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.

In the article, Kristoff and his Chinese wife, Sheryll WuDunn, give us a glimpse into the minds of international power brokers:

There’s a growing recognition among everyone from the World Bank to the U.S. military’s Joint Chiefs of Staff to aid organizations like CARE that focusing on women and girls is the most effective way to fight global poverty and extremism. That’s why foreign aid is increasingly directed to women. The world is awakening to a powerful truth: Women and girls aren’t the problem; they’re the solution.

So what we have is a concerted global effort to help “women and girls,” probably along the lines of the decades-old campaign to do so here at home, which has resulted in the collapse of traditional marriage and boys being increasingly marginalized in school and the workplace.

One of the tools used to promote women in less developed parts of the world is “microfinance” — essentially small scale credit extended to women through World Bank programs and such. An example Kristoff gives is that of a Pakistani housewife with an unemployed husband (who is, naturally, described as a deadbeat and a wife-beating villain):

Saima took out a $65 loan and used the money to buy beads and cloth, which she transformed into beautiful embroidery that she then sold to merchants in the markets of Lahore. She used the profit to buy more beads and cloth, and soon she had an embroidery business and was earning a solid income — the only one in her household to do so. Saima took her elder daughter back from the aunt and began paying off her husband’s debt.

So here we have a success story, in which wealth is being created through light industrial production of apparel.

Of course, we should all cheer the change in circumstances for Saima, who has now turned the tables and become domineering toward her husband:

Today, Saima is a bit plump and displays a gold nose ring as well as several other rings and bracelets on each wrist. She exudes self-confidence as she offers a grand tour of her home and work area, ostentatiously showing off the television and the new plumbing. She doesn’t even pretend to be subordinate to her husband. He spends his days mostly loafing around, occasionally helping with the work but always having to accept orders from his wife. He has become more impressed with females in general: Saima had a third child, also a girl, but now that’s not a problem. “Girls are just as good as boys,” he explained.

OK, microfinance works in some cases, but the real question is whether the following statement is really accurate:

Perhaps the lesson presented by both Abbas and Saima is the same: In many poor countries, the greatest unexploited resource isn’t oil fields or veins of gold; it is the women and girls who aren’t educated and never become a major presence in the formal economy. With education and with help starting businesses, impoverished women can earn money and support their countries as well as their families. They represent perhaps the best hope for fighting global poverty.

No, I don’t think so. Countries that successfully raised themselves out of poverty following WW II did not do so through small businesses run by women. Certainly, they put women to work, particularly in Asia, but these jobs were part of a state-planned emphasis on light industry that exploited country girls by making them the low-wage workhorses in factories, i.e. sweatshops. For Korea, China and Thailand this has worked out pretty well, but it didn’t have anything to do with “liberating” women; in fact it was all about control and exploitation. And once the sweatshop model outlived its usefulness, countries like Korea have switched to higher value-added products rather than footwear. These high-end products are manufactured and designed overwhelmingly by men.

Kristoff (who is actually a supporter of sweatshops) is getting it wrong. The countries that most successfully lifted themselves out of poverty did so through patriarchal authoritarianism and strict control and exploitation of women. Of course, once the hurdle was cleared, women were given increasing freedom and opportunity, after which most voluntarily switched from production to service jobs.

So Kristoff’s crusade is doomed. Any effort that encourages female independence and dominance as a means to lift a society out of poverty is working against its own stated goal, as we can see from our own ghetto failure here in the US, where women are clearly socially dominant, and yet have not managed to lift themselves out of poverty without paternalist carrot and stick type incentives from above.

We should beware of crusades advocated by pompous elites like Kristoff, who think they can solve the world’s problems despite having only a contrived understanding of the world, honed to very narrow specifications in detached, exclusive institutions.

Of course, Congolese women have had it hard during the war, but what of the men? Have more women died? I seriously doubt it, but this is American feminism at work: the men don’t count. Even the young boys who have been pressed into service – some seized from classrooms – are largely ignored. So for the sake of her sisters, Clinton can get aggressive with male students who ask her questions she doesn’t like, or that appear to undermine her authority as The Most Important Woman in the World, and our press outlets can be counted on to offer only cringing platitudes to wives and female bosses as they bow and scrape to the feminist overlord.

Hillary Clinton is now in Liberia to support its first female president. We know nothing about the woman; in fact, I’d never heard of her before. Turns out there’s a good reason for that. Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, president of Liberia, has been named in the final report issued by the Liberian Truth and Reconciliation Committee as a political financier and supporter of the warlordism that has plagued the country for decades, displacing well over a million people. She is a former supporter of warlord Charles Taylor, and a key player in various insurrections. Because of these activities, the report recommends that she be barred from office for thirty years.

Imagine that. Hillary Clinton defends her rude behavior on the one hand by suggesting that she’s standing up for women’s (rather than human) rights in the Congo, and then promptly flies over to support a female warlord with the blood of thousands – many of whom were undoubtedly women – on her hands. The hypocrisy is brutal.

What this clearly demonstrates is that feminism isn’t about human rights at all, but rather power — especially for “big women” like Hillary Clinton and Ellen Johnson Sirleaf. We should be thankful that her husband, former President Bill Clinton, was sent to deal with the North Koreans instead of her. In a geopolitically crucial region such as Korea, where millions could vanish in the flash of atomic blasts, the last thing we need is a second-rate supporter of tin-pot despots calling the shots. Not that the North Koreans ever would have made a deal with her anyway — oddly, even they have proven themselves more diplomatic in person than Hillary.

If the new American foreign policy mission is promoting feminism, i.e. female dominance, let’s get that out in the open and argue its virtues here at home. Despite the fact that there are some serious moral issues with exporting any political ideology, we should at least figure out whether we approve of what our politicians would force on others. If not, there’s a good chance we’ll be making a lot of enemies and losing a lot of friends, and we have only to look at countries like North Korea to see why that’s a bad idea.