Since this is Mother’s Day in the US, let’s note that the NGO Save the Children has created an index of the best and worst places to be a mother. Also check out their great multimedia presentation. It’s a great resource. Save the Children based their index on the following criteria:
Lifetime risk of maternal mortality
Percentage of women using modern contraception
Skilled attendant at delivery
Female life expectancy
Expected number of years of formal schooling for females
Ratio of estimated female-to-male earned income
Maternity leave benefits
Participation of women in national government
Under-5 mortality rate
Percentage of children under age 5 moderately or severely underweight
School enrollment ratios
Ratio of girls to boys enrolled in primary school
Percentage of population with access to safe water
It is pretty comprehensive and, of course, it reflects the fact that market-based policies (translation: do-nothing policy stances) do not provide the benefits necessary for healthy motherhood. The index also assumes, rightfully so, that gender equality is also a condition for healthy motherhood.
In case you’re wondering, the United States ranks 27th, down one slot from last year (must be these great family values-based social policies Bush implemented). Unsurprisingly, the Scandinavian social democracies fare the best, what with all the social programs, and vacations and health services. And all that with the general public policies designed to reduce inequalities, create safer societies.
Bottom 10 Worst places to be a mother
137 Ethiopia
138 Mali
139 Djibouti
140 Eritrea
141 Guinea-Bissau
142 Angola
143 Sierra Leone
144 Yemen
145 Chad
146 Niger
These are not surprising either. Sub-Saharan Africa is plagued with poverty and other problems that completely gendered, that is, these problems affect women the first and the worst (bad sentence / bad grammar… hey, at least France makes it to the top 10!).
As StC CEO Charles MacCormack states,
“To close the gap and improve conditions for mothers and children, especially among the poorest, the global community needs to do a better job of providing mothers with access to education, income-earning opportunities, and basic health care – for mothers and their children.”
And here I thought all we had to do was to encourage abstinence and marriage. </snark>
I have been amazed (in a bad sense) by the story of the raid by the State of Texas on the Fundamentalist Mormon compound in El Dorado and the removal of 460 children. It is indeed incredible that such practices are allowed to persist in the 21st century United States.
When it comes to religious fundamentalist movements and other reactionary and fascist groups, there is no better source on the Internet than the blog Orcinus (David Neiwert’s blog, with co-author Sara Robinson). In this cas, Sara Robinson got the thankless task of reporting on this and in this post (which is well worth a read), she recommended Daphne Bramham’s book, The Secret Life of Saints - Child Brides and Lost Boys in Canada’s Polygamous Mormon Sect. I fully trust Sara’s judgment, so, I got the book and, boy, it was quite a read.
If you don’t know anything about the Fundamentalist Mormon, this is the book you want to get the full historical and social context of a sect that has tentacles in Utah, Arizona, Texas, Idaho, South Dakota and British Colombia in Canada. Even though the title indicates a focus on the Canadian side of the sect (Bramham is a journalist for the Vancouver Sun and she has a blog there as well), the book includes a lot on the American branch of the Fundamentalist Church of the Latter Day Saints (FDLS, which has been in the news so much recently).
Liberation is starting an interesting weekly series in partnership with the National Institute of Audiovisual (INA - the television archives). They will publish segments of old television programs with important intellectual figures. The first installment can be seen here, an interview with Claude Levi-Strauss. Claude Levi-Strauss was the initiator of a major (and I mean MAJOR) epistemological shift in France (VERY simplistically, from existentialism to structuralism) thanks to his structural anthropology (excerpts here). The French intellectual scene was never the same… there is a “before Levi-Strauss” and “after Levi-Strauss”. Of course, I am still an enthusiastic reader of his work and he is still considered the most important French intellectual in France. And he’s still alive!
Unfortunately, it’s all in French, so, if you don’t speak the language (you mean the whole world is not francophone? Well I never!), you’re missing out on all the good stuff on the structural study of myths as language and the raw and the cooked as symbolic representations of the duality between nature and culture. I still think there is very little that is more powerful than structural analysis (and post-structural as well… damn, I have to blog more on theories, especially the French ones).
The good news is that there is a YouTube clip for everything, so, without further ado, let’s hear it from Pierre Bourdieu (gosh, I miss him!) - with sub-titles - on Levi-Strauss.
Employment constitutes less and less a protection against poverty. This is one of the conclusions of a report in France, from the National Observatory on Poverty and Social Exclusion (ONPES - a national research institute).
