p. 111-112
CAPTIVE NATION
A few years ago, I read an article claiming that the United States is the first society ever to record more rapes of men than of women, a distinction attributable to the vast numbers of men we have seen fit to imprison. [6]
Another disturbing fact: According to the legal scholar Michelle Alexander, author of The New Jim Crow, there are now more black adults in some kind of “correctional control”—meaning under the restraint of some arm of the criminal justice system—than there were slaves in 1850. Naomi Murakawa, author of The First Civil Right, adds that fully “one in three black men” passes his life “under probation, parole, or prison on any given day.”[7] Not only does the United States have the largest population of people incarcerated of any country, but we are the only nation that routinely hands out life sentences to children.
Anyone inquiring how an obscenity like this came to pass—how it is that the home of the free outstripped what we used to call "captive nations” as well as countries philosophically dedicated to wholesale imprisonment like apartheid South Africa—anyone looking into these things soon realizes that this cannot be laid simply and neatly at the doorstep of the Republican Party and Those Awful Wingers. It is true that the Republican Richard Nixon started the war on drugs, and that the Republican Ronald Reagan escalated it. But the Democrat Bill Clinton—the buddy of Bono and Nelson Mandela, the man repeatedly nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize—easily bested both of these Republicans as well as all other presidents in his zeal to incarcerate[8] Alexander writes as follows of Clinton’s 1994 crime law:
Far from resisting the emergence of the new caste system, Clinton escalated the drug war beyond what conservatives had imagined possible a decade earlier. As the Justice Policy Institute has observed, “the Clinton Administration’s ‘tough on crime’ policies resulted in the largest increases in federal and state prison inmates of any president in American history.“ [9]
[footnote] *According to a 2014 study of the age of mass incarceration, big increases in sentence length have “no material deterrent effect” on crime and do not reduce the crime rate. See The Growth of Incarceration in the United States: Exploring causes and Consequences, a study by the National Research Council of the National Academies, 2014, p 140. Additionally, the violent-crime rate peaked 1991 and was already on its way down by 1994.
p.118 “Toil hopelessly or go to prison: that is life at the bottom, thanks to Bill Clinton.”
p.120 “the triumph of Clinton marked the end of the Democrats as a party committed to working people and egalitarianism…” p. 130 “Clinton’s achievement was to make Democrats an equal competitor with Republicans for Wall Street’s affections…”
…
The Connection of Prison and Finance (Debt as a kind of bondage [p235ff])
But let’s not be too quick to brush [the Hillary Doctrine] off as propaganda. Among other things, the Hillary Doctrine us understand what Hillary really thinks about the all-important issue of income inequality. Women entrepreneurs as the solution for economic backwardness is not a new idea, after all. It comes directly from the microfinance movement, the poverty-fighting strategy that has been pushed by the World Bank since the 1990s, and Hillary’s idea brings with it an entire economic philosophy. For starters, it is closely connected with the World Bank’s larger project of “structural adjustment,” in which countries were required to reform their economies in the market-friendly ways—privatizing, deregulating, and downsizing--and, on the bright side, Western organizations would help those countries’ poor people with microloans.
It is hard to overstate the attraction of microlending to the liberal class, or at least to that part of it working in the foreign-aid sector. Microlending, such people came to believe, was the elixir for the disease of poverty, the financial innovation that would save the third world. Foundations embraced it. Thousands of careers were built on it. Billions of dollars were spent advancing it. The United Nations declared 2005 the “International Year of Microcredit.” Muhammad Yunus, the Bangladeshi economist who popularized microlending, won a Nobel Prize in 2006. Three years later, Barack Obama gave Yunus the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
It was all so simple. While national leaders busied themselves with the macro-matters of privatizing and deregulating, microlending would bring the science of markets down to 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-sufliciency, you could make entire countries prosper, you could bring about economic development itself.
