Southern New Hampshire University/University of Limpopo South African Microenterprise Development Institution

Leave it to the Republicans to oppose microloans and small enterprise budget assists to economically disadvantaged persons of continents that begin and end with the letter A and don’t feature tiny Asian geniuses with advanced degree paths for minors. Yes, I’m talking about Africa and the Americas, two places where apparently it’s manifest destiny to die of starvation whilst your banana republic rulers and psychotic genocidal despots make mincemeat of the general populace instead of building the infrastructure and strengthening education pillars.

No, Alabama doesn’t apply, though you might have thought so. But while Fannie Mae is no longer giving out subprimes to backwoods illiterates, the clearest indicator of the success of the microloan principle is the fact that millions are presently living under the watchful eye of the welfare state. It’s not a lonely existence, nor is it devoid of merit. Why, just the other day Buck Muskrat and his family of eight began the long, arduous journey into the hills of Arkansas with intent to produce and distribute “mountain sweet water” across state lines. Thanks to government micro-handouts, they get to install new filters on their custom-built still, ensuring that their customers will no longer suffer debilitating blindness, retching, and liver disease.

But let’s transport the process overseas to the squalid savannas and craven cocoa fields. What happens when you give Swahili Sue a generous grant of two thousand American? Sue, with the entrepreneurial spirit of her long-necked ancestors, is able to collect shiny pebbles, paying the kids of distant tribesmen sweatshop wages to gather shells (dead animals or bullet casings, either one), while her cousin, the one who owns the funky bodega (which he secretly runs a Nigerian email scam out of), sells her radiator wire from junked and burned out vehicles. She now employs neighbors, who previously hacked *their* neighbors to death with machetes for a living, to construct necklaces and bracelets, which she is then able to ship to the nearest city market, where corrupt officials, after being given their own economic stimulus packages, allow her to maintain a booth in the market next to the biggest tourist draw in the city. Pretty soon Swahili Sue is pulling in $500 every month. After bribes and payouts, she is still the leader of the pack, and with her growing capital she’s able to employ even more.

Pretty soon she’s running a small shop inside an air-conditioned building. She gets calls from local politicians, who want her opinion on new zoning legislation. She threatens to move her business across the water if she doesn’t get a tax break from the local warlord, who it so happens, freaking loves those bullet casing necklaces. He cuts her a midnight deal, and now the two of them maintain one of the biggest jewelry trading outfits in the entire region. She’s making the real stuff now, including possible blood diamonds from south, in the Congo, but it’s funny how the greasy southerners always seem to have a fresh story about all the opportunity there is if you just open your eyes.

Swahili Sue is better than all that. She maintains a delicate balance, paying off the right officials to keep her operation running smoothly, but she also takes care of her people. Her factory floor fairly hums, and even pregnant workers get padded chairs to sit on while they set stones, hand-embroider little suede bags, and stuff pendants into jewelry boxes. This is the reality–you can’t run a business here without feeding the monkey, and the monkey drives a lot of cars, usually bulletproof vehicles with tinted glass and built-in bars with the country’s second best Amarula and ice. Sue looks at the papers every day to know what’s coming down the road–which ethnic cleansing may clean her country’s house next, which politician she’ll want to cozy up to and which one she’ll want to steer clear of.

And at the end of the day, when she’s selling her company to a guy who thinks he’s a businessman because he ran a regional sugarcane distribution center and whose rich uncle is subsidizing him, she’ll think back to that first $2000 someone gave her, and wonder how she came so far with so little.

The results of the federal election have depressed me. The hegemony of social conservatism is going to continue for quite some time.
It is all about families. Traditional families. Christian families. Heterosexual families. Families standing on suburban lawns behind those famous white picket fences.
What about lefty non-Christian (secular) singles or couples? What happens to those living in the inner city in apartments?
They become exiles on main street says Chris Shiel over at Back Pages.

I’ve responded to this in his comments, but I’ll repost below, for your benefit (if you don’t like visiting the links in these kinds of posts).
I’m concerned that you’re framing this post with words that unfairly scale into a context that is, at best, an exaggeration of the true situation. Words like ‘hegemony’ and ‘taboo’ imply an active and knowledgable takeover of national interests by the party in question (in this case, social conservatists). I think this is not the case at all. Rather, a nation undergoes natural pendulum shifts in cultural and social values.
The globe currently is tending toward the zenith of this conservative swing, and your country and mine, and others, reflect this predominating shift in values. It will surely swing the other way at some point, presumably in the near future (the shift from the liberal 60′s has only taken 35 short years; these shifts will continue to occur closer and closer together as the pendulum narrows in its scope).
You intimate that when the “traditional” heterosexual family culture thrives, the secular, non-traditional family becomes marginalized. True, to a certain extent, though I don’t think you can argue against the fact that marginalized people in our day and age enjoy far more freedoms, opportunities, and legislative/judicial support than ever in the world’s history. 100 years ago gay marriage would not even have been conceivable, much less talked about openly. I think you’re ignoring the rights and freedoms that have been gained, and are painting a gloomier picture than really exists. I’m speaking generally; of course individual cases may experience extreme isolation and persecution, but on the whole, the tendency has curved steeply toward a more open society, and this with several swings of the pendulum from liberal to conservative and back again and forth many times over.
Finally, I’m concerned that your perception of the so-called censorship society is a doomsayer. While generally I oppose censorship, society has an imperative to guide morals. Despite relativistic thinking, morality is something apart from the law, but it must influence in some form or fashion the way the law handles society’s natural predilections. Chaos is the natural state, and without the constraining influence of law and morality, the doom of society is chaos and death. Social conservative influences help balance out the natural humanistic breakdowns, and stabilize the more libertine implications of a free society. Taboos exist for a reason, and not all taboos should be considered problematic, or a menace to freedom.