Bono denied by the party of the people

[Jesuit]

Meetings in Washington last Thursday between rock star Bono and Democrats, including Senate leader Harry Reid of Nevada, yielded a nice photo-op but not much else, according to Bono.

Bono, the U2 frontman and anti-poverty activist, was on Capitol Hill to seek assurances that $1 billion in planned U.S. spending to fight AIDS and malaria in Africa would not be lost if Congress freezes agency budgets in the coming year.

Bono said he also was seeking to close a "commitment gap" between what President Bush has requested for anti-poverty efforts and what Congress has agreed to spend in the past.

After meetings with incoming Senate Majority Leader Reid, House Speaker-to-be Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., and Democrats on the House Appropriations Committee, Bono said he came away empty-handed.

"I'm alarmed we could not get a commitment from the Democratic leadership to prevent the loss of $1 billion in the continuing resolution," Bono said Thursday in a statement.

"I don't know who to blame. Democrats are blaming Republicans. Republicans are blaming Democrats. But the million people who were expecting (mosquito) bed nets don't know who to blame. They just know that a promise made by the United States to keep their families safe is in danger of being broken next year."

A day later, Bono reconsidered his tough comments and took a softer tone in a follow-up.

Bono said Friday that Reid "acknowledged a difficult situation" with the congressional budget "but he sincerely pledged his best efforts to improve the situation."

Bono said Reid "made my day taking me onto the Senate floor and leading me through the history of that great room."

Reid spokesman Jon Summers said he could not provide details of the sessions, but said the Nevadan "enjoyed his meeting with Bono. They come from different places, but both share a true commitment to solving these critical problems."


http://www.reviewjournal.com/lvrj_home/2006/Dec-18-Mon-2006/news/11460940.html

Who will help those poor souls now?

[TheEschaton]

Well, if you're right, the charitable donations of the American people will help from their portion of the tax cuts.

-TheE-

[Jesuit]

Well, if you're right, the charitable donations of the American people will help from their portion of the tax cuts.

-TheE-

Don't you mean the evil capitalist pig-dogs?

[TheEschaton]

The American people aren't pig-dogs, they're just slaves of an immoral system.

-TheE-

[Gan]

The American people aren't pig-dogs, they're just slaves of an immoral system.

-TheE-

Its easy to say that when all your bills are paid by someone else.

[TheEschaton]

All of my bills are paid by myself, thank you very much. Including my tuition.

-TheE-

[ElanthianSiren]

Bono is courting those coming into power (and rightly so), but we have to suspect there are many many groups courting these same people. I don't expect them to give a concrete answer now, so Reid's reaction isn't very surprising.

I certainly do hope that the incoming congress extends a generous hand to those struggling. At the very least, they can reinstitute the school lunches for underprivledged children here cut in the last budget session.


-M

[Jesuit]

The American people aren't pig-dogs, they're just slaves of an immoral system.

-TheE-

If you think the system is immoral, why are you still here? The best thing about America is the fact that if you don't like it here, nobody stops you from leaving.

[Parkbandit]

If you think the system is immoral, why are you still here? The best thing about America is the fact that if you don't like it here, nobody stops you from leaving.


Exactly. You don't like this 'immoral system', then please.. do the right thing and get the fuck out. Don't bitch about a system that you are taking full advantage of.. then call it immoral... because it makes you worse than the system itself.

[Sean of the Thread]

BONO = HOMO

[Parkbandit]

BONO = HOMO

Naw.. I think he's a great artist.. his political motives are a bit skewed and unrealistic.. but you have to love U2.

[TheEschaton]

Exactly. You don't like this 'immoral system', then please.. do the right thing and get the fuck out. Don't bitch about a system that you are taking full advantage of.. then call it immoral... because it makes you worse than the system itself.

Or, I could stay and work to change that system instead of giving up and saying it's useless.

You might say I've chosen to "stay the course."

