Pop star Bono, lead singer of the best-selling Irish rock band U2 and self-proclaimed conscious of the world, recently showed us what he was all about. The rock star and Catholic ‘social activist’ emissary of John Paul II’s campaign "against poverty and for debt relief", had quite a weekend of activity and personal publicity for his contribution at the World Economic Forum (WEF) in New York and at the National Football League Super Bowl fiesta in New Orleans.

"Pop Star Bono Wows Bigwigs at Elite Economic Forum" was the way the New York Village Voice put it. While thousands of courageous demonstrators took to the streets to denounce the event despite a tremendous jingoistic propaganda barrage and blatant brutal police-state type intimidation from New York’s finest, our self-content Bono was having the time of his life with the representatives of the 1 000 most powerful corporations in the world. Sharing the stage with the likes of the planet’s richest capitalist, Bill Gates and U.S. Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill in a ritzy downtown hotel, the "progressive" catholic Bono had many soothing words for the "poor" capitalist class. After having huddled with the heads of huge drug companies like Merck & Co. and Bristol-Myers Squibb Co., he had this to say:

I don’t think they are the bête noire that all my friends think. I think they need to make profits, we need to do research.

As if research had anything to do with profits! Of course, Bono was not alone trying to cozy-up to this elite club. There was his friend Desmund Tutu and numerous other henchmen of the ruling class: academics, NGO bureaucrats and trade union bosses. But Bono...

lent an air of popular legitimacy and urgency to this week’s gathering of the world’s rich and powerful that prime ministers and top corporate chieftains only wish they could attract,

wrote the Voice.

I really believe if we all gather forces on this and we don’t create easy bad guys and good guys on this... we can make progress,

the singer said at a news conference. Of course the call to unity and harmony of the classes, of the rich and poor has been the message of the Catholic Church through all its witch-hunting, colonialist, obscurantist, moneymaking and ruling class serving history. Bono’s lies are as old as Christianity itself.

But Bono even surprised the WEF participants when he announced he would visit Africa with his friend, U.S. Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill in March. Occurring during the on-going war in Afghanistan, the U.S.’s dreadful treatment of its prisoners of war and in the wake of Bush’s "axis of evil" speech, this endorsement and participation in American imperialism’s next operation in Africa must have even stunned his most loyal "progressive" fans. No wonder that many of the well-heeled participants at the WEF flocked to the stage to collect the rocker’s autograph!

Then again this "poor people’s friend" had not finished his work in the cause of "social justice" and worldwide peace. The next day, he was the star attraction at the Super Bowl half-time show. This "sporting" event took the form of a twelve-hour capitalist propaganda and ultra-patriotic militaristic brainwashing operation the likes of which had probably never been equalled since the 1936 Berlin Olympics... Imagine Leni Riefenstahl with today’s electronic technology and world scale broadcast possibilities.

After hours of jingoist preparation of the crowd, the unfortunately talented singer and his group took to the stage and delivered powerfully as an immense banner started to rise behind them. On it, the names of every unfortunate person who died on 911. You could literally feel the emotion of the crowd coming through the television set and then it’s shock when, as the singer was arriving to his finale, the immense banner crumbled to the ground, bringing to oblivion the names of the thousands of New York victims in a scene designed to imbed in the minds of all the fall of the infamous twin towers. A few seconds later, as all the lights where on him, Bono theatrically opened his jacket, revealing his true colours: the lining made up The Star Spangled Banner, the American Flag! This reformist servant of God had become one of the new "Gods of the Stadium", the title of the 1936 Riesenstahl film. Surely, bad times are upon us. Workers will need the maximum awareness of who are their friends and who are there enemies. In these times, Bono has made his choice clear.

As it was 2 000 years ago, Christian propagandists want to reform slavery, communist revolutionaries want to abolish it. Which side are you on?