The report confirms that the trend of poverty reduction over the past two decades seems to have paused: in France, in 2005, 6.3% of people were below the poverty line (approximately $1,000/month for a person living alone), a percentage similar to that of 2003. What has changed is the intensity of poverty, which has gotten worse: the gap between the median income of the poor and the poverty line is widening. What this means is that the poor are getting poorer and their income becomes more distant from the poverty line and their quality of life is more and more marked by precariousness.
And this is where employment becomes a factor. There are more and more working poor: in 2003, they were 1.47 million; by 2005, they were 1.74 million (7% of the active population). Poverty affects first and foremost those that experience long periods of unemployment, but also those are work all year long in part-time jobs (21% of the working poor) and the non-salaried or independent workers.
Family status also has an impact on the probability of being working poor. One third of the working poor have an unemployed spouse (as opposed to 23% of the active population), another third has no partner (as opposed to 25%). So, even when individually, workers make more than the poverty line, their familial situation is what drags them into the category of working poor.
“Wage inequality has increased dramatically in the United States since the 1980s. This article investigates the relationship between this trend and occupational structure measured at the three-digit level. Using the Current Population Survey from 1983 to 2002, we find that the direct association between occupations and wage inequality declined over this period as within-occupational inequality grew faster than between-occupational inequality. We estimate multilevel growth models using detailed occupational categories as the unit of analysis to assess how the characteristics of occupations affect changes in mean wages and levels of wage inequality across this time period. The results indicate that changes in mean wages across occupations vary depending on the characteristics of individuals in those occupations and that intra-occupational inequality is difficult to predict using conventional labor force data. These findings seem largely inconsistent with the common sociological view of occupation as the most fundamental feature of the labor market. Correspondingly, a more comprehensive approach—one that incorporates the effects of organizational variables and market processes on rising wage inequality in the New Economy—is warranted.”
Bottom line: one’s occupation is less and less correlated to wages, hence the article title: “The Rise of Intra-Occupational Wage Inequality in the United States, 1983 to 2002″. That is, 70% of the increase in wage inequalities occurs within (rather than between) occupations.
Kieran Healy focuses on the organizational implications and how this flies in the face of the idea that as occupations require more skills, then, they should command greater wage inequalities than less skill-based occupations (the old trope that education solves everything, to put it dumbly). I would argue that this is the practical version of the Zygmunt Bauman’s concept of Liquid Society.
I guess I’ll never run out of sexist posts (and I didn’t even blog the Democratic primary! for no other reason than other people do that better than I could). So, Malaysia it is and it’s a two-fer, first, this lovely item (to file under the general hypocrisy that Islam is not sexist and veiling women is for their protection):
“Women’s groups in Malaysia have reacted angrily to proposed government restrictions on women travelling abroad on their own. State media say the plan would require women to obtain written consent from their families or employers. The Malaysian foreign minister said the move would prevent single women being used by gangs to smuggle drugs.”
See? It’s not repressive at all. It’s just to protect single women. Because the proper and safe state for a woman is to be married and under the protection of her husband. Now, of course, the damn women’s groups have criticized the proposal as oppressive and regressive. They also argue, foolishly, that women can make their own decisions. Obviously, these groups hate women. [/snark]
If that weren’t enough, we get the second item from the BBC as well, it is both sad and encouraging:
“A religious court in Malaysia has allowed a Muslim convert to leave the Islamic faith, in what is being hailed as a landmark ruling. Penang’s Sharia court ruled that Siti Fatimah Tan Abdullah was free to return to Buddhism, following the collapse of her marriage to a Muslim man. It was decided she had not had proper counselling during her conversion. Malaysians are rarely allowed to renounce the faith - those who do can be prosecuted under stringent laws. Religious rights are a sensitive issue in Malaysia - which is 60% Muslim.”
The sad thing is that Malaysia uses Sharia law, a reactionary body of religious law. The encouraging thing is the ruling in itself. But I really like the BBC’s last sentence here. It turns euphemization into an art form: look, Malaysia is a religious country where Sharia law applies, meaning, widespread sexism and religious privilege as well as stratification.
The ruling itself looks very much like the Muslim version of the Catholic annulment: she’s allowed to leave Islam because she never really was a Muslim in the first place. Had she received more counseling and guidance (my translation: more indoctrination), she’d be stuck with that religion.
