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Cold War II: Russia. Georgia and Ukraine

posted on Friday, September 05, 2008 08:54 AM

What happened in Georgia last month couldn't have been closer to the work of P-CED whose efforts in Eastern Europe promote "swords to ploughshares" social enterprise.

We'd begun by seeding the concept with our founder's paper on social capitalism, while appointed as an honorary researcher to Clinton's re-election committee.

Work in Russia began in 1999, following the collapse of Russia's economy where the author then leveraged a USAID project to include a Grameen-model microfinance bank in Tomsk, Siberia. The bank model was replicated in Tbilisi Georgia in 2003. Unlike prior Harvard (HIID) macro attempts to deploy top-down development in Russia, it advocated a policy of targeted bottom-up micro development. It yielded results of more than 15,000 loans in Tomsk, with loan service and business survival >95% over 4 year duration with the Grameen type lending model - without collateral..

5 year ago, work began to deploy the same targeted development approach to a Islamic community at risk in the Crimean penninsula. Local corruption issues delayed implementation but it was re-submitted in 2006 along with our 'Marshall Plan' paper, to the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

This is where for the first time, a development strategy paper took the step of advocating economic smart bombs as a weapon against poverty and the consequences, includinfg possible regional confrontation.

In an interview with Inci Bonman of the Washinton based International Committee for Crimea, founder Terry Hallman describes the P-CED concept:.

"Essentially, P-CED challenges conventional capitalism as an insufficient economic paradigm, as evidenced by billions of people in the world living in poverty in capitalist countries and otherwise. Under the conventional scheme, capitalism - enterprise for profit - has certainly transformed much of the world and created a new breed of people in capitalist societies, the middle class. That is a good thing. But, capitalism seems to have developed as far as it can to produce this new class of fairly comfortable people between rich and poor, at least in the West where it has flourished for quite some time."

That was 4 years ago, when something might have been done. It may now be too late.

http://www.iccrimea.org/scholarly/economicdev.html

http://www.p-ced.com/projects/ukraine/

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