Post 02: Understanding Human rights

An article written by regular columnist Randy David on Human rights is worth reading given the atmosphere of instant death pervading the territory called the Philippines. http://opinion.inquirer.net/96308/human-rights-and-the-poor Just clink on the LINK. You are to do a research on "The Origins of Human Rights". You can Google the subject and print them. This is group work (The same grouping that met last 05 August, Friday. Give at least 5-group shared insights. Just one page only. Format: Word generated report. To be submitted written on a short bond paper. Deadline is: 19 August, Friday. Classroom as venue. Query? Do write at leonidas.jose@yahoo.com

Social Classes in the Philippines

Philippine social classes.

EDSA 25th Anniversary, Statement by Former Senior Government Officials

25 Years of People Power from EDSA Revolution to Daang Matuwid:
Lessons in Democratic Life for Our Nation’s Future
(A Statement from the Former Senior Government Officials)


We, former senior government officials, join our people in celebrating the silver anniversary of the victory of our democratic revolution.

The Filipino people can rightfully be proud that they took the path of people power revolution, a path taken since by many other nations from Eastern Europe to the Middle East, including the latest from Tunisia and Egypt.

Our own people power revolution banished a dictator, defeated takeover attempts by various military factions, ratified a Constitution that guarantee our rights, rebuilt the institutions essential for our democratic governance, gave power and resources to our local governments, and liberated our media, our economy and our society from the many oppressions of authoritarian rule. Many of our countrymen celebrate just surviving another day; surely our people must celebrate making so much history in the first 25 years of our democracy.

We celebrate our achievements but we must be mindful of the monumental tasks that remain. Thus far, our people power revolution has failed to end corruption at the highest levels of our government, failed to lift millions of our fellow Filipinos from poverty, and failed to bring enduring peace to our countryside, particularly in Mindanao. Our democracy is now a 25-year old young adult. It must rise from the exuberance of the EDSA revolution and embrace the discipline of daang matuwid. It has so much yet to learn and do.

What Have We Learned?

1. Our people like to choose their leaders. They often choose wisely. Sometimes they choose liars, cheats, and thieves but bad leaders do not fool all the people all the time. We must never again compromise the integrity of our elections being the only way for our people to choose their leaders.

2. Our country has many honest, competent and courageous people willing to sacrifice for our democratic institutions to function well. We must get more of our best, most decent and brightest people to become civil servants because their service will save our nation.

3. Our laws speak so clearly: a public office is a public trust. We must keep our leaders, particularly those at the highest levels, and our civil servants, including those at the grassroots, faithful to our laws and worthy of our trust. We must make sure those who violate our trust suffer substantial consequences.

4. The exercise of our freedoms and rights is our best guarantee for a secure and prosperous future. Surrendering our liberties for security and prosperity is a fool’s bargain. The greatness of our leaders will depend on the responsibility borne by our citizens. We revere our dearly departed Corazon Aquino not just because of what she did but even more because of what she was able to inspire our people to do.

What Must We Do?

Now we must join the one-year old presidency of Benigno Simeon Aquino to do what he said in his inaugural he would do: “Ilalaan ko ang aking buhay para siguraduhin na ang ating demokrasya ay kapaki-pakinabang sa bawat isa.”

1. We must first rid our government of the leeches and vampires sucking the blood of our people. We need to restore responsibility and accountability in our public agencies. We must finally take the steps necessary to make the Office of the Ombudsman the “protector of the people” that our Constitution intended it to be, instead of the coddler of the corrupt powerful that it has become. Throughout our government, we must make graft rare not common, corruption unusual not routine, and abuse extraordinary not SOP. Our highest officials must become the leaders in honesty and integrity or serve as prime examples of punishment for violations, when necessary.

2. We must invest in improved health and better education to realize the promise of our nearly hundred million people being the true blessings they were meant to be for their families and our country. Our nation has nearly doubled in numbers since the EDSA revolution 25 years ago. Our society and economy has the means to protect all Filipinos from sickness or disability and to enable all to become literate, skilled and productive in a modern technological world. We need to deploy these means sooner rather than later before the growing numbers of the sick and ignorant overwhelm those who are well and educated.

3. We must expand our economy, not just on the obvious vigor of our cities, but also on the growing prosperity of our farmers, fisherfolks and rural communities. Our economy must grow more by creating jobs at home and less from merely spending the remittances of workers abroad. So many of our economic enterprises survive on the exploitation of our workers that we need to re-discover the powerful virtuous cycles possible when workers are lawfully treated so that they become better consumers. We must give attention to employing our young people who are unable to get jobs because they have no prior job experience. Our government and the private sector should start up internships, apprenticeships, on-the-job options and other modes of providing our young mostly unemployed workers with valuable work experience.

4. We must have a government that serves, not constrains, the individual and collective enterprise, energy and creativity of our people. First of all our government must not insult, scandalize or provoke another outbreak of people power by its failures to retain our trust in its integrity and our respect for its competence. We must use the power of the people, not just to oust dictators or plunderers, but also to educate our children, heal our sick, empower the powerless, and uplift the lives of all. Our government must mobilize our citizens, not just in protest of its mistakes or in the election of its replacements, but also in strategic and sustained participation in governance, enterprise and development.

5. We must build an inclusive and just peace everywhere conflict and insurgency prevails. We should support prudence, perseverance and good faith in the political negotiations between the government and the major insurgencies afflicting our countryside. We should also accelerate the delivery of missing public services, expanded economic opportunities and more knowledge and information to communities long isolated by armed conflict. We urge our political leaders to provide political solutions to our very real problems that continue to kill Filipinos and keep those who survive poor.

Our democracy has the capacity to perform far better than it had done thus far. Whatever imperfections our democracy might have, we can make it work better if we strive daily to strengthen our institutions and if more of our people become responsible citizens. Our most important task is the elimination of the worst miseries of poverty and the lessening of inequities that are the root of all unrest and instability in our beautiful land. Let us dedicate this silver anniversary celebration to our people power revolution’s eventual attainment of this task.



