Event: Microcredit discussion and networking session - 3/22

On December 10, 2006, Dr. Yunus and the Grameen Bank were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize We are still celebrating...

Join us for a stimulating discussion about how the power of microcredit is being harnessed here in New York City.

Network with other microcredit enthusiasts over wine and hors d'oeuvres.

Thursday, March 22, 2007

5:30pm?7:00pm

TimeMachine 57th Street at Madison Ave.

New York City

Project Enterprise, a New York City non-profit based on the Grameen Bank's award-winning model that helps New Yorkers create their own economic opportunities.

< www.projectenterprise.org < S m a l l L o a n s B i g C o n n e c t i o n s.

RSVP to Beth Dunphe bethd@projectenterprise.org 212-678-6734 ext. 15

Article: A Nobel Peace Prize for Neoliberalism? The Myth of Microloans by Alexander Cockburn

I don't usually visit Counterpunch.Org very often, but like the articles they publish. This article by Alexander Cockburn really appealed to my logic as far as Dr. Yunus' recent Nobel Peace Prize victory goes. While the whole world celebrated and praised Dr. Yunus, as did I, it took a few days for me to realize that the whole idea of microcredit and microloans made a large group of people, further entrenched in debt. And debt is never a good thing. No matter how small or useful, debt can only make you worse off because it maes you dependant on some other person or entity for your needs and/or survival. This can never be good.

And it is now that I sit here thinking, "what was Dr. Yunus thinking?", that I present to you an article by Alexander Cockburn of Counterpunch.org. Happy reading...

Some excerpts:

The trouble is that microloans don't make any sort of a macro-difference. They have helped some poor women, no doubt about it. But in their own way they're a register of defeat. Back in the early 1970s there were huge plans afoot to change the entire relationship of the Third to the First World, to speed Third World economies towards decent living standards for the many, not just the few. At the United Nations radical economists were hard at work drafting plans for a New World Economic Order. All that went out the window and here are the caring classes thirty years later, hailing microloans.

In the statistical tables of human development Bangladesh ranks 139th, worse than India, with 49.8 per cent of its population of 150 million below the official poverty line. In the homeland of the Grameen Bank, about 80 per cent of the people live on less than $2 a day. A UN Development Program study in the early 1990s showed that the total microcredits in Bangladesh constituted 0.6 per cent of total credit in the country. Hardly a transformation.

But today the World Bank and the IMF, along with state-owned and commercial banks are diving into microfinance. The microloan business is fast becoming a gigantic empire, bringing back into control the very banks and bureaucracies women have been trying to bypass. Microcredit is becoming a macro-racket.

Governments like microloans because they allow them to abdicate their most basic responsibilities to poor citizens. Microloans make the market a god.

The trouble with publicly-subsidized credit programs is that they're public and they're large and run contrary to the neoliberal creed. That's why Younus got his Nobel prize, whereas radical land reformers get a bullet in the back of the head.

Bangladeshi gets Nobel Peace Prize

This is amazing news. Power to South Asians! The region has come along way in its almost six decades of independent existence. While many say we have miles to go before we sleep, I like to think we also have much to be proud of.

Slow and steady...we'll make it.

While I am delighted that Muhammad Yunus, founder of Grameen Bank in Bangladesh, received the award, I was slightly taken aback when I read the sub-headline for an article from The Economist:

"An anti-poverty campaigner and a bank in Bangladesh have won this year’s Nobel Peace Prize. The purpose of the prize has become muddled. It may be better to withhold it next time"

Upon reading the article, I found out some very interesting information and a different point of view on how the bestowing of this award works. Read on for further enlightenment...