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| ON THE OTHER HAND |
| Where We Are Headed By Antonio C. Abaya September 19, 2002 Before an assembled audience of more than a hundred executives and officers of the Lopez Group of Companies (Meralco, Bayantel, First Gas, ABS-CBN, etc), which I had been invited by Chairman Oscar Lopez to give a briefing to, I outlined what I thought were the key developments in the past 40 years which help explain the situation now and which could give us a clue as to what may happen in the coming two to five years. First, the situation at present. It is one of despondency and despair as reflected in the recent spate of public opinion surveys, by various credible polling organizations, that told us, among other things, that 19% of Filipinos consider the Philippines a hopeless country and would move to other shores if they could; that only 35% of Filipinos are happy with the way democracy is working here; that 52% say that life is getting worse, and only 15% say that life is getting better; that 38% believe that economic prospects here will worsen and only 17% believe they will improve. Etc. (The results of these surveys and my earlier comments on them are archived in the website www.tapatt.org). How did things come to such a pass, especially in a country that used to have the second highest standard of living in Asia, second only to Japan�s? Regular readers of this column know that I have two pet theories about this. One, the minimum wage law, which came into being in the mid-1950s, discouraged American manufacturers from setting up shop here in the 1960s, locating their factories instead in Hong Kong and Taiwan. This despite the fact that Filipino workers spoke and understood some English (most Chinese workers did not), and despite the fact that Filipino workers and employees were at home with American business practices (most Chinese workers and employees were not). The compelling reasons for locating in Hong Kong and Taiwan, rather than here, were the facts that wages in Hong Kong and Taiwan were, believe it or not, lower than wages here then, and, more important, were not mandated by a minimum wage law. Two, the Philippines did not get around to trying to develop an export-oriented economy until it was too late. In the 1970s, South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore deliberately geared their economies to the export of manufactured goods. In the 1980s, Malaysia, Thailand and Indonesia also took this tack, in addition to their traditional export of commodities. The Philippines did not follow suit until the 1990s, by which time the global marketplace was becoming overcrowded and highly competitive, especially with the entry of the People�s Republic of China. Having been crippled by the minimum wage law and having been left out of the export boom, the Philippines became the economic laggard in the neighborhood, unable to create enough jobs for its people, forcing millions of us to seek employment abroad. This also had the effect of fuelling the spread of criminality and lawlessness, which in turn discouraged even more investors from putting their money and factories here, thus compounding the problems of rising unemployment and low tax revenues. It also made the growing armies of the unemployed lumpen proletariat vulnerable to communist agitprop that their poverty was caused by the greed of the elite ruling class, the corruption in the burgis government, the inhumanity of the capitalist system and the machinations of the evil Americans who want to keep Filipinos poor, barefoot and pregnant (why, it has never been adequately explained to me). Two other extenuating circumstances have added to our growing catalogue of woes: one, rapid population growth has literally eaten up most of the modest economic gains we have managed to achieve; two, the freedom enjoyed by the communist movement here (but not in our successful neighbors) to infiltrate and agitate almost every sector of society has just about guaranteed that no president will ever be allowed to succeed since a successful president would be fatal to their socialist revolution. In the 2002 World Almanac and Book of Facts, the population growth rates of the countries of East Asia are listed as follows: Taiwan 0.83%, Singapore 0.86%, South Korea 0.89%, Thailand 0.91%, China, including Hong Kong, 0.92%, Indonesia 1.60%, Malaysia 1.96%, the Philippines 2.13%. (These data may be a tad outdated: the growth rate for the Philippines is now 2.32%; that of the other countries may be even lower). Our successful neighbors may be said to be living in Forbes or Dasma or Alabang; some of them � Indonesia and Malaysia � may be said to be living in Merville, the unpretentious middle-class subdivision where I reside. But in this analogy, the economi- cally challenged but biologically prolific Philippines is camped out along the railroad tracks and under bridges, producing babies at an alarming rate, faster than it can earn the money to house, feed, clothe and educate them. Given this tragic mix of economic failure, social irresponsibility and ideological naivete, where are we headed for? ***** Economically, there is no possibility that the Philippine economy can ever generate GDP growth rates of 8 to 12% for even