Category: economy

marck, edel, benignO

over @ the collective filipino voices, young blogger marck ronald rimorin laments:

When are people going to write for the poor, the downtrodden, the laid-off, the fired, the underpaid, the hungry, the sick, the ill… those people who are as sickened about everything as we are, yet don’t have the benefit of blogs or computers to do what they can of it, no matter how small?

radical u.p. intellectual edel garcellano, “sir” edel to many generations of comparative lit students, has this comment on bloggers post-bambi that might explain why it aint gonna happen, marck.

The ANC journalists find blogging the most competitive for mainstream media. Now anyone can infiltrate the public sphere when once in the pre-cyber years only the favored & the ideologically acceptable icons could smugly perorate.

Bloggers of varied IQ & credentials can deliver their daily spiel in cyberspace. Let a hundred flowers bloom? There are, of course, the attendant risks of libel & other judicial threats in a feudal environment, but the current scenario simply exemplifies that the huge energy of counter-discourse is being tapped to mount an offensive against the canonical satraps of state apparati.

This is what the valley golf brawl has uncovered: the rise of cyber critics, who responsible or not, middling or talented, tilt the balance in favor of the unarticulated response, the publicly repressed, the individually marginalized. The personal-& the quotidian, the everyday-has assumed the political: & militarist mentors are hard put to clamp the irreverent folks in jail, much less stem the textual avalanche. In the techno-terrain, words transform, mutilate.

Of course, bloggers must necessarily be middle-class, professional. No informal settlers would figure in the equation, even if OFWs infest their fold. The discourse therefore is basically extension/amplification of capitalist production, some internal resistance that however falls within the ambit of reformist negotiation. The very idea therefore of a radical dialogue isfar-fetched.

It might even cultivate the impression that freedomflourishes in a fascist state. For which a Maoist revolution is old hat, impractical, naïve, discredited.

yes, the discourse is reformist rather than radical.  most if not all bloggers are middle-class and the middle-class is, at best, reformist — we want changes, an end to corruption (which we think will solve poverty) but nothing too drastic, nothing that would rock the boat or upset the status quo.  in contrast, “radical” is associated (and outlawed) with the communist left and means drastic deep-seated changes in the way wealth and resources are distributed and how we do business with each other as a people.  the kind of discourse that threatens and shakes the status quo, indeed the kind of discourse (in filipino) that can be found elsewhere in the blogosphere, but not in sosyal fv.

HOWEVER, fv is not entirely without substance.  i hate to disagree with practically everyone who has ever dissed and continues to diss marck’s co-blogger benignO.  i’ve just been to his blog getrealphilippines — i visited once long ago to check out his ebook but was turned off, i don’t remember why now, senior moment ;) — the book’s gone, in its place a brief analysis of and solutions to the poverty and backwardness of the filipino that is the best stuff i’ve read so far on the subject from a filipino (okay, filipino-australian), who is obviously influenced by third wave thinkers and informed by the filipino experience, and whose context of solutions is actually another way of redistributing the wealth and doing business with each other as a people.  his current post substance matters in an economic crisis is also worth cross-posting @fv.

Decades of dependence on foreign employment (and a lack of appreciation of its social costs), sustained prostitution of the economy at the altar of the gods of “foreign direct investment”, and a consumer market opened to a flood of non-durable imports has rendered Philippine society one that utterly lacks substance — one that could now be providing a safety net for workers once hailed as “heroes” of the Republic now returning to become its burden.

it’s a pity that rather than flesh out, test, develop further his ideas @  fv — the perfect venue, i’d say — mostly benigno heckles and baits and asks hard questions, the latest of which is:  what does “the filipino” stand for?

Even as we struggle with the low bar of defining an identity, the aim for a stand – the higher bar – I realise seems a virtual impossibility for a people such as ours based on what I’ve seen so far.

What does the “Filipino” stand for?

The question remains unanswered; not that it ever will be convincingly.

Then again isn’t conquest of perceived impossibility the very essence of achievement? Maybe not so if you are a Filipino. And that kind of regard for achievement is probably what defines us.

what does “the filipino” stand for?  right now “the filipino” (collective, as opposed to the individual) does not stand for anything, much like fv, which does not stand for any one thing that the group as a whole can agree on — if there is, it has yet to be articulated.  in the case of the nation, the possibility of standing for something, the capacity to stand for something, has yet to be grasped, thanks to mainstream media that continue to fail the people.

economic experts urge: fix rate @ 55php to 1$

now that we know for sure, thanks to the world bank and senator miriam defensor santiago, that corruption is alive and doing very well under gloria macapagal arroyo, lalong nakakatakot at nakakailang all the talk about stimulus funds, a whopping php330 billion, to be spent on infrastructure in aid of generating jobs, raising consumption, and weathering the global recession.  u.p. economics professor, once budget secretary, benjamin diokno is right:

“Big projects take time to implement and a big chunk of the funds are usually lost to corruption,” he told reporters at the sidelines of the Export Development Council forum on Thursday at the Hotel Sofitel.