That’s unusual, but, I have to confess that it cracked me up (via the BBC):
“A South African woman divorcing her husband has tried to publicly shame him into paying her maintenance. She has plastered posters on her car detailing his infidelities. Passers-by in George, Western Cape, who stopped to read them, took out their phones to take pictures of the captions, Die Burger newspaper reports. “I decided to make a peaceful point for women everywhere who struggle to get their maintenance,” the woman, whose case is still in court, told the paper. A poster on the boot of her car read:
“If my soon-to-be-ex-husband thinks he can:
bed down cheap women,
buy them underwear,
wine and dine them in the best restaurants,
take them on five-star holidays,
take ‘excite’ tablets for erectile dysfunction,
go out boozing each night AND not pay me my maintenance as ordered by court,
and think I will take no action, he has another thing coming.”
Standing by her car, the woman explained that she had discovered her husband had been cheating on her after 36 years of marriage.”
Yeah, that sucks. That also means that this woman has to put herself through what Harold Garfinkel used to call a degradation ceremony in order to shame her husband into pay his alimony. Unfortunately, that is something not uncommon in a patriarchal context.
“The leader of Nepal’s Maoists has said that his party’s recent election victory is a sign of the global resurgence of communism. But Pushpa Kamal Dahal, also known as Prachanda, stressed his party believed in retaining multi-party competition. Prachanda has made it clear that he wants to become the first president of a Nepalese republic. The Maoists won twice as many seats as their nearest rivals in last month’s polls for a constitutional assembly.”
Prachanda hopes to start a revolutionary chain reaction in developing countries (well, the Mercosur countries certainly have taken a left turn which I blogged about here a while back). This is also communism 2.0 in that Prachanda believes multi-partyism is an acceptable political format and that competition in political ideas is healthy for society (that’s certainly new… can he tell that to Kim Jong-il?) and that it was the lack thereof that had been fatal to previously communist countries. More than that, these communists believe in private foreign investments (so, how are they communist, again?). Anyhoo, at least, we know they’ll abolish the monarchy once the Assembly is seated. It will be interesting to see how things turn out.
So what’s the story here? Hugo Constantino et Adan Perez are wanted by the police. They are accused of having repeatedly raped a 4-year old boy, in a wealthy private school and to have filmed their sadistic acts for a network of pornographic and pedophiliac videos. What is making everything worse (can it get worse than the sadistic rape of a 4-year old?) is that the State of Oaxaca is trying to cover it up and to stall the investigation by all means necessary. It has been over a year since the legal proceedings started and the 2 men are still at large.
On April 3rd, federal agents have discovered where Hugo Constantino - the husband of the school owner, the San Felipe Institute - was hiding in Oaxaca. But member of the state police intervened and stalled them for several hours to give him time to disappear again.
The victim’s mother, Leticia Valdes, has stated that the state is trying to hide the existence of a global network. After filing a complaint for the rape, she has received death threats by telephone, unidentified men are constantly watching her house, her car has been vandalized. She has been offered hush money. The little boy is in therapy but is still much traumatized by what he has been through (yeah, no shit). The suspicion of a global network of pedophiliac pornography has emerged because the director of the Institute (the wife of Constantino) has done a lot of unexplained travel to Spain. Mexico is the world’s third producer of pornographic pedophilia.
Ms Valdes also has a hard time finding an attorney to represent her and her son in Oaxaca. She has had four already, and they all resigned under pressure and because of the potential implications of the complaint. The second man on the run, Adan Perez, teaches computer sciences at the Institute, is also the nephew of the director (Constantino’s wife again). This woman is heavily connected to the state branch of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI - Mexico long dominant political party), especially, the governor’s wife.
And while Ms Valdes has problems finding legal representation, the Institute has no such difficulties. All the attorneys representing it are influential members of the state PRI, former senators, former state prosecutor, former state secretary of interior. This legal powerhouse is led by a legal mind who defended the members of the military involved in the “disappearances” during the 1970s “dirty war”.
This is not the first time that the Institute has been accused of something like that. And following the example of Ms Valdes, three other mothers have filed complaints for the same crime against other private institutes (what the hell is going on in these places?). Public opinion in the state is divided over this and only one newspaper has dared reporting on it.
Why is it that power and sexuality are always so intimately intertwined? Well, feminists have answered that one over and over (often to deaf ears). So, just go read Feminism 101.
Via the BBC, the latest side effects of the food price crisis:
“India’s agriculture minister has rejected calls for additional debt cancellation for millions of farmers. In February, the government agreed a $15bn scheme to write off the debts of millions of small farmers - those with less than two hectares of land. But there have been demands from opposition and some governing coalition parties to extend the loan waiver to farmers who own more land. Farm activists say debts have been driving many farmers to suicide.
