This Can't Be Happening!

A new study reported by TCBH! journalist Dave Lindorff in the May issue of American Banker magazine details how the mission of microlending has gotten off track, and why helping impoverished women is getting harder to do.
 

In the three decades since Muhammad Yunos came up with the idea of microloans for women to start businesses as a way of combating poverty in the world’s poorest societies, it has attracted widespread support, and even earned Yunos and his Grameen Bank a Nobel Peace Prize in 2006.

There are now roughly 2000 microfinance institutions around the globe, and, as of 2009, the last time a complete survey was attempted, an estimated 74 million borrowers had $38 billion of the tiny loans outstanding.

But microlending is becoming a victim of its own success. The big money that now flows into this niche has tended to transform microloans into more of a business enterprise than a social one — which, a recent study shows, shifts the focus away from the poor in general and women in particular.

“A lot more money is doing a lot less good,” says Tyler Wry, an assistant professor of management at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business, who conducted the study with Eric Yanfei Zhao, a docoral fellow at the University of Alberta School of Business in Canada. they analyzed data from 1,800 microfinance institutions in 121 developing countries.

“There has been a strong pattern over time in many countries of these microloans moving away from targeting the poor and from focusing on women,” Wry says. This is problematic because, he says, micofinance’s original goal of lending to poor women is based on sound principles: women in impoverished societies are generally the most destitute of all, and giving them loans to start small businesses yields a substantial gain in family income and better outcomes for children…
 

For the rest of this article by Dave Lindorff please go to American Banker

Microloans, begun as a way to alleviate poverty through aiding women, is losing its way by seeking profits

I used to read the news in the morning and often find myself saying “This can’t be happening!,” which is actually how this news site got its name. But if I were just getting set to create the site these days, I’d have to call our publication “WTF!?,” which is what I find myself saying more and more often over my morning paper.

Just consider some recent news.

* In late April, Cameron D’Ambrosio, a high school student and amateur rapper in the town of Methuen, outside Boston, posted a rap on his Facebook page that made a musical, non-specific reference to making a bomb bigger than the Boston Marathon bomb. He didn’t do anything, didn’t make a bomb, didn’t attempt to get the materials for a bomb, and by all accounts didn’t know how to make a bomb. He just wrote and sang about the idea. No matter, he was arrested by Methuen’s Finest, and is now in jail on — get this — $1 million bail — awaiting arraignment on state “terrorism” charges that carry a potential prison sentence of 20 years. The kid has the misfortune of being 18, so he’s being treated as an adult, though he clearly is not one.

The chief of police of Methuen, exhibiting that incredible mentality of police these days in 9-11 all-the-time America, explained the arrest of an over-the-top wannabe songwriter saying, “When we’re just recovering from what occurred in Boston, to make a threat and use what occurred in Boston to enhance your threat, is extremely alarming for us.”

Really, what can you say to something like this but WTF!? Once when I was 14, I and two friends painted the side of a girl’s house orange on Halloween. I suppose that could have been terrifying, but when we got caught later, our penalty was to repaint the house, not arrest. Ditto when we threw some rocks at cars as kids and one broke a guy’s windshield as he drove by. Stupid, yes. Terror inducing for the driver, probably. And certainly worse than writing a song. But we didn’t get arrested or go to jail. We paid for a new windshield.

* Then there’s the sad story of a five-year-old who fatally shot his two-year-old sister with a rifle while their mother had “stepped outside” the house, leaving the two small kids alone and unsupervised. Such tales of gun accidents by children are all too common, but this one came with a bizarre twist: the five-year-old was reportedly firing his own rifle! It was a cute little “starter” .22-cal. gun called a Crickett (motto: “My first rifle”) available in blue, pink and red-white-and-blue. His doting grandma had bought for him as a birthday gift.

Only in America: Selling “starter” rifles for the pre-school and kindergartner set. WTF!?

I was visiting my mother
When I passed this really old guy in the hall
Who bore a slight resemblance to my father
(Who looked like a street person
On a bad day in his last years,
Or an old testament prophet
With his beard permanently stained
At the corners of his mouth)
And I almost asked him for his blessing
When he looked up at me
Through his eyebrows and said,
“Go take care of your mother”.
I knew what he meant.
He meant everyone’s mother.
I could see that he was a wise man,
So I said,
“Are we going to make it?”

It was the summer of 1981. I was working on an ambulance in Philadelphia, transporting a cancer patient to a hospital for radiation treatments. The man was in his sixties, and I felt he knew his days were numbered.