For Reference:

Jesus Estanislao
Former Secretary
Department of Finance
Mobiline: 0918 934 1038

Vicente Paterno
Former Minister
Ministry of Industry
Mobiline: 0917 795 7974

Sixto Roxas
Former Chairman
National Economic Council
Mobiline: 0928 520 3301

Leticia Ramos-Shahani
Former Undersecretary
Deparment of Foreign Affairs
Mobiline: 0915 487 1877

Philippines fails to industrialize, women as drug mules

MANILA--"Maid in the Philippines" was how its top export commodity used to be known, with millions of women from the impoverished country hired abroad as domestic workers.

But as menial jobs vanish in the global recession and opportunities fail to materialize at home, more and more desperate Philippine women are resorting to something far more dangerous -- smuggling drugs as mules.

http://globalnation.inquirer.net/news/breakingnews/view/20110220-321282/Women-drug-mules-pay-as-Philippines-fails-on-jobs

Rural situation, Philippines

About half of the Philippines’ 88 million people live in rural areas. Poverty is most severe and most widespread in these areas and almost 80 per cent of the country’s poor people live there. Agriculture is the primary and often only source of income for poor rural people, most of whom depend on subsistence farming and fishing for their livelihoods. In general, illiteracy, unemployment and the incidence of poverty are higher among indigenous peoples and people living in the upland areas. Overall, more than a third of the people in the Philippines live in poverty.

Click on the link.

http://www.ruralpovertyportal.org/web/guest/country/home/tags/philippines

Systemic dysfunction of society

PUBLIC LIVES

September 2, 2010

Randy David



Leadership in a transitional society



In our society, when something goes wrong, people ask: who’s to blame? Remedy is instantly sought in the replacement of officials rather than in the review of systems. In other societies, the prior question that is asked is: what went wrong? Only after this is answered do heads roll. The focus on personalities is not something unique to us, nor is it inherent in Filipino culture. It is just what differentiates a traditional from a modern society.



The fact that we are in transition only makes our situation a bit more confusing. We have modern systems in various domains of our national life, but these are easily trumped by the traditional authority of powerful and influential figures. The latter typically claim all the credit for successes. But, when failures and breakdowns occur, they quickly point to their limited responsibility under modern rules.



Take our political system. We tend to highlight the deficiencies of leaders, forgetting that they themselves are creations of the same traditional system in which we all play a role and which we help reproduce in our daily lives. In quest of solutions, we like to cast around for heroic individuals who can redeem the deficiencies of an entire society. As a result, our elections become nothing more than exercises in finding someone we can trust at any given moment, and later blame for all the dysfunctions of our society.



Our politicians not only willingly play this game but indeed they encourage it, for that’s how they win votes. Instead of concrete plans and programs of government, they concentrate on fundamental contrasts in personal virtues and endowments. In all this, the systemic character of persistent social problems – poverty, corruption, social injustice, incompetence, etc. – is effectively concealed. And so when these problems explode in our face, the first thing we do is, again, find someone to blame. Sometimes, sensing that the blame should not be heaped on a few people, we go through episodes of collective breast-beating in atonement for our moral failings.



Yet these problems are largely the outcome of structural failings. Catharsis and atonement alone will not make them go away. The governance of a society like ours has become an incredibly complex business. We have not only greatly multiplied in number. Our people’s experiences, values, and beliefs have also become extremely diverse. Our links to the rest of the world have likewise phenomenally expanded. No longer are we merely responsible for ourselves and to ourselves, we are today also answerable to many other peoples around the world whose lives ours are intertwined with ours.



The old ways of governing, dependent upon the performance of strong, charismatic, or extraordinary leaders at the top, are no longer adequate for managing such complexity. They belong to simple hierarchical societies. Modern problems require differentiated institutional systems and reliable professional response. The era of the heroic individual whose direct personal intervention is demanded in every crisis is long past. Modern impersonal systems are built precisely as a way of reducing complexity. They will not work properly, however, when their operation can, at any point, be overridden by the personal decisions of lone rangers.



In a previous column on the hostage crisis that led to the tragic death of eight Hong Kong tourists, I noted that the bungled effort to rescue the hostages could not be ascribed solely to incompetence or lack of equipment on the part of the police. The entire effort seemed marked by “institutional paralysis.” A system was in place for dealing with hostage situations. But, from what we now know, it appears that the police officers in charge were unable to fully activate this system and confidently assert their authority in the presence of the many big shots that were interfering in the operation. In the end, no one in particular was in charge.



We would be mistaken to think that this systemic problem will go away by simply dismissing people ahead of a full report of what happened. This may appease some people, but it will only hide the larger institutional crisis that is upon us. This crisis did not grow overnight, and it will not be solved overnight. Indeed it was allowed to fester over the years, providing the setting for quick fixes like martial law and people power revolutions. At every turning point, the ensuing change never went deep enough to disturb the basic framework of a patronage-driven hierarchical society. It is this whole system that is today in crisis.



Tragic events like Typhoon Ondoy, the Maguindanao massacre, and the hostage crisis at the Quirino grandstand have one thing in common – they all lay bare the dysfunctionality of our existing social system. They underscore the need to review and strengthen our institutions, or, at the very least, free them from the grip of traditional patrons and authority figures. The structural solutions will increasingly become clear to us in time, if we can resist the tendency to moralize and personalize everything.



Perhaps it is a good thing that despite the uniquely personal circumstances that thrust him to the presidency, President Aquino has kept a very low profile. He speaks plainly and almost diffidently, and, instead of projecting an aura of charismatic confidence, is quick to admit lapses. Given the existing political culture, this may not be the most astute demeanor for a new president to project. But it is the best setting in which to strengthen institutions.



public.lives@gmail.com

Probe team, Goodbye

Interview with Cheche Lazaro of Probe.


http://services.inquirer.net/print/print.php?article_id=20100724-282906

Handog ng Pilipino sa Mundo

Why are Filipinos so Poor? By F. Sionil Jose

In the ’50s and ’60s, the Philippines was the most envied country in Southeast Asia. What happened?

