Free Republic

The winding roads into the valley of Nebaj are lined with advertisements for cheap loans. Banks and cooperatives and microfinance operations make their pitches: “Credit in three days.” “Funding for your small business.” “We’ve lowered our interest rates!” U.S. officials have long touted the power of finance to lift people out of poverty — and backed loans to farmers and small-business owners across the developing world. But here in the Guatemala Highlands, the epicenter of the country’s migrant exodus, those loans often fund a different activity, the region’s most profitable: Smuggling migrants north to the United States. Over the past...

OSLO (AFP) - Attack the causes of poverty and you remove the roots of conflict -- that is the message the Nobel Committee wanted to send out by awarding its Peace Prize to the creator of a micro-credit scheme which benefits millions, analysts said on Friday. Bangladeshi economist Muhammad Yunus, the so-called "Banker to the Poor", and the Grameen Bank he founded three decades ago were the surprise winners of the award for pioneering a system of small-scale loans that has helped 6.6 million people escape the grind of poverty. As the head of the Nobel Committee, Ole Danbolt Mjoes,...

In Part 1, I introduced you to GS1. A United Nations sanctioned not for profit organization with an intent to tag every thing with RFID technology. In this article I will expand on GS1, as well as introduce you to pilot projects, organizations, and people working to implement this agenda. This article will give readers a introduction to the cashless society, as well as the groups and people behind it...... ....a brief review of some history is necessary. Many reading this will be familiar with the Earth Charter. This document more than any other helped lay the foundation of the...

After the latest bombshell, Congressmen and Senators are calling for the Clinton email scandal to be re-opened! Yesterday, the Trump administration quietly released even more of Hillary Clinton's previously-unreleased emails and it includes a bombshell. There is now (concrete evidence) that Hillary Clinton emailed classified information to people outside of the government and asked them to print out a hard copy for her and Bill. This is one of the emails that the Obama administration tried to hide. In it, Hillary Clinton is seen forwarding 2-3 pages worth of classified information to Doug Band. If that name sounds familiar, he...

Today the President handed out the Presidential Medal of Freedom to not one, but two Antisemites. There was has been a lot of written about one of of the recipients, former Irish President Mary Robinson, who was responsible for the 1991 UN Conference on Racism, which turned out to be a conference for every type of Antisemitism in the world. But the former UN hate monger wasn't the only Antisemite receiving a Presidential award today, the other one honored by the President was Bishop Desmond Tutu For example Tutu has made some very disturbing statements about the Holocaust. He has...

(Crain's) — ShoreBank, the South Side lender that carved out a national reputation by successfully lending in low-income urban neighborhoods for three decades, was seized by regulators Friday after an extraordinary rescue effort featuring the nation’s largest financial firms fell short. But all was not lost for the neighborhoods ShoreBank has served for more than three decades. The new management of the bank, led by former First Chicago Corp. senior executive David Vitale, acquired $1.54 billion in deposits and most of ShoreBank’s $2.14 billion in assets from the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. and will reopen ShoreBank’s 15 branches in the...