-TheE-

[Jesuit]

Or, I could stay and work to change that system instead of giving up and saying it's useless.

You might say I've chosen to "stay the course."

-TheE-

You ain't changing anything. I don't know how it is in your world, but in the real world there are haves and have nots, since you're not a have you'll never change the policy no matter how educated you think are.

[TheEschaton]

Wow, I'm not a have. That makes me sad.

Coincidentally, what makes me a have not? Or at least not a have? That I'm an immigrant?

-TheE-

[Parkbandit]

You think you will change the system.. a system that most Americans enjoy. Because YOU don't like the system.. you believe it to be broken and in need of fixing. To hell with the majority of Americans that believe we have the best system on the planet.

Seriously, you should work on the system in your little fantasy world.. you can pretend it's any system you want it to be. Leave the real world for those of us who haven't lost touch with reality.

Thanks.

[Sean of the Thread]

<----Does not love U2. My favorite lyric is "How long must we sing this song?"

[Gan]

All of my bills are paid by myself, thank you very much. Including my tuition.

-TheE-

Somehow I really doubt that. You come off on these boards as a spoonfed spoiled rich brat who has never had to work for anything in your life and yet you cry foul of the very system that has supported you through college, the peace corps, and through your law degree (and with an east coast ivy-league air of snobbery). You really make those of us who are blamed to be idealists or even realists a mere shadow of extremist thought.

If you are paying your own bills, what are you currently doing for work?

Like I said, your words here on the PC scream the beatnik prose of those who live off the man while they are fighting the man.

PS. Merry fucking Christmas.

[DeV]

Bono is courting those coming into power (and rightly so), but we have to suspect there are many many groups courting these same people. I don't expect them to give a concrete answer now, so Reid's reaction isn't very surprising.

-MThe only sensible post in this thread so far.

And very much agreed.

[Parkbandit]

Somehow I really doubt that. You come off on these boards as a spoonfed spoiled rich brat who has never had to work for anything in your life and yet you cry foul of the very system that has supported you through college, the peace corps, and through your law degree (and with an east coast ivy-league air of snobbery). You really make those of us who are blamed to be idealists or even realists a mere shadow of extremist thought.

If you are paying your own bills, what are you currently doing for work?

Like I said, your words here on the PC scream the beatnik prose of those who live off the man while they are fighting the man.

PS. Merry fucking Christmas.

LOL.. dead on.

Way to bite the hand that feeds you.

[Back]

Given Bono’s passionate nature I’m surprised he wasn’t more critical in his original statement. He later toned it down from what was already probably toned down to begin with.

Speculation: With the Democratic Party sweep across America (Congress, Governor and State Legislatures) Bono may have thought “Finally, we can get this commitment.” So he flies out to have a sit down but comes away slightly discouraged without a commitment from a Congress not yet in session and with many, many things on the table that need immediate attention. Not that money for AIDS in Africa is not needed immediately but there are some things we need to address quickly so that in the future we are able to maintain commitments like the one Bono is seeking.

[TheEschaton]

I don't get it - if I gave up everything I had, you'd argue I was a "have not" and won't be able to affect any change that I want to affect..

...yet, if I do use money and influence to affect change, I'm somehow biting the hand that feeds me? I am an anti-capitalist, yes, but that's because the present incarnation of capitalism is not good. Can capitalism be implemented in a way which serves the interest of the lower and middle classes? Yup, it would just mean taking a hit on record high profit margins, which is kind of against the point of capitalism to begin with. Would I support such reforms? Sure. If it worked, I'd be happy and content with that. If it didn't? I'd push for a system where justice was implemented within the economic system itself.

So, to recap: I am against the current manifestation of free market, no holds barred capitalism. Capitalism as a whole? Eh, I'm indifferent to it - it could be made to a just system, but then, this "People-first" capitalism isn't really capitalism to many. Meanwhile, I can play the stock market, invest in companies which aren't being evil, turn a profit, and use it to pay for my law school which will help me affect that change.

