LOS ANGELES -- What do Irish rock group U-2's lead singer Bono and U.S. Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill have in common with currency-exploiter and philanthropist George Soros? A major obsession: that, in the long run, poverty, deteriorating global public health and declining economic development can prove even more destructive enemies to civilized life than are terrorists.
The U.S. media has been portraying the leather-jacketed rocker and the pinstriped Treasury official -- on a self-designed tour of African poverty spots -- as an "odd couple." But if it takes a village to raise a child, it may take this sort of odd couple to raise our consciousness about the have-nots having even less these days, at a time when the haves appear to have more and more.
That's the blunt theme of Soros' new book "On Globalization." It's an impassioned plea for attention to be paid to the losers of globalization. The ideology of the free market, with all its superficial success stories, has become so dominant that it all but obviates any other well-thought-out alternative view about what is best for planet Earth. The Soros critique of the unfettered free-market capitalist system -- which advocates major reforms in capital distribution, for starters -- comes at a time when the world is troubled about how to cope with terrorism.