In my conversations with the man, it came up that I was a Vietnam veteran. He told me he was in the CIA in Saigon in the early 1970s.

“What did you do?” I asked.

“I delivered bags of money. That’s pretty much all I did in the end. I was a bagman. I’d get an order to carry a bag of money to some character somewhere in Saigon. And that’s what I did.”

We both smiled grimly, as if to say, our war had turned out to be a moral debacle.

So it was a case of déjà-vu when I read in The New York Times that the CIA has for some time been delivering “bags of money” to the office of Afghan President Hamid Karzai. You can be sure they were also delivering bags of money to a host of other nefarious actors in the corrupt mix of people loyal to our cause in Afghanistan. Afghan writer Qais Akbar Omar calls it “ghost money” and writes, “If ghost money were going to the people who needed it, Afghanistan would have a lot fewer ghosts.”

My dying, ex-CIA friend, it seems, was one in a long tradition of bagmen in US imperial history. Now, of course, we must also have bagwomen to provide the strategic sugar to accompany the salt of our bombing campaigns.

When I returned from Vietnam I began reading a lot of history, from Bernard Fall’s great books on the French Indochina War to Robert J. Lifton’s early work on PTSD, Home From The War. I had been a 19-year-old radio direction finder in the mountains west of Pleiku locating Vietnamese radio operators so our forces could kill them and all the men and women in their units with artillery, aerial bombardments or infantry search & destroy missions. I have their blood on my hands, indirectly.

The legacy of European colonialism in the world

From my reading, I realized too late I was the “bad guy” in Vietnam and that the Vietnamese had never done anything to me or, more important, to my country. In fact, the Viet Minh were our ally and critical in helping us fight the Japanese toward the end of World War Two. After the war, like the Indians, the Indonesians and others colonized by European powers, they had had enough of colonialism and wanted to control their own destiny. Naively, they thought the US would help them in that goal. Looking back from 2013, it’s clear if we had left them alone — had not killed two to three million southeast Asians over ten years and devastated the nation — the Vietnamese would have ended up exactly where they are now, like their regional enemy China, a hybrid socialist/capitalist state. All we did was slow them down.

This Summer, a team at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) has undertaken a remarkable project: to recreate the first web site and the computer on which it was first seen.

It’s a kind of birthday celebration. Twenty years ago, software developers at the University of Illinois released a web browser called Mosaic in response to work being done at CERN. There, a group led by Tim Berners-Lee had developed a protocol (a set of rules governing communications between computers) that meshed two basic concepts: the ability to upload and store data files on the Internet and the ability of computers to do “hyper-text” which converts specific words or groups of words into links to other files.

They called this new development the “World Wide Web”.

The Original Web Pages
When you read Berners-Lee’s original proposal you get a feeling for the enthusiasm and optimism that drove this work and, since it’s all very recent, the people who did it are still around to explain why. In interviews, Sir Tim (Berners-Lee is now a Knight) insists he could not foresee how powerful his new project would be but he knew it would make a difference. For the first time in history, people could communicate as much as they want with whomever they want wherever they want. That, as he argued in a recent article, is the reason why it’s so critical to keep the Web neutral, uncontrolled and devoid of corporate or government interference.

In our convoluted world of constantly flowing disinformation, governments tell us the Web is a “privilege” to be paid for and lost if we misbehave, corporations tell us they invented it, and most of us use it without really thinking much about its intent. Very few people view the World Wide Web as the revolutionary creation it actually is.

Whether its “creators” or the vast numbers of techies who continue to develop the Web think about it politically or not, there is an underlying understanding that unifies their efforts: The human race is capable of constructive exchange of information which will bring us knowledge all humans want and benefit from and in collaborating on that knowledge, we can search for the truth. There is nothing more revolutionary than that because the discovered truth is the firing pin of all revolution.

Twenty years later, it’s painfully ironic that, when they hear the word “Internet”, most people probably think of Social Networking programs like Facebook and Twitter. As ubiquitous and popular as Social Networking is, it represents a contradiction to the Internet that created it and to the World Wide Web on which it lives. It is the cyber version of a “laboratory controlled” microbe: it can be and frequently is productive but, if used unchecked and unconsiously, it can unleash enormous destruction, reversing the gains we’ve made with technology and divorcing us from its control.

My mother died last Thursday at the age of 89. Her death, fortunately coming peacefully after she suffered a stroke during her sleep, followed a long mental decline caused by Alzheimer’s disease.