And, because I like to quote people to end on, this one is from Gandhi: "It isn't capital that is evil, it is the way men use capital that can be evil. Capital used for good is good in and of itself."

-TheE-

[ElanthianSiren]

Actually, there was someone on the board that was bragging that they got so many grants and scholarships that their school of choice paid them to go. I'm not sure it it was TheE or Edaarin, but I remember thinking way to play the system.

Also, if your family has money/you've inherited money, it's pretty easy to use said system with a small influx in capital or to use just the interest generated if your lump sum is big enough and you are cost-conscious enough; money from options paid for my education in full last semester. If you have those advantages, why wouldn't you use them and be proud of a family that has enabled you to use them?

I doubt the individuals that instituted programs like lunch for underprivledged children did so because their children were underprivledged. Having the means to fend for yourself doesn't mean that an individual can't desire change for others without as many advantages.

Just my take,
-M

[TheEschaton]

It certainly wasn't me, ES, who had tuition paid for me. I think it might of been Ed.

-TheE-

[ElanthianSiren]

Might have been then. I used to get your persons confused constantly until I spent more time in the pictures thread and had a face to put with the name. :blush:

-M

[Stanley Burrell]

Electrical Storm was capitalist pig-addled turncoat feces that makes Bono's recent knighting ring the pangs of despised laugter quite audibly.

I don't follow the celebrity + politics mixture and your site had an Ad Council banner.

I am aware of my self-indulged pretentiousness in the above.

[Latrinsorm]

Given Bono’s passionate nature I’m surprised he wasn’t more critical in his original statement.They probably edited out a bunch of "fooks" and "yobs" and such-like.

[Jesuit]

And, because I like to quote people to end on, this one is from Gandhi: "It isn't capital that is evil, it is the way men use capital that can be evil. Capital used for good is good in and of itself."

-TheE-

Didn't he support the hindu caste system and hate the harijans?

[Jesuit]

Here's some info showing what a hypocrite Gandhi was. Gandhi and TheE must be related. When the British proposed the Poona Pact in India, Gandhi was so opposed to it he actually went on a hunger strike.




Poona Pact:

(Sept. 24, 1932), agreement between Hindu leaders in India granting new rights to untouchables. The pact resulted from the communal award of Aug. 4, 1932, made by the British government on the failure of the India parties to agree, which allotted seats in the various legislatures of India to the different communities. Mahatma Gandhi objected to the provision of separate electorates for the “scheduled castes” (untouchables), which in his view separated them from the whole Hindu community. Though in prison, Gandhi announced a fast unto death, which he began on September 18.
B.R. Ambedkar, the untouchable leader, who felt that his group's special interests might be advanced by the government's system, resisted concessions until Gandhi was near death. He and the Hindu leaders then agreed to the pact, which withdrew separate electorates but gave increased representation to the scheduled castes for a 10-year period. Ambedkar complained of blackmail, but the pact marked the start of movement against untouchability within the Indian nationalist movement.

[Latrinsorm]

From that excerpt alone, it appears to me that Gandhi was concerned from a "separate but equal" perspective, not that he was out to get the untouchables.

Gandhi had his faults, but pro-caste in any morally objectional sense wasn't one of them.

[Jesuit]

Alright let me clarify.


In India, supposedly the worlds largest democracy, the leadership of the rapidly growing Dalit movement have nothing good to say about Mohandas K. Gandhi. To be honest, Gandhi is actually one of the most hated Indian leaders in the hierarchy of those considered enemies of India's Dalits or "untouchables" by the leadership of India's Dalits.

Many have questioned how could I dare say such a thing?