By F. Sionil Jose

What did South Korea look like after the Korean War in 1953? Battered, poor – but look at Korea now. In the Fifties, the traffic in Taipei was composed of bicycles and army trucks, the streets flanked by tile-roofed low buildings. Jakarta was a giant village and Kuala Lumpur a small village surrounded by jungle and rubber plantations. Bangkok was criss-crossed with canals, the tallest structure was the Wat Arun, the Temple of the Sun, and it dominated the city’s skyline. Ricefields all the way from Don Muang airport — then a huddle of galvanized iron-roofed bodegas, to the Victory monument.Visit these cities today and weep — for they are more beautiful, cleaner and prosperous than Manila. In the Fifties and Sixties we were the most envied country in Southeast Asia. Remember further that when Indonesia got its independence in 1949, it had only 114 university graduates compared with the hundreds of Ph.D.’s that were already in our universities. Why then were we left behind? The economic explanation is simple. We did not produce cheaper and better products.

The basic question really is why we did not modernize fast enough and thereby doomed our people to poverty. This is the harsh truth about us today. Just consider these: some 15 years ago a survey showed that half of all grade school pupils dropped out after grade 5 because they had no money to continue schooling.Thousands of young adults today are therefore unable to find jobs. Our natural resources have been ravaged and they are not renewable. Our tremendous population increase eats up all of our economic gains. There is hunger in this country now; our poorest eat only once a day.But this physical poverty is really not as serious as the greater poverty that afflicts us and this is the poverty of the spirit.

Why then are we poor? More than ten years ago, James Fallows, editor of the Atlantic Monthly, came to the Philippines and wrote about our damaged culture which, he asserted, impeded our development. Many disagreed with him but I do find a great deal of truth in his analysis.This is not to say that I blame our social and moral malaise on colonialism alone. But we did inherit from Spain a social system and an elite that, on purpose, exploited the masses. Then, too, in the Iberian peninsula, to work with one’s hands is frowned upon and we inherited that vice as well. Colonialism by foreigners may no longer be what it was, but we are now a colony of our own elite.

We are poor because we are poor — this is not a tautology. The culture of poverty is self-perpetuating. We are poor because our people are lazy. I pass by a slum area every morning – dozens of adults do nothing but idle, gossip and drink. We do not save. Look at the Japanese and how they save in spite of the fact that the interest given them by their banks is so little. They work very hard too.

We are great show-offs. Look at our women, how overdressed, over-coiffed they are, and Imelda epitomizes that extravagance. Look at our men, their manicured nails, their personal jewelry, their diamond rings. Yabang – that is what we are, and all that money expended on status symbols, on yabang. How much better if it were channeled into production.

We are poor because our nationalism is inward looking. Under its guise we protect inefficient industries and monopolies. We did not pursue agrarian reform like Japan and Taiwan. It is not so much the development of the rural sector, making it productive and a good market as well. Agrarian reform releases the energies of the landlords who, before the reform, merely waited for the harvest. They become entrepreneurs, the harbingers of change.

Our nationalist icons like Claro M. Recto and Lorenzo Tanada opposed agrarian reform, the single most important factor that would have altered the rural areas and lifted the peasant from poverty. Both of them were merely anti-American.

And finally, we are poor because we have lost our ethical moorings. We condone cronyism and corruption and we don’t ostracize or punish the crooks in our midst. Both cronyism and corruption are wasteful but we allow their practice because our loyalty is to family or friend, not to the larger good.

We can tackle our poverty in two very distinct ways. The first choice: a nationalist revolution, a continuation of the revolution in 1896. But even before we can use violence to change inequities in our society, we must first have a profound change in our way of thinking, in our culture. My regret about EDSA is that change would have been possible then with a minimum of bloodshed. In fact, a revolution may not be bloody at all if something like EDSA would present itself again. Or a dictator unlike Marcos.

The second is through education, perhaps a longer and more complex process. The only problem is that it may take so long and by the time conditions have changed, we may be back where we were, caught up with this tremendous population explosion which the Catholic Church exacerbates in its conformity with doctrinal purity.We are faced with a growing compulsion to violence, but even if the communists won, they will rule as badly because they will be hostage to the same obstructions in our culture, the barkada, the vaulting egos that sundered the revolution in 1896, the Huk revolt in 1949-53.

To repeat, neither education nor revolution can succeed if we do not internalize new attitudes, new ways of thinking. Let us go back to basics and remember those American slogans: A Ford in every garage. A chicken in every pot. Money is like fertilizer: to do any good it must be spread around.Some Filipinos, taunted wherever they are, are shamed to admit they are Filipinos. I have, myself, been embarrassed to explain, for instance, why Imelda, her children and the Marcos cronies are back, and in positions of power. Are there redeeming features in our country that we can be proud of? Of course, lots of them. When people say, for instance, that our corruption will never be banished, just remember that Arsenio Lacson as mayor of Manila and Ramon Magsaysay as president brought a clean government.We do not have the classical arts that brought Hinduism and Buddhism to continental and archipelagic Southeast Asia, but our artists have now ranged the world, showing what we have done with Western art forms, enriched with our own ethnic traditions. Our professionals, not just our domestics, are all over, showing how accomplished a people we are!

Look at our history. We are the first in Asia to rise against Western colonialism, the first to establish a republic. Recall the Battle of Tirad Pass and glory in the heroism of Gregorio del Pilar and the 48 Filipinos who died but stopped the Texas Rangers from capturing the president of that First Republic. Its equivalent in ancient history is the Battle of Thermopylae where the Spartans and their king Leonidas, died to a man, defending the pass against the invading Persians. Rizal — what nation on earth has produced a man like him? At 35, he was a novelist, a poet, an anthropologist, a sculptor, a medical doctor, a teacher and martyr.We are now 80 million and in another two decades we will pass the 100 million mark.

Eighty million — that is a mass market in any language, a mass market that should absorb our increased production in goods and services – a mass market which any entrepreneur can hope to exploit, like the proverbial oil for the lamps of China.
Japan was only 70 million when it had confidence enough and the wherewithal to challenge the United States and almost won. It is the same confidence that enabled Japan to flourish from the rubble of defeat in World War II.
I am not looking for a foreign power for us to challenge. But we have a real and insidious enemy that we must vanquish, and this enemy is worse than the intransigence of any foreign power. We are our own enemy. And we must have the courage, the will, to change ourselves.

F. Sionil Jose, whose works have been published in 24 languages, is also a bookseller, editor, publisher and founding president of the the PhilippinesÕ PEN Center. The foregoing is an excerpt from a speech delivered by Mr. Jose in Manila, Philippines.

