Lessons from Davos: Gates' Creative Capitalism can also Work at Home in the U.S.
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?
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.
This means that charity dollars do not have to be raised again and again to keep the benefits reaching the people who need them as the business model creates that kind of sustainability. In other words folks, it becomes about TRUE giving instead of simple tax write-offs and getting rid of guilt. It is about helping people to help themselves so that they eventually do not need out help anymore! Yet governments should, and some already do, allow for companies and individuals to receive some kid of compensation for "giving" to social businesses, microcredit organizations, etc. And these organizations do exist, such as Grameen America, or microcredit loan centers in the Bronx and central Los Angeles.
My father grew up not far from where Bill Clinton was born and I returned to that part of the rural U.S. many times during my youth and young adulthood. My father took me to see how and where people lived, and how little they had. He made me and my brother pick cotton one very hot day, and I can recall cutting my fingers and the blood sticking to the cotton. We were also brought to the sugar cane fields, and driven to rural communities where people had little education and no access to credit or any way to make their lives better. When I saw the images on television of Katrina decades later what made me truly sad was that nothing at all had changed. These people had slipped through the cracks, somehow did not exist in America. That is, until we saw them on TV. But these people did and do have ideas. This is not about giving credit to people to buy a flatscreen television or waste borrowed money; it is about people who want to, if given the chance, work, create small businesses for which there is a real need in their communities. People who had to leave New Orleans after Katrina are now nurses and workers in Houston and elsewhere. We only ever hear the negative, but that is the media's fault, not the fault of those who have suffered and are only looking for a little help to make their lives and those of their families better.
But the welfare system which penalizes someone for earning anything at all, as well as the lack of support for the establishment of microcredit banks, has slowed down the process of creating independence for some of our own country's most vulnerable people. Hopefully the U.S., especially with the recent economic woes and problems of unchecked speculation which have hurt the most vulnerable borrowers, will begin to address these issues. The real problem behind lending in the "sub-prime" area is not the borrowers themselves who truly wanted to own their own homes, but those who used cheap money to flip properties, creating a bubble, on which inflated prices for loans became based, and thus those who truly needed the credit lost out.
This year at Davos we are witnessing a miraculous thing...but one also wonders why it took so long to happen. Human beings are very capable and creative if given the opportunity. Muhammad Yunus, Bill Gates, Michael Dell, Jeff Skoll, Craig Barrett of Intel, the CEO of Danone in France, Bill and Hillary Clinton and many many others all understand this and are taking concrete steps within the world of business to do give people opportunities.. What a truly amazing thing it is that we are finally thinking globally, and that true globalization is now understood also as acting locally, or even using ideas, monies etc. from one part of the planet to help focused local ventures in communities halfway around the world. But let us also look at home to help. From rural Arkansas, Washington State and New Orleans, to the ears of those Americans at Davos, come home to the U.S. and do something here. And remember, we are indeed all interconnected.
Follow Vivian Norris de Montaigu on Twitter: www.twitter.com/vivigive
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Both Bill Gates and Warren Buffett are not saints...b
Why can't we be a bit more optimistic about people's reasons for doing things...s
This is a step in the right direction.
This is an opposite story: it reports the exact opposite of what is really going on.
Why do the world's richest people have more and more, while most people have less and less? Because the rich people keep grabbing more and keeping it for themselves. Not because they are generous, kind, and charitable.
Bill Gates and Warren Buffet have combined their massive wealth not for charitable purposes, but instead to avoid paying taxes by hiding their income in tax-free charitable holdings completely controlled by them, then using that massive tax-free wealth to gain control of even more of the world.
Their mantra of "Gee, I have too much money" is so absurd. Give it away. Or better still, don't hide it in these phony self-owned charities. Pay taxes on it, then give the rest to legitimate charitable groups like Unicef, Habitat, or Doctors Without Borders.
Too much money? Feeling guilty? Build hospitals throughout the world, put money into a fund to hire doctors, buy drugs, keep the hospitals operating for generations. Build schools, put money into a fund to pay for them for generations. Build houses.
These privately-
A Ph.D. which includes writing on Globalization and Cinema also would most likely include looking at how international Media is funded, subsidized
"Having studied, worked and lived between the US and Europe for many years..."
Excuse me; I enjoy a good bit of "cinema" as much as the next guy, but last time I looked, between meant somewhere in the middle of two points, which in this case would be the very wet Atlantic. Not to pick at nits too much, but this sort of oversight in Vivian's bio does not add to her credibility as an observer or reporter on international finance, no matter how creative it might be.
Bill Clinton gave us NAFTA. Apparently the lessons of Muhammad Yunus were totally lost on him. His economic policies gave rise to the greatest social dislocation that Mexico has ever experienced; destruction of the family farm, the consolidation of land and wealth in the hands of the Elites, and the forced march of illegal immigration that has turned America into a low wage battleground and formerly productive Mexican families into criminals.
To say that our modern day Robber Barons, in the form of that convicted international Monopolist, Bill Gates, now have the answers for the very situation they helped to created, is lunacy. It borders on believing that WalMart has a secure, high paying, job with tremendous health benefits for you! These people don't give money away, they take it away. And as long as it is cheaper to send our jobs to Asia or India and import HB1 engineers for half what an American would make, we will only see more of this type of self inflating perpetuation of the third-worlding of America in the guide of feel good altruism.
Saying that micro loans are a good idea for the US can only mean one thing ...
We are now a third world country...
Hahaha! I thought I heard you say that Bill Gates is a primary voice in showing us how to do capitalism the right way. I've spent 20 years on the front lines in that industry, watching that guy decimate good companies and, arguably, hobble an industry to a point where competition is sparse and costs are higher than they need to be - all at the altar of "shareholder value." He's the epitome of "predatory" capitalism. Which I guess DOES qualify him to speak on the matter.
But whatever he's selling is either conscience blood-money or a self-aggrandizing, adult-sized version of "hey, look at me!"
It's been called social business, moral, conscious and now creative capitalism. 12 years ago however, the idea of abandoning the nonprofit model in favour of a business model which recirculates value in the community was pitched at President Clinton directly, in what was described as People-Centered Economic Development.
http://www
Many of this year's candidates for the Presidential election speak of Marshall Plan against poverty, yet from that same source, comes an extension of the 'creative capitalism' paradigm in a microeconomic 'Marshall Plan'
to address both the causes and effects of poverty.
The influence grows, to the point that influential thinkers now some see this kind of approach in the context of US foreign policy, in what's now described as Smart Power.
http://www
"Creative Capitalism" is the way capitalism was meant to be -- at least from a "viable form of economics" viewpoint. Unregulated, predatory capitalism is not sustainable -- it is an economic Ouroboros that destroys the very environment it needs to survive.
It is disastrous that so many have ideological blinders that prevent them from realizing this.
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