The Daily Swarm

Bono is blogging the Millennium Development Goals Summit in New York for the Finanical Times, where “the sun arcs over the Manhattan skyline and the markets start dancing nervously out of time, the lyrics I’ve been scribbling over breakfast have been removed and replaced by spreadsheets with large numbers in tiny font as we wrestle with EU budgets” while preparing for his photo-op with John McCain and Sarah Palin and to “make our case that now is precisely the time to invest in the world’s poor.”

Some sample Bono observations:

AB: What are the two or three goals you want to achieve this week?

Bono: 1. Blogging for the FT, being your roving reporter in the canyons of Manhattan. While the world upends on Wall Street, I’ll be mostly midtown at the UN and the Clinton Global Initiative talking about the resilience of the world’s poor while the world’s rich find out how fragile life can be.

2. Unlock €1bn of unspent European Union Common Agricultural Policy money. This year our farmers don’t qualify for it, food prices are high. African farmers desperately need it.

3. Show what’s working as well as what’s not. Bad news about Africa travels much farther than good news. There will be a historic and innovative announcement on malaria on Thursday – watch out for it. Thanks to debt relief, aid and African leadership, 29m more children are going to school.

AB: What will you actually be doing in the days ahead?

Bono: A sleepless cocktail of rabble-rousing, meetings with politicians, chief executives, faith leaders and NGOs. People such as Nicolas Sarkozy, President Jakaya Kikwete of Tanzania and Gordon Brown.

AB: What exactly happens in the meetings you have with these world leaders?

Bono: Judo in a suit.

Sarko is a real physical presence in a room. He might even be taller than me… animated, funny one minute; annoyed the next. I admire his energy and vision. We need him. His radical proposal for a Mediterranean union is an example of his thinking differently, challenging orthodoxy. We want him to apply his innovativeness to the business of aid… its time for some new ideas. But he’s also going to have to fund them. And there’s the rub. He’s not averse. At one point in the meeting he reached across and grabbed my arm: “You know, Africa is Europe’s next door neighbour… 13 kilometres from us… our fate is bound up in theirs… it’s in our own self interest.” The meeting started with the beautiful Carla Bruni, a great ally in our efforts to better our storytelling about the effectiveness of good aid. Both the first lady and the president change the molecular structure of any room they are in – he speeds them up, she calms them down. A great team.

Gridlock in the streets as well as the markets here. Yellow cab drivers red in the face as they honk their horns at the diplomatic motorcades hovering around the east side. I think I saw Prime Minister Wen walking in Central Park early morning, unless it was a decoy. The guns of the US secret service a few feet behind looked real enough. Maybe the premier was fed up of waiting at the lights.

Lots of speeches etc going on inside the UN… President Bush, President Sarkozy. We’re on the outside today, meeting activists from Africa, India and Europe to talk about holding the people on the inside accountable for their promises.

The promises in question this week are the Millennium Development Goals or MDGs (check out my blogger-in-arms Jeff Sachs). (Side note from someone who works in the communication business: the proliferation of acronyms mean that working on this stuff is like drowning in alphabet soup. There is no sense of PR….it’s easy to lose your audience when you are talking in letters rather than words…)