yunusworld

2008-08-25T11:18:00.001-07:00

Blog year2008 in october is about ending poverty http://events.takingitglobal.org/20255 so we hope this week's syndication to 100 blogs will exponentialise to tens of thousands of blogs by then, with a little help from friends like you

sustainability club http://sustainabilityclub.com

social business club http://www.socialbusinessclub.net

collaboration cafe http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_9nL_a0K97I

yunus 10000 http://yunus10000.com collaboration coordinators for youth dialogues in that city and between cities together with invitations to action specific to each video good news story - eg if you want microcredit to beat off big banks why not help any school try out micro credit with the world's simplest program small change, big changes - a microloanfoundation franchise

Peers across hemispheres and I are far more interested in ensuring that each of these intercity movements vetoes any uses of 20th c failing system methods that the majority of club coordinators -or where elected an honorary board - vote against, than prescribing revenue models.

OPEN SOURCING THE CLUBS
Obviously we should want coordinators to make a living out of work input whlst at the same time recognising that being a club coordinator is probably worth more than having many a professional qualification - or needs to become so if this world is to be sustainable. Equally where profits are repeatedly generated I assume we can find a way iof agreeing some sliding scale that should be contributed either to your favourite grassroots organsiation in bangladesh or to a small list of other potential grassroots partners of future capitalism which should probably need at least 75 of members refendum to confirm

I am very happy if people will negotiate what other rules they would need to want to participate as well as to clarify where they want diferent contant at the mother webs. The main web system I use costs $35 a year per web so its not difficult to imagine that major cties will also want to set up their own branch web or of course a free blog - either of which we will happily linmk from the top of the mother web.

Obviously some of our constitution needs double checking with for example the 100000 bangladeshi's and other Gandhians who are the main practical exemplar of the values we seek to network worldwide so that the future sustains 7 billion brilliant jobs and goodwill multiplying across all women, children and even men.

We wish to learn from each city's most successful ways of mobilising and cross-cultural celebration, as well as metods for ensuring that any action network actually reaches to those in most desperate need of its service. This is one of the big lessons of bangladeshi experience -reiterated by every micro-system designer in bangladesh we have interviewed - once a networks starts empowering the entrepreneur inside it will never get deeper than the deepest needsholders it begins with. This is a lesson that many global NGOs seem never to have begun to grade.

chris macrae http://worldentrepreneur.net
washington dc inquiries desk usa 301 881 1655 info@worldcitizen.tv
y10000 at facebook http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=22045349892

2008-05-15T23:20:00.001-07:00

Join Yunus bookclub1000 and help connect heroic change

2008 Goodwill News - Year 1 of Future Capitalism
Launch of Future Capitalism book: features Grameen Danone as world's first multinational social business & explains how social business model has been validated from 30 years of developing the microcredit banking sector J1	Business Week article F29-Yunus world's favourite goodwill entrepreneur whose goal of ending Financial Imperalism is as big as Gandhi’s	Wall Street Journal on Yunus opening New York bank –how & why sustainability bankers would never have wasted a cent on subprime: M1	Youtube with Gordon Brown from Number 10 Downing Street :21	Grameen Health Launch of The Grameen Green Children Eyecare hospital social business (aravind model) in Dhaka: 12
World Economic Forum: Bill Gates joins Leaders of Future Capitalism: J25	Grameen Credit Agricole launch announced	Parisian business leaders celebrate French edition and Grameen Veolia is announced	Launch of Innovation Bank in Bahrain & announcement of 2 Billion $ inward investment in Bangladesh	Top 25 dialogues of microcreditsummit year 008 are announced. They include industry sector responsibility response to Mexican abuse of goodwill and IP.
Book hits Best Seller list on last day of 12 city US booktour J24- in New York, nine year old investigative journalist leads humanity's celebration	Doonesbury cheered as inspiring economics correspondent at London School of Economics talk - changing mindsets and mini-professordom is development economics biggest crisis F15	President Sarkozi orders HEC to provide an SMBA with Yunus a Chair of Social Business	Milken debates with Human Innovation World's G3 : Grameen's Yunus, Genome's Ventner & Google's Schmidt

Chris Macrae Breaking News May 2

Congrats To Milla and Tom currently top of future capitalism headlines with opening on may 12 in Dhaka of The Green Children Eye Hospital Social Business http://www.earthtimes.org/articles/show/professor-muhammad-yunus-and-the,376842.shtml

wlill London be 3rd to connect with joint venture of Bangladesh and California ???

2008-05-13T07:20:00.000-07:00

Yogurt & Cucumber Dommage: yunus world's worst book review: The Economist

coming soon yutube of May 13 Bronx tv at Lehman University debates: for the want of a collaboration meeting format we risk losing http://wholeplanet.tv

HAP Race - the Next Moon Race
How many people in london will answer the call for HAP monthly meetings on expediting Hunger And Poverty's Museum - which an active GrameenCap/yuNus Forum/ Hunger Project big city could world serve by multiplying the goodwill to Do Now

connecting multiple views of yuNus

yuNus the world's number 1 sustainability investment fundraiser - mail info@worldcitizen.tv if you have a view to link here

Presumably before the MCI meeting in Bali the microworld will work out they are missing yuNus Forum Social Action group http://wholeplanet.tv/id27.html -whose stories and celebration of humanity are needed as much as all the other MFI experience action planning sub-networks
-if post-bali wherever there had been 10 citizens from the same place they started a HAP monthly forum then the first item on the agenda would be to get citizens demand every MCI is constituted as a social business if I understand Yunus maps, that would be an unstoppable changing world for microeconomics to multiply goodwill and sustainability investment in human productivity around

imagine if instead of knowing monthly that every first monday there was a fast company meeting , you knew in 2008 part 2 that 100 londoners would monthly turn up at a 2 hour evening meeting on ending poverty, ending hunger, liberating 3 billion women- not always the same people -eg perhaps you would go 4 times a year - but a largely consistent network of 300-500 people in the audience

what sorts of speakers could we book to that meeting - the sorts of people like Gordon Brown or his representative who youtube a commitment when yunus is around
http://www.number-10.gov.uk/output/Page15305.asp
but how do they follow that through in the next 12 months- ceos or their representatives debriefing us on future capitalism projects they do with yunus; the sorts of people who want to wiki together an open SMBA-or better still $100 laptop it if this meeting all had $100 laptops

Equally the audience network of such a meeting process would be a critical mass for if you like minifinancing citizen collaboration projects we need to develop yunus space-perhaps only 20 of the 300 people would be rich folk but it would give them a chance to start up citizen social business philanthropy primarily guaranteed as being either a grameen type project or a thp one (actually garage internet for the poor project pledges don’t need much money , more the guarantee there is an ongoing audience to feedback and interface them

If we could get the sort of meeting process I imagine going in London it would be one of the year 1 Future Capitalsim top 7 entrepreneurial wonders to dialogue in Dhaka with Dr Yunus as every city could convene such forums; if you like its the big picture view of what yunus forum could do whilst uniting subforums that sent delegates to the monthly event

Oddly we also need such meetings to do homework - eg the Milken conference produced arguably the most amazing one hour video ever in uniting the curiosity of the heads of google, grameen and a genome scientist in solutions humanity needs http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gpFVtodCqn8

we need the space to commit to each other that we will watch such videos as spend say 20 minutes of the next meeting debating the homework video; also when you have a meeting of this scale it becomes worthwhile paying $100 for someone to transcribe the video so we can handout the text too

Yesterday's mapping news: THE JOINT VENTURE OF BANGLADESH & CALIFORNIA

http://cmseducation.org/ http://ciseducation.org/ Educators of 250000 children in India tell me Drucker, Gandhi and Montessori were as correct as 20th C could get: Knowledge Unmanaged can be a very playful zone to be the flow- once the worlds of women*poor*youth understand that the mapping trangle of yunus & gates & schmidt (grassroots world*bilanthropy world* do no evil corpoarte world) have already signed Future Capitalism's dotted line to promote a knowhow exchange between Bangladesh and West Coast USA turning from banker to the poor to internetworker for the poor through 6 community sustainbility compasses of banking, health, education, agriculture,microgovernment and truth media for consumer goods, IMAGINE if in the late 90s you had huge first Tuesday meetings or ecademy meetings for trivial uses of the internet why dont we have HAP meetings for how to connect the internet for humanity. This isnt a zero-sum game but it would be good to see London/Uk be the third knowledge cross-cultural flow group to join in with Bangladesh and California; I will be turning to a campaign towards asking directors of The Economist to start The Grameen Economist before Business Week does it- doubtless this will drive them mad with me but the broader sanity of connecting London Bangladesh California is the only change game in town that Londoners truly need to map in the next 12 months.
Why not take this mail and trio up ie debate it with two other perope. I bet you will find more practical answers than theoretical questions, and a lot more fun than I know how to wordsmith

Incidentally after 40,000 pounds of field test and probably a year elapsed of my time I dont believe in the meeting process of pioneers of change at all, or indeed any of the other UK social entrepreneur or green networks' modes of meeting and virtual boxing that I have experienced in the last decade. Systemically their media is impoverishing. They are not open enough, not contextually gravitated around urgent trust maps, nor collaboratively the far side of the social business system transformation, the yunus book simply asks us to map; if they were they would already be debating yunus book weekly among 1000 internetowrking readers. Sadly they are living up to Ackoff' and Gandhi broken system prediction - the harder they try from the historic side of the fence the more they waste the brightest young things power to question, freedom of speech, free market and all other dumbing down media (or addiction to demand) traps

Chris 301 881 1655
yunus diary http://www.microcredit.tv/id32.html
free speech's big bang: citizens meeting format diaries http://www.microcredit.tv/id33.html

World Service 2.0 & Olympics2.1
Of course the reason why against the odds London will be one of the first 10 cities to unite with Bangladesh and California is we will be the first country boycott our own olympics if the BBC hasnt taken to covering the peoples sustainability games with more attention than spectator sports by 2012; every sustainability crisis has 3 main missing connections:
Local
Media with worldwide scale
Measures that multiply goodwill and human productivity instead of count up last quarters financial numbers

