponent. Don't have an argument you can't win. On the Africa stuff we can't lose, because we're putting our shoulder to a door God Almighty has already opened. We carry with us—this is something that's important—the moral weight of an argument. That's much bigger than the personalities having the debate. I might walk into an important office
and people are looking at me as though I'm some sort of exotic plant. But after a few minutes, they don't see me. All they're hearing is the argument, and the argument has some sort of moral force that they cannot deny. It's bigger than you, and it's bigger than them. And history as well as God is on its side.