From: Jurriaan Bendien (adsl675281@TISCALI.NL)
Date: Sat Oct 14 2006 - 09:02:14 EDT
Hi Patrick, Thanks for the info, whew, that is a lot. One passage stands out for me, since I thought the same thing: "It always amazes me how sincere the poor are in paying back their loans. If a bank staff meets a defaulting borrower, who has discontinued her contact with the bank for a period of several years, and reminds her about the outstanding loan, she never says "Forget it", or "Who Cares". She always says: "I am sorry I could not pay back. I'll like to do that as soon as I can"." These very poor people seem to have a morality of promise-keeping that many corporations don't have... Think of Enron. My reference to "the secret of original accumulation" is of course tongue-in-cheek, but the serious issue to which it refers concerns the problem of how you can create markets where there are none because people are too poor to buy very much (That is not to say they don't trade at all, because they barter and so on). In the age of bankers' capitalism, micro-credits seem to be a logical answer to that problem. Serious analysts though rapidly arrive at the conclusion that property relations are an essential factor, but there the analysis more or less stops... It often does not occur to them that the possessions of some could depend on the dispossession of others... If micro-credits are the best we can do these days, the poor will be poor for a long time! Jurriaan
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