2024 24th update http://www.normanmacrae.com/netfuture.html : Big Bang to Bangla
There are very human things to put right at a speed faster than our individual gods or goods – only the mass of collaborative people power can believe and do it; no amount of top people summiting or white housing alone will achieve sustainability in time.
In search of the future of meeting formats whose Satyagraha commune http://wholeplanet.tv/

connecting 10 types of people empowering communications and community-building project solutions

2008-05-02T09:21:00.000-07:00

samuel -whether summit hosts know it or not , a summit is only worthwhile if it connects through practice futures as well as past open source but communally viewable learnings with about 10 other things which we spent 4 days discussing in dhaka with Dr Yunus team at the start of the year -other things include interalia:

*hub spaces for quickly testing which projects fail

*meta-hubs of which africa has the best in blecher's free university http://cidaworld.tv http://brac.tv

*videos made for people to debate and peer to peer cluster so they know which small collection of videos makes their community rising case, explains how they will practice community up, communicates such celebration of humanity that potential naysayers are literally blown off their pulpits

*some virtual mode of communication of which email is always the most cross-culturally communal and deepest context-gravitating to trust map round and low cost in spite of all the wizard virtual community boxes people throw at us

etc

I will assume for now this conversation is on videos/youtube produce. Then in terms of people who I believe are 100% committed to letting yunus guide us through his colaboration world changing book;

when practical you should keep in contact with mark as a filmaker and storyteller researcher;

probably lesley or peter as people who understand the grassroots africa have problems that the top are not solving.

In parallel Mostofa knows bangladesh has problems and solutions having spent 30 years searching for these through grassroots up systems

I wish I could help comepetently nominate who among the rest of the circulation lists I am in the thick of knows how to do what but because these things need to combinatorially flow (one misconnect or peson gping walkabout destroying all the multiplcation of impossible becomes possible when right action right time right people right place ) and connect- let's start with any remaining issues on videos and then if there is another topic let's see who we all feel able to add in to this circulation

chris

Yunus Video of month - when Dr Yunus Youtubed in Downing Street for PM Gordon Brown

2008-04-25T12:38:00.000-07:00

Transcript

Scene 1 Greeting

Prime Minister Gordon Brown: Hello How are you, what a pleasure

Muhammad Yunus: It’s a pleasure for me

PM : It’s good to see you

(They Shake Hands)

Scene 2 Muhammad Yunus Introduces himself to the camera from the heart of 10 Downing Street

I am Muhammad Yunus from Bangladesh with Grameen bank. We lend money to extremely poor people for income generating activities. I am suggesting that Africa needs a lot of microfinance programs – tiny loans 30 dollar, 45 dollar 100 dollar – and paid back in weekly installments. It doesn’t need any collateral. It doesn’t need any lawyers into it but the repayment rate is very high: 98% or 99%.

Microfinance is very important because it allows people to bring out their own initiative, bring out their own capability. And they can move on their own speed to cerate income, to get out of poverty. And people in Africa are very enterprising people, particularly women. Microfinance focuses on women. Today in Bangladesh within Grameen Bank we have 7.5 million borrowers a- 97% of them women. The Prime Minister is very much aware of it; very supportative of it. So we will discuss how to make it happen in Africa

Scene 3 PM and Dr Yunus sitting round a cup of tea
PM There is so much goodwill to the work you have been doing, and it is so important

Scene 4 After tea: Muhammad Yunus denouement

At the same time, we will be discussing another concept – the social business : business to do good to people - (show copy of Dr Yunus new bestselling book Creating a World Without Poverty- Social Business, The Future of Capitalism ). This is business where you aim at the social objectives, not for making money for yourself. You cover your cost, make profit but the profit doesn’t go to investors or outsiders but stays with the company to achieve the goal that you set out to help achieve or lead.

2008-04-25T12:32:00.001-07:00

Dear Christian

I particularly wanted to follow up your talk with emerging news from Nobel Laureate Dr Yunus whom I have met 4 times this year as it seemed that his views on how citizens can help network sustainability and multiply goodwill flow closely with what I understood of yours. I believe there is also overlap with the presentation made by George Dragnich.

1) I gather from this article that Grameen's solar and biogas services - already in use in over 100,000 households in Bangladesh have been approved by world bank as a carbon offset recommendation http://www.climatechangecorp.com/content.asp?contentid=5283 Is this what you were recommending?

2) This week I saw Dr Yunus before he jumped into a taxi to do a youtube from 10 Downing Street . http://www.number-10.gov.uk/output/Page15305.asp
The PM and Yunus discussed the social business map of his new book as well as possible food crisis interventions and directing more aid to africa of the microcredit type. I believe he then flew over to New York and talked about the food crisis with the Deputy Director General at the UN

3) Dr Yunus' leading info tech builder Kazi Islam ceo Grameen Solutions was presenting recently at the UN http://www.un-gaid.org/en/system/files/web20_Provisional+Programme+24Mar08v2.pdf on the plan to link in 10000 rural telecentres to question the www on 5 community building - health, agriculture, education, community empowering gov, media for needed consumer goods . You may already know his work - otherwise I have a Grameen prosepectus pdf on this if anyone wants a copy

4 In DC my next door neighbour works at the Japanese Embassy and says that Mr Yamamoto who leads JICA in USA is a fan of Dr Yunus. I don't know how to help connect all this possible grassroots momentum. In New York, Peter's monthy tavern for action debriefings around Yunus knowhow seems to be atracting the younger employees ready to run away from the big banks!

5 The thousand-reader Yunus bookclub that I host very much wants to help support any of the flows that can make these initiatives come together on all sides. If you have ideas on what we could do next or need any help in making sure that your ways of improving sustainability blend with Yunus team leaders in USA (headed by Norwegian Vidar Jorgensen) or Dhaka, I am always happy to try to make sure everyone knows who's who etc. We are focusing on obvious stuff that citizens need to rehearse like which 200 videos (half Yunus connecting, half from anywhere) help connect sustainability work and SMBA curricula around 24 worlds: the 3 under-represented populations : poor, women, youth; the 4 hemispheres; the egrameen.com big 6 community compasses, etc
http://www.wholeplanet.tv/id27.html

We will probably be running off thousands of dvds now we have several hours of Yunus speeches which everyone can edit to dialogue around their context's deepest meanings and most urgent solutions needs.

Yours sincerely

Chris Macrae
usa 301 881 1655
yunus booktour day in london http://worldentrepreneur.net/_wsn/page4.html
romors of what's possible http://rowp.tv

2008-04-15T11:53:00.000-07:00

Project Snapshot: Bringing Grameen Bank To California
Speaker(s): Isabel Maxwell, Senior Advisor to Grameen America (West Coast) & Grameen Trust
Tuesday, April 15th, 2008 - 7:30PM at The Hollywood Hill Event Center, Hollywood
Grameen America is a microfinance company whose mission is to help alleviate poverty through entrepreneurship by providing loans, savings programs, credit establishment, and other services to the working poor in the United States. Grameen America is built upon the success of the Grameen Bank of Bangladesh. Founded by Professor Muhammad Yunus, the Grameen Bank is the most widely recognized microfinance company in the world. This success earned both Professor Yunus and the Grameen Bank the Nobel Peace Prize in 2006. Grameen America has been created so that people with limited or no access to credit can use entrepreneurship and self-employment, proven means in the United States, for increasing wealth and escaping poverty. The poor are frequently prevented from pursuing entrepreneurship opportunities because mainstream banks will not make loans to people who lack minimum credit scores and collateral. These "unbanked" individuals typically have limited experience in understanding financial institutions, getting loans, building savings and managing credit. While conventional banks turn away these borrowers, the success of high-interest rate predatory lenders (often charging over 300-400% APR) such as payday loan corporations, pawnshops, and check cashers has shown that the unbanked constitute a highly valuable customer base.Grameen America provides an alternative for these borrowers. Grameen America provides banking for the unbanked.
$10 Cover. Complimentary Cocktails & Parking. Pre-order Meal with RSVP.Sponsored by St. Supery Vineyards, Heineken, & Liquid Om Water.

2008-04-06T09:09:00.000-07:00

interesting web http://www.microcapital.org/?p=1785

Now Reading...
Tuesday, March 4, 2008
MICROCAPITAL STORY: Wall Street Journal Interviews Muhammad Yunus and Discusses Grameen America
» Posted by Jennifer Lee in Category: Key Players at 12:02 am
The Wall Street Journal (WSJ), a leading business publication, interviewed Muhammad Yunus, founder of Grameen Bank and 2006 Nobel Peace Prize winner, in an article titled “Muhammad Yunus: Subprime Lender”. The article covered Mr. Yunus’ entrance into U.S.’s microcredit market and his approach to credit lending.
Grameen America, Inc. is Mr. Yunus’ new microfinance venture which focuses on serving “poor, aspiring entrepreneurs in the United States”. It is a for-profit microfinance company, follows the same lending model as Bangladesh-based Grameen Bank, and is focused on New York City with the intent to eventually spread throughout the US. Since it’s initiation in January, Grameen America has loaned a total of USD 145,000 at interest rates around 15 percent. Like other Grameen programs, priority is given to women borrowers; there are no credit-history checks; and borrowers do not need collateral or deal with complicated paperwork.
Grameen America joins other U.S. micro lenders such as ACCION USA, a private non-profit organization and part of ACCION International. ACCION USA has lent over USD 120 million to poor entrepreneurs in Brooklyn since 1991, and over USD 154 million to over 16,000 entrepreneurs nationwide. The microfinance information clearinghouse Mix Market lists only one US-based MFI: ECDC Enterprise Development Group (EDG), a non-profit, non-bank financial institution. EDG has provided microfinance services to over 5,000 people in Washington DC’s metropolitan area and had 250 active borrowers as of September 2006.
Given the economic turmoil caused by the U.S subprime mortgage collapse, Mr. Yunus discussed the risks of subprime-lending in the article as well. While Mr. Yunus described his business as “sub sub sub subprime”, he is not fazed by the credit crisis, blaming the collapse on sloppy business techniques. Despite the lack of collateral, guarantees, and lawyers common in conventional American lending, Grameen Bank claims over 98 percent of their loans are repaid and attributes the success to “know[ing] what is the limit within which we operate.”
Mr. Yunus also emphasizes access to credit as a basic human right, placing it as No. 1 when compared to other human rights such as the right to food, shelter, work, and health. He argues that through microcredit self-employment is possible. Self-employment can generate income, which in turn can provide food, shelter, and health care.
Beyond microfinance, Mr. Yunus explains how “social business” can eliminate world poverty. Social business is a “cause-driven” business model rather than a profit-driven model. Unlike charities, social businesses must recoup their investments, at minimum cover their costs, but still concentrate on creating products or providing services with social good. Furthermore, Mr. Yunus believes that a business model is needed to efficiently bring about change. Unlike a philanthropic dollar, Mr. Yunus states that “social business dollar has endless life, it recycles. And you build institutions.” With institutions come creativity, innovation, and continuity. Mr. Yunus fully details his vision on social business in his new book “Creating a World Without Poverty”.
by Jennifer Lee
Additional Resources:
Grameen: America, Social Business, Foundation, Bank
Wall Street Journal: “Muhammad Yunus: Subprime Lender”, by Emily Parker, March 1, 2008.
Financial Times: Letters to the Editor, “Queens Needs Microfinance as much as South Asia”, by Anne Fish, February 27, 2008.
MicroCapital Stories on Yunus Wins Nobel Peace Prize
ACCION: International, USA
ECDC Enterprise Development Group