I’m sure the Veterans Administration is relieved. They won’t have to pay her the thousands of dollars in retroactive pension money they would have owed had she lived until they finally processed her application (or the tens of thousands of dollars more they’d have spent if she’d continued to live).

Mom was a US Navy veteran of World War II. Something of a pioneer for women in the military, she volunteered to become a Navy WAVE (Women Accepted for Voluntary Emergency Service) as a young woman in her early 20’s during the war, and was posted at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, where she took on the duties of some male sailor who was thus freed up to go to sea. Because she had earned an honorable discharge, she was entitled, in her old age, to a pension, currently worth about $22,000 per year, based upon her financial need.

Dorothy Lindorff (1923-2013), pacifist and WWII Navy WAVE veteran, never got her VA pension

The way these pensions work is, if a retired veteran’s income, after deducting all medical costs, including the costs of home care for those who cannot live on their own because of some disability, falls below the pension amount of $22,000, the VA is supposed to provide pension funds that will “top up” the person’s income to that level. In my mother’s case, because she was unable to take care of herself, and had to have a round-the-clock home-care companion in her house, her cost of care — about $70,000 a year — was entirely eating up both the $36,000 pension my father left her and her $14,000 Social Security widow’s benefit, leaving her with a deficit of $20,000 a year plus the cost of her food and other things, all of which I and my two siblings had to cover.

In early January, I filed her application for a veteran’s pension. We had earlier registered her with the VA, so they had already, two years earlier, processed and confirmed her discharge papers and issued her a veteran’s ID number. Last June, we also applied for her veteran’s medical benefits and she had been approved for VA healthcare last October. All we needed to do in January then, since her service and discharge status had already been confirmed, was document her income, which we did with a statement from both the Social Security Administration and the Connecticut State Comptroller’s pension office (my dad, a US Marine veteran who had died in March, 2012, had been a professor at the University of Connecticut), and document her home-care and other medical expenses, which required only a statement from the licensed home-care agency we were using.

All of that should be so routine and simple that a pension could have been approved with the stroke of a few computer keys, but we were advised by a veterans affairs advocate working for the town of Windham, Connecticut that such applications were taking nine months to a year for the agency to process!

Let’s do a little exercise. Forget nationalities and identities for a moment.

Imagine you are a police detective investigating a horrific bombing in your city — one in which several people were killed and hundreds were injured. You have a captured suspect whom you are sure was one of the bombers, and another was killed in a shootout, but both are young and not very sophisticated.

They might have acted alone, of course, but knowing how these things work, you are also looking for leads to try to determine who else might have been involved, and especially who might have been behind the incident.

As it happens, your two suspects are immigrants. They were brought to your country at a young age by parents who were refugees seeking asylum from a region of the world riven by civil war, brutal repression by a larger power, and that was a breeding ground for terrorists who had been known to have launched terrible attacks against civilians, including schools and full movie theaters in that larger power.

Now supposing you discovered that the national intelligence agency of a rival nation to that larger power had actually provided support to the terrorists that were attacking it, and that, moreover, the two young men who were your suspects were related to an uncle who had for three years been married to the daughter of a top member of that intelligence agency — the latter a man who had had a long history of active involvement in that agency’s major covert operations.

Wouldn’t you be deeply suspicious about the nature of the connections between the two young men and this intelligence agency? Of course you would!

Well, let’s put some names to this scenario.

Two Degrees of Separation? (From left: ex-CIA spook Graham Fuller, his daugter Samantha, his former son-in-law Ruslan Tsarni, and Tsarni nephew Tamerlan Tsarnaev (deceased)

Has the “land of the free and home of the brave” decided to roll over and concede defeat to terrorism?

George Bush’s “war on terror,” supinely backed by a cowed Congress of Democrats and Republicans, re-introduced torture to the American playbook, finished what Bill Clinton started in taking away our right to habeus corpus, made illegal wiretapping routine and built a culture of fear in our national psyche in order to keep us from rising up against these assaults on our Constitution. Barack Obama has continued these practices and gone further with his obsession with drone attacks worldwide, including strikes that murder American citizens without even bothering with indictments, let alone trials, and with his further expansion of wiretaps, secret government and police spying and repression of Constitutionally protected protest.