Rich and Poor in the land of P-Noy

Editorial
Rich and poor
Philippine Daily Inquirer
19 June 2010


IF ADMINISTRATION OFFICIALS WOULD ONLY bother to see how our Asian neighbors are doing, it might be less effusive in touting President Macapagal-Arroyo’s economic achievements or legacy. For example, a recent report published in the New Straits Times said that in 2009 the number of millionaires in Singapore grew by 35 percent, while those in Malaysia grew by 34 percent. The Boston Consulting Group, which conducted the study, said 11.4 percent of Singaporean households owned more than US$1 million in “investible assets,” a measure of wealth that excludes real property and other non-liquid assets like paintings. That comes up to about 93,000 millionaires in a nation of 4.7 million people. The study also found that 60 percent of households in the island nation had bankable assets worth between US$250,000 and $1 million. And what made this all the more astonishing is that it happened during the same year when the country’s gross domestic product (GDP) shrank by 2.1 percent.

And how did Filipino families fare during the “36 quarters of uninterrupted growth” under the Arroyo administration? There are no comparable figures for the Philippines. But recent computations made by the National Statistical and Coordination Board give us an idea of how we compare with our more progressive neighbor. The computations based on the Family Income and Expenditure Surveys indicate that while the rich may have become richer, their ranks have become thinner. The “rich” here are defined as families with monthly incomes of at least P199,927 or P2,393,126 a year. The average monthly income of families classified as rich today amounts to P235,155, compared to P194,965 in 2006. Romulo Virola, the NSCB secretary general who recently gloated about a “glorious ending” for the Arroyo administration after surprising 7.3 percent in GDP growth during the first quarter, said that in 2006 there were 19,738 rich families (out of an estimated 17.4 million families), less than half the number in 2000 when 51,160 families were classified as rich.

Virola said the decline in the number of rich families “would not have been so bad” if the middle class had expanded at the same time. It did not. As a proportion of all families, those belonging to the middle class (families earning an average of P36,964 monthly today) also declined to 19.1 percent in 2006 from 22.7 percent in 2000. Thus over the same period, i.e., from 2000 to 2006, the proportion of low-income families increased to 80.8 percent from 77 percent. These are families that earn an average of P9,061 a month in 2010.

(Curiously, while the NSCB gives the estimated 2010 incomes for each category—rich, middle class and low-income—it does not have both the absolute number of families in each category or their proportion to the total number of families for the current year.)

If the rich and the not-so-rich have declined in number (or at least as a percentage of the total number of families), where did the fruits of the years of growth go? To the poor obviously, though still not enough to significantly improve their standard of living. The average monthly income of the low-income families has grown to P9,061 in 2010 from P5,766 in 2000, but their monthly expenditures have kept pace, growing to P8,345 from P5,186. While it looks as if some improvement has been made, it is at best marginal. Survey after survey shows more and more people rating themselves poor or complaining of hunger.

At this point it would be futile to even dream of catching up with our more progressive neighbors. But in the end, it matters little how few millionaires we have. What matters most is how many millions of poor we have among us. Cutting their number should be the first priority of government and society.

Poverty and Paolo Mangahas, Essay

Between Poverty and Paradise

Paolo Mangahas head of WWF in Malaysia , recently won an award for this essay

LAST night, I had dinner with a German friend to talk about her planned trip to the Philippines . She had just completed an internship program in one of the law firms here in Malaysia and wanted to take a short holiday in a nearby country before heading off to Australia to finish her studies. She wanted to know more about the Philippines and asked me for tips on making the most of the two-and-a-half weeks that she had allotted for this vacation.

We planned her trip between bites, armed only with a faded map of the Philippines that we had downloaded from the Internet. My goal was to identify all the "must-see" places in the country (her criteria being beaches and volcanoes), plot them according to distance and flight routes, and then cram them all in 17 days. A tall order indeed, especially for someone like me who has never had a sense of direction even in my own neighborhood.

For the life of me, I could not spot where Boracay was on her map. So I took the easy way out and told her to go to Palawan instead.

I carried on with the task like a diligent student trying to remember my geography, starting from the rice terraces in Banaue up north, moving down south to the Mayon Volcano in Bicol and the Chocolate Hills in Bohol . It was an embarrassing ordeal nonetheless as she could see that I was struggling to find all the other attractive destinations on the map, which in turn made me realize how little I truly knew about my own country. She was very excited about the trip and was eager to learn more about the country and its people.

She imagined the Philippines to be an eternal fiesta of Spanish and Chinese Third-World flair, filled with warm and accommodating people who all speak with a clear American accent, where all men have the handsome earthy appeal of Jericho Rosales and women the heavenly mestiza charms of Kristine Hermosa (thanks to Filipino soap operas that have become so popular here in Malaysia ). It was certainly one of the most honest cultural impressions that I have ever heard and quite amusingly, one shared by many. In my German friend's opinion, the Philippines is one of the most open-minded countries in Southeast Asia . I found this view rather interesting, especially since it came from a European who has never stepped foot in the Philippines and whose only direct exposure to the country, was me.

The funny thing about cultural impressions is that they often come from a place of both acute perception and blatant ignorance, split in the middle by what is painfully true. But they are what they are ~ impressions. Quite naturally, my friend and I have come to build our own impressions about Malaysia in the several months that we have been here. Malaysia is a beautiful country that seems to be in a hurry to develop economically, but is hampered by a palpable trace of social reluctance. It seems grounded on an age-old culture that simply does not mix well with progress, or at least the kind dictated and exemplified by the Western world. I find this true for most developing Asian countries, including the Philippines .

My friend pointed out that she has never seen a beggar in the streets of Kuala Lumpur since she moved here and asked me if it is the same in the Philippines . As a matter of fact, she admitted that she has never seen a beggar up close in her whole life and asked me to explain how it is to live in a poor country like mine.

She wanted to know more about poverty. Her question struck a chord in me because I realized that apart from Jericho Rosales, this woman had absolutely no idea about the country where she was going and how it was out there. Here was someone who came to me wanting to know more about my country and the best I could offer was a geographical representation of scenic destinations, which I hardly even knew myself.