What the country needs during these difficult times, he said, are easily implementable and quickly felt initiatives.

more than ever, professor diokno’s recommendation that the exchange rate be fixed at 55php to 1$ seems infinitely more sound, if the idea is truly to pump-prime the economy before things get worse.  writes filomeno s. sta. ana of action for economic reforms:

Benjamin Diokno’s proposal to peg the exchange rate at PhP 55 to a US dollar is gaining a broader constituency.The exchange-rate debate is no longer an esoteric one, confined to finance executives, exporters, and academic economists.

Those engaged in the manufacture of import substitutes now recognize that a competitive exchange rate can be a better alternative to tariffs to protect domestic industry and jobs. The tourism industry also sees the importance of the exchange rate, aside from its freedom-to-fly advocacy, for the country to draw in bigger numbers of inbound tourists.The BPO (business processing and outsourcing) industry has seen how a rapidly appreciating peso (in 2007) can sharply cut profit margins. Note that some of the Philippine corporate giants—the Henry Sy family and the Ayalas, for example—have stakes in the tourism or BPO industry.


The largest constituency that has added its voice for a competitive exchange rate is made up of the overseas Filipino workers (OFWs).They are highly organized and politically articulate.… Specifically, undervaluing the peso by fixing the exchange rate at PhP 55.00 to US$ 1.00 from the current PhP 47.00 to US$ 1.00 is a pump-priming tool to boost consumption.Thus, for every US dollar that an overseas Pinoy sends home to her family, the latter obtains an additional PhP8.00.In a manner, that’s a windfall gain of 17 percent based on the present exchange rate.In the aggregate, assuming that the US$15 billion in OFW remittances in 2008 will hold, we can expect an additional PhP 120 billion in the pockets of OFW families in 2009.

meanwhile, instead of spending the 330 billion bucks on the usual infrastructure projects in urban areas most of that stimulus fund could be spent on farm-to-market roads and irrigation systems that would pump-prime the agricultural sector so we can produce our own rice, among other crops, instead of relying on imports.

but of course we’re going to hear objections from the globalists, not least of them the gma camp.  says men sta. ana:

A criticism that the Diokno proposal cannot evade is that a currency undervaluation is improper at a time of a global economic crisis.The deep recession that has hit the advanced economies requires global collective action.Beggar-thy-neighbor practices such as devaluing the currency will undermine the recovery of hard-hit countries that suffer from current account deficits and overvalued currencies.

but really it’s about time we started thinking of ourselves first, what’s best for us, which is what other nations are doing, worrying about themselves first.  sabi nga ni senador manny villar:

“We have to think on our own and come out with an economic model that is suited to the Philippines,” he said.

“It is no longer automatic that what is good for others is good for us. We have the intellectual capacity to decide on the model that we should follow and not depend on other countries,” Villar said.

He said the country has a large pool of economists, both in the government and the private sector, who could be tapped to formulate an economic model for the Philippines.

Villar explained the economic models used by western governments and international organizations have turned out to be ineffective in preventing the housing credit problem in the United States from developing into a global crisis.

“The global financial crisis has crunched or destroyed some conventional economic thinking, particularly the Washington consensus. When we finally get out of this crisis we will find that things will never be the same again,” the senator said.

“First, we have been led to believe that big is good, so we encourage consolidations, mergers, combinations, like in the banking system,” he said. “However, the collapse or near-collapse of the world’s biggest banks – UBS, Citigroup, Bank of America and, of course, Lehman – has shattered this once-held gospel truth,” he pointed out. “Big is not necessarily good because being too big also means being unwieldy,” Villar added.

He also said the crisis has shattered belief that less government intervention is better.

“In reality, we know now that the damage wrought on the global economy would have been far greater if governments did not intervene,” he noted.

a new economic model, one appropriate to our strengths and cognizant of our weaknesses, is exactly what we need to turn things around, and not a copy-cat model based on whatever obama manages to work out with europe, russia, and china.

finally, wise words from a presidentiable.  of course he has yet to comment on diokno’s proposal of a 55-to-1 exchange rate.  if he says yes, he  just might get my vote.