In reply I urge people outside of India to try and keep in mind my role as the messenger in this matter. I am the publisher of the Ambedkar Journal, founded in 1996, which was the first publication on the internet to address the Dalit question from the Dalits viewpoint. My co-editor is M. Gopinath, who includes in his c.v. being Managing Editor of the Dalit Voice newspaper and then going on to found Times of Bahujan, national newspaper of the Bahujan Samaj Party, India's Dalit party and India's youngest and third largest national party. The founding President of the Ambedkar Journal was Dr. Velu Annamalai, the first Dalit in history to achieve a Ph.d in Engineering. My work with the Dalit movement in India started in 1991 and I have been serving as one of the messengers to those outside of India from the Dalit leaders who are in the very rapid process of organizing India's Dalits into a national movement. The Dalit leadership I work with recieved many tens of millions of votes in the last national election in India. With that out of the way, lets get back to the 850 million person question, why do Dalits hate M.K. Gandhi?

To start, Gandhi was a so called "high caste". High castes represent a small minority in India, some 10-15% of the population, yet dominate Indian society in much the same way whites ruled South Africa during the official period of Apartheid. Dalits often use the phrase Apartheid in India when speaking about their problems.

The Indian Constitution was authored by Gandhi's main critic and political opponent, Dr.Ambedkar, for whom our journal is named and the first Dalit in history to receive an education (if you have never heard of Dr. Ambedkar I would urge you to try and keep an open mind about what I am saying for it is a bit like me talking to you about the founding of the USA when you have never heard of Thomas Jefferson).

Most readers are familiar with Gandhi's great hunger strike against the so called Poona Pact in 1933. The matter which Gandhi was protesting, nearly unto death at that, was the inclusion in the draft Indian Constitution, proposed by the British, that reserved the right of Dalits to elect their own leaders. Dr. Ambedkar, with his degree in Law from Cambridge, had been choosen by the British to write the new constitution for India. Having spent his life overcoming caste based discrimination, Dr. Ambedkar had come to the conclusion that the only way Dalits could improve their lives is if they had the exclusive right to vote for their leaders, that a portion or reserved section of all elected positions were only for Dalits and only Dalits could vote for these reserved positions.

Gandhi was determined to prevent this and went on hunger strike to change this article in the draft constitution. After many communal riots, where tens of thousands of Dalits were slaughtered, and with a leap in such violence predicted if Gandhi died, Dr. Ambedkar agreed, with Gandhi on his death bed, to give up the Dalits right to exclusively elect their own leaders and Gandhi ended his hunger strike.Later, on his own death bed, Dr. Ambedkar would say this was the biggest mistake in his life, that if he had to do it all over again, he would have refused to give up Dalit only representation, even if it meant Gandhi's death.

As history has shown, life for the overwhelming majority of Dalits in India has changed little since the arrival of Indian independence over 50 years ago. The laws written into the Indian Constitution by Dr. Ambedkar, many patterned after the laws introduced into the former Confederate or slave states in the USA during reconstruction after the Civil War to protect the
freed black Americans, have never been enforced by the high caste dominated Indian court system and legislatures. A tiny fraction of the "quotas" or reservations for Dalits in education and government jobs have been filled. Dalits are still discriminated against in all aspect of life in India's 650,000 villages despite laws specifically outlawing such acts. Dalits are the victims of economic embargos, denial of basic human rights such as access to drinking water, use of public facilities and education and even entry to Hindu temples.

To this day, most Indians still believe, and this includes a majority of Dalits, that Dalits are being punished by God for sins in a previous life. Under the religious codes of Hinduism, a Dalits only hope is to be a good servant of the high castes and upon death and rebirth they will be reincarnated a high caste. This is called varna in Sanskrit, the language of the original Aryans who imposed Hinduism on India beginning some 3,500 years ago. Interestingly, the word "varna" translates literally into the word "color" from Sanskrit.

This is one of the golden rules of Dalit liberation, that varna means color, and that Hinduism is a form of racially based oppression and as such is the equivalent of Apartheid in India. Dalits feel that if they had the right to elect their own leaders they would have been able to start challenging the domination of the high castes in Indian society and would have begun the long walk to freedom so to speak. They blame Gandhi and his hunger strike for preventing this. So there it is, in as few words as possible, why in todays India the leaders of India's Dalits hate M.K. Gandhi.