Now, in the aftermath of the Boston Marathon bombing and subsequent manhunt, we’re being told that there are a couple of new aspects to this “new normal” that we’ll just have to get used to. Functional martial law–the shutting down of an entire metropolitan region — has now happened without even an official declaration from the governor or the president. Our 4th Amendment right protecting us from unwarranted search and seizure no longer has any meaning if the powers that be deem it inconvenient. And the right to be told that we can remain silent rather than incriminate ourselves under interrogation is now optional, again at the discretion of the police authorities.
 
Let’s examine these two new nails in the Constitution’s coffin. During the manhunt, Boston and federal authorities, backed by National Guard troops and possibly private mercenaries (who were observed, though never officially acknowledged, working at the scene of the marathon), locked down the city, ordering residents to stay inside while police officers ignored the fourth amendment and entered any house at will in their search.

Welcome to the new America: Stay inside, don't question police, and you probably won't get hurt…

Occupy Wall Street’s dynamic grass roots movement is quiescent and may or may not return. Its respite or demise is due to a combination of deliberate and apparently nationally directed police violence and federal, state and local government spying, as well as to its own lack of political direction. It remains a political space to focus tremendous energy and passion, and draw to it many millions of the 99%.

Many sympathetic to OWS maintain that it needs a political party. One of them is Patrick Walker, a native of the gritty industrial city of Scranton in northeastern Pennsylvania. Walker participated the OWS movement as part of Occupy Scranton. He has also joined in anti-fracking activism via the Gas Drilling Awareness Coalition and End Gasocracy Now, which put him under the watchful eye of Homeland Security.

Following a move to Georgia, Walker now seeks to gain political traction by focusing his efforts on progressive Democrats within the Democratic Party (D.P.), hoping to bring the party “back” to the 99%. He does not seek D.P. permission as do many other insider party reform efforts.

Walker began his effort—which he calls Start a True Blue Democrat Progressive Revolt—on two websites:
RuckUs and at True Blue Democrats: A Progressive Revolt

“We need to take our political system back from Big Money. I offer this as a promising strategy idea for making that happen,” Walker says.

As he sees it, “The people in Washington and our statehouses — Republicans and Democrats — are already too bought off by (or scared of) Big Money to listen to ‘We the people’.”

Can the passion of the Occupy Movement be turned to taking over the Democratic Party, or is the Democratic Party a lost cause?

Speaking as an investigative reporter with almost 40 years’s experience, I can say that when government officials won’t talk, they’re generally hiding something embarrassing or worse.

I tried, and nobody will talk about those Craft International Services private security personnel who were widely observed and photographed near the finish line of the Boston Marathon, wearing security ear-pieces, hats and T-shirts bearing the company’s skull logo, and all wearing the same dark coats, khaki pants and combat boots, some carrying what appear to have been radiation detectors. (I got no hard answers, though there were some inadvertent hints given.)

I first contacted a man identifying himself as Jack Fleming, a public affairs person with the Boston Athletic Assn., sponsor of the marathon. Fleming advised me that “If you want to ask about that you should contact the Commonwealth (of Massachusetts) Executive Office of Public Safety.”

I called that agency and spoke with the public information office there, a man named Terrell. He first said, “Did you call the Marathon organizers?” When I replied that I had, and that they had said to call his office, he replied, “They did?” Then he said, “You should call the City of Boston Police Department. They released a security plan to some media organizations.”

Indeed they had released that plan to the Boston Globe. Based upon the information it got from the police the article the Globe ran, did report that the Police had deployed “air patrols, K9 units, and more than 1,000 uniformed officers and soldiers along the 26-mile course and the finish line,” but it made no mention of the private contracting of soldiers-for-hire, which is what Craft International does (see the Craft website). News agency Reuters reported, meanwhile, that a top official for the Massachusetts state Homeland Security Department, Undersecretary Kurt Schwartz, told a group at Harvard U. that his agency had “planned” for a possible bombing attack on the marathon, even running a “table-top” exercise about such an event a week before the race.

I called the Boston Police to ask if they had hired the Craft International personnel who were observed at the scene just before and after the bombing, and was told by the public affairs office there that “Anything having to do with the investigation of the bombing would have to be referred to the FBI Boston Division office.” When I pointed out that I wasn’t asking anything about the investigation, but was simply asking who had hired the security personnel from Craft International, the answer was simply repeated: “You’ll have to ask the FBI.”

So I called the FBI, and got a public affairs person there named Amanda Cox. Her initial response to my question was, “I do not have any information on that.”

Seven apparent Craft International rent-a-soldiers behind and departing (top rt. with backpack) a communications van