What was most attractive about microlending was what was not, what it made unnecessary: any sort of collective action by poor people, coming together in governments or unions. The international development community now knew that such institutions had no real role in human prosperity. Instead, 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 cellphones, bank accounts, and a little capital, were what was required to remedy the third world’s vast problems. Millions of people would sell one another baskets they had made or coal they had dug out of the trash heap, and suddenly they were entrepreneurs, on their way to the top. The 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.[25]
Microlending is a perfect expression of Clintonism, bringing together wealthy financial interests with rhetoric that sounds outrageously idealistic. Microlending permits all manner of networking, virtue-seeking, and profit-taking among the lenders while doing nothing to change actual power relations——the ultimate win-win.
Bill Clinton’s administration made microlending a proud point of emphasis in U.S. foreign policy, and Hillary has been a microlending enthusiast since her first days on the national stage. She promoted it as a form of female empowerment in a famous 1995 speech she made in Beijing and she supported microlending efforts wherever the first family traveled in the 1990s--there’s even an exhibit on the subject at the Clinton Library that shows Hillary giving a speech in the Gaza Strip in front of a sign that reads, “Women’s Empowerment Through Micro Lending.” In 1997 she cohosted a global Microcredit Summit in Washington, D.C., replete with the usual third-world delegations. Hillary’s own remarks on that occasion were unremarkable, but those of the president of the Foundation were well worth remembering. Here is what he said to the assembled saviors of the third world:
Everyone in this room is a banker, because everyone here is banking on self-employment to help alleviate poverty around world. ,
At the closing session of the summit, bankers joined national singing “We Shall Overcome.”[26]
In the decade that followed, the theology of microlending developed a number of doctrinal refinements: the idea that women were better borrowers and better entrepreneurs than men; the belief that poor people needed mentorship and “financial inclusion” in addition to loans; the suggestion that they had to be hooked up to a bank via the Internet; the discovery that it was morally OK to run microlending banks as private, profit-making enterprises--many of the arguments that I had heard at the No Ceilings conference, expressed in the unforgettable tones of international female solidarity.
These ideas were the core of the Hillary Doctrine. Hillary’s ambassador-at-large for global women’s issues, Melanne Verveer, declared in 2011 that “financial inclusion is a top priority for U.S. government” and announced her terrible chagrin that “3 billion people in the world remain unbanked; the majority them are women.” Hillary’s undersecretary for democracy and global affairs, Maria Otero, came to State from one of the biggest American microlending institutions; in her official U.S government capacity, she expressed her joy at how microfinancing had evolved “from subsidized microloans to a focus on self-sufficiency, to an emphasis on savings, to a full suite of financial products delivered by commercial regulated banks” and how all this had “affirmed the capacity of the poor to become economic actors in their own right.” Hillary herself proudly recalls in her memoirs how the State Department rebuilt Afghanistan by handing out “more than 100,000 small personal loans” to the women of that country.”
These are fine, sterling sentiments, but they suffer from one big problem: microlending doesn’t work. 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 to help the poor at all. In a carefully researched 2010 book called Why Doesn’t Microfinance Work?, the development consultant Milford Bateman debunks virtually every aspect of the microlending gospel. It doesn’t empower women, Bateman writes; it makes them into debtors. It encourages people to take up small, futile enterprises that have no chance of growing or employing others. Sometimes microborrowers don’t even start businesses at all; they just spend the loan on whatever. Even worse: the expert studies that originally sparked the microlending boom turn out, upon reexamination, to have been badly flawed.
Nearly every country where microlending has been an important development strategy for the last few decades, Bateman writes, is now a disaster zone of indebtedness and economic backwardness. When the author tells us that dominance of the microfinance model in developing countries is causally associated with their progressive deindustrialization and infantilization
He is being polite. The terrible implication of the facts he has is that what microlending achieves is the opposite of development. Even Communism, with its Five Year Plans, worked better than this strategy does, as Bateman shows in a look at microloan-saturated Bosnia.[28]
There’s a second reason the liberal class loves microfinance, it’s extremely simple: microlending is profitable. Lending to poor, as every subprime mortgage originator knows, can be a lucrative business. Mixed with international feminist self-righteousness, it is also a bulletproof business, immune to criticism. The million-dollar paydays it has brought certain Microlenders are the wages of virtue. This combination is the reason the international goodness community believes that poor women by lending to them at usurious interest rates is a fine thing all around.”
