Back in the summer of 1975, a group of women met at the first United Nations Conference on Women in Mexico City. A Danish economist named Ester Boserup had just published an analysis noting that while women performed over 65% of the world’s work, they earned only 10% of the income, and owned less than 1% of the world’s property. And women were routinely denied commercial banking privileges. One of the attendees, Michaela Walsh, had what was at the time a radical observation: unless women got access to money and credit, they would never have power.

Over the next decade, the network she created, which has come to be known as Women’s World Banking, became one of the pioneering forces in helping women entrepreneurs enter the financial world and get credit they would not otherwise have been able to access. Today, WWB is an integral part of what we all know as microfinance.

On June 17th the Catholic social justice lobbying group NETWORK launched a 15 day Nuns on the Bus tour. They are speaking out against the House Republican budget because, as they write: “When the federal government cuts funding to programs that serve people in poverty, we see the effects in our daily work. Simply put, real people suffer. That is immoral.”

At a press conference this afternoon broadcast live on ABC 7 (a truncated version here), Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa said. “The Occupy encampments have changed the one-sided conversation, the movement has awakened the country’s conscience…After this initial success the movement is now at cross roads. It is time for Occupy LA to movement from this piece of parkland.”

He cited public health, public safety and the security of encampment.

We’re Americans. We can dismiss the possibility we live in a banana republic as nonsense, right?

Raw Story has an interesting article about Faith in Public Life’s campaign to spread awareness of Glenn Beck’s “warped gospel” and his outrageous claim that talk of social or economic justice is tantamount to Marxism or Nazism (because if there was one thing Stalin and Hitler were known for, it was their intense commitment to social justice), and it reminded me once again of the obscenity of conservatives claiming the mantle of Christianity while opposing everything Jesus stood for.

A personal microfinance success story