At least 10,000 debt-ridden farmers have committed suicide in India each year over the last decade - and activists say hundreds more have done so in recent months, despite the aid package. Rejecting the demand, the federal agriculture minister, Sharad Pawar, said the government was not in a position to take on new responsibilities. Drought, a fall in crop prices and an increase in the cost of cultivation are cited as reasons for the farmers’ plight. Many farmers have been forced to take out loans to buy necessary supplies, but these have left them heavily in debt. Some turn to moneylenders, who charge much higher rates of interest than banks.”
It is not a new issue, just one made worse by the current crisis. I have blogged enough on microcredit to underline how much access to credit is central to survival in many poor areas. Without access to legitimate credit, poor peasants in Asia have no other option than to use moneylenders who charge them usury interest rates. One of the major persistent forms of slavery in India is debt bondage, which can be passed from generation to generation.
The European Union has already abolished the death penalty. If a death penalty country wants to become a member, it has to abolish it. Now, the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) is reviewing life sentences (via Le Monde):
The case before the ECHR is that of a Frenchman who spent 41 years in prison and was paroled after several unsuccessful parole hearings. He sued the French government for arbitrary detention. A ECHR panel had rejected the case, but the full court decided to hear it again (ECHR press release). The current position of the court is that life sentences do not violate human rights if it is possible for a lifer to be paroled at some point. It is the withdrawal of possible parole that would constitute inhuman treatment. Should not only de jure but de facto life sentences be imposed, they would violate Article 3 of the European Convention on Human Rights which states “No one shall be subjected to torture or to inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.”
It seems that the most likely outcome of this case and decision of the court will be that life sentences are acceptable as long as a parole system is in place and is not arbitrary (that is, potential parolees get hearings on a regular basis but everyone knows it’s for show).
Via Liberation, the rich Bolivian region of Santa Cruz has declared its autonomy after a successful - but illegal - referendum. The “yes” obtained around 82% of the votes with 30 to 40% abstention. This autonomy gives the region expanded powers in political and economic matters, at the expense of the central government. In particular, the new status gives Santa Cruz increased power over administration of land policy and the sale of natural resources, especially natural gas. For the government, this is a ploy by the local oligarchy and wealthy landowners to enrich themselves and protect their exclusive interests. However this issue is resolved institutionally, Santa Cruz started a chain reaction: 3 out of 9 regions have now planned to hold their own autonomy referenda.
According to Le Monde, things started with constitutional disputes between the central government and the opposition right-winged prefects of 6 of the 9 provinces.
But as nationalist leader Andres Soliz Rada states, both parties are liquidating the national state: the right-wingers by getting regional autonomy because they do not like governmental policies, and the central government by giving way to extreme multiculturalism with three flags and 36 languages.
But at the heart of this is land policy: the government-sponsored constitutional reform would limit the size of latifundia to 5,000 to 10,000 hectares whereas Santa Cruz lands largely belongs to 40 families. The largest plantations might be redistributed to peasants, something, of course, unacceptable to the local landowning oligarchy (via Le Nouvel Observateur). This result of the referendum is a blow to the government since Santa Cruz generates 30% of the GDP of Bolivia. The bottom line is economic, as stated in the Independent,
“The new constitution is at the source of the regional discontent with the central government. Its strong pro-indigenous and socialist content and the controversial way in which it was approved – inside an army barracks – have made it a rallying point for opposition forces across the country. (…) The reason for the opposition is economic more than anything else, although racist smears have tainted the arguments of both camps. In recent years Santa Cruz has grown from an outback region into Bolivia’s economic powerhouse, responsible for a third of the national GDP. The region boasts 40 per cent of the country’s arable land and one fifth of its gas reserves.
The Morales government is pushing for more control over those resources, claiming the benefits should go to the country’s poor as a whole. The Santa Cruz government says it deserves a larger slice of the profits from fossil fuels.”
And the Bolivian ethnic divisions are very clear: the “white” elite in Santa Cruz was very much in favor and the instigator of the referendum whereas the indigenous populations opposed it. And it can get pretty ugly (via the Guardian):
“The vote also expressed hostility to the government’s championing of indigenous communities which scrabble for survival in the highlands, a very different Bolivia to Santa Cruz and the relatively prosperous eastern lowlands. (…) “My family is voting for autonomy because the Indians want to dominate us,” said Olga Tordolla, a woman in a largely indigenous quarter of Santa Cruz city known as Plan Tres Mil. “They are racist, they hate white people.”"