2008-03-29T12:59:00.001-07:00

Dear Mostofa

could you come to brixton hub at 3 on sunday

I am doing an hour meeting at 2.00 with tav to understand -for what is my very last time since crashing expoentials make me extremely impatient as a parent- whether anything he did in 2007 with 30K of my daughter's or anything he wants to do in virtual stuff has any open wave use that I can snap with DR yunus' 6 maps - ebank, ehealth, egov, e-edu, eagri (including climate), e-consumer with 10000 rural telecentres questioning the world for open and source models -at all 3 levels of social action, social business startups, meta-partners in open and compound-purpose "future capitalism" once the west coast internet companies have agreed their combined future capitalism social business with Dhaka- which at $100,000 3 year loan for starting up and sustaining 100 telecentres over 3 year is the best bargain any half way sane or hi-trust http://hi-trust.tv http://brand.blogspot.com http://rowp.tv (rumors of what's possible since jan 6 Dhaka) worldwide brand expert or free marketer has even seen since the start of media with global or worldwide scaling , in which I include methods of consciouisness communing that have religious intensity but no particular god for men to politically storytell round-

but then I am just a simple systems mapping mathematician and would like to belivee god or good would always win out but see that human relations system patterns the bigger they are organised provide the exact opposite certainty while governed by badwill measures- something 1000 gandhians in delhi 2004 found easy to believe when I prestented an open whitepaper on coming wars between goodwill and badwill networks but 20-35 mobile-addicted singles round london seem unable to believe is sataygrahan- even when you invite them to look at 25 years between2 reformation bar of london barristers Gandhi and accidentally my maternal grandfather

we can then discuss any positive reports - eg were you at clinton uni

From this first trip to london since rac
http://worldentrepreneur.net/_wsn/page4.html
from Tony Manwaring, Alan Mitchell, Robert Knowles, Rebecca Harding and I think Lesley (all 5 of which I have ultimately to advise that they go meet yunus in dhaka if you can find a diary space in te next year cos their projects are too big for sustainability than I can relieably act as some interface for) who is always deeper mapped on her own context s.aftrica than anyone apart from perhaps you on bangladesh

I need leave the hub at 4.30 thoiugh if anyone wants dinner with my father at 6.00in wimbledon they can come along

I dont use mobile - tav's is0780 956 9369

chris

2008-03-12T12:29:00.000-07:00

Miami
MIAMI, March 10 /PRNewswire/ -- PODER Magazine, the premier publication for the business elite focusing on U.S. Hispanic and Latin American policymaking and corporate strategy, and The Boston Consulting Group (BCG), one of the world's leading management consultancies, today announced plans for honoring recipients of the fifth annual PODER-BCG Business Awards, which will be presented at a ceremony this coming Wednesday evening, March 12, in Miami. The Awards recognize individuals who have demonstrated remarkable strategy, vision and execution in their respective businesses, and celebrate excellence in leadership in the Americas and throughout the world.
Nicholas Negroponte, founder of the One Laptop per Child (OLPC) program, will be the ceremony's keynote speaker. This year, PODER and BCG have joined forces to support Mr. Negroponte and his organization by making a symbolic donation of 100 computers per Award recipient -- 1,300 in total -- to encourage and improve children's education across Latin America. Attendees will be invited to participate in this effort by making donations of their own the night of the Awards ceremony.
John C. Clarkeson, BCG's chairman emeritus, who will participate in the ceremony, said, "We are proud to support these Awards and their mission of recognizing excellence in business leadership and innovation, and are particularly pleased that this year's Awardees are being honored for their philanthropic efforts."
With eleven-time Emmy winner Teresa Rodriguez, co-host of Univision's primetime program "Aqui y Ahora," serving as Master of Ceremonies, the event will conclude the 2008 PODER Philanthropy Forum, which aims to demystify the complex issues that hinder private and corporate philanthropy in Latin America. The Forum will gather together leaders from Latin America and the U.S., including Nobel Peace Prize recipient Muhammad Yunus and Dr. Larry Brilliant, director of Google's philanthropic arm Google.org.
2008 Honorees
Recipients of this year's PODER-BCG Business Awards include Timothy Marquez, chairman and CEO of Venoco, Inc., honored with the "Innovation in Philanthropy Award"; Dr. Eduardo Padron, president of Miami Dade College, given the "Excellence in Education Award"; Joel Simon, executive director of the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), awarded the "Freedom of Press Award"; Monica Lozano, publisher and CEO of La Opinion, the nation's largest Spanish language daily newspaper and senior vice president of impreMedia, given the "Excellence in Media Award"; Eddie "Piolin" Sotelo, of Univision Radio's leading Spanish-language radio program "Piolin por la Manana," awarded the "Community Enrichment Award"; Fabio Villegas, president of Avianca and German Efromovich, and president of Synergy Group, given the "Best Enterprise Transformation Award"; Enrique Norten, honored for "Excellence in Architecture and Design"; Carlos Ott, also honored for "Excellence in Architecture and Design"; Viviane Senna, president of Instituto Ayrton Senna, awarded the "Philanthropy Award"; Pedro Ibanez, board member of the Universidad Adolfo Ibanez (UAI), honored for the "Best Contribution to the Next Generation"; Monica Manzutto and Jose Kuri of the Galeria Kurimanzutto in Mexico City, for "Excellence in the Promotion of Art"; and Gustavo Santaolalla, two-time Academy Award-winning composer and producer, honored for "Artistic Achievement."
In addition, the PODER-BCG Business Awards will give special recognition to artist Fernando Botero for his philanthropy. Having achieved enormous worldwide success through his art, Mr. Botero has taken to donating select pieces to line parks and streets in cities such as Paris, Rome, and those in his native country of Colombia. Mr. Botero has also generously donated his personal art collection, which includes magnificent pieces by Picasso and Rodin, to the cities of Medellin and Bogota.
Miami Mayor Manuel Diaz also plans to give a special presentation on the role of philanthropy in Miami, which will recognize local philanthropists and their contributions.
"This year's Award winners are an exceptionally diverse and accomplished group of leaders," Isaac Lee, PODER Magazine's editor-in-chief said. "We commend them on the impact they have made in their fields and the inspiration they have given others around the world."
About PODER
The PODER Philanthropy Forum is one of a series of events organized by PODER magazine. PODER magazine is a monthly magazine that targets the business elite of the U.S. Hispanic market. PODER also has editions in Colombia, Mexico and Chile, with articles that contain unique and relevant business content. Under an exclusive content distribution agreement, PODER also publishes a selection of articles from The Economist, the world's leading weekly magazine. More information on the 2008 PODER Philanthropy Forum and the PODER-BCG Business Awards can be found at http://www.poder360.com/ .

social business happenings of february

2008-02-19T12:08:00.000-08:00

paris feb 18 Grameen Credit Agricole opens with 50 million euros for microcredit http://www.grameen-credit-agricole.org/en/index.html

earlier this month Grameen America opened its bank for the poor - out of Queens

-------------------------------------------

whilst being interviewed at The Guardian newspaper in London, Yunus confirmed that The Guardian qualified as a social business!

2008-02-01T06:41:00.000-08:00

Timeless Top Links:
please comment on what google alerts you find most timely -eg http://news.google.com/news?hl=en&um=1&tab=wn&q=capitalism+yunus&btnG=Search+News

or http://news.google.com/news?hl=en&um=1&tab=wn&q=capitalism+%2Byunus+OR+gates&btnG=Search+News

please help develop section on the book that changed the world

From alert on yunus capitalism http://news.google.com/news?hl=en&um=1&tab=wn&q=capitalism+yunus&btnG=Search+News

Bill Gates’ Softer CapitalismBusinessWeek - 7 hours agoThat’s the capitalism Gates used to laud, and it’s improving the quality of life from Belgrade to Bangalore. It’s the kind of economic revolution that ...Bill Gates' Plan to Better the World Motley FoolANOTHER VOICE Mr. Gates' capitalism Houston ChronicleCommentary: For and against Gate's 'creative capitalism' ZDNet.com.auDaytona Beach News-Journal - New York Times all 17 news articles »

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/vivian-norris-de-montaigu/lessons-from-davos-gates_b_83575.html
Lessons from Davos: Gates' Creative Capitalism can also Work at Home in the U.S.
Posted January 28, 2008 10:27 AM (EST)
Read More: Bill Gates, Capitalism, Creative Capitalism, Davos, Davos 2008, Globalization, Grameen Bank, Hurricane Katrina, Katrina, Microcredit, Mohammed Yunus, Poverty, Social Business, Breaking Business News

Over twenty years ago, when a little known governor in Arkansas, Bill Clinton, and his wife, heard about a Bangladeshi economics professor turned banker-to-the-poor, they wanted to know more. How did these small loans to help build local businesses work? Why were they loaning mostly to women? And could it work in parts of the impoverished South?
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And wasn't it amazing that a governor from Arkansas and his wife could actually imagine that someone from one of the poorest countries halfway around the world might actually have an answer that would work in the United States? The fact is that where "Creative Capitalism" or Social Business, as Clinton's friend, Muhammad Yunus, the Bangladeshi professor he nominated for the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize, calls it, is also needed here in the United States.
Flash forward to today and people like Bill Gates are talking about "Creative Capitalism," the good that companies can do by helping create sustainable businesses which do good for communities around the world. Brad Pitt, who has dedicated himself to helping the people of New Orleans devastated by Katrina, and many others want to meet with Nobel Peace prize winner, Muhammad Yunus. CEOs of corporations are slowly but surely "getting it" and invite him into their board rooms. Governments, finance ministers, billionaires, women's groups, the list goes on -- are all becoming part of this snowball effect. They are interested in creating sustainable "hybrids," giving based on a business model, which has as its aim not making money off of the poor, but building the kinds of businesses which can provide goods and services for the poor, including health care, communications, etc. while using a "creative capitalist" structure.

