I've had a LOT of feedback from my eNews coverage of Nobel prize winner Yunus and the micro-loans he pioneered with Grameen Bank in Bangladesh, one of the poorest countries in the world. Today, many countries, including America, are utilizing micro-loans with great effectiveness for the poor and disadvantaged.

I saw Yunus on TV again the other day. The aggressive interviewer was asking whether micro-loans was a "good business", a new and hitherto untapped profit opportunity. Yunus responded that they were NOT doing it to maximize profit, but at low interest rates to help poor people by stimulating their entrepreneurial spirit and allowing them to develop their own independence. The reporter was puzzled, "Huh?" He simply didn't understand the response; the idea was completely outside his "logic box".

Already the concept is becoming distorted. There are many websites that will help to find micro-loans, defined as $ 35,000 and under. Gosh, that's a long way from "micro" for the average poor person. And they caution that banks "require some type of collateral and the personal guarantee of the business owner." They completely miss the point. Poor people have no collateral - micro-loans operate on the basis of trust and personal judgment. Tell that to bankers, and they go blank.

There are cynics, of course. Some suggest that "micro-loans cannot make a macro-difference" and the concept is just another form of "neo-liberalism". It makes me mad to read some of this stuff from well-fed, arm-chair critics, stuck in their ivory-towers of wealth and privilege.

America itself has a poverty and hunger epidemic. During the Christmas and Thanksgiving holidays, as we indulge in an excess of turkeys and ham and cakes and booze and holiday cheer, 35 million people in America don't have enough food, 12 million of them children.

Anna Quindlen of Newsweek expresses her frustration: "The problem is intractable and profoundly serious; the public doesn't know, corporations don't care, and there's no creative thinking".

In this new century, the Achilles-heels of Democracy and Capitalism are exposed. Poor people don't vote. Capitalism has no mechanisms to cope with Poverty, except obscure "trickle-down" theories. Indeed, Poverty breeds Terrorism. Capitalistic tools such as machine guns and tanks can't contain militant terrorists who threaten our society. Meanwhile, America preaches Democracy, and yet doesn't know how to cope with those who win a fair democratic election - in Palestine, the democratic winners were termed "terrorists".

We need to come up with innovative new ideas to solve the seemingly intractable problems of Poverty and Terrorism. We need more ideas like micro-loans - self-replicating, exponentially multiplying mechanisms that solve real problems at the lowest levels of society.

We need new "soft" solutions to the "hard" problems of this new century. Read my 3-year old article (weblink below). And thinkaboutit.