By this time, I had put down the pen I was holding, set aside the map, and got ready to explain to her details about my country. I did not know where to begin. After all, how does one explain poverty to someone who has never experienced it before? To make things more relevant to her, I started by comparing the Philippines to Malaysia . I told her that blue-collar workers in the Philippines did not have the same opportunities as the ones in Malaysia , who can afford to eat in the same restaurants where executives eat or even shop in stores where their own bosses shop. I told her that unlike the ones I have met in Malaysia , secretaries and administrative clerks in the Philippines will eat in posh restaurants only on very special occasions and can barely afford to travel to other countries. I then told her about the beggars, young and old, who parade the streets of Manila , the children who knock on car windows selling sampaguita, the mothers who have to forage for food in garbage landfills, and the unemployed fathers who waste their lives on drugs and alcohol. I told her about the shanties that bedeck highways and railroads, the unproductive traffic jams, the garbage-infested streets and sewers, and the regular typhoons that flood the country and exacerbate already poor living conditions. I told her that poverty in the Philippines unapologetically hits you in the face the very moment you step in. It is an open wound just waiting to be healed.

My friend looked shaken, as if experiencing for the first time a world she has seen only on TV. That was when my tears started to fall. I could not help it. I have never cried in front of a semi-stranger before but for some reason, I cried this time because she was still not immune to these things.

Her unawareness taught me to see poverty as if for the first time myself, which brought out a lot of pain. I have become so used to the pain that I have forgotten how it felt until I painted for her the sad face of poverty.

I then found myself having to explain to her that despite all these, the Philippines is still a beautiful country and this you will also feel the very moment you get there. It is a beauty characterized by the indomitable human spirit of a people who have seen better days and yet still have the capacity to find a piece of heaven in their lives. It is a beauty defined by the untiring faith of a people who have learned to acknowledge their plight with reverence and yet have never lost the courage to dream big dreams.

It is a beauty characterized by the painful history of a people who have been abused and pillaged through the years and yet still have so much of themselves to give.

Now her tears were falling, smearing the map that I had earlier vandalized with circles and arrows. But I knew it did not matter anymore at this point.

I realized that my friend had learned all she needed to know about my country and my people. She thanked me profusely, saying that she came to me wanting to know more about how poor the Philippines is but in the end, she learned how abundantly blessed Filipinos are.

A beach is a beach and a volcano is a volcano anywhere in the world, but it is the people who make the difference. I learned in that moment that I may not know the geographical features of my country all too well, but I sure know its heart and its because it is who I am. The real poverty lies in not knowing this.

Vision of Presidentiables? Are there any?

No, no, Noynoy

By Antonio C. Abaya

Written on Aug. 17, 2009

For the Standard Today,

August 18 issue

Reader Vida Royal Manigsaca emailed me on August 8 that “I have questions regarding the sorry state of our country that I want you and your generation to enlighten me about.
It is difficult for me to express them because I don’t want to be regarded as unfair and disrespectful to my elders. Please bear with me. Here they are:

1. Why did our elders fail?
2. How did they fail?

My reply, which was electronically published in my “Reactions to ‘Damaged Control’” was as follows

“Our generation – your elders – failed because we did not produce a Lee Kwan Yew, or a Mahathir Mohamad or a Park Chung Hee. Instead we had a succession of mediocre, insipid, even stupid leaders who could not see beyond their noses and had no economic plan to build a prosperous society. The two who had the brains and could have made a difference – Marcos and Arroyo – turned out to be irremediably corrupt and wasted their time and talents trying to stay longer in power so that they could steal even more.

“Your generation does not show much promise either. Look at those positioning themselves to be president: Manny Villar, Joseph Estrada (again), Chiz Escudero, Loren Legarda, Noli de Castro, Bayani Fernando, Gilbert Teodoro, Ronaldo Puno, Noynoy Aquino, Among Ed Panlilio, Bro. Eddie Villanueva, Jamby Madrigal, Nicky Perlas, Grace Padaca, JC de los Reyes…..and tell me if you can see in any of them even the faintest resemblance to a Lee Kwan Yew or a Mahathir or a Gen. Park. “

My answer, of course, is that none of the above has the makings of a Lee Kwan Yew or a Mahathir or a Gen. Park. And yet it is someone who has the qualities of these three foreign leaders that the Philippines badly needs in order to overcome decades of consistently poor governance, restore our badly battered self esteem, and draw for us a credible vision of what we want our country to be.

We need someone like Lee Kwan Yew who was/is personally incorruptible and at the same time was/is so conversant with economics and international relations that he could speak ex-tempore and defend his policies before an assembly of multinational CEOs and diplomats and made/make solid sense, whether they agreed/agree with him or not.

In addition we need the strong sense of nationalism of Mahathir Mohamad who in the 1980s drew a vision – Malaysia Vision 2020, that sought and seeks to transform Malaysia into a fully industrialized country by the year 2020 – that he was able to convince the multi-ethnic, multi-cultural, and multi-religious people of Malaysia to embrace as worthy of their national loyalty, beyond the narrow appeals of their tribes and ethnic groups. No mean feat, considering the catastrophic demise of equally multi-ethnic, multi-cultural, multi-religious federal Yugoslavia in the 1990s that cost hundreds of thousands of lives.

Mahathir’s nationalism also expressed itself in his readiness to fearlessly fire back at other countries, other world leaders, as well as international agencies whenever he felt they were trampling on the national self-interests of Malaysia.

We also need the single-minded determination of Gen. Park Chung Hee to transform his impoverished, resource-poor and inconsequential Republic of Korea from 1961 to 1979 (when he was assassinated) into a fully industrialized country that is now one of the ten biggest economies in the world.

Compared to these three giants, most of the contenders for the Philippine presidency in 2009 are mere pygmies, bereft of any national vision aside from having themselves installed in the highest office, and devoid of real substance, like puffed-up balloons, the products of clever political marketing through self-serving infomercials, generous praise releases from hyperactive PR technicians, and lavish but undeserved hoohahs from mercenary columnists….. and not much else.

Noynoy Aquino is only slightly different from the rest of the pack. His sole claim to fame is that he is the son of Ninoy and Cory and the brother of Kris. Through many years in the Lower House and in the Senate, he has not succeeded in establishing his own political persona. Perhaps he has not even tried, content as he may have been to bask in the reflected glory of his forebears and his famous sibling.

Are these the attributes of a revolutionary leader? No. And yet this is what the Philippines needs, a leader who can start and lead a revolution, a peaceful one, as much as possible; a violent one, if necessary.