New york times jan 29 http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/01/29/many-are-already-at-work-on-fulfilling-gatess-vision/?ref=technology
Many Are Already at Work on Fulfilling Gates’s Vision
By John Markoff
Bill Gates’s bold Davos challenge to the world’s capitalists last week should have come with equally bold footnotes.
“There are billions of people who need the great inventions of the computer age,” he asserted. “Breakthroughs change lives only where people can afford to buy them.”
Conspicuously missing from the appeal, which asserted that human nature is not just driven by greed but also by concern for our fellow beings, was any reference to the work and thinking of the Nobel Peace Prize winner Muhammad Yunus.
The microfinance innovator, who is known as the “banker for the poor,” recently wrote a book, “Creating a World Without Poverty: Social Business and the Future of Capitalism,” that foreshadows Mr. Gates’s newfound social philosophy.
Last week Mr. Gates called on the executives of the largest corporations to add social entrepreneurship to their agenda, a leopard-spot-altering exercise at best. However, in challenging his compatriots, one of the experiments he overlooked was Mr. Yunus’s stunning success at Grameen Phone in Bangladesh, an effort he has pioneered during the past decade in partnership with Telenor, a Norwegian wireless carrier.
Intended as an experiment to extend wireless communications networks to the world’s poorest people, the program has become a remarkable success on multiple levels. Not only did it create a class of “phone ladies” who brought wealth into village communities, it has grown quickly enough and been profitable enough that Mr. Yunus said this week in Davos that Telenor had decided to break its original promise to his organization and refused to turn over control to allow the program to be run on a not-for-profit basis.
The challenge now facing the firm is to replicate its success as a wireless voice provider as a wireless Internet company. This week in Davos, Mr. Yunus said that that transformation was well under way.
The deeper implication of that shift would be an advance from a communications to a computing revolution. As voice networks have paved the way into the farthest reaches of the emerging world, it is likely that they will quickly be followed by the Internet and the World Wide Web. That in turn could become a great leveler, bringing markets, electronic commerce and health care networks to the world’s poorest.
With any luck it will mean that the emerging nations will finally complete the promise of a failed computing experiment played out by a team of French and American computer scientists in Senegal a quarter of a century ago. The original idea was that computing technology would make it possible to skip a stage of economic development, with people in developing nations quickly joining the information society without having to undergo industrialization.
Which brings us back to Mr. Gates’s plea at the World Economic Forum last week. Microsoft’s research lab in India, he said, was focusing on a variety of projects, ranging from low-cost wireless to new computing interfaces that will allow semi-literate and illiterate people to use computers effectively.
These are great ideas, but at Davos this year there were already a proliferation of technology-driven projects in evidence, all targeted at the bottom of the economic pyramid. They indicated that over the next decade the so-called “digital divide” may prove less of a barrier than previously thought.
Because Moore’s Law — the doubling of chip density at regular intervals — drives down price while increasing performance, computing has reached an increasing portion of the world’s population at an accelerating rate. Today over three billion people — half the world’s population — have cell phones. This year at the World Economic Forum, wireless industry executives predicted that two billion more would be added in the next six or seven years.
This underscores the increasingly rapid spread of the Internet, for what is a cell phone but a computer and a radio attached to a wireless data network?
The real challenge may prove to be whether the emerging world will modernize without repeating the mistakes of Mr. Gates’s developed world that have produced climate and pollution crises.
Free market beats free food in fight against povertyScotsman, United Kingdom - Jan 26, 2008... Nobel Peace Prize winner Muhammad Yunus argues convincingly that social business is an achievable way of exploiting capitalism to help the poor. ...

Davos 2008: Bill Gates' Creative Capitalism and Muhammad Yunus ...Huffington Post, NY - Jan 24, 2008... and they are put forth in his latest book, Creating a World Without Poverty: Social Business and the Future of Capitalism. Professor Yunus, also known ...

Gates' one-liners and reading listSeattle Times, United States - Jan 28, 2008... pioneer and Nobel laureate Muhammad Yunus, who spoke here recently. A Wall Street Journal story on Gates' "creative capitalism" idea noted as much, ...

Doing Good BusinessTIME - Jan 24, 2008Muhammad Yunus, the microfinancier who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2006 for helping prove that making tiny loans to poor people can be profitable, ...

Wealth of Ideas: Bill Gates Issues Call for a Benevolent CapitalismWall Street Journal - Jan 24, 2008Muhammad Yunus, the Bangladeshi economist who won the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize for his work providing small loans to the poor, is traversing the US this month ...

Bill Gates and Wal-Mart want to save the worldSalon (subscription) - Jan 24, 2008... capitalism, crushing all who dared oppose it, seemed daring. So I would not have predicted that a decade later, Gates, channeling Mohammad Yunus, ...

The Daily Star
New book by Prof Yunus launched in USAThe Daily Star, Bangladesh - Jan 12, 2008Prof Yunus is currently on a tour of the US to publicise his book titled 'Creating a world without poverty: Social business and the future of capitalism'. ...

Corporate Social Responsibility
'Our Pick' http://www.csrwire.com/News/10807.html
1.29.2008 ET
Source: CSR@Intel
Davos: Par Deux
By Bruce Sewell

January 29, 2008 - Well, it's been 4 days and 1 "Davos" since my last blog. Got about 3 hours sleep last night (brings my total for the week to ~18), and now I'm headed down the mountain towards Zurich. Just time to share a couple of observations and 1 particular highlight before both my computer and my brain say "leave me alone you fool" and take a much needed rest.Each year 1 or 2 themes emerge as dominant. In 2007 the prize went to global climate change, in 2008 the WEFie (like an Oscar only not) goes to… the state of the US economy. From TV crews taking surveys on every street corner, to a panel of all 8 of the G8 Finance Ministers, the question on everyone's lips was, "a slowdown or a recession"? I know I'm just a lawyer, but I'll try to summarize the consensus answer: we have not yet seen the bottom in terms of the sub-prime crisis; if the US Congress acts quickly and decisively with a stimulus package we may be able keep this from developing into a full blown (or long lived) recession; this isn't just a US problem so other economies around the world are going to have to pitch in; and, non-US markets are strong enough to survive a US cold without catching the flu, but only if the US ailment does not turn into influenza or something worse (all economists wanted to be doctors but couldn’t afford the tuition).The other key theme for 2008 was 'enlightened capitalism'. Both Forbes and the Economist kicked off the week with articles about the need to align corporate social responsibility programs with business interests and core competencies. Bill Gates made a public plea for more "compassionate capitalism" and Dr. Muhammad Yunus (Nobel Peace Prize winner) gave us the phrase "social business". No matter what its called, it boils down to a pretty simple idea: corporations can and should make profits for their shareholders; but corporations can also chose to run some "not-for-loss" programs where the shareholders break even but the program recipients and society at large are immeasurably enriched. Don't think corporate charity, instead this is a corporation putting its money, human resources, program management, and logistical skills, etc., to work in a financially neutral but socially positive way. Let's face it, governments have money and people but government efficiency is an oxymoron. NGOs and "not for-profits" can be nimble but they usually lack resources. Of course enlightened capitalism should involve public/private partnerships but it’s the financial model that really sets it apart from what we currently think of as CSR or corporate philanthropy. An interesting idea…stay tuned. For the full article Click Here...

Yunus @ St. James's Piccadilly

2008-01-28T06:26:00.000-08:00

Nobel Peace Prize winner Dr. Muhammad Yunus will speak at St. James’s Church, 197 Piccadilly on Saturday, February 16^th at 2.30pm. His latest book Creating a World without Poverty – Social Business and the Future of Capitalism was recently launched in the US and is already in position 18 of the New York bestseller list.

After having been invited to the World Economic Forum in Davos, Dr. Yunus comes to London to first speak at the London School of Economics on Friday, Feb. 15^th at 6pm.

At St. James’s Church his talk will be responded to by a podium of distinguished Londoners. The first to confirm at this very short notice is:

Aubrey Meyer, promoter of Contraction & Convergence, a global, equal-rights-based framework for the arrest of greenhouse gas emissions.

Dr. Yunus established the Grameen Bank in 1983 after having lent $27 to 42 women who were victims of loan sharks and recruiters of slave labour. Grameen means ‘rural’ or ‘village’ in Bengali.

After having studied economics at Dhaka University, Dr. Yunus was awarded a Fulbright scholarship to study economics at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee. He then served as chairman of the economics department at Chittagong University before devoting his life to providing financial and social services to the poorest of the poor. He is the founder and managing director of the Grameen Bank and the author of the bestselling Banker to the Poor.

Dr. Yunus and the Grameen Bank are winners of the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize for ‘their efforts to create economic and social development from below.’

