Bob Geldof can often be a polarising figure when waxing lyrical on the need for wide-sweeping changes to today's global political architecture. He paints with a broad brush and colours his argument with expressive imagination. Right wingers hate him. But whatever one's political leanings the former Boomtown Rats frontman and force behind Live Aid is always worth listening to. So it is irritating in the extreme to read conservative opinion pieces and News Ltd's Cut and Paste column belittling him as muddled and naive.
For example, take this smarmy piece of vitriol - an editorial from the Australian:
THE world according to Bob Geldof is a dispiriting place where the tub-thumping righteousness of the preacher meets the post-nationalist, agenda of the New Left. Ironically, the former rock singer best known for staging the Live Aid concerts to fight poverty is now promoting ideas that will stunt global growth and entrench disadvantage for billions of people in the developing world.
The 1985 Live Aid concerts produced some memorable musical performances, and arguably helped focus world attention on a famine in Ethiopia, partly caused by drought and partly by the country's Marxist-Leninist president Mengistu Haile Mariam, who committed 46 per cent of the Ethiopian gross national product to military spending. It is hard to measure to what extent Live Aid eased the plight of the Ethiopian people, but it is beyond doubt that Mengistu skimmed off much of the cash. He is currently in exile in Zimbabwe having been sentenced to death in absentia for genocide.
...China, on the other hand, shunned the Geldof mendicancy model for capitalism. In 1985, China's GDP was marginally ahead of Ethiopia's at $US290 per person. Last year it was 13 times larger than Ethiopia's -- $US6094 -- as the country surged towards developed-world status. India, too, wisely chose business over the begging bowl, and increased its per capita GDP from $US300 to $US1592 over the same period.
Geldof, however, won't give up, and incredibly still manages to find a platform on the ABC, where his economically challenged, muddle-headed message comfortably fits house style. On Tuesday he told Lateline that capitalism had visited carnage on the world, sovereign parliaments were failing and that the 21st century required "a new paradigm". "It's not just failure within the system, it's failure of the system," he said, citing Cyprus and his own country, Ireland, as exhibits.
We beg to differ. Ireland, despite its current serious economic problems, has thrived in the era of globalisation by deregulating its markets and reducing protection in so far of the EU has allowed; its per capita GDP grew by a factor of seven to $US44,781 between 1985 and 2012. Ireland's recent problems are not so much a failure of capitalism, but a failure of the centrally managed European experiment.
In a free market of ideas, Geldof's muddled arguments would sink under the weight of their own ridiculousness. In a celebrity-driven culture, however, Geldof's short-lived stardom as a rock musician is enough to guarantee him a platform for the rest of his life, and so we are obliged to take his wearisome rhetoric seriously. As Ayn Rand once wrote: "The uncontested absurdities of today are the accepted slogans of tomorrow." Eventually, by degrees, "they are suddenly declared to be the country's official ideology". We urge our friends at the ABC to consider bringing back the show Countdown. It would allow Geldof to go back to his day job, fronting the Boomtown Rats, while India, China and the rest of the developing world tap the animal spirits of capitalism to make poverty history.
The above was in response to Geldof's appearance on the ABC's Lateline program in which he gave his views in his usual style on how the world needs to break from its perenial boom and bust cycle, while at the same time giving a well deserved kick in the backside to Rupert Murdoch as one of the overlords of the current capitalist system. According to reports, radio shockjocks joined the News Ltd chorus. Not for them the finer details, instead they ridiculed Geldof on the basis of disjointed excerpts from the interview crudely taken out of context - even making fun of the bags under his eyes and dishevilled hair. The point of this whole exercise was to dismiss him as nothing more than an old rock star with a head full of nonsense, just in case people listened to him and agreed.
It's always refreshing to hear someone who speaks with utter conviction and with a good deal of common sense. Contrast that with ideologically driven sections of the media, big business and the politicians and you can see why Geldof and those like him represent a threat to the established order.