I do not know what Noynoy has accomplished nor what he believes in, that I must vote for him for president. What have you done and what do you propose to do if you were to become president? The same rule-of-thumb by which I measure others, especially Chiz Escudero and Gilbert Teodoro, two young men in a hurry to become president, but without any solid accomplishment to their credit, without any clear idea of what they would do if and when they got there.

It is not enough that you have a glib tongue in criticizing the many shortcomings of the Arroyo administration (Escudero), or that you went to Harvard Law School and was a bar topnotcher (Teodoro). What have you accomplished, and what do you propose to do if you were to become president?

By the same token, it is not enough that you are the son of Ninoy and Cory and the brother of Kris, Noynoy. What have you accomplished and what do you propose to do if you were to become president?

If his endorsers hope to connect Noynoy subliminally with his mother Cory Aquino’s People Power “Revolution” of 1986, then they would be making a mistake. By many accounts, including mine, the most notable thing about that “Revolution” was that it did not result in anything revolutionary, aside from removing the over-staying dictator.

For all her many admirable attributes, Cory Aquino was no revolutionary. She looked backward, towards restoring our polity to its pre-1972 configuration. She had no vision for the future, for building a New Jerusalem.

We cannot afford to have another backward-looking president, who wants to restore our polity to a pre-Arroyo configuration. That would be nothing less than – Holy Mother of God! – an Erap restoration.

We need a forward-looking president, a truly revolutionary president, someone with the attributes and visions of Lee Kwan Yew, Mahathir Mohamad and Gen. Park Chung Hee.

That is why Noynoy (and Chiz and Gibo) must tell us what he and they have done and what they propose to do if he and they were to become president.

No, no, Noynoy. Being the son of Ninoy and Cory and the brother of Kris are not enough to reward you with the presidency. You must develop your own political persona, and part of that persona are your accomplishments in the past and your vision for the future.. *****

Cory Aquino - New York Times

Corazon Cojuangco Sumulong Aquino 1933-2009.

Cory Aquino 76, 1933-2009

Follow the link on Cory Aquino by BBC: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/7324443.stm

Mexico and the Philippines

Mexico and the Philippines shares the same story with the financial crisis due to the American subprime.

Click on the above link for the article.

No Better Idea by Antonio Abaya

No Better Idea

By Antonio C. Abaya

Written on Dec. 17, 2008

For the Standard Today,

December 18 issue

This should be titled Anachronistic III as it is a sequel to the previous articles of the same title, and it seeks to answer the question of Can the Arroyo Government defeat the Communist insurgency by the year 2010, as it pompously claims it will.

My answer to that question is No.

The successful countries around us defeated their Communist insurgencies, in the 60s and 70s, by a combination of a) draconian measures that hounded their Communists without let-up, and b) a broad-based prosperity, brought about by correct economic strategies that made Communist ideology irrelevant and uninteresting to most of their people..

Such draconian measures, exemplified by the Internal Security Act (ISA) that the Malaysian and Singaporean governments inherited from the British colonial government aimed at destroying the above-ground front organizations of the Communist movement, even ahead of the armed guerillas.

In pursuit of that strategy, the ISA empowered the Malaysian and Singaporean governments to legally and constitutionally arrest and detain, indefinitely and without trial, anyone merely suspected of being a Communist or Communist sympathizer.

But that was in the 60s and 70s, at the height of the Cold War, when Communism was considered a global threat and the Soviet Union and Maoist China actually lived up to that reputation by sponsoring and arming "wars of national liberation" in Asia, Africa and Latin America.

At the same time that they marginalized their Communist malcontents with draconian measures, Malaysia and Singapore laid the groundwork for broad-based prosperity in the 70s and 80s by gearing their economies towards the export manufactured goods and by riding the tourism boom in the 90s. (The Philippines did neither one.)

So for the average Malaysian and Singaporean citizen, there was a trade-off. In exchange for diminished civil and political rights – much of which continue to the present – they enjoyed general prosperity that reached all levels of their multi-racial societies.

Such was not the case in the Philippines, where the authoritarian President Ferdinand Marcos employed only half-baked measures against the local Communist movement and at the same time did very little to upgrade the Philippine economy from archaic import substitution to the more wealth-creating export of manufactured goods.

For example, at the same time that he allowed his military to assassinate selected Communist leaders, he also permitted the Communist-led labor unions of the KMU to organize openly and to stage strike after strike against our few export-oriented industries (e.g. garments factories) until their owners got fed up and moved their factories to other countries.

This would never have been allowed at all by the constitutional authoritarians of Malaysia and Singapore, much less by the military governments that ruled South Korea, Taiwan, Indonesia and Thailand in the 70s and 80s.

In the first decade of the 21^st century, Communism has faded as a global threat, having collapsed from the accumulated weight of its failures in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union in 1989-91 and the calibrated transformation of China (since 1979) and Vietnam (since 1986) into capitalist economies.

Any attempt now to revive the draconian anti-Communist measures that were standard in the region in the 60s, 70s and 80s would be universally condemned and would make the Philippines an international pariah. It would dry up the flow of foreign direct investments and official development aid for this country.

At the same time, having missed the exports bus in the 70s and 80s and the tourism bus in the 90s, the Philippines does not enjoy the broad-based prosperity that is self-evident in South Korea, Taiwan, China, Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand, and even in Indonesia and Vietnam.

Given this absence of broad-based prosperity and the now political incorrectness of draconian measures against the Communist movement, it is hard to envision how President Arroyo can live up to her promise of defeating the Communist insurgency by 2010.

A credible, visionary president, armed with a Better Idea, could conceivably overcome these handicaps and convince the remaining 5,000 Communist insurgents to abandon the armed struggle and return to the mainstream. It is safe to assume that most of them are no longer ideologically driven but are merely reacting to conditions of social injustice, poor governance and hopeless poverty.

But President Arroyo is neither a visionary nor is she credible. Her concept of a Better Idea is limited to looking for creative ways to remain in power beyond 2010. Unless she steps down or is removed by force, there is no future for this country. *****

Reactions to tonyabaya@gmail.com. Other articles in www.tapatt.org and in acabaya.blogspot.com.

Is there hope in the Philippines?