In his new book, Dr. Yunus proposes ‘social business’ as a core principle for a kinder capitalism as Bill Gates called it in Davos. In Dr. Yunus’ definition, a business is social if it addresses health, education or environment or is owned by the poor and disadvantaged.

The condition for funding social business is that investors may not take profits out of the enterprise. That proposes a number of challenges on the level of ‘business as usual’. Between profit-motivated business and philanthropic charity, it provides a third way for entrepreneurs with social objectives.

The Forum for Stable Currencies is hosting the event as it has been advocating the use of public or ‘green’ credit to address climate change, finance flood damages and other public purposes through Early Day Motions in Parliament since 2002. The organiser Sabine McNeill says: “microcredit is for women in Bangladesh what green credit is for Government in the UK: credit without collateral. That means trust and cooperation top-down and bottom-up. For we have only one planet and time is running out. If Governments and NGOs don’t deliver, social businesses will, especially when banks and financial institutions begin to think along social objectives.”

BeTheChange will be set up for booking your place on Saturday in London and on Sunday in Bristol.

2008-01-20T14:55:00.001-08:00

archives on the worldwide network challenges yunus invites humanity to flow with him since nov 007

help us (1 2 3) edit the best first introduction to the Yunus entrepreneurial revolution of social business and future capitalism

world citizen guide has produced a special to linkin with yunus book and booktour

our guides are open source and we provide bursaries where communities have ideas on re-editing to match their cases with worldwide ones

see the world citizen guide at yunus loaded at ned http://www.ned.com/group/community-general/file/2.81.12008674812/ (free membership required to this discussion space)

or loaded at our home archives http://www.valuetrue.com/home/gallery.cfm (free and direct public)

to make the most of the world citizen guide format print out the first 20 pages as then double sided pages and then fold in half

this guide will be discussed directly with Dr Yunus in New York on jan 23 with a view to editing and improving before distributing 1000+ guides to Yunus booktour audeinces in UK Feb 14-17

of course we welcome your idea on how to iteratively improve the guide to be the most usable first introduction to everything that networks can make out of social business and future capitalism

if you know of a yunus booktpour blog or facebook, please add it in to this conversation and we'll display a link in this top space listing

http://yunusworld.blogspot.com
http://yunusforum.blogspot.com
http://www.facebook.com/editgroup.php?gid=8966859358

2008-01-18T10:21:00.000-08:00

Book (1) 100Club News (facebook)

CLUB2: Turning Yunus Chapter 1 into a Book debating mysterious 20th C systems that failed to serve poverty, and how the denoument can be Social Business- Capitalism's Future

This book club began its regular meeting today, at the London branch of Aga Khan University.

Long notes and submissions will be posted here

2008-01-15T06:04:00.000-08:00

There are 2 most exciting moments of my life:
Birth of Daughter one Valentine's day
Meeting Dr Yunus Dhaka, 3 january 2008

I hope our co-editors will join in diarising similar exciting moments. It will take me a while to explain why 3 jan 2008 changes what I want to network and do with business. You will understand this blog better if you read Yunus new Book as per the blog's title and showing at eg
http://www.amazon.com/Creating-World-Without-Poverty-Capitalism/dp/1586484931/ref=pd_bbs_sr_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1200319032&sr=8-2
I am not very smart at choosing what virtual communities to replay exoperiences and challenges at ... but here are a few i an testing - tell me if I could be doing beter some space else

http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=8966859358

http://www.ned.com/group/community-general/news/108/

http://grameen.tv/

http://worldentrepreneur.net/

2007-12-31T06:34:00.000-08:00

There's an idea afoot that economics will never be the same again after londoners and other world entrepreneurs have got at it in 2008 thanks to the Future Capitalism liberation led by Dr Yunus

but before we boldly go when none has gone before, perhaps there are some questions stimulated by early reading of Yunus new book on Social ABC (Action*Business*Change Capitalism): to communalise, prepare the way, ensure we are going on near enough the same future history journey

I ask readers of the book to help-including the 1000 we are sampling out of London - what Q&A can we voice to help those who havent got the book see why there is a completely new invitation? here from Yunus- your deepest grassroots project can connect with yours and ours and all of their connections can change capitalism if we free business from its 90 day extraction metrics chains, and make each social business measurable to compounding its future mission for life - Yunus has sorted out the maths of this; he's demonstarting how to do it by finding partners in nthe largest Base of the Pyramid experiments any nation has ever witnessed let alone Bangladesh; he's also a banker who is not interested in owning poverty solutions but listing poverty's crucial problems and cataloguing all known open solutions alongside each other so you can choose from or improve the menu at source

question 1 and some answers to impriove might be:
Yunus Flow Q&A1
Q: Truly, what’s use of globalisation economics? -why do people do economic theory?

To let every person and locality see and map what exponentials are rising and crashing their futures...

To ground the overall integration of societies in the united goal of ending systemic poverty..

I would particularly like to hear Rebecca’s views on this Q&A if time permits

Support for these answers and vocabulary:
Truth and system transformation vocabulary of Gandhi and Einstein

First 140 years of severe entrepreneurial questioning of great and good on future exponentials rising by The Economist; interesting now that Economist 2.0 may be called Asia Rising

World wars as churchill pointed out in 30s (and Gore has borrowed in 00.s) escalated by lurking over inconvenient truth – ie not intervening in time to prevent disastrous compound consequences

2007-12-25T06:50:00.000-08:00

Draft book talk written by Dr Yunus , 25 December 2007 -given for open source use by Yunus at Grameen Dhaka 6 January:

While free market capitalism is thriving globally almost unopposed now and bringing unprecedented prosperity to many, half of the world lives on two dollars a day or much less. Eradication of poverty remains the biggest challenge before the world. Colossal social problems and deprivations, mostly poverty-related and very unevenly distributed around the globe, continue to shame us everyday. Obviously the free market has failed much of the world. Many people assume that if free markets can't solve social problems governments can. After all government is supposed to represent the interests of society as a whole. But decades and even centuries of experience has shown that while government must do its parts to help alleviate our worst problems, it alone cannot solve them

Fortunately for us there is a keen desire among many to lend a hand through charity for addressing the problems of poverty and other social problems. Charity is rooted in basic human concern for other humans. The concern in nowadays usually expressed in the shape of non-profits and NGOs which may take various names and forms. Then there are aid organisations sponsored by rich governments bilateral and multilateral. Nonprofits and aid organisations are trying to keep the problems within some control. But charity is a form of trickle-down economics; if the trickle stops, so does help for the needy. On the other hand multilaterals like Word Bank focus only on growth as the means of helping the poor, but cannot see that the poor people can be actors themselves. There are serious questions about the type of growth that can help the poor. As another response to the global social problems some businesses are identifying themselves with the movement for Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR), and are trying to do good to the people while conducting business. But profit-making still remains their main goal, by definition. Though they like to talk about triple bottom lines of financial, social and environmental benefits, ultimately only one bottom line calls the shot: financial profit.

I always believed that poverty can be totally conquered quite soon if the right approach is adopted. I based my belief on the inherent ability of the poor that can be unleashed once they are given the opportunity to help themselves. This I have proved in action through three decades of experience with Grameen Bank in Bangladesh, which basically recognised that credit without collateral is a fundamental right of the poor. Our success with this in my own country has been widely replicated all over the world including in some of the richest countries; and the Nobel prize 2006 for me and Grameen Bank has been told in my earlier book: 'Banker to the Poor'. In this new book I have described the further revolution of Grameen system. But more importantly I have introduced and elaborated here my broadened concept of Social Business, that Grameen experience has led me into.
Grameen allowed the poor to be an actor in the free market and to enjoy some of its fruits to try to come out of poverty. It is fundamentally a business model, pure and simple. This is a Social Business. There can be other Social Business not necessarily involving microcredit. They are just like any other business; but for social objectives and not for personal dividend. I have tried to show in the book why Social Business can succeed in addressing social problems where other means mentioned above have failed. Social Business should not be confused with the term Social Enterprise which is used in a more encompassing sense and includes NGOs, personal initiatives, charities etc and may include Social Business too.

Social Business introduces a totally revolutionary dimension to the free market economy. It keeps all the mechanism through which the normal Profit Making Business (PMB) works and prospers - capitalization, expert business management, competitiveness etc - but investors here do not receive any dividend though they can recover their investment if they want to reinvest in other Social Business or PMB. The satisfaction gained in achieving the social goals are the only motive behind the investment and the business will be evaluated according to that standard. Essentially it is a no-loss, no-dividend business aimed at social objectives -education, health, environment, whatever is needed. The profits here remain with the business and help it grow further. The whole thing is based on the premise that entrepreneurs need not be motivated only by the profits they personally receive, but can also be motivated by social goals and may enjoy success there with equal satisfaction. The important thing is not to mix up a Social Business with a PMB. In fact, the inclusion of Social Business alongside PMBs in the business world will give free market capitalism a larger, nobler and a more fulfilling purpose. Its advantages over straightforward charity are many - efficiencies, continuous use with each turnover, competition with PMBs following the same rules, utilization of business innovations being some of the most important ones.

There can be two types of Social Business. Type one focuses on businesses dealing with social objectives only, as has just been mentioned. Type two can take up any profitable business so long as it is owned by the poor and the disadvantaged, who can gain through receiving direct dividends or by some indirect benefits. There are various ways how the ownership can go to the poor. The two types can be mixed together in the same Social Business as has happened in the case of Grameen Bank. In a similar mixture of the two types, a socially beneficial rural toll road can be built by a company as a Social Business whose ownership will belong to the poor.
On the other hand a huge project such as a Deep-Sea Mega Port in Bangladesh I have been advocating for, which will be used by several countries in the whole region and can potentially change the economic face of Bangladesh, can be built by a Social Business owned by the poor women of the country.

