We met at the 2006 welcome reception for the Women’s Media Centre in San Francisco. Here’s the rave I posted on my blog about meeting three of my sheroes – you, Robin Morgan, and Gloria Steinem.

http://shailja.com/news/newsletterblog/2006/09/robin-morgan-hugged-me-tonight.html

Before you support the Yunus / Grameen Bank model as “lifting women out of poverty”, I urge you to look at the serious critiques of microcredit, and Grameen Bank, from feminists and third-world economists.

For example, this excellent article by feminist economists, Susan Feiner and Lucilla Barker, on the website of the International Museum of Women:

http://www.imow.org/economica/stories/viewStory?storyId=3693

The key to understanding why Grameen Bank founder and CEO Muhammad Yunus won the Nobel Peace Prize lies in the current fascination with individualistic myths of wealth and poverty. Many policy-makers believe that poverty is “simply” a problem of individual behavior. By rejecting the notion that poverty has structural causes, they deny the need for collective responses. In fact, according to this tough-love view, broad-based civic commitments to increase employment or provide income supports only make matters worse: helping the poor is pernicious because such aid undermines the incentive for hard work. This ideology is part and parcel of neoliberalism.

For neoliberals the solution to poverty is getting the poor to work harder, get educated, have fewer children, and act more responsibly. Markets reward those who help themselves, and women, who comprise the vast majority of microcredit borrowers, are no exception. Neoliberals champion the Grameen Bank and similar efforts precisely because microcredit programs do not change the structural conditions of globalization–such as loss of land rights, privatization of essential public services, or cutbacks in health and education spending–that reproduce poverty among women in developing nations.

And this piece by financial journalist Gina Neff:

http://www.leftbusinessobserver.com/Micro.html

“But while the press and the global network of localists rave about the bank’s lending to “landless” women, the miracle dissolves on closer inspection. For example, Grameen rules insist that its borrowers own their homes – not unlike the assumption that shoeless women have bootstraps. Evidently Bangladeshi homeless women don’t count as the poorest of the poor. And unfortunately, Grameen borrowers are staying poor. After 8 years of borrowing, 55% of Grameen households still aren’t able to meet their basic nutritional needs – so many women are using their loans to buy food rather than invest in business. That’s a figure that the press fails to mention.”

Because I am possibly one of your biggest fans, will you please someday talk about one of my favorie movies that you made: “Period of Adjustment”? I thought you were fabulous in that movie.

I have to tell you….after seeing a pic of you in the NY Post, where you comment you’re slowly falling apart….I showed it to a friend who is about your age with the same joint problems…and it brought such a smile to her face. It was like, well, if Jane Fonda can find humor in it….so can I. As Bette Davis once said….”growing old ain’t for sissies”.

Can’t wait to see you on screen again soon. The new film sounds like it will be great. I love that whole extended family theme. Take care.

Bill