"What's Matter W/ Kansas" Author: Stinging Criticism of Clintonism: Banks Lock Arms W/ State Dept:

[amborin]

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 What’s 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 ain’t 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 countries—a midwife from Haiti, a student from Afghanistan, the chocolate maker from Trinidad, a former child bride from India, an environmental activist from Kenya—­while 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.

In the course of Hillary Clinton’s 1996 book, It Takes a Village, for example, this favorite rationale of the day—think of the children!—was deployed to explain her husband’s draconian crime bill as well as more directly child-related causes such as charter schools.

Frank continues, using the microloan craze as a microcosm of the cozy bedfellows made between “professional-class liberalism” and corporate capitalism.

The idea that unifies and explains these disparate initiatives is the theology of microfinance. It is hard to overstate the attraction of this magical idea to the liberal class, or at least to that part of it working in the foreign-aid sector. Micro­lending, such people have come to believe over the past few decades, was the magic elixir for sexism and poverty, the financial innovation that would save the Third World. Foundations embraced it. Careers were built on it. Billions were spent advancing it.

....She (Hillary) cast herself as a high-minded ally of Silicon Valley. She enshrined a version of feminism in which liberation is, in part, a matter of taking out loans from banks in order to become an entrepreneur. And between these two doctrines, it seems clear that income inequality has little role in the grand sweep of her political career....


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 people—plus cell phones, bank accounts, and a little capital—was what was required to remedy the Third World’s vast problems.....

T

he key to development was not doing something to limit the grasp of Western banks, in other words; it was extending Western banking methods to encompass every last individual on earth.....

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 relations—the 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 Doesn’t Micro­finance Work? the development consultant Milford Bateman debunks virtually every aspect of the microloan gospel. Microlending doesn’t empower women, Bateman writes—instead, 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]

1. Thanks - I want to delve into this further. K&R

[arcane1]

2. "brings together wealthy financial interests with rhetoric that sounds outrageously idealistic"

Perfectly said

[haikugal]

3. Thanks for this post! K&R!

[jwirr]

4. Anyone know how this is related to the organization in Norway

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]

5. Thomas Frank is always the smartest person

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.

[appalachiablue]

6. K & R. More great work from Tommy Franks. This system is awful.