one year, let alone for 20 years, the sine-qua-non of the success stories of the seven tiger economies of East Asia. This means that this country can never be another Malaysia or another Thailand, let alone another Singapore or another South Korea. There are several reasons for this, among which are a) we were left behind in the export boom; b) rampant lawlessness and communist agitprop activities discouraged and will continue to discourage most foreign and domestic investors from putting their factories here; c) add to this a new element: terrorism from Islamic extremists who want �southern Philippines� to be part of their pan-Islamic state; d) a population growth rate that is only slightly lower than the GDP growth rate, which means that modest economic gains are eaten up, literally and figuratively, by new mouths to feed; e) big budget deficits and low tax collection lead to a progressively weakened currency, making imports � especially oil � more expensive, which leads to higher costs of living and more social unrest, which in turn inhibit the growth of enterprise; f) unquestioning embrace of free trade has wrecked and ruined domestic producers and encouraged multinational manufacturers to move their factories to other Southeast Asian countries, thus increasing the army of unemployed and underemployed; g) high energy cost, the highest in Asia next to Japan�s, is another disincentive to job-generating enterprise This bleak economic future impinges on our politics. The rich will always survive. The middle classes with marketable skills have the option to seek employment abroad. It is the lumpen proletariat who are in a hopeless rut and are therefore vulnerable to either a) the agitprop of the communist movement or b) the siren song of showbiz fornicators whose net implicit message, unwittingly but gleefully spread by print, electronic and celluloid media, is that the country�s problems can best be solved through morning-to-midnight inputs of singing, dancing and laughing. Even in the most unlikely event that a scrupulously honest, intelligent, sincere, hardworking, charismatic, articulate, effective and genuinely popular leader (whoever he or she may be) is elected in 2004, Philippine political culture will not allow him or her to succeed. The constitutionally mandated six-year presidential term is simply not long enough to turn around a problem-wracked country like the Philippines. All the successful countries in this region had modernizing leaders who were in power for from 13 to 30 years. If a shift to the parliamentary system were initiated after 2004, those who want to become president or prime minister in 2010 will insist that the president elected in 2004, no matter how good he/she turns out to be, must exclude himself/herself from the elections in 2010, and this exclusion will be supported by the Roman Catholic bishops especially if he/she turns out to be a Protestant, an agnostic or an atheist. In other words, the trapos will be back in power after six years. And no matter how good our 2004 President turns out to be, he/she cannot possibly please everyone. The Catholic bishops will pillory him/her if he/she comes out in favor of birth control. The communist movement will continue their demos, strikes, bus burnings, assassinations, extortion and guerilla war if he/she accepts American help against Islamic extremists, does not raise the minimum wage or lower oil prices or meet other such demands. The bleeding heart liberals will beat him/her with a stick over the national ID card or the death penalty or over the strict enforcement of laws, any law, currently in the books, as this will be seen as fascistic and heartless and the incarnation of Big Brother.. Most of all, the guns-for-hire in print and electronic media, who do not find any good in anyone or anything that moves in the first place, unless paid to do so, will have a field day imputing corruption or nepotism or both in government agencies, under the rubric of �absolute freedom of the press,� and, even without an iota of proof, the imputations will be believed by the general public who have developed a knee-jerk attitude of �they�re really all corrupt� from decades of trapo mis-rule. So where are we headed? In the short term, the most optimistic forecast is �More of the same.� In the medium and long term�. Will there be a medium and long term? I ask this because at the present growth rate of 2.32% per annum, today�s 80 million quarrelsome Filipinos will be 100 million quarrelsome Filipinos in the year �.Jesus Christ!�2012, or only ten short years from now.. ***** The bulk of this article appears in the October 7, 2002 issue of the Philippine Weekly Graphic magazine. |