Is there hope in the Philippines? If there is where does it lie?

The article written by Antonio C. Abaya is very timely for we as Filipinos should think critically on this island nation's direction.

Read along.

Anachronistic

By Antonio C. Abaya

Written on Nov. 24, 2008

For the Standard Today,

November 25 issue

The topic assigned to me was "Defeating the Communist insurgency."

But I told my audience last Friday, Nov. 21, that talking about "defeating the Communist insurgency" was anachronistic because Communism itself has become anachronistic.

My audience was composed of military officers, local government officials, and representatives of various government agencies, taking a five-day seminar on national security at Camp Aguinaldo under the direction of the National Defense College of the Philippines.

Our neighbors in East and Southeast Asia had defeated their Communist insurgencies decades ago, by taking draconian measures against their insurgents: Malaysia and Singapore, by using their Internal Security Act (ISA), inherited from the British colonial government, which gave both governments the right to throw in jail, indefinitely and without trial, anyone suspected of being a Communist or a Communist sympathizer; South Korea, Taiwan and Thailand – confrontational states vis-à-vis North Korea and Maoist China - by crushing the Communist movements in their territories during their periods of military rule in the 70s and 80s; Indonesia by a bloodbath against the Parti Komunis Indonesia which had tried to grab power by machine-gunning to death almost the entire military high command in Halim Air Base outside Jakarta in September 1965. Estimates vary from 300,000 to two million on the number of suspected Communists and Communist sympathizers summarily executed by the military in their counter-coup.

But to use such draconian measures now against our Communist insurgents would no longer be fashionable and would just make this country an international pariah, and would dry up investments and official development aid..

Even before the first decade of the 21^st century, Communism has faded as a global threat, having imploded from the accumulated weight of its own failures.

In 1989, millions of East Europeans – Poles, Hungarians, Czechs, etc – literally walked out on their Communist regimes in a spontaneous, leaderless and largely bloodless (except in Romania) civil revolt, People Power in its purest form, that forced their Communist governments to resign.

In 1991, a similar civil revolt broke out in Moscow, primed by the glasnost and perestroika reforms of Mikhail Gorbachev and inspired by the defiance of the Eastern Europeans. The 15-state Union of Soviet Socialist Republics collapsed and the Communist Party of the Soviet Union was even outlawed, ironically in the very country where the first Communist revolution had triumphed, only to be restored months later.

Since 1979, Maoism as the definitive national ideology was slowly and systematically dismantled in China by the pragmatic Deng Xiaoping, who restored capitalism and the profit motive, a counter-revolutionary transformation which propelled China to the status of an economic super-power in less than 30 years.

Communism is dead. The only Communists left in Europe are two Filipinos: Jose Ma. Sison and Luis Jalandoni. And even Joma has admitted that the victory of Communism, once considered by its gibbering true believers as inevitable and imminent, would now take "hundreds of years." (See my article 'Hundreds of Years' of Nov. 14, 2006, archived in www.tapatt.org.)

But why is there still a Communist insurgency in the Philippines?

Largely because of the failure of successive Philippine presidents, from Marcos to Arroyo, to build an export-oriented economy. And also due to the failure of these same presidents to conceptualize and articulate a Better Idea. Communism is an Idea. To defeat it, one must have a Better Idea.

In my article Why Are We Poor? of Dec. 14, 2004 and subsequent articles, all archived in www.tapatt.org, I listed down the economic missteps that successive Philippine governments committed in the past fifty years.

One. The passage of the Minimum Wage Law in the late 1950s, which discouraged American companies from locating their factories in the Philippines. They located them instead in Taiwan and Hong Kong because wages there were lower (believe it or not) than here and there was no statutory minimum wage.

Two. In the 1970s, South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore and Hong Kong (then a British colony) geared their economies towards the export of manufactured goods. The Philippines did not, content as we were with import substitution.

Three. In the 1980s, Malaysia, Thailand and Suharto's Indonesia followed the original Four Asian Tigers above in gearing their economies towards the export of manufactured goods. The Philippines did not. What few export industries Marcos managed to set up were deliberately wrecked by the Communist KMU unions which staged strike after strike against them, until their owners got fed up and moved their factories to other countries.

When I started writing a column in 1987, I kept on hammering on the theme of export—oriented industries, but President Aquino and her group of allegedly 50 advisers ignored my counsel. It was President Ramos in 1992 onwards who seriously went into export industries., but by then it was too late: China was emerging as the dominant producer and exporter of manufactured goods. (FVR himself told me that he kept a file of my articles, which was confirmed by an American academic who was researching on the Philippine military.)

Four. President Ramos worked at cross purposes with his own export initiative by accepting the advice of Opus Dei economists Jess Estanislao and Bernie Villegas, who pushed for an accelerated embrace of free trade and globalization, even ahead of fully developed South Korea and Taiwan. The resultant flood of imports drowned local producers, causing them to stop or reduce operations, forcing millions of Filipino workers to look for work overseas.

Five. In the 1990s, the Philippines failed to ride the tourism boom, just as we had failed to ride the export boom earlier. In 1991, Indonesia and the Philippines had exactly the same number of tourist arrivals :one million. In 2007, Indonesia had six million; we managed only three million. (Malaysia had 16 million, Thailand 13 million).

Six. The Philippines failed to manage its population growth. In the 1970s, Thailand and the Philippines had the same population size, 45 million. Because it had an active and successful population management program, Thailand's population grew to only 65 million in 2007, while the Philippines', which did not have one, grew to 89 million.

By any yardstick, it is easier to feed, clothe, house, educate and provide jobs for 65 million people than for 89 million.

Prosperity is about jobs. Let us not even talk about South Korea, Taiwan and Singapore because they are so far ahead of us, having embarked on the export of manufactured goods as far back as the 1970s. In 2006, South Korea's exports totaled $326 billion, Taiwan's $216 billion, Singapore's $283.7 billion.

Let's talk of Malaysia, whose exports in 2006 totaled $158.7 billion, compared to the Philippines' $47.2 billion, or a difference of $111.5 billion. If we follow the rule of thumb that one billion dollars worth of exports create 100,000 manufacturing jobs, we can conclude that our failure in exports cost us about 11 million foregone jobs.