Ah yes, the Americas’ beleaguered white people, always oppressed, always hated. But in this case, this is truly the revolt of the white elite against an elected president whose policies are too redistributive for their taste. There is reason for the rich ranchers and right-wing militias to be worried after the “pink tide” that is sweeping South America (via another Guardian article).
“Ecuador and Paraguay elected radical outsiders as Presidents, Venezuela continued espousing socialist revolution, and Argentina, Brazil, Chile and Uruguay retained left-wing governments.”
The big question now is whether this vote is going to be the first step in stopping Evo Morales’s policies. The answer is not clear. After all, his government just nationalized four oil companies.
This includes three oil companies with foreign capital. The government also has plans to nationalize telecommunications companies.
There is now a stand-off as to which policies will prevail: the quasi-apartheid system that favors white ranchers and right-wing militias, or the socialist mixed with indigenous identity politics of Evo Morales.
Bolivia is quite an interesting country, politically, these days. It seemed to have been at the forefront of some major struggles relating to the globalization of capitalism. First, there were the water wars, so brilliantly presentes by a PBS Now report (back in the days where the show was an hour long, hosted by Bill Moyers) in partnership with Frontline World, the best TV program available in the US on world affairs, IMNSHO.
What were the water wars? In many ways, Bolivia’s economic situation at the beginning of the 21st century was comparable to that of a lot of peripheral countries. So, when Bolivia elected a former IBM executive for president, he decided to modernize the country, strengthen the currency and reduce debt levels, as well as open the country to foreign investment. To do so, he called on to the World Bank for help and received the same one-size-fit-all list of requirements to make Bolivia part of the global economy and attractive to foreign investments. One such recommendation was the privatization of water in Cochabamba, a city in the Andes with 800,000 inhabitants, largely poor and indigenous.
The problems started when only one company bid for the water distribution system, Aguas del Tunari, a subsidiary of corporate giant Bechtel. It was a sweet deal for Aguas del Tunari as the government guaranteed them a 15 to 17% profit margin (so much for liberalization and letting the market set prices). Immediately, Aguas del Tunari jacked up the price of water so that a lot of peasants could no longer afford it. More than that, privately dug wells were by law to be controlled by Aguas del Tunari. Finally, once private, water distribution decreased and shortages started. Unsurprisingly, unrest and riots ensued, followed by government repression. Ultimately, the executives of Aguas del Tunari fled the country, but sued the Bolivian government for 25 million dollars (the lawsuit was withdrawn in 2006). In Cochabamba, indigenous and labor leaders decided to take over water distribution but no one, neither the government not the World Bank, offered to help them. (Liberation’s Autour du Monde blog has a good summary of the issue here and here)
The victory of the peasants and indigenous peoples over the corporate giant opened the way for the election of Evo Morales in 2005, the first indigenous president. It is not a surprise that one of his first decisions was to create a Ministry of Water headed by one of the leaders of the demonstrations. The public company that now manages water distribution in Cochabamba can boast that it has extended the grid and kept prices low based on a sliding scale. In the absence of support from the government or the World Bank, most financing for infrastructure comes from European foreign aid and non-governmental organization. There are still problems, though: about half the city receives no water and has to rely on water cisterns and individually-dug wells. The infrastructure is aging and the public company has produced only deficit.
This struggle seems to be a catalyst of all the issues related to economic globalization: the role of international institutions such as the World Bank, the power of Transnational Corporations such as Bechtel, the reduction in power of national government used only as conduits to liberalization, the winners and losers of structural adjustment programs, the plight of indigenous peoples, and the difficulties involved in trying to forge an alternative model for the delivery of basic services, conceived as rights rather than commodities. All these issues zeroed in on Cochabamba and there does not seem to be an easy or just solution to all this.
What is very clear, however, is that the global economic system is not a fair one. It is heavily biased in favor of investors and large corporations, and stacks the deck against peasants, indigenous peoples and labor. So far, attempts at correcting such gross imbalances have been unsuccessful and the current riots related to the food situation are a global extension of the conflict that exploded in Cochabamba in 2000. Unless the issues of the inequalities and loss of quality of life are addressed, it is a fair assessment to say that the global economic system will generate more chaos and instability in the world.