OF COURSE, one can never quite include all the factors that explain our present predicament. But � and Peter Wallace in an excellent article himself includes the first � the twin laws like CARL and the Lina Law have ensured that the land left for the owner is not as viable for production as they used to be, and lot owners with modest incomes have had to contend with several obstacles before they are able to build a home on their property, which is occupied by squatters. The net effects are to discourage more productivity (on the part of landowners who�d rather sell their land to developers), and more homes for the middle classes (who now opt to migrate to other countries rather than face the prospects of evicting a squatter who is more protected by the law than he is). Other than these, you have painted a rather accurate, if grim, picture of what awaits us down the line, if we don�t control our population and if nothing is done to update our laws to make our country more competitive even just in the Asian region. Ethel P. David. [email protected] October 23, 2002 ��������������......................... I AGREE generally with what you said. The minimum wage issue is but the smaller factor. What made us laggards was the inward-looking protectionist economy. We protected the Puyats, Concepcions and other compradors. Ours is the Latin American model of underdevelopment. Look at what is happening to Latin America today. Same as in the Philippines. There is extensive literature on this. We have an entrenched oligarchy that was rooted in landlord-compradorism. The ruling classes which emerged in the Tiger economies were nurtured in the open economy. That�s the BIG DIFFERENCE. Ross Tipon. [email protected] October 24, 2002 MY REPLY. You use the language of the communists (�landlordism-compradorism�) but even the communists will tell you you�ve got it all wrong. Except for Hong Kong and Singapore which, because of their small populations and entrepot geography, were always free trade zones, the Tiger economies of East Asia � Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Malaysia, Thailand and now China � all prospered under protectionist, not free trade, regimes. The rich countries (US, EU etc) are trying to break down those protectionist barriers through the mechanism of the WTO so that they can dump their surplus production into those lucrative markets, but not without resistance from them. That is why Malaysian PM Mahathir is so unpopular in the US: he keeps telling the free traders what a bunch of hypocrites they are. As recently as last year, the US was trying to break down Japanese barriers to the free entry of American films (Kodak) and automotive components into their market. The country that you apparently admire the most, the USA, is one of the most protectionist countries in the world even though it is one of the loudest advocates of free trade. Mahathir is right; they really are hypocrites. Just this year, President Bush imposed a 30% tariff on imports of steel and a 35% tariff on imports of Canadian lumber, in order to protect American jobs and American industries. In addition, there are quotas on the imports of garments and sugar, in order to protect American jobs and American industries.This is protectionism, not free trade. Read my article of March 6, 2002 titled Protectionism Wins Over Free Trade. The US adopted a policy of protectionism from independence in 1776 to the passage of certain laws in the 1930s that formally ended that protectionist regime. But even after the formal end of protectionism, the US continued to practice it, as shown by the above examples. Without protectionism, the US could not have built up its industrial base as it would have become the dumping ground of manufactures from the more developed European economies, especially England. During the American Civil War (1861-1865), England supported the South which had a plantation economy and was therefore a natural market for its industrial products. England regarded the industrializing North as a potential industrial rival, which it indeed became, thanks to its protectionist regime. So what open economy are you talking about? ��������������������..................... I LIKE your analysis. What bothers me, though, is why Filipinos could not think the way their more affluent neighbors thought.. Are Filipinos stupid? If so, then there is no hospital that can treat their illness. And no amount of analysis or theory or government action can make them bright. For if they were not as stupid as they seem, they would heed your advice. Gras Reyes. [email protected] October 24, 2002 MY REPLY. No, Filipinos are not stupid; they just had the misfortune of inheriting wishy-washy liberalism from the Americans. Our now more affluent neighbors did not. One result of this liberalism is the de facto religion here: be kind to crooks, be kind to criminals, be kind to kidnappers, be kind to cannibals, be kind to coup plotters, be kind to communists. This solicitousness for the rights and welfare of law-breakers, rather than their victims, was/is also not present in our now more affluent neighbors. Another result of this liberalism is �absolute freedom of the press� in which media, being profit-oriented, concentrates on the bad news rather than the good because bad news sells more copies and attracts more listeners and viewers than good news; in which media, like its American antecedent, is inherently anti-government and sees no good in anyone or anything connected with the government. Also not present in our now more affluent neighbors, especially during their formative decades, but, in most cases, up to now.. A third result of this liberalism is the minimum wage law, enacted in the mid-1950s, which discouraged most American manufacturers from locating their factories here, setting them up instead, starting in the 