And consider also that in 2007, Malaysia attracted 16 million tourists, compared to our three million, or a difference of 13 million. If we follow the rule of thumb that one million tourists create 100,000 tourism-related jobs, we can conclude that our failure in tourism cost us another 1.3 million foregone jobs.

So our combined failures in exports and tourism cost us 12.3 million foregone jobs, one and a half times the number of Filipinos forced to work overseas because they could not find jobs here. It is the difference between prosperity and poverty and explains why a Communist insurgency continues to fester here, long after Communism became anachronistic. (To be concluded) *****

Conclusion:

In the first part of this essay, I had written that the ultimate reason why a Communist insurgency still lingers in the Philippines, decades after our neighbors had solved their Communist insurgencies, is the failure of one Philippine president after another, from Ferdinand Marcos to Gloria Arroyo, to create broad-based prosperity.

In the East and Southeast Asian context, this failure was caused by wrong choices in economic strategies and policies, most especially in exports and in tourism. Two other East and Southeast Asian countries share our failure: North Korea and Myanmar, both of which have followed autarkic economic policies – meaning they were not interested in importing or exporting anything. Both countries have also deliberately shunned the presence of foreigners, tourists and otherwise, out of a deep-seated xenophobia.

But in the case of the Philippines, our failures in exports and tourism were not the result of deliberate autarkic and xenophobic policies, but rather the result of poor, mediocre, myopic, unimaginative, even stupid, leadership at the very top, from Marcos to Arroyo.

Marcos is pilloried for having been corrupt and authoritarian. But all the other leaders in East and Southeast Asia in the 1970s were corrupt and authoritarian, with the possible exception of Singapore's Lee Kwan Yew, who was also authoritarian but was apparently incorruptible.

The greatest sin of Marcos, I told my audience at Camp Aguinaldo, was his failure to build an export-oriented economy for the Philippines, as the other Asian leaders had succeeded for their countries at that time.

The Communists and nationalists blame our poverty on the Americans, the Japanese, the IMF and the World Bank. But neither the Americans nor the Japanese, nor the IMF nor the World Bank exerted any pressure on us NOT to develop export industries or tourism. These were the sovereign choices of our leaders, and they have been proven spectacularly wrong.

I wrote in the first part of this essay that our failure in exports and tourism, compared to Malaysia's success, cost us 12.3 million foregone jobs, one and a half times the number of Filipinos forced to work abroad because they could not find gainful employment in the Philippines, jobs that our domestic economy failed to create because of wrong and poor choices in economic policies and strategies.

The export of manufactured goods was the basis for the industrialization of our neighbors which enabled tens of millions of their citizens to rise from poverty to middle-class status. Broad-based prosperity, generated by exports of manufactured goods, dulled any interest in and appetite for Marxist-Leninist-Maoist revolution.

Aided in no small measure by successful efforts to slow down population growth. As I wrote in comparing Thailand and the Philippines, it is far easier to feed, clothe, house, educate and provide jobs for (Thailand's) 65 million people than for (our) 89 million.

The growth of enterprises in their export-oriented economies mopped up their pools of unemployed and underemployed, thus raising wages and salaries without the crutch of a minimum wage law, as entrepreneurs bid higher and higher for the workers and employees that they needed

In the light of the current economic crisis ravaging the entire world, there is an upside to our failures. As millions of people in the developed and developing countries lose their jobs and/or reduce their family expenses, markets for everything – including foreign tourism and imported manufactures – will shrink in the next two to four years.

As the East and Southeast Asian country with the least developed export and tourism sectors, the Philippines will suffer the least from the global meltdown, not because of any astute defensive measures taken by our stupid leaders, but because we just happen to have accumulated the least crockery that can be broken as the financial tsunami sweeps through our neighborhood.. This is our consuelo de bobo.

The tsunami also means that, for the time being, exports and tourism will not generate the GDP needed to raise tens of millions of Filipinos from poverty to middle-class status, as they did in the 1970s, 80s and 90s in other Asian countries. It is the enduring tragedy of us Filipinos that, having missed the exports and tourism buses in the past, because of the myopia and stupidity of our leaders, we now see that there is no bus going anywhere anytime soon.

While the tsunami is raging worldwide, GDP has to generated largely in the domestic economy. This means domestic producers have to be encouraged to start and expand their enterprises, with the domestic market, by necessity, their target market. This also means that global trade has to be conducted on a fair or managed trade basis, not on a free trade basis, despite the hue and clamor against protectionism in the recently concluded APEC Summit in Lima, Peru..

Under free trade – embraced foolishly by Gloria Arroyo, even while she was still a senator – rich and developed economies will always have advantages over poor and developing ones. Rich and developed countries have the capital, the technology, the marketing connections to overwhelm poor and underdeveloped ones with their products.

Poor and developing countries will never manage to develop their economies – and generate the jobs they need to survive - if they are overwhelmed right from the start by the superior products of rich and developed ones.

Under fair and managed trade, poor countries should have the option of choosing which products they can import and from which countries, so as to protect their producers and their workers from being overwhelmed by floods of imports, under the rubric of reciprocity. Nations will have to come to mutual agreements that "we will buy your products a, b and c, but only if you will buy our products x, y and z, in more or less equal measures."

This may be the direction that President-elect Obama is heading, after he promised the American electorate that he would create "five million jobs that cannot be outsourced." My sense is that American producers and American jobs will be protected under an Obama administration, and rightly so. Copycat Filipinos should do no less.

President Arroyo is correct in proposing a P100 billion package to stimulate the Philippine economy through a crash public works program. The US has set aside a similar bailout package now totaling $1.5 trillion, China more than $530 billion, parts of both of which will go into public works spending.

This would be similar to the New Deal emergency employment program launched by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in the 1930s to pull the US economy out of Depression. Which, for the information of McCain-Palin supporters who labeled Obama a "socialist", was socialistic and against the tenets of laissez faire capitalism.

In the Philippine context, however, caveats have to be raised: how much of those P100 billion will really go into building infrastructure and generating jobs, how much will get attached to the sticky fingers of President Arroyo's relatives and favored bureaucrats, and how much will go into bribing congressmen and women into passing ChaCha that will allow her to stay in power beyond 2010 as prime minister? *****

Reactions to tonyabaya@gmail.com. Other articles in www.tapatt.org and in acabaya.blogspot.com.