CAPTIVE NATION
A few years ago, I read an article claiming that the United States is the first society ever to record more rapes of men than of women, a distinction attributable to the vast numbers of men we have seen fit to imprison. [6]
Another disturbing fact: According to the legal scholar Michelle Alexander, author of The New Jim Crow, there are now more black adults in some kind of “correctional control”—meaning under the restraint of some arm of the criminal justice system—than there were slaves in 1850. Naomi Murakawa, author of The First Civil Right, adds that fully “one in three black men” passes his life “under probation, parole, or prison on any given day.”[7] Not only does the United States have the largest population of people incarcerated of any country, but we are the only nation that routinely hands out life sentences to children.
Anyone inquiring how an obscenity like this came to pass—how it is that the home of the free outstripped what we used to call "captive nations” as well as countries philosophically dedicated to wholesale imprisonment like apartheid South Africa—anyone looking into these things soon realizes that this cannot be laid simply and neatly at the doorstep of the Republican Party and Those Awful Wingers. It is true that the Republican Richard Nixon started the war on drugs, and that the Republican Ronald Reagan escalated it. But the Democrat Bill Clinton—the buddy of Bono and Nelson Mandela, the man repeatedly nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize—easily bested both of these Republicans as well as all other presidents in his zeal to incarcerate[8] Alexander writes as follows of Clinton’s 1994 crime law:
Far from resisting the emergence of the new caste system, Clinton escalated the drug war beyond what conservatives had imagined possible a decade earlier. As the Justice Policy Institute has observed, “the Clinton Administration’s ‘tough on crime’ policies resulted in the largest increases in federal and state prison inmates of any president in American history.“ [9]
[footnote] *According to a 2014 study of the age of mass incarceration, big increases in sentence length have “no material deterrent effect” on crime and do not reduce the crime rate. See The Growth of Incarceration in the United States: Exploring causes and Consequences, a study by the National Research Council of the National Academies, 2014, p 140. Additionally, the violent-crime rate peaked 1991 and was already on its way down by 1994.
p.118 “Toil hopelessly or go to prison: that is life at the bottom, thanks to Bill Clinton.”
p.120 “the triumph of Clinton marked the end of the Democrats as a party committed to working people and egalitarianism…” p. 130 “Clinton’s achievement was to make Democrats an equal competitor with Republicans for Wall Street’s affections…”
…
The Connection of Prison and Finance (Debt as a kind of bondage [p235ff])
But let’s not be too quick to brush [the Hillary Doctrine] off as propaganda. Among other things, the Hillary Doctrine us understand what Hillary really thinks about the all-important issue of income inequality. Women entrepreneurs as the solution for economic backwardness is not a new idea, after all. It comes directly from the microfinance movement, the poverty-fighting strategy that has been pushed by the World Bank since the 1990s, and Hillary’s idea brings with it an entire economic philosophy. For starters, it is closely connected with the World Bank’s larger project of “structural adjustment,” in which countries were required to reform their economies in the market-friendly ways—privatizing, deregulating, and downsizing--and, on the bright side, Western organizations would help those countries’ poor people with microloans.
It is hard to overstate the attraction of microlending to the liberal class, or at least to that part of it working in the foreign-aid sector. Microlending, such people came to believe, was the elixir for the disease of poverty, the financial innovation that would save the third world. Foundations embraced it. Thousands of careers were built on it. Billions of dollars were spent advancing it. The United Nations declared 2005 the “International Year of Microcredit.” Muhammad Yunus, the Bangladeshi economist who popularized microlending, won a Nobel Prize in 2006. Three years later, Barack Obama gave Yunus the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
It was all so simple. While national leaders busied themselves with the macro-matters of privatizing and deregulating, microlending would bring the science of markets down to 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-sufliciency, you could make entire countries prosper, you could bring about economic development itself.