1960s, in Hong Kong and Taiwan, where wages were lower than wages here, and, more important, were not mandated by a minimum wage law. This crippled this country right at the start in the race towards prosperity. Another by-product of American liberalism, which our neighbors did not imbibe from their colonizers, is the glorification of the individual over and above the community. We have a weak sense of nationhood and our national debates are mostly over the rights of individuals or groups of individuals, rather than their responsibilities to the community. We do not have �Asian values� to the extent that our neighbors do; instead we have �American values�, which see the individual as more important than the community. A case in point is the debate over the national ID, where the right to privacy of the individual is deemed more important than the right to security and more efficient government service of the community. As usual, the communists use the language of liberalism to protest the ID, though the real reason is their concern that the national ID may be used to flush them out of the woodwork. A further result of American liberalism is the unquestioning embrace of free trade and globalization despite the overwhelming evidence that free trade and globalization have ruined thousands of Filipino producers, displaced millions of Filipino workers and employees from their jobs, and even encouraged multinational manufacturers to close their factories here and move them to other Asian and Asean countries, maintaining only their marketing arms here. How to undo this, perhaps, well-intentioned but, nevertheless, corrosive legacy is the challenge to Whoever Wants to Save This Country From Its Past.. ���������������������............... THANK YOU for sending me occasional email on various topics. But I wouldn�t mind being removed from your list to give others a chance to read your thoughts. Salamat at mabuhay! Dean Bocobo. [email protected] October 24, 2002 ������������������������� GREETINGS! I write to thank you for providing me a copy of your incisive commentaries. And I thank you also for quoting On Line in your column. More power to you, Sir. I hope I can have you On Line for the issue of the day. Gene Orejana. [email protected] October 24, 2002. MY REPLY. Anytime, Gene. You know where your staff can reach me. �������������������������� YOU WROTE: �a population growth rate that is only slightly above the GDP growth rate, which means that modest economic gains are eaten up, literally and figuratively, by new mouths to feed�� Don�t you have population growth and GDP growth reversed in the quote above? Otherwise the article, from my point of view, cannot be faulted in any way. Bob Hanan, Queensland, Australia. [email protected] October 24, 2002 MY REPLY. Thank you for pointing out the error. It has been corrected. ������������������������� FIRST, I enjoy your articles very much. This was an enlightening one � but you lost me when you talked about the �machinations of the evil Americans who want to keep Filipinos poor, barefoot and pregnant.� You already address the issue very well in your article, pointing objectively at the reasons leading to our country�s current social and economic conditions without having to lay the blame at �evil� Americans. (MY REPLY: I was trying to be sarcastic by paraphrasing what the communists and the nationalists say are the reasons for our malaise. I am sorry that the sarcasm was lost on you.) The United States has so much on their agenda I don�t think that is on their list. I understand you were constrained to events of the last 40 years so if you were pointing to that from a historical context � you could not go back further to the times of Spanish colonization that ingrained the Patronage mentality to our culture, a precursor to corruption being a way of life. Drawing from an earlier article you wrote, perhaps we should take the reasons for the problems and focus on the solution. I should have liked to see you include what you think are viable solutions to consider, to plant the seed in other words, since you certainly have the background and the influence to start the country thinking in this direction. I live in the United States now. I work hard and earn a living along with hundreds of thousands of immigrants. Filipinos are seen as hardworking and industrious and pride in my heritage pushes me to represent my country well. I haven�t lived (in the Philippines) for 25 years � I left when I was 15 but whenever anyone asks me where I�m from � I always say The Philippines. Immigrants by nature are forward thinking and tend to focus on the positive, taking advantage of opportunity versus dwelling on circumstance. It�s the glass-half-full over the glass-half-empty way of thinking. Wouldn�t it be great if we could infuse the country with this thinking. We are capable. You�re probably saying, yeah � dream on. It�s a nice thought though, isn�t it? Simplistic and wishful��. Pia Tamayo Lapidus. [email protected] October 24, 2002 MY REPLY. I lived in the US for almost five years, first as a college student, later as an employee. And over the past 30 years I have been in and out of the US 20 to 25 times; I have lost count. In general, I admire the US and the Americans. But there are some