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Wednesday, August 19, 2009
“Peasant Blacksmithing in Indonesia: Surviving Against All Odds,”
That was Barack Obama's mother's dissertation title. The MSM's love-in with the President continues:
Indeed, Dr. Soetoro found that the villagers she studied in Central Java had many of the same economic needs, beliefs and aspirations as the most capitalist of Westerners. Village craftsmen were “keenly interested in profits,” she wrote, and entrepreneurship was “in plentiful supply in rural Indonesia,” having been “part of the traditional culture” there for a millennium.
Based on these observations, Dr. Soetoro concluded that underdevelopment in these communities resulted from a scarcity of capital, the allocation of which was a matter of politics, not culture. Antipoverty programs that ignored this reality had the potential, perversely, of exacerbating inequality because they would only reinforce the power of elites. As she wrote in her dissertation, “many government programs inadvertently foster stratification by channeling resources through village officials,” who then used the money to further strengthen their own status.
Hmmm. Kind of like an inner city ghetto? In oh, say, Chicago.
These same observations also led her to start working with institutions like the Ford Foundation and the United States Agency for International Development to devise alternate pathways for reaching and working with the poor. She helped to pioneer microcredit programs that made small amounts of capital available to weavers, blacksmiths and other low-income groups — people who would otherwise have had no access to credit.
Nothing about the Indonesian government nationalizing the blacksmithing industry.
Posted by Richard Anderson on August 19, 2009 | Permalink
Comments
PUBLIUS I'm going to guess you don't really know what the average low income urban Chicago mindset is. Neither Das Kapital or The Wealth of Nations would be read there... "Thug Life" however is a best seller. It's not about working together, or building a life. They bitch that nobody gave them a life while they steel someone else' 1994 Cavalier that was their only way of getting to work. That's hardly an exaggeration. Get back to me when one of your best friends happens to be an ex-gang-banger from Chicago.
Not all impoverished places are alike, impoverished America is an issue of morality and culture, not capital.
Obtaining start up Capital in North America is easy, even if you have no credit, are an illegal alien, don't speak English and have never run a business before.
Although once you have the capital the tax and regulatory systems will chew you up and rob you worse than any criminal element.
Posted by: Pete | 2009-08-19 12:50:00 PM
I was being facetious with the crack about Chicago. I find it ironic that Obama's mother seems to have had a better grasp of capitalism that he.
Posted by: Publius | 2009-08-19 1:36:29 PM
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