What was most attractive about microlending was what was not, what it made unnecessary: any sort of collective action by poor people, coming together in governments or unions. The international development community now knew that such institutions had no real role in human prosperity. Instead, 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 cellphones, bank accounts, and a little capital, were what was required to remedy the third world’s vast problems. Millions of people would sell one another baskets they had made or coal they had dug out of the trash heap, and suddenly they were entrepreneurs, on their way to the top. The 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.[25]
Microlending is a perfect expression of Clintonism, bringing together wealthy financial interests with rhetoric that sounds outrageously idealistic. Microlending permits all manner of networking, virtue-seeking, and profit-taking among the lenders while doing nothing to change actual power relations——the ultimate win-win.
Bill Clinton’s administration made microlending a proud point of emphasis in U.S. foreign policy, and Hillary has been a microlending enthusiast since her first days on the national stage. She promoted it as a form of female empowerment in a famous 1995 speech she made in Beijing and she supported microlending efforts wherever the first family traveled in the 1990s--there’s even an exhibit on the subject at the Clinton Library that shows Hillary giving a speech in the Gaza Strip in front of a sign that reads, “Women’s Empowerment Through Micro Lending.” In 1997 she cohosted a global Microcredit Summit in Washington, D.C., replete with the usual third-world delegations. Hillary’s own remarks on that occasion were unremarkable, but those of the president of the Foundation were well worth remembering. Here is what he said to the assembled saviors of the third world:
Everyone in this room is a banker, because everyone here is banking on self-employment to help alleviate poverty around world. ,
At the closing session of the summit, bankers joined national singing “We Shall Overcome.”[26]
In the decade that followed, the theology of microlending developed a number of doctrinal refinements: the idea that women were better borrowers and better entrepreneurs than men; the belief that poor people needed mentorship and “financial inclusion” in addition to loans; the suggestion that they had to be hooked up to a bank via the Internet; the discovery that it was morally OK to run microlending banks as private, profit-making enterprises--many of the arguments that I had heard at the No Ceilings conference, expressed in the unforgettable tones of international female solidarity.
These ideas were the core of the Hillary Doctrine. Hillary’s ambassador-at-large for global women’s issues, Melanne Verveer, declared in 2011 that “financial inclusion is a top priority for U.S. government” and announced her terrible chagrin that “3 billion people in the world remain unbanked; the majority them are women.” Hillary’s undersecretary for democracy and global affairs, Maria Otero, came to State from one of the biggest American microlending institutions; in her official U.S government capacity, she expressed her joy at how microfinancing had evolved “from subsidized microloans to a focus on self-sufficiency, to an emphasis on savings, to a full suite of financial products delivered by commercial regulated banks” and how all this had “affirmed the capacity of the poor to become economic actors in their own right.” Hillary herself proudly recalls in her memoirs how the State Department rebuilt Afghanistan by handing out “more than 100,000 small personal loans” to the women of that country.”
These are fine, sterling sentiments, but they suffer from one big problem: microlending doesn’t work. 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 to help the poor at all. In a carefully researched 2010 book called Why Doesn’t Microfinance Work?, the development consultant Milford Bateman debunks virtually every aspect of the microlending gospel. It doesn’t empower women, Bateman writes; it makes them into debtors. It encourages people to take up small, futile enterprises that have no chance of growing or employing others. Sometimes microborrowers don’t even start businesses at all; they just spend the loan on whatever. Even worse: the expert studies that originally sparked the microlending boom turn out, upon reexamination, to have been badly flawed.
Nearly every country where microlending has been an important development strategy for the last few decades, Bateman writes, is now a disaster zone of indebtedness and economic backwardness. When the author tells us that dominance of the microfinance model in developing countries is causally associated with their progressive deindustrialization and infantilization
He is being polite. The terrible implication of the facts he has is that what microlending achieves is the opposite of development. Even Communism, with its Five Year Plans, worked better than this strategy does, as Bateman shows in a look at microloan-saturated Bosnia.[28]
There’s a second reason the liberal class loves microfinance, it’s extremely simple: microlending is profitable. Lending to poor, as every subprime mortgage originator knows, can be a lucrative business. Mixed with international feminist self-righteousness, it is also a bulletproof business, immune to criticism. The million-dollar paydays it has brought certain Microlenders are the wages of virtue. This combination is the reason the international goodness community believes that poor women by lending to them at usurious interest rates is a fine thing all around.”
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