Bono

Bono   (singer, activist)
Born	Paul David Hewson 10 May 1960 Dublin, Ireland
Nationality	Irish
Religion	Christian
Spouse	Ali Hewson
Member of	Atlantic Council/Distinguished Leadership Awards, WEF/Global Leaders for Tomorrow/1993
Irish singer "kissing the arses of the rich and powerful" and preaching on global inequality while avoiding taxes

Paul David Hewson known by his stage name Bono, is an Irish singer-songwriter, activist, philanthropist, and businessman. He is the lead vocalist and primary lyricist of rock band U2. His philanthropic ventures, like One Campaign, is funded and staffed by a selection of deep state operatives.

Career

Born and raised in Dublin, Ireland, he attended Mount Temple Comprehensive School where he met his future wife, Alison Stewart, as well as schoolmates with whom he formed U2 in 1976. Bono soon established himself as a passionate frontman for the band through his expressive vocal style and grandiose gestures and songwriting. His lyrics frequently include social and political themes, and religious imagery inspired by his Christian beliefs.

On 13 July 1985, U2 performed at the Live Aid benefit concert ] at Wembley Stadium. The event, to raise further funds for relief of the 1983–1985 famine in Ethiopia, was before a crowd of 72,000 fans and a worldwide television audience of 1.5 billion people, and made stars of U2.

He was selected a Global Leader for Tomorrow by the World Economic Forum in 1993, the inaugural batch.

Bono was among those named in the 2017 Paradise Papers after he was identified as an investor in a company which bought a shopping mall in Lithuania in 2007 and transferred ownership to a mailbox company in Guernsey, in a scheme to avoid tax. Bono welcomed the subsequent investigation by the Lithuanian tax authority, saying that transparency was necessary and he had personally campaigned for it.

In 2007 moved part of their multimillion-euro song catalogue from Ireland to Amsterdam six months before Ireland ended a tax exemption on musicians' royalties. Under Dutch tax law, bands are subject to low to non-existent tax rates. U2 manager Paul McGuinness stated that the arrangement was legal and customary and businesses often sought to minimise their tax burdens.

ONE Campaign

He is co-founder of the ONE Campaign, an NGO claiming to work on behalf of the extremely poor, but with a board a rouges gallery "largely composed of multimillionaires, corporate aristocrats and US enforcers" with the main funding provided by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

On March 5, 2021 Gayle Smith was appointed Coordinator for Global COVID Response and Health Security at the U.S. Department of State. He previous job was president and CEO of the One Campaign. She has also been Administrator of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID).

Unlike the vast majority of development NGOs, ONE concentrates exclusively on political work. The organization itself does not run any projects of emergency aid or development cooperation, but campaigns in particular towards the G8 countries to reduce the structural obstacles to development in poorer countries. The organization's headquarters are in Washington, D.C., and its European headquarters are in London. Further offices are located in Berlin, Brussels, Paris, Abuja and Johannesburg.

In his book The Frontman: Bono (in the Name of Power), the Irish scholar Harry Browne maintains that “for nearly three decades as a public figure, Bono has been … amplifying elite discourses, advocating ineffective solutions, patronising the poor and kissing the arses of the rich and powerful”. His approach to Africa is “a slick mix of traditional missionary and commercial colonialism, in which the poor world exists as a task for the rich world to complete”. Writing "As a multimillionaire investor, world-class tax avoider, pal of Bush and Blair and crony of the bankers and neo-cons, Bono has lent credence to the global forces that wreak much of the havoc he is eager to mop up. His technocratic, west-centred, corporation-friendly campaigns have driven him into one false solution, unsavoury alliance and embarrassing debacle after another. The poor for him exist largely as objects of the west's charity. They are not seen as capable of the kind of militant mobilisation that might threaten western interests".

In January 2005, on the sidelines of the World Economic Forum in Davos, he participated in the launch of a label of Product Red products, the profits of which are intended to finance programs to fight against AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria.

At the replenishment conference for the vaccination alliance Gavi in 2015, ONE in Germany was supported in particular by Bill Gates in demanding that the German payments for the alliance be increased. I

Smearing critics

ONE used its power to create a negative response to a book by African economist Dambisa Moyo, Dead Aid: Why Aid Is Not Working and How There Is a Better Way for Africa, which was published in January 2009.

In June 2009, Moyo told former U.S. presidential Republican speech writer Peter Robinson during a Hoover Institute sponsored Uncommon Knowledge interview that "the harshest thing that has happened [in terms of responses to her 2009 book Dead Aid], Bono's and Bob Geldof's organization, called ONE, who I had tried to have a number of meetings with before the book came out, about what the theses of the book were, launched a very vitriolic attack against me. To the point that they were calling organizations ahead of my meetings and media appointments and sent a letter to African NGOs claiming, basically, painting me as a genocidal maniac trying to kill African babies. In other words, trying to get Africans to be against me. To me, that was not really fostering dialogue."

 

Events Participated in

Event	Start	End	Location(s)	Description
Munich Security Conference/2017	17 February 2017	19 February 2017	Germany Munich Bavaria	The 53rd Munich Security Conference
WEF/Annual Meeting/2006	25 January 2006	29 January 2006	Switzerland	Both former US president Bill Clinton and Bill Gates pushed for public-private partnerships. Only a few of the over 2000 participants are known.
WEF/Annual Meeting/2011	26 January 2011	30 January 2011	World Economic Forum Switzerland	2229 guests in Davos, with the theme: "Shared Norms for the New Reality".
WEF/Annual Meeting/2019	22 January 2019	25 January 2019	World Economic Forum Switzerland	"The reality is that we are in a Cold War [against China] that threatens to turn into a hot one."

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References

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