Is this an utopia? Will there be Social Business outside the realm of microcredit? Who will invest in such Social Businesses? I could answer these questions confidently in the book, not only because I have faith on my idea and on the ability of entrepreneurs to have social motives as well as profit making motives; but also because I am seeing this actually happen at this very moment. I have devoted a good part of the book on the details of the first such Social Business we have started - Grameen-Danone Comany which went into operation in early 2007. The idea of the company was born over just a casual lunch I had with Frank Riboud, the Chairman and CEO of Groupe Danone, a large French corporation -- a world leader in dairy products. It took just that time for me to convince him that an investment in a Social Business is a worthwhile thing for Danone shareholders. Even though it will not give any personal dividend to them, he believed that they could go for it when everything will be explained to them. However, it took somewhat more time to fix up the modalities , the product (a fortifies sweet yogurt for the poor malnourished children of Bangladesh at a price they can afford), the financing, tax and regulatory issues, new yardsticks for evaluating business, and many other such details. And I have devoted many pages of the book on these details to show how all these things can be taken care of. The yogurt 'Shoki Doi' (Energy Yogurt) is already in the market. The Grameen System has invested in a second Social Business - this time an Eye Hospital where the poor can have eye treatment and cataract operations at a very low cost and all others in the small town and villages around will have an excellent medical facility where there was not any like that before.

Social Business is a new concept and its practice is just beginning. As my book reveals, it has to make a lot more explorations while gaining more experience. There are challenges to be faced and solutions to be made. For example, we had to invent a totally innovative marketing system to keep the market fragmented so that the low cost "Shokti Doi' is reserved only for the poor children and does not appear in the urban market for the well to do. I have also touched upon other issues such as how can the ownership of the Type 2 Social Business be transferred to the poor, or how can the wonderful opportunities offered by IT be best deployed for the Social Business.

One thing is very clear to me: that with the Social Business taking off, the world of free market capitalism will never be the same again, and it then will really be able to put the deathblow on global poverty. I am sure many business wizards and successful business personalities will apply their abilities to the new challenge - the challenge of creating a poverty-free world within a short time. At the moment we are seeing merely the line of the horizon. Soon a good part of business genius of the world will devote itself to this new goal of social good. A whole new stockmarket with it new indices will thrive in the financial capitals of the world motivated by this new incentive. It will accelerate the process of poverty eradication to an unthinkable pace using the same market mechanism which accelerated the global prosperity for the rich in the first place.

2007-11-30T23:57:00.000-08:00

First Half Yearly Reports on Future Capitalism

Background (your comments welcomed here at yunusworld dialogue #1)
BANGLADESH - It is probably the case that the 2 greatest microeconomists living today learnt to query their profession in Bangladesh whilst wars or famines were raging. It is definitely the case that Bangladesh has now spent over 30 years training over 100,000 grassroots networkers in community rising service economy.

FRANCE - as well as coining the word entrepreneur as the way of mapping how productively free are peoples, and how sustainable are communities' compound futures - France is leading today's mutinational corporate adoption of Future Capitalism with an SMBA at their leading business school and thanks to he brilaint corpoarte leaders at Danone, Veolia and Credit Agricole.

SCOTLAND's UNITED NATIONS 1850 - Adam Smith's hi-trust maps of free markets originated in the late 1700s but are often completely mistranslated by those who design economic models around big gets bigger. Adam's obsession with microeconomics aimed to reconcile his country's loss through a hostile takeover by the UK, an event around 1700 which led to Scots having more of our compatriots worldwide webbed than living in Scotland by the middle of the 19th century. Thus all local to global futures which you choose now benefit from history's proven experiences from these 3 quarters and others (eg gandhi's Satyhagraha -communities unite in whole truth - since 1907) which we look forward to YOU informing US of.

yunusworld dialogue #1
where did the world's most trusted microeconomists experientially learn and where can we network community rising projects around them today -please comment

will you help yunus build humanity's most collaborative and sustainable networks

2007-11-30T04:18:00.000-08:00

in november 007 intercity rumors that yunus was daring to ask this biggest question of human sustainability sooned started being confirmed; so far Dr Yunus has kindly shared 6 hours of a very busy january 008 with personal investigators of this subject out of London and aiming to collaborate with every city. we have been inviting a team of first 20 londoners to correspond on this in every way - email chris.macrae@yahoo.co.luk if you want a listing of the most active forst 20 of any particular month - meanwhile see some sample reasoings of why yunus book and its invitations to socially interact are changing people's world's here

here is a space for trying to synthesise what we hear; this is real time stuff and doubtless there will be correspondent errors to iteratively re-edit; if you vote for one world of humanity with all the knowhow to end poverty, lack of communal healthcare, wars and abuse of nature's abundant clean energies and foods and waters then please help us get the good news flowing anywhere that you believe people locally need to be inspired to sociloa action for everyone's futures

MAIL WRITTEN 28 January after 2 personal hours with Yunus in New York and train to Phildeplhia asking Londoners to connect the mother of all open networking colaborations in time for yunus UK vists feb 14-17

Excuse me - with many of you, I am being misinterpreted over many months from what I most wanted to voice and connect - mea culpa but equally as a mathematician I want to get back to maps and charetering open systems offering a world of integrated all-way round ("communally true") communications not nof one text nor one soundbite at a time, one noisy vested interest voice at a time be that a greedy owner or someone selling their own untried or closed idea

- yunus truth questioning ground zero london: sofia has promised such a yunus map will start going up physically on the wall of brixton hub the next time she's in there - it will have minimum background, maximum action project events that are already hapening but where people are invited to connect thrir flow to the events yunus networking goals -it would be a good idea if this map was 100% aware of the first worldwide web every built between yunus top 5 team in dhaka and the whole world of humanity namely http://www.yunussocialactiongroup.org/

Yunus Forum London peers of mostofa, sofia and I have since dec 2006 been those who openly and actionably accepted invitations to meet yunus at whatever time or place or notice he could give - have had the unique priviledge of a total of 6 hours of private time with Yunus this month (january) the most frenetic he has ever had on a worldwide tour basis: so we wish to share absolutely all we could know-act and can flow connections of every yunus event but the way not to do that is for each of you to ping me with separate questions about each separate event

beyond our updating micro-printed world citizen guide which yunus has contributed the most sparking 1000m word summary of his book's chalenge to writeen on dec 25 for open source world citizenry http://www.valuetrue.com/home/gallery.cfm , a way to guide this is to put up every side of what we each know -and could flow -about these events as well as any long-term projects we have permission to connect around yunus at eg a blog since we have not single tool that veryone knows how to begin to use

therefore I will send or resend invitations on everyone on this list to co-edit this blog
http://www.yunusworld.blogspot.com/

in particular if you have some detailed information about any of the events while yunus is in the UK please blog it or mail it to me as open information for me to put up wherever it best fits; equally if you see any news of world or capitalism changing that is directly prompted by yunus book or friends, pelase link us up

since discovering the book in mid november -and inviting londoners to hub around it with photocopies I brought over at ned november and books I distributed the first day of its uk launch - I have learnt that Dr Yunus has a crisis- there is one man in the midst of the 2 insane (ie compounding loss of human sustainability) globalisation worlds of corporate and charitable compound irresponsibility who with a 5 people team in dhaka is inviting people to re-netowk the world at every level issuing an invitation which if you like is the deep human side of what tim berners lee never integrated with his wishes for the www

whilst there are many geographical and cultural dimensions to the networks that need to be webbed if poverty is to be ended , a peaceful century co-created, abundant clean energy, food and water invested in naturally with the sun's photosythesis, healthy communities starting with every child's health care..., I have asked Dr Yunus the following questions very directly

1 do you want this web of networks to have as much impact over the next 5 eyars as microcreditsummit has as the world's most productive network - answer yes

2 is anyone of your historical contacts already shaping the networks you want - answer no?

3 are you really up for all 3 levels:

A - social Action : change awareness of every child, youth, educator of what wishes 21st C could still humanly sustain- invite cross-cultyral celebration of this

B: - Social Business - get every city to develop socila bsuienss stockamrkets until there are more social bsuienss activists than MBAs

C : Creative Future Capitalism : involve global corporations in Base of Pyramid partnership experiments of the like of which their innovation strategies have utterly ignored since 1984; ensure that Yunus as a 98 year old's likfe work in ending poverty in bangladeh is particularly accelerated by this hi-level network

there are detailed reasons why Yunus has to start building each of these networks as an open book not one that gets creamed off by the top as happened in 20th century; no example is clearer as a paradon than what happened last thursday

Bill Gates was explaining at WEF that he was inviting all major corporations tio come join in yunus books big base of byramid socila business partnerhsip benchmarking; at the same time as WEF management had refused to let delegates have yunus book cos they wanted to delegates to have their rival one; at the same time as one londonm team member was sharing an hour's personal train ride with yunus to listen to feedback on what the heck was london bookclubs of 1000 about and how seamlessly networked could he yunus expect the UK to be- would the Uk be as successful in continuing the momentum of his book as the USA in getting it to jump in at the bestseller list at number 18 soon to be in top 5

back in 1995 I write the book that began the genre of how to share an organsiation's most vital Q&A and openly network these outside and n; it is called brand chatering; one of the projects sofia promised to undertake 4 months ago was to study the book and help peer to peer it; you can start a 100 chartering bookclud with her if you like as copies are available in wimbledon more or less alongside yunus books

chris macrae

us 301 881 1655 http://grameen.tv

if you decide that you wish to help yunus to the max then start studying searches like http://news.google.com/news?hl=en&oe=UTF-8&um=1&tab=wn&resnum=0&ct=property-revision&cd=1&q=%2Bcapitalism++%2Bgates+%2Byunus&btnG=Search+News

Gates' one-liners and reading list
Seattle Times, United States - 3 hours ago
... pioneer and Nobel laureate Muhammad Yunus, who spoke here recently. A Wall Street Journal story on Gates' "creative capitalism" idea noted as much, ...

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/businesstechnology/2004148753_btdownload28.html

Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates has been getting some good mileage from self-deprecating humor in recent high-profile speeches.

There was the sidesplitting "Bill's Last Day" video at the International Consumer Electronics Show. And last week, Gates opened his speech at the World Economic Summit in Davos, Switzerland, with these quips:

"As you all may know, in July I'll make a big career change. I'm not worried; I believe I'm still marketable," he said, getting laughs. "I'm a self-starter, I'm proficient in Microsoft Office. I guess that's it. Also I'm learning how to give money away."