“Muslim scientists and clerics have called for the adoption of Mecca time to replace GMT, arguing that the Saudi city is the true centre of the Earth. Mecca is the direction all Muslims face when they perform their daily prayers. The call was issued at a conference held in the Gulf state of Qatar under the title: Mecca, the Centre of the Earth, Theory and Practice. One geologist argued that unlike other longitudes, Mecca’s was in perfect alignment to magnetic north. He said the English had imposed GMT on the rest of the world by force when Britain was a big colonial power, and it was about time that changed.”
Ok, fine, yes, a lot of things have been established by evil Western people, but really, this one is harmless and is pretty much institutionalized by now, so, who cares? That’s not what will reconcile Islam with modernity. But wait, there’s more: behold the Mecca watch!
“The meeting also reviewed what has been described as a Mecca watch, the brainchild of a French Muslim. The watch is said to rotate anti-clockwise and is supposed to help Muslims determine the direction of Mecca from any point on Earth.”
Are you kidding me? Isn’t there any common sense left in that community?
“The underlying belief is that scientific truths were also revealed in the Muslim holy book, and it is the work of scholars to unearth and publicise the textual evidence. But the movement is not without its critics, who say that the notion that modern science was revealed in the Koran confuses spiritual truth, which is constant, and empirical truth, which depends on the state of science at any given point in time.”
This need to find proof in religious texts of scientific discoveries is a very annoying - to put it mildly - trend, not just in Islam, but in all fundamentalist movements. Richard Dawkins has disposed of such nonsense repeatedly, so, just go read him.
Bottom line: science and religion do NOT mix, so, any attempt is a disguised to hijack science in the name of religion.
How does he explain the credit crisis? For him, this crisis is not a bug, it’s a feature of the normal functioning of the global financial and banking system. The very principles of credit - the guarantees that are demanded, the bonus based on risk funded on the backs of the least solvent people - have revealed that this system does not know how to lend to the poor. And it’s the banks’ fault. They loaned a lot of money, all the while making false promises with great offers, teaser rates, and a guarantee to be able to reimburse over long periods of time. In reality, the poor were put under extreme pressure to reimburse since this is where large profits come from. This is the logic of the financial system. Which is, of course, the opposite of what Grameen Bank does.
The only logic of this system is the maximization of profits. There is no other logic here. That’s what led to subprimes and hedge funds. In this sense, according to Yunus, this system is blind to anything else. He is stricken by the focus on the enormous sums of money lost by banks and the little focus on how low-income people were duped by maladapted offers from the banks and whose homes are repossessed or simply abandoned, if only to blame them for their greed or irresponsibility whereas bank losses are explained in structural terms.
For Yunus, the system that is collapsing today is one based on a faulty economic principle: loans cannot be granted without collateral, especially to poor people. This is a principle that has the strength of dogma. With Grameen Bank, he has proven that this is not true. This principle prevents half of the world’s population from participating into the global economic system, and not just in the Global South, but in the US and Europe as well. Traditional banks, as the saying goes, only loan to the rich. But for Yunus, what’s the point of such banks if they do not contribute to creating value or helping people getting out of poverty through their own labor? This is a major blind spot in the current system: banks and financial institutions do not understand the importance of independent economic activities as well as households as productive units. The informal sector, as it is called, must be recognized as legitimate productive activity, as a source of employment, and should be encouraged through credit.
However, orthodox economic literature ignores it. Only salaried employment in busisnesses is considered. Therefore, economic prescriptions are based on enterprises employing people, or resulting in unemployment if they do not. That is the current logic of capitalism. It seems absurd, to Yunus, to limit economic activity to this narrow definition. Why should the poor of the Global South wait for large corporations to hire them? Why not let them create their own employment through access to credit? This is this narrow conception of employment and denying credit to the alternative that is a form of slavery, for Yunus. For him, the overworked, salaried American, employed by large companies, is slave to the rigidities and instabilities of the system.
This is where Yunus sees the real danger of current economic structures: a unidimensional man (Herbert Marcuse, anyone?). Salaried life should be one option among many other opportunities. The denial of such possibilities, especially in the Global South, clearly is described by Yunus as a form of alienation (in the Marxian sense).
The other major blind spot of the current financial system is its sexism. Grameen’s focus on women is well-known by now. The reason for it is that women are more productive and more solvent than men and this gendered economic productivity generates greater communal benefits. Men spend on themselves. Women spend on their families and communities. There is greater general welfare achieved by women rather than men. And this aspect, for Yunus, holds true everywhere in the world.
But overall, Yunus argues that we are seeing the collapse of a faulty financial system and that it is time for something different: social capitalism.
Via 