BANGKOK - The global financial crisis has highlighted a curious success story: A bank that doles out loans to some of the world's poorest, least-creditworthy people continues to have a payback rate of nearly 100 percent.
Nobel Peace Prize winner Muhammad Yunus, known as the "banker to the poor," quips that the Grameen Bank he founded owes its success to "sub-sub-subprime borrowers" who also own nearly all the bank's equity.
The following excerpts are from Herman Daly's interview with ecological economist Tom Green:
The following was adapted from a speech on May 2, 2009 at The Progressive’s
100th anniversary conference and originally printed in The
Progressive magazine, August 2009 issue:
Can the North Bay achieve a modern version of the New Deal to revive the region’s economy and promote a sustainable green future?
The obstacles are huge — and so are the imperatives. A massive recession is boosting unemployment, while severe pollution continues to fuel global warming. The need for a Green New Deal is greater than ever.
Despite the best efforts of the Obama
administration, the economy is a long ways from recovery. The
speculative system that created the mess remains intact, and
foreclosures and unemployment continue to rise. But at the same time, a new economy is taking form.
It’s built on a recognition that the only thing too big to fail is the
Earth itself.
It is ironic that homo sapiens, we big-brained and clever species, can
trace almost every tragedy and failing to one generic cause: a failure
of imagination.
We seem to be an idiot savant species --
stunningly clever at so many things, capable of greatness, creativity
and sacrifice for others, melding genius and love when we are at our
best, and greed and hate at our worst.
It's highly unlikely that life as we know it - or
want it - can continue for long unless we rein in population growth.
Too many measures indicate that the great mass of us burning fossil
fuels, gobbling up renewable resources, and generating toxic trash is
overloading our life support ecosystems. In the central North Pacific
Ocean gyre, swirling plastic fragments now outweigh plankton 46 to one.