This is, of course, an oversimplification. India's social problems remain the most pressing in the world and a few paragraphs are not going to really explain matters to anyones satisfaction. The word Dalit and the movement of a crushed and broken people, the "untouchables" of India, is just beginning to become known to most of the people concerned about human rights in the world. As Dalits organize themselves and begin to challenge caste based rule in India, it behooves all people of good conscience to start to find out what the Dalits and their leadership are fighting for. A good place to start is with M.K. Gandhi and why he is so hated by Dalits in India.


Thomas C. Mountain is the publisher of the Ambedkar Journal on India's Dalits, founded in 1996. His writing has been featured in Dalit publications across India, including the Dalit Voice and the Times of Bahujan as well as on the front pages of the mainstream, high caste owned, Indian press. He would recommend viewing of the award winning film "Bandit Queen" as the best example of life for women and Dalits in India's villages, which is the story of the life of the late, brutally murdered, Phoolan Devi, of whose international defense committee Thomas C. Mountain was a founding member. He can be reached at tmountain@hawaii.rr.com

[TheEschaton]

Umm, Gandhi was protesting basically a separate country unto itself within India. To set aside a certain amount of seats for one group, and only allow that group to pick them is not Democratic in any way, whether the group is based on religious affiliation or not. Basically, if you agree with the article which says varna is color, it's like saying you should set aside 25 seats in the Senate for black people only, and only black people can vote on those seats. This, while it may be the "best" way to ensure a discriminated minority is represented, is neither fair, just, nor democratic. Gandhi protested this lack of democracy built into the Constitution. It's like saying white people can't represent black people, or black people cannot represent white people. Correcting the wrong of caste discrimination with another wrong does not make the situation right. Discrimination cannot be fought with forced quotas. And before you call me a hypocrite, I don't believe in quotas here in the U.S., either.

Furthermore, Gandhi has been known to celebrate and enjoin the potential of all human beings, including untouchables...once again, you are twisting Gandhi's political act here, to preserve democracy, as a religious act of discrimination and hate - when Gandhi had always worked to love the untouchables, unlike many of his own caste.

-TheE-

[Artha]

Actually, there was someone on the board that was bragging that they got so many grants and scholarships that their school of choice paid them to go. I'm not sure it it was TheE or Edaarin, but I remember thinking way to play the system.
It was Edaarin, but a) he went to a really amazing high school, from which all graduates with a C average or better get accepted to any state university in Virginia and b) went to (one of?) the least costly state universities in Virginia.

It'd be nice to get paid to go to school though...

[Jesuit]

You forgot to end on a quote from Gandhi. Let me give you one.

Gandhi said:

"I believe that caste has saved Hinduism from disintegration." He also said, "To destroy the caste system and adopt the Western European social system means that Hindus must give up the principle of hereditary occupation, which is the soul of the caste system. The hereditary principle is an eternal principle. To change it is to create disorder."

[Latrinsorm]

As I'm sure you're aware, because I found the same site when I googled Gandhi and caste, Gandhi goes on to say that putting moral worth on a caste is absolutely unacceptable, precluding any possible caste discrimination. Thus, it's more likely Gandhi's quote has more to do with preventing the kind of topical Western/modernization that would later occur in places like the Middle East. All you can really derive from his quote is that he didn't think the Indian way of life should be discarded in favor of the Euro-American model.

[Daniel]

Actually, there was someone on the board that was bragging that they got so many grants and scholarships that their school of choice paid them to go. I'm not sure it it was TheE or Edaarin, but I remember thinking way to play the system.


-M


At the USO in LAX, so replying quick while my directions print out, but it might have been me. I don't neccessarily remember it, but I've gotten over 100k in Scholarships in the past year. On top of my school grants (another 30) My GI Bill (20) and Pell grants (maybe 8)