Can a tank top change the world? You’ve seen the ads: red RAZR cell phones, red iPod nanos, red American Express cards, red shoes from Converse, red watches from Armani, and celebrity after celebrity wearing red T-shirts from the Gap: Oprah Winfrey, Steven Spielberg, Penelope Cruz, Mary J. Blige, and even little Dakota Fanning. The goal: fight AIDS, tuberculosis, and malaria. The method: each company associated with the Product Red campaign would donate some of the profit of each sale to the Global Fund to fight disease in Africa. Take advantage of Americans’ material consumption to fund a good cause: by spending holiday dough on (RED) products, Christmas gifts fight disease as well as spoil grandchildren. Companies profit, the needy are helped, and celebrities celebrate their self-importance: a win all around. Right?

Well, sort of. Companies do have to turn a profit, after all. So of that $250 for a red, 8 gigabyte iPod nano, only 10 bucks goes to charity. 1 percent of the dollar value of purchases made on the American Express Red card goes to charity; half of the profits on the Gap’s (RED) clothes do the same. Ten percent of the cost of iTunes’ Red Gift Cards fight disease. The red RAZR – price tag, $304.99 – raises 17 dollars for the Global Fund. According to Advertising Age magazine, the (RED) campaign raised about $18 million to fight disease – while advertising costs reached $100 million. Not to be too cute about it: Product Red is very much in the red.

That means that five times as much money was spent making Bono more famous than helping combat diseases ravaging sub-Saharan Africa. Never mind the odd, grating branding of the campaign itself – INSPI(RED), ADMI(RED), DESI(RED), and so on – or the insistence on one color (buying a white iPod or black RAZR wouldn’t give any money to charity). Never mind that the (RED) campaign turned the desperate, ugly, human issue of children born with AIDS, parents dying of malaria, and family members wasting away from TB into an excuse to assuage the horror of disease-ridden Third World poverty by binging on consumerist excess. Never mind the promotion of greed as a cure-all to Western guilt. The campaign simply didn’t work! Celebrities promoting Product Red got a Q rating boost in lieu of doing anything much constructive about the issue. Bono gets more people to fawn over him, Oprah gets more people to worship her, and Dakota Fanning looks even more creepily precocious.

So what? you ask. It’s still $18 million dollars to help needy people that wouldn’t have otherwise been raised, right? The CEO of (RED), Bobby Shriver (brother-in-law to our favorite bodybuilder-turned-governor) responded to the Advertising Age article on the Product Red website, joinred.com. Product Red is not a charity, Shriver said, but rather “an entirely new ‘fund raising’ model.” The $18 million figure will be up to $25 million when the next accounting report is due, which is five times the sum of the private donations to the Global Fund in the previous four years combined. And the money spent on advertising the Product Red campaign came out of big companies’ advertising budgets, and would have been spent on other, non-fundraising products instead.

Well, maybe. Shriver doesn’t give us all of the facts. For example, the Global Fund has raised over seven billion dollars, mostly from governments, since its inception in 2002. So the $25 million dollars raised by Product Red, less than a hundredth of the Fund’s money, is not even a drop in the bucket. Last August the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation donated $500 million dollars to the Global Fund: with a sign of a pen, and zero fanfare, they donated twenty times as much money in a second as the massive (RED) campaign raised in a year.

A few lessons to be learned: One – super-rich people can have far more of an effect than even the sum of the rest of us. Two –  super-rich governments can have an even greater effect than super-rich people (most of the Global Fund’s billions came from governments worldwide). Three – if you care about diseases in Africa, donate directly. Otherwise, don’t bother yourself. The website BuyLessCrap.org, a response to Product Red, has direct links to donate to various charities, including the Global Fund. As the site says, “Join us in rejecting the ti(red) notion that shopping is a reasonable response to human suffering.” In short: greed-as-charity is crass and cynical, and there are better ways to help.

We need to back off from the cult of Paul Hewson, aka Bono. Bono campaigns against poverty endlessly, using his celebrity to both work for debt relief and aid packages at G8 – for which he must be lauded – and lobby people like Oprah Winfrey and Tony Blair. But U2, like any profit machine, funnels the hundreds of millions it makes on tours and albums to minimize taxes. When, last year, Bono moved U2’s song catalogue from his native Ireland to a tax shelter in the Netherlands, he shifted a financial burden onto common tax payers. The chutzpah – he lobbies governments for aid packages while evading the taxes that would fund that same aid! We hear endlessly about Bono “raising awareness” for various causes, but he refuses to talk about his personal contributions to those causes. This is surely not for humility – that is the one virtue he lacks. In fact, of his two main drives, Project Red and the ONE campaign, neither asks for donations, nor does Bono himself donate to either one. If anything, personal sacrifice is discouraged in favor of signing a petition or wearing a bracelet (ONE campaign) or buying a cell phone (Project Red).

But it comes down to one thing: personal sacrifice – that is, giving something up – is the primary way to meaningfully and honestly help others. One check from Bono’s massive bank account could do far more good than a dozen Product Red campaigns. This is not to say that everyone should sacrifice for charity. But Bono makes a show of doing so while feeding his ego, boosting his exposure, and gallivanting with bigwigs, all the while refraining from making a true – namely, monetary – sacrifice. This isn’t hypocritical as much as lacking in self-reflection. The limelight in which he basks is blinding, and Bono needs to decide what he aims for: recognition or change. He has long achieved the former. But as long as his idea of the latter comes from a red tank top, he will be doomed to failure, his influence squande(red).