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I was at an old country church celebration in...
Posted on 2010-Mar-10 at 04:04
I was at an old country church celebration in Arkansas about three months ago to celebrate its 150th anniversaryThere were about seventy-five people there, all packed in this small wooden churchAfter the service, we went out under the pine trees to have a potluck lunch, and I found myself talking to an old man who was obviously quite brightFinally, I asked him, Mister, how old are you? He said, Im eighty-twoWhen did you join this church? Nineteen sixteen, he saidIf you had to say in one sentence, what is the difference between our state now and in 1916? He was quiet for a moment, then said, Governor, thats pretty easyIn 1916 when I got up in the morning I knew what was going to happen, but when I get up in the morning now, I dont have any ideaThat is about as good a one-sentence explanation about what has happened to America as Lester Thurow could give
(2) Human capital is probably more important than physical capital now
(3) A more constructive partnership between business and government is far more important than the dominance of either
(4) As we try to solve problems which arise out of the internationalization of American life and the changes in our own population, cooperation in every area is far more important than conflictWe have to share responsibilities and opportunitieswere going up or down together
(5) Waste is going to be punished it appears to me that we are louis vuitton back pack spending billions of dollars of investment capital increasing the debt of corporations without increasing their productivityMore debt should mean increased productivity, growth, and profitabilityNow it means, too often, less employment, less investment for research and development, and forced restructuring to service nonproductive debt
(6) A strong America requires a resurgent sense of community, a strong sense of mutual obligations, and a conviction that we cannot pursue our individual interests independent of the needs of our fellow citizens
If we want to keep the American dream alive for our own people and preserve Americas role in the world, we must accept the new rules of successful economic, political, and social lifeAnd we must act on them
Over the next five years, I would refine my analysis of globalization and interdependence and propose more initiatives to respond to them, juggling as best I could my desire to be a good governor and to have a positive impact on national policy
In 1987, my agenda for the legislative session, Good Beginnings, Good Schools, Good Jobs, was consistent with the work I was doing with the National Governors Association under the theme Making America WorkIn addition to recommendations that built on our previous efforts in education and economic development, I asked the legislature to help me get the growing number of poor children off to a good start rolex ladies in life by increasing health-care coverage for poor mothers and children, starting with prenatal care in order to lower the infant-mortality rate and reduce avoidable damage to newborns; to increase parenting education for mothers of at-risk children; to provide more special education in early childhood to kids with learning problems; to increase the availability of affordable child care; and to strengthen child-support enforcement
From Hillary, I had learned most of what I knew about early-childhood development and its importance to later lifeShe had been interested in it as long as Id known her, and had taken a fourth year at Yale Law School to work on childrens issues at the Yale Child Study Center and YaleNew Haven HospitalShe had worked hard to import to Arkansas an innovative preschool program from Israel called HIPPY, which stands for Home Instruction Programs for Preschool Youngsters, a program that helps to develop both parenting skills and childrens ability to learnHillary set up HIPPY programs all across the stateWe both loved going to the graduation exercises, watching the children show their stuff and seeing the parents pride in their kids and themselvesThanks to Hillary, Arkansas had the largest program in the country, serving 2,400 mothers, and their children showed remarkable progress
The main focus of my economic development efforts was to increase investment and rolex oyster perpetual explorer watch opportunity for poor people and distressed areas, most of them in rural ArkansasThe most important proposal was to provide more capital to people who had the potential to operate profitable small businesses but couldnt borrow the money to get startedThe South Shore Development Bank in Chicago had been instrumental in helping unemployed carpenters and electricians set themselves up in business on the citys South Side to renovate abandoned buildings that otherwise would have been condemnedAs a result, the whole area recovered
I knew about the bank because one of its employees, Jan Piercy, had been one of Hillarys best friends at WellesleyJan told us South Shore got the idea to fund artisans who were skilled but not creditworthy by conventional standards from the work of the Grameen Bank of Bangladesh, founded by Muhammad Yunus, who had studied economics at Vanderbilt University before going home to help his peopleI arranged to meet him for breakfast in Washington one morning, and he explained how his micro-credit program workedVillage women who had skills and a reputation for honesty but no assets were organized in teamsWhen the first borrower repaid her small loan, the next one in line got hers, and so onWhen I first met Yunus, the Grameen Bank already had made hundreds of thousands of loans, with a repayment rate higher than that for commercial lenders in BangladeshBy 2002, Grameen had chanel j12 watch made them to more than 2 million people, 95 percent of them poor women
If the idea worked in Chicago, I thought it would work in economically distressed areas in rural ArkansasAs Yunus said in an interview, Anywhere anybody is rejected by the banking system, you have room for a Grameen-type programWe set up the Southern Development Bank Corporation in ArkadelphiaThe Development Finance Authority put up some of the initial money, but most of it came from corporations that Hillary and I asked to invest in it
When I became President, I secured congressional approval for a national loan program modeled on the Grameen Bank, and featured some of our success stories at a White House eventAgency for International Development also funded two million micro-credit loans a year in poor villages in Africa, Latin America, and East AsiaIn 1999, when I went to South Asia, I visited Muhammad Yunus and some of the people hed set up in business, including women whod used the loans to buy cell phones, which they charged villagers to use to call their relatives and friends in America and EuropeMuhammad Yunus should have been awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics years ago
My other major interest was welfare reformI asked the legislature to require recipients with children three years old or over to sign a contract committing themselves to a course of independence, through literacy, job training, and shop for chanel bags wor
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