… This is what has been largely missing in the campaign for the 2013 elections—a serious debate on desirable strategies for achieving national prosperity.

We have been treated to endless mantras about free public education, stable jobs, lower prices, lower taxes, etc.

I have yet to hear anyone talk about the need for frugality and sharing—in the light of our limited resources and the scandalous disparities in wealth and income that divide our people.

Everyone seems to accept the primacy of economic growth as a national goal, with little regard for the environmental consequences.

Everyone seems to concede that the ultimate goal of every Filipino is to earn as much money as possible to be able to satisfy desires that the market itself incessantly creates.

We talk of the need to radically change our way of life. Elections should be the occasion for discussing what exactly needs changing, why, and how we can all take part in the effort.

~ Randy David

By Giovanni Tapang, Ph.D.

It is disheartening to hear from the Presidential spokesperson, Edwin Lacierda, …that “national industrialization is passe.” He issued this statement as he announced the termination of the government’s negotiations with the National Democratic Front. It now appears that government policy, as reflected by its stance on the peace negotiations, no longer considers building our domestic industrial economy an important goal for this administration.

Read on…

… it is ideology that allows Teddy to have a clear sense of a framework for nation, one that allows him to actually run on a platform. And when I say that, I mean that there is an answer to problems, there are clear solutions to the crises upon crises that this nation faces. When I say ideological, I mean that his is a platform that doesn’t talk about national issues as if these are disparate from each other; instead it reminds us about how everything is connected and how fundamental change has to mean working with these connections, working on the idea of systemic change. 

… all the hard work of the candidates and their supporters can be negated by what Information Technology people call the Automated Garci – or the automated dagdag-bawas operation. How dagdag-bawas operations can be pulled off with the automated electoral system in place is discussed by several IT experts of the volunteer group AES Watch in the newly published book Was your vote counted.

It has been long in coming, but each lesbian, gay, bisexual and trangender Pinoy and Pinay would do themselves well to choose #28 on that long list made up of mostly bogus party-list organizations. It would do us all well too, to vote for the LGBTs in our midst, the ones who are our friends and co-workers, the people we admire and those in our families. I will vote for my best friends and my teachers, I will vote for the fairy godmothers who I grew up with, I will vote for the artists who continue to create, despite. There is every reason to vote for the LGBTs in our lives.

 ~ Katrina S.S.

… In Why Nations Fail, economists Acemoglu and Robinson provide a brilliant explanation on how progress and development is largely a function of ‘inclusive’ — as opposed to extractive — governance. Using their dichotomy, the Philippines clearly falls within the extractive category, whereby the core-elite have blocked appropriate policies, which would have made the country a true democracy, anchored by a large middle class, an entrepreneurial sector, and strong institutions spurring growth and innovation. Therefore, in many ways, the developmental failure of the Philippines has something to do with its weak and divided state, which seldom had the right ‘policy space’ to make optimal economic decisions. Throughout the post-War period, the Philippine state has either been at the mercy of entrenched elites, pushing for particularistic interests and blocking policies/legislations aimed at national development, or international financial institutions (IFIs), which have prescribed counterproductive policies, notably ‘Structural Adjustment Programs’ (SAPs), causing tremendous poverty, social dislocation, agricultural decline and ‘de-industrialization’ across the developing world. Sometimes, the Philippines was at the mercy of both...

~ Richard Javad Heydarian