I have been more tolerant of the likes of Bob Geldof than, for example, my good friend and co-orchardeer Paul Kingsnorth, but something snapped when I saw this photo. Does Saint Sir Bling Bob find himself a winking bubble in the froth topping the champagne (1) that intoxicates the powerful?
Diving beneath the surface, George Monbiot skillfully cuts and pastes some press releases and other material from Baby Milk Action and ibfan to recount the pushing of unsafe formula milk down the throats of babes while the fine words flow at Heiligendamm. (The example is the Philippines, but this is the third report in as many weeks in The Guardian, following Johanna Moorhead's first hand investigation into goings on by Nestlé and other companies in Bangladesh, and Marie McGrath on the deadly effects of formula in disaster zones).
Mark Danner (Words in a time of war) might respond "Well, D'oh!":
[The attitude of the Bush administration] is brilliantly encapsulated in a single sentence drawn from the National Security Strategy of the United States of 2003: "Our strength as a nation-state will continue to be challenged by those who employ a strategy of the weak using international fora, judicial processes and terrorism." Let me repeat that little troika of "weapons of the weak": international fora (meaning the United Nations and like institutions), judicial processes (meaning courts, domestic and international), and.... terrorism. This strange gathering, put forward by the government of the United States, stems from the idea that power is, in fact, everything.
[ (1) I first typed "champagne" as "champaign", which RB suggests be defined as "a cause that celebrities get involved in".]
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