Wrong with the picture.




This is a 2006 remix/remake of "Click" - an advertisement that ran in 2005 for the Make Poverty History campaign. View their original here.

This campaign made me uneasy from the get go; what is it about celebrities that makes them think they have automatic expertise on political and economic affairs? How can they be so unaware of the relationship between capital, consumerism and global inequality?

Don't get me wrong. I'm all for a better, more just world where resources are distributed evenly. And you have to hand it to these celebrity folks for being organized. But not only are their sentimental good intentions suspect (jacuzzi marxists, or penthouse proles), but you wonder that they don't concentrate on things they might actually know about, like the neighbourhoods where they grew up or the conditions on the streets where they now live. Not that they'd know any better what to do here either, but at least it seems more possible they could actually take some ownership over the problems in their own milieu.

No I don't buy the Make Poverty History campaign or any other celebrity driven campaign. Actually I literally CANNOT buy it. I can't afford it. I don't go to their movies let alone send money to Brad Pitt et al.

I don't actually mind celebrities. They have some real talents. I think though that maybe they should hook up with the folks who helped make them stars and work on their own shit. Make their own history as it were. That's what we all should be doing. Not make poverty history, but make your own history.

The Nation reports that these big ten media conglomerates, for the moment, rule the cosmos.

2009 update - The problem of "aid" is again hitting the mainstream media:

"[T]he trillion dollars that has gone to Africa was aid not investment. And at its extremes, the money has contributed to a long history of corruption in Africa. But corruption is just one aspect of failure. More on the economic side it's actually been very detrimental in terms of inflation and debt burdens. And then on the political side it disenfranchises Africans because the government spends a lot of time courting donors rather than being accountable to their people."

- Dambisa Moyo http://www.pri.org/business/Global-Development/aid-in-africa.html

... thanks in no small part to Moyo's new book Dead Aid, reviewed by Louis Century, in the Guardian.

Other similar books:
Lords of Poverty, 1994, Graham Hancock
The Bottom of the Pyramid, 2005, P.D. Prahalad
The Bottom Billion, 2007, Paul Collier