2016 Postmortem
Related: About this forum"What's Matter W/ Kansas" Author: Stinging Criticism of Clintonism: Banks Lock Arms W/ State Dept:
Thomas Franks writes of how the disastrous micro-lending program, touted by Hillary's State Department, ensures that banks infiltrate every corner of the globe. Instead of helping poor people through micro-loans, the banks ensure that the recipients are trapped in permanent indebtedness to the banks:
Frank, who famously asked in Whats the Matter With Kansas? why working class Americans vote for Republicans against their own economic self-interest, is now turning his critical lens on the Democratic Party, with Hillary Clinton as both one of the founders of the New Democrat movement as well as 2016 heir apparent. And it aint pretty:
...at this March 2015 pre-candidacy Clinton Foundation event....
Roughly speaking, there were two groups present at this distinctly First World gathering. Many of the people making presentations came from Third World countriesa midwife from Haiti, a student from Afghanistan, the chocolate maker from Trinidad, a former child bride from India, an environmental activist from Kenyawhile the women anchoring this swirling praise fest were former secretary of state Hillary Clinton and the wealthy foundation executive Melinda Gates......
.......What the spectacle had to offer ordinary working American women was another story.
Frank continues, using the microloan craze as a microcosm of the cozy bedfellows made between professional-class liberalism and corporate capitalism.
microloans would bring the science of markets down to the individual. Merely by providing impoverished individuals with a tiny loan of fifty or a hundred dollars, it was thought, you could put them on the road to entrepreneurial self-sufficiency, you could make entire countries prosper, you could bring about economic development itself.....
we were to understand poverty in the familiar terms of entrepreneurship and individual merit, as though the hard work of millions of single, unconnected peopleplus cell phones, bank accounts, and a little capitalwas what was required to remedy the Third Worlds vast problems.....
Microlending is a perfect expression of Clintonism, since it brings together wealthy financial interests with rhetoric that sounds outrageously idealistic. Microlending permits all manner of networking, posturing, and profit taking among the lenders while doing nothing to change actual power relationsthe ultimate win-win.
As strategies for ending poverty go, microlending appears to be among the worst that has ever been tried, just one step up from doing nothing at all to help the poor.......In a carefully researched 2010 book called Why Doesnt Microfinance Work? the development consultant Milford Bateman debunks virtually every aspect of the microloan gospel. Microlending doesnt empower women, Bateman writesinstead, it makes them into debtors. .....
Nearly every country where microlending has been an important development strategy for the past few decades, Bateman writes, is now a disaster zone of indebtedness
.......What drives this market are the buyers. Like Walmart and Goldman Sachs locking arms with the State Department
this is from Daily Kos....much more at the link:
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2016/02/23/1489918/-Thomas-Frank:-Whats-the-Matter-With-Democrats
myrna minx
(22,772 posts)arcane1
(38,613 posts)Perfectly said
haikugal
(6,476 posts)jwirr
(39,215 posts)that provided this type of loans around the world through donations from people like us? Can't remember the name.
They were using the same idea and one of the problems was that the lenders still could charge whatever interest they wanted to.
hifiguy
(33,688 posts)in any room he is in. Unless Thomas Piketty is also there.
And per usual, Herself is welded to the banksters and their interests while trying to make herself look good doing so. And failing miserably, also as per usual.