Gates' Davos speech, which he described as the most important he'll give this year, centered on the idea of creative capitalism, "an approach where governments, businesses, and nonprofits work together to stretch the reach of market forces so that more people can make a profit, or gain recognition, doing work that eases the world's inequities."

The idea sounded to us like a version of the "social business" espoused by microcredit pioneer and Nobel laureate Muhammad Yunus, who spoke here recently.

A Wall Street Journal story on Gates' "creative capitalism" idea noted as much, and also shared the back story of how Gates developed the ideas he expressed in the Davos speech.

The books that he read, as reported by The Journal, include:

• "The Theory of Moral Sentiments," the less-famous predecessor to "The Wealth of Nations" by Adam Smith.

• Former World Bank economist William Easterly's "The White Man's Burden," which suggests five decades of international aid have done little for the world's poor. Gates hated it, according to The Journal.

• "The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid," by University of Michigan professor C.K. Prahalad, which argues that businesses should not overlook the world's poor as a market. Gates dined with him "near Seattle" in 2004, The Journal reported.

• "The Bottom Billion," by former World Bank director Paul Collier, which calls out the widening gap between the world's richest and the poorest.

Getting a break

With spring-break season looming, Farecast chimed in with this observation: Travelers will probably pay 10 to 12 percent more for a plane ticket during that time.

The Seattle-based company, which provides predictive information about airline fares, offers a couple of tips:

• Avoid traveling during the height of college breaks — around March 8 to 22.

• Think Tuesday. A Tuesday-to-Tuesday trip saves a bunch, especially compared with flying on weekends.

What's in an Office?

Todd Peters, the former Staples exec whom Microsoft hired to head up its Mobile Communications Business as corporate vice president of marketing, said he had a leg up when he took on the task of raising consumer awareness of his former employer. Staples came out with the "Easy Button" campaign under his watch.

Still, when he got there, he said, the biggest thing Staples had going for it on the branding front was that its name didn't start with Office (unlike Office Depot and OfficeMax).

Top of the clubs

The Boys & Girls Clubs of America last week named Robbie Bach, president of the Microsoft division responsible for fun, as chairman-elect for 2009-10. Under his watch, Microsoft has plunged into the video-game business with the Xbox and now Xbox 360 game console and the Zune digital media player.

Bach, officially president of Microsoft's Entertainment and Devices Division, has long been involved with the Boys & Girls Clubs.

The news release was silent on whether Bach would hook the clubs up with Xbox 360s.

Download, a column of news bits, observations and miscellany, is gathered by The Seattle Times technology staff. We can be reached at 206-464-2265 or biztech@seattletimes.com.

2007-10-17T15:51:00.000-07:00

Microcredit in Bangladesh

2007-01-31T10:26:00.000-08:00

Resource area of Yunus Book CLUB2 (of facebook 100)

Turning Yunus Chapter 1 into a Book debating mysterious 20th C systems that failed to serve poverty, and how the denoument can be Social Business- Capitalism's Future

This book club began 18 Jan 2008- however long notes and submissions will use this idary space (ie Jan 007)

2007-01-01T10:46:00.000-08:00

Systems Pattern Rule Testimony in Network (system**N) age to Club 2
Testimony by Chris Macrae - valuetrue.com Yunus ABC resources, system blogger, transparency & sustainability exponentials mapper

PRO1 Future Shock of Systemic Whole Truth
Systems compound exponential consequences.
Primary measurement rules determine consequences.
Primary rules are those used at the most frequent decision-making cycles and rewards governing.
Over time a system is liable to compound the destruction of any non-primary goal.

PRO1 Consequence
Regarding the overall system people choose to integrate globalisation: if ending poverty’s extreme local traps is not a primary goal of any worldwide system, then that system will accidentally compound extreme poverty. This applies whatever name the system goes under – eg to NGOs; Governments; Development Elite eg world bank; Corporate Social Responsibility

PRO1 Advanced Test
Living systems are particularly tricky to put boundaries on. This is because they do not exist on their own but in interfacing smaller subsystems within them, bigger systems that contain them as well as environmentally where over times space that separated historic systems disappears and causes their collision. At this time over-competitive systems fail, and only collaborative ones have a chance of harmonising higher order value. Note testimonies around Global Reconciliation Network (eg Alfonso Lingis) demonstrate that cultures are a particularly critical type of system interface as nearly 7 billion people in under one generation come together around networking’s death of distance.

2006-12-31T10:54:00.000-08:00

Cultural Testimony from Global Reconciliation Network's Alfonso Lingis
(GRN 1 2 3 ..)

Obstacles to Dialogue Today

1. Cultures in Dialogue

Today the great centers of wealth and power that derive from the production and control of information--Houston, Silicon Valley, the Ruhr, Lyon, Milan, Tokyo-Osaka, Shanghai, Taipei, Seoul, Mexico City, São Paulo--drain off the brain power of the outer zones--the scientists but also writers, architects, artists, and musicians. The planet has also never before seen such immense migrations of poor peoples--so much of it forced or illegal. These people may bring only low-tech work skills, but they bring their cultural identity. The great cultural capitals of proud nation states--Paris, London, New York, Sydney, Bangkok, Singapore--have become multiethnic and multicultural.
But that has always been the case. Mohendo-daro, Memphis and Thebes, Mahabalipuram, Angkor, Djenné Djeno in the Sahel, Teotihuac•n, Qosqo--all the centers of great cultures had been cosmopolitan cities, with markets full of foreign merchants but also with whole quarters of settled foreigners. What we have come to know as distinctive and dominant civilizations--Egyptian, Persian, Chinese, Roman, and Mongolian--were the result of drawing toward themselves resources, artefacts, inventions, and concepts from the most diverse ethnic areas and cultures. Anyone visiting Angkor Wat is struck to see altars on which Hindu deities dance around altars with seated Buddhas, friezes depicting everyday life so obviously carved by sculptors who had come from or gone to Borobudur, Chinese guard lions..
"Different cultures within a region appear to be commenting on one another," anthropologist Shirley Lindenbaum wrote, "chamber music performances, with each group attuned to the sounds of their neighbors." The understanding one culture has of others is a piecemeal affair; it is the appreciation of the utility or taste or beauty of things in neighboring or far-off cultures. The appreciation is not necessarily that of the utility of something in the culture it came from, but the likely different utility it will have in the culture which adopts it. Thus Brahminic priests and court rituals were imported into the court at Sukhothai and especially Ayutthaya in fifteenth century Siam without bringing in the caste system to that Buddhist kingdom. Hindu priests and court rituals were imported into Bali in the fourteenth century, without bringing in reincarnation across species; a Balinese who dies will be reincarnated only in children of his own family.
A culture is then an open-ended framework where ever more insights, inventions, and customs can be accommodated, to provide an ever richer environment for a people inhabiting a particular place. A culture is comprehensive and comprehending--it supplies a people with a framework that gives meaning to fragments of experience and direction to lives. It is also comprehensive and comprehending in that, in the measure that it is vibrant and expansive, it assimilates elements from surrounding cultures. This kind of understanding is partial, fragmentary, and also creative: by assimilating foreign elements it endows them with new and different significance.
And it is membership in a vibrant and expansive culture that produces in individuals the will to understand other cultures. How eager to meet and hear travelers, merchants, and religious teachers were Kublai Khan, Jayavarnan VII, Chingiz Khan and Moctezoma! And today it is the sense of being in a center of a vibrant and expansive culture themselves that motivates both scholars and ordinary travelers there to understand other cultures.
Yet it is also true that the centers of wealth and power today generate racial and ethnic oppositions. Often the poorer people in a society, and the poor people who come into a society, are viewed across racial and ethnic stereotypes. But today dialogue between peoples is especially obstructed by racial and ethnic stereotypes that are created for political and military purposes, and that can be created overnight. Sociologists have shown that in the United States before the second World War, Arabs were perceived as being good fighters and exotic desert lovers with harem girls. Before World War II, there was little American political involvement in the Middle East. The defense of Israel, and the struggle for control of the oil reserves changed all that. Now Arabs are depicted as cruel, weak, and decadent. A whole population that had no idea at all who or where the Hutus or Kosovars or Tamils are a week later have fixed images of them as people with whom dialogue is impossible.
The production of such stereotypes is a much more important part of political and military initiatives than before. For there has been an immense change in warfare in the past century: in the First World War, 90% of the killed and wounded were soldiers; in the Second World War, but 40%. In the wars of the last decade, 90% of the killed and wounded are civilians. In today's civil wars and guerrilla wars, the civilian population is in fact the principal strategic target. But also when a superpower launches military initiatives in which in principle not one of its own soldiers are to be killed, then the civilian population is likewise the real target. The smart military technology is not aimed at defeating the enemy troops but instead at destroying the civilian will to resist. Thus the depicting of the entire civilian population of the target country as fanatics one could not understand or dialogue with is an essential element of contemporary political and military offensives.

