Having worked for a period of time in the micro-lending ‘business’, I can tell you from experience that it is all too easy to get banksters in on the action and thereby ruin a good thing.
I highly recommend micro-lending for average folks to begin small businesses, especially those who must begin ‘under the radar’ until such time as we see the direction that our economic collapse is going to take, and if there will be any viable business opportunities remaining to the people.
Yet the recent horrors perpetrated on the Grameen Bank, as reported in The Economist, have convinced me that there is no community with wealth or assets, no matter how small, that global banksters don’t want their hands in, and if they get them there, will ruin things for everyone involved. The very thinking processes of ‘investors’, politicians and banksters must change or they have NO PLACE in the field. Especially since it is usually their policies, their regulations, their profit motives that have guaranteed poverty and despair in the first place, their participation is absolutely questionable.
For micro-lending to work, it operates on VERY DIFFERENT PRINCIPLES than banking in general, and if it does not, it is doomed to failure. In the way that quantum physics is very different than physics, successful micro-lending is very different than macro-lending, and in my estimation, failures of micro-lending are far less damaging to the community than the larger type.
I could tell you some horror stories, and I might yet in the future. But suffice it to say that in any dealings I had with banks, for the benefit of the small businesses that we were developing, the BANKS NEVER GROKKED THE PRINCIPLES. No matter how many ways it was presented, no matter how varied, creative and clear the principles, it appeared to me that the bankers simply had blinders on and could never bridge the gap. They could never get their minds around ‘benefitting the citizenry.’
So alas for Muhammed Yunus, whose global acclaim got him the wrong attention, it looks as though the financial ‘interests’ will be taking him down rather than seeking understanding, are looking to seize such assets and wealth that Grameen Bank had generated, and poverty will return to small communities that were actually making some headway against it.
