It looks like Novaseeker’s comment on Kristoff might be right on the money. It turns out that not only does Sheryl Wudunn (Kristoff’s wife) plan on releasing a book in September about the importance of a global drive to empower women, she is also deeply involved with charities that hold the purse strings in these endeavors.
Mme. WuDunn, according to the Times, works in philanthropy and finance. As a former employee of Goldman Sachs she is an experienced investor, which leads me to wonder what kind of money is in this “philanthropy” business she’s involved in. Fortunately, Lukobe posted a few good links in the comments. Here’s a quote from one of them:
[...] globally, more than 145 funds, with assets of nearly half a billion dollars, exist to improve the lives of women and girls. Many focus their efforts domestically; about a third work internationally. Not one existed in 1972 when the Ms. Foundation, the first national fund for and by women, was established. Collectively they now form the Women’s Funding Network and have plans to increase their joint coffers by another billion dollars by 2018, in concert with a drive called Women Moving Millions, which aims to encourage individuals, mostly women, to donate $1 million or more. The goal was to raise $150 million in three years, a target exceeded this spring by $30 million.
Looks like a decent business to be in. Madoff certainly milked the charity angle, and perhaps Mme. WuDunn plans on doing so as well, but I can only speculate on that. What I do know, thanks to Beltain, is that people are being asked to invest in “microfinance” funds, and are being promised a decent return as well as the opportunity to feel good about themselves for helping “women and children” in impoverished countries. I would be quite surprised if Mme. WuDunn were not involved in these micro-lending schemes, which I can say with some confidence flat out won’t work, except to extract a few bucks here and there from millions of peasants in the developing world, which probably does add up over time.
For some reason, it all reminds me of the usurious carpetbaggers who followed the Union Army into the South after our Civil War.
4 responses so far ↓
1 Clarence // Aug 20, 2009 at 7:00 am
Oh, I don’t know, Welmer.
It seems microfinancing can work, at least in some individual cases and in the larger sense if it goes to certain things like agriculture. However, I readily agree most microfinance is not going this way, and “female empowerment” microfinance loans might help some women individually but they will not be beneficial to the societies in the long run.
2 novaseeker // Aug 20, 2009 at 7:55 am
Yep. His wife is the ideological driver there. I have observed Kristoff since he was the beat reporter for the NYT in Beijing, and he has become progressively more feminist, no doubt due to her influence. It’s of course no surprise that he is hawking investment in third world women since this is his wife’s line of work.
3 whiskey // Aug 20, 2009 at 10:07 pm
This is the mark of a corrupt aristocracy. It’s inbred. Much of the feminist influence is merely the female half of aristocracy exerting itself. Which is also the mark of a corrupt and inbred aristocracy.
Women of course, love aristocracies. All dream of being Princesses.
4 miles // Aug 21, 2009 at 6:10 pm
oh if Carlos Slim simply hadn’t given the Times that loan…
I would -really- enjoy seeing Bob Herbert, Kristoff, PAUL (slug) KRUGMAN, Smarmeen Loud, David (neoconservative phoney-trotskyite) Brooks, Frank Rich (weenie-man), Thomas Friedman, and Senoir Cohen all have to get jobs outside that paper……
I love how the Slimes gets to trot out what-should-be-discredited hacks like Thomas Friedman as “experts” over and over.
I wish newspaper syndicates were completely illegal. I wish no one person was even allowed to own stock in multiple newspapers. The news is too important to let a syndicate like Gannett to control so many papers and force opinion writers like those above on us in second-tier cities. I turn to the local editorial page and see the mugs of those above and it makes me sick. Nobody in my part of the world really give a tinker’s damn about what these smug schmucks think except the extremely status-worshipping swipple-sell-out-slime. They follow them like the readers of Ayn Rand’s literally creation, Ellsworth Toohey’s column, “One Small Voice”, swalling whole everything they say with no thought of their own. “Our betters have decided for us”. Fuck that shit. I’ll think for myself.
If you can’t tell, I dislike the Pravda-on-the-Hudson somewhat.
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