2. Dialogue with the Past

To go to another land is so often to go to another time. It is almost impossible to go to Istanbul without encountering, on view of the great mosques the Ottomans built on the seven hills of Constantine's Nova Roma, the Ottoman Middle Ages. Almost impossible to go to Peru without encountering the Tuantinsuyo of the Inca. The Spanish mansions of Qosqo are second-stories built on the great mortarless walls of the Inca city. It would be almost impossible to leave the urbanized coast to cross the Australian outback without encountering aboriginal Australia.
Last summer, contemplating the skeleton of Lucy in the little anthropological museum of Addis Ababa, how moved I was to see our remotest ancestoróthat is, a member of the earliest generation of our species. How everything that we find out about the ancestors of the present Homo sapiens sapiens moves and concerns us!
Whenever we go to encounter a past civilization, we have the sense of encountering our past, our forefathers. Even when we encounter a culture that did not precede ours, that instead our culture destroyed, and a people from which we are not descended--for example, when we encounter the Inca world, we feel we are returning to an earlier world from which our world has come, an earlier world that, however vagrantly, gave birth to our world.
Thirty years ago this return to our common ancestors motivated a good deal of ordinary travel. In the face of the thermonuclear arms race and policies concocted in think-tanks that turned out to be disastrous, people who went to Japan, to Bhutan, or to the Amazon were seeking places where layers of older civilizations still persisted, were seeking the "wisdom of the past." They were seeking the way people lived and lived together.
Today the very nature of the media sweeps away the past. The instantaneous nature of television reporting holds our eyes gaping upon the immediate future. Newspapers and magazines keep us breathless in the expectation of new inventions in cancer research, in mineral sciences, in energy production, in genetically altered food crops. The marketing industry excites us for new comfort and safety in personal transportation, new facilities in home cooking and entertainment, new pleasures in furnishing and clothing. As a result we have the sense that what mergers and contracts are being made, what inventions patented in Houston, Silicon Valley, the Ruhr, Lyon, Milan, Tokyo-Osaka, Shanghai, Taipei, Seoul, Mexico City, and São Paulo are important, will determine our lives. Societies that are still clinging to the allegedly discredited socialism or welfare state or that are not speeding up the allegedly needed market reforms are dismissed with impatience.
More than that: new advances in communications, and also genetic engineering and cloning have made us think that human relations will soon be radically different from all that they have been until now. As a result every society where layers of past civilization persist seems "backward" and gets discredited.
There is another factor: it is that our immediate past forms a black wall that cuts us off from our forefathers and our ancestors. The immediate past of rich countries is the two wars in which they embroiled the whole world. And since then so many lands where layers of older civilizations persisted slaughtered their populations in the same way. So many millions of people gassed, incinerated, buried in mass graves, disappeared. There are today so many of us who have no idea where or how our parents were disappeared. And so many of us no longer communicate with our fathers and forefathers, we no longer hear what they learned.

3. The Assertion of Distinctiveness

A culture, we said, is an open-ended framework where ever more insights, inventions, and customs can be accommodated, to provide the richest possible environment for a people inhabiting a particular place. And a culture has a desire to be understood by others. But a culture is also the means whereby a people in a particular place asserts their singularity. On the island called New Guinea, in a population of a million and a half Papuans, some seven hundred languages were elaborated, and the most diverse practices--in initiation rituals, in spouse exchange among moities, and in ritualized homosexuality. Among them, all Papuans, all living in very similar ecological situations and using very similar tools, there is the most astonishing diversity of cultures and languages. Peoples living in close proximity institutionalized opposing notions of what constitutes legitimate marriage and what constitutes incest--conceptions which today Westerners think of as defining what is natural and moral and what therefore must be valid universally. Every culture has to be seen as a formulation of the identity of a people, a statement of their distinctiveness.
Javanese dance, Mongolian throat singing, the griot singing of West Africa, the male initiation rites of the Asmat in Irian Jaya--these belong only to that people. Japanese often say that the Japanese language communicates through allusions and silences in ways that no other language does, such that one who does not know the Japanese language cannot really understand many of the ways Japanese interact and many of the forms of Japanese art. An occasional foreigner can learn Japanese Sumo wrestling or Spanish flamenco or Sumba island double ikat weaving, but it would take so long and involve such a total immersion in the training and culture that very few ever will.
We can revel in the spectacle of human diversity, the spectacle of people quite differently placed than ourselves, encased in different material conditions, driven by different ambitions, possessed of different notions as to what life is all about. We can be energized and exhilarated by the unending array of human possibilities--even if we are not tempted to adopt any particular one of them for ourselves. We may well deplore the leveling of differences in the everyday life of peoples that is being produced by the global marketing of mass produced consumer goods.
But some of these traits a culture produces to marks its singularity and distinctiveness we may well find morally objectionable or repugnant. A culture may in fact do things in order to be not understood by others and by us. A society can affirm its distinctiveness against its neighbors. It may banish foreigners and burn foreign books and artworks. In Sri Lanka Sinhalese security forces burnt the Jaffna public library; Serbian gunners shelled and destroyed the National Library in Sarajevo. A society can affirm its distinctiveness against the rest of humanity--indeed, against humanity. A society asserts its distinctiveness in rejecting the UN charter of human rights, or dialogue with any other society. A society may even assert its opposition to the whole of the rest of humanity. W
as there not something of that in the destruction of the Buddhas of Bamiyan? Those fifteen-hundred-year-old works were esteemed by everyone who knew about them to be part of our common world heritage. To destroy them was something the rest of humanity could not understand, could not accept.
Religion is one of the characteristic ways by which a culture, indeed a civilization, affirms its distinctiveness. We seem particularly unable to deal with, or even understand the fact that today when conflicts become genocidal, they so often take the form of religious wars. Catholics, Orthodox, and Muslims in the Balkans. Protestants and Catholics in northern Ireland. Hindus and Buddhists in Sri Lanka. Muslims and Jews in Israel and Palestine. Muslims and Christians-animists in the Sudan. Christians and Muslims in the Celebes. We can see that when a people make their conflict with another people, a conflict which is perhaps territorial or economic, into a religious cause, they readily find material and military support from co-religionists in distant lands. But beyond that: could it be that religion is about the only form of thought that can induce peoples who had perhaps for centuries lived together in cities and towns to now rise up and butcher their neighbors and set fire to their homes? That religions can absolutize economic and ethnic conflicts and make them genocidal?
When a people find themselves confronted with a culture which affirms its distinctiveness by setting out to destroy the fundamental values of their culture, understanding cannot issue in an all-encompassing view in which each culture has its place and its legitimacy. Then must we say that the only way to recognize the distinctiveness of the culture that negates us, the only way to respect it, is to wage war on it? Anything less than that is not to recognize what it is the other culture affirms. Only force recognizes an action set forth in order to be not understood.
But to wage war effectively it is necessary to know one's enemy, that is, to understand him. War against a culture that sets itself outside of, or above, the rest of humanity also requires understanding of that culture, and thus dialogue with it. Such dialogue always harbors the hope that the other party may begin to understand us.

poverty

2004-12-31T20:55:00.000-08:00

Poverty Is Poison

By PAUL KRUGMAN
Published: February 18, 2008
"Poverty in early childhood poisons the brain." That was the opening of an article in Saturday's Financial Times, summarizing research presented last week at the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

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Paul Krugman.

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As the article explained, neuroscientists have found that "many children growing up in very poor families with low social status experience unhealthy levels of stress hormones, which impair their neural development." The effect is to impair language development and memory — and hence the ability to escape poverty — for the rest of the child's life.

So now we have another, even more compelling reason to be ashamed about America's record of failing to fight poverty.

L. B. J. declared his "War on Poverty" 44 years ago. Contrary to cynical legend, there actually was a large reduction in poverty over the next few years, especially among children, who saw their poverty rate fall from 23 percent in 1963 to 14 percent in 1969.

But progress stalled thereafter: American politics shifted to the right, attention shifted from the suffering of the poor to the alleged abuses of welfare queens driving Cadillacs, and the fight against poverty was largely abandoned.

In 2006, 17.4 percent of children in America lived below the poverty line, substantially more than in 1969. And even this measure probably understates the true depth of many children's misery.

Living in or near poverty has always been a form of exile, of being cut off from the larger society. But the distance between the poor and the rest of us is much greater than it was 40 years ago, because most American incomes have risen in real terms while the official poverty line has not. To be poor in America today, even more than in the past, is to be an outcast in your own country. And that, the neuroscientists tell us, is what poisons a child's brain.

America's failure to make progress in reducing poverty, especially among children, should provoke a lot of soul-searching. Unfortunately, what it often seems to provoke instead is great creativity in making excuses.

Some of these excuses take the form of assertions that America's poor really aren't all that poor — a claim that always has me wondering whether those making it watched any TV during Hurricane Katrina, or for that matter have ever looked around them while visiting a major American city.

Mainly, however, excuses for poverty involve the assertion that the United States is a land of opportunity, a place where people can start out poor, work hard and become rich.

But the fact of the matter is that Horatio Alger stories are rare, and stories of people trapped by their parents' poverty are all too common. According to one recent estimate, American children born to parents in the bottom fourth of the income distribution have almost a 50 percent chance of staying there — and almost a two-thirds chance of remaining stuck if they're black.

That's not surprising. Growing up in poverty puts you at a disadvantage at every step.

I'd bracket those new studies on brain development in early childhood with a study from the National Center for Education Statistics, which tracked a group of students who were in eighth grade in 1988. The study found, roughly speaking, that in modern America parental status trumps ability: students who did very well on a standardized test but came from low-status families were slightly less likely to get through college than students who tested poorly but had well-off parents.

None of this is inevitable.

Poverty rates are much lower in most European countries than in the United States, mainly because of government programs that help the poor and unlucky.

And governments that set their minds to it can reduce poverty. In Britain, the Labor government that came into office in 1997 made reducing poverty a priority — and despite some setbacks, its program of income subsidies and other aid has achieved a great deal. Child poverty, in particular, has been cut in half by the measure that corresponds most closely to the U.S. definition.

At the moment it's hard to imagine anything comparable happening in this country. To their credit — and to the credit of John Edwards, who goaded them into it — both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama are proposing new initiatives against poverty. But their proposals are modest in scope and far from central to their campaigns.

I'm not blaming them for that; if a progressive wins this election, it will be by promising to ease the anxiety of the middle class rather than aiding the poor. And for a variety of reasons, health care, not poverty, should be the first priority of a Democratic administration.

But ultimately, let's hope that the nation turns back to the task it abandoned — that of ending the poverty that still poisons so many American lives.

------------------------------------

And he provides data and report reference on his blog at NYT highlighting especially UK and USA as we respectively score the worst!

February 18, 2008, 10:06 am
Other countries' wars on poverty
A lot of today's column was based on two sources.

One was Tim Smeeding's "Poor people in rich countries", which has a lot of information both on the specifics of how government policies affect poverty and on the broad overall relationship between government spending and poverty:

Policies and poverty
Spending and poverty
The other was the IFS report on inequality and poverty in Britain. Here's the table on child poverty; "relative" poverty measures the % of children in families with incomes below 60% of median, while "absolute" has a poverty line with fixed purchasing power, more or less the US standard.

Child poverty in Britain