aspects of our inheritance from them that have worked against our development as a nation. These are summarized in my reply above to the email from Mr. Gras Reyes. How to undo these negative legacies � which, not by coincidence, differentiate us from our now more affluent neighbors � is really the challenge that faces our leaders. Unfortunately, many or most of them are not even aware of the problem, since their focus is on election or re-election. And with a scandalously suicidal population growth rate, many observers believe it is not a question of a half-full or half-empty glass, but one that is cracked and leaking very badly. ��������������������������� THANK YOU for e-mailing me your articles, which I read with great interest, whether I totally agree or not. Regarding this last article, as a simple observer of the Philippine reality (I am an Italian executive who spends long periods in Manila), I would like to express some of my considerations, which might be simplistic or totally wrong, but which according to my experience go to the core of the problem. I see the Philippines still as a colonial country, where the colonizers are now the rich Filipinos. Since, however, they colonize their own country, they do not appear as such. Like the colonizers of the past century, they don�t want to give up their privileges. The difference is that the �declared� colonizers sooner or later had to lose their privileges whereas there is no pressure on the �new colonizers.� The �evil Americans� play their game because it brings them profits (let�s face it, isn�t that what the American capitalist system is all about? Luckily in Europe we still have some form of government regulation and protection for the poor). In order to maintain their privileges, they don�t want to redistribute their wealth, i.e. they don�t pay taxes (this is one of the main problems pointed out also by the ADB and the World Bank). Another means to maintain their privileges is through corruption and politics. In the end, it�s a game of survival from both sides: the rich to survive their privileges, and the poor to physically survive. In such a game anything goes. Ugo Guido. [email protected] October 25, 2002 MY REPLY. Thank you for sharing your thoughts. The communists and the nationalists share your belief that the Philippines is still a colonial country. But primarily a colony of the Americans, and only secondarily a colony of the elite. But I do not share this point of view. The Philippines is not that important to the Americans; we could sink to the bottom of the ocean today and the Americans would hardly miss us. It would not affect their trade balance at all. As for the elite, it is to their advantage that we prosper because that would mean more customers and therefore more income for their many businesses, as I pointed out in my article of November 6, 2001, titled In Defense of the Much Maligned Elite. As for tax evasion, that is certainly a problem, as you and the ADB and the World Bank have pointed out. But it is a national sport not only in the Philippines but in Italy as well. We have the lowest tax collection as percent of GDP in this part of the world. And tax evasion is indulged in not only by the rich, but also by the poor and the middle class. According to the BIR, of some 27 million wage and salary earners in the Philippines, only some three million file income tax returns, and only some two million pay any income tax at all. That is why I have long proposed doing away with income taxes and increasing instead direct or consumption taxes. This is more democratic. Everyone has to pay in direct proportion to his/her consumption. Example: a rich family with ten cars, pays much more road taxes on the gasoline and diesel fuel that they consume than a middle class family with one jeep, or a poor family with one motorcycle. Example: a rich family with ten air-conditioners in their mansion pays much bigger taxes on the electricity that they consume than a poor family with one electric fan. BUT EVERYONE PAYS. And the taxes are more easily collected as the government will deal with only a few power companies, water companies, oil companies, telecom companies, airlines and shipping lines, bus lines, railway lines, etc, instead to trying to collect, unsuccessfully, from 25 million tax evaders. With much fewer collection points, cheating can be more easily monitored and detected. But this is opposed by communists and bleeding heart liberals on the grounds that it will place an enormous financial burden on the poor. As if a monthly tax of, say, 20 pesos on the energy consumption of a poor one-electric-fan family is going drive that family to starvation! This is the kind of debate that energizes this country, with lawyers signing manifestoes (usually against the government), nuns and priests holding �prayer vigils� (against the government), communist fronts staging demos, street theater and strikes (against the government), columnists and radio commentators giving their pompous opinions (against the government), judges issuing TROs (usually against the government), opposition politicians riding on the brouhaha (against the government), military malcontents threatening coups (against the government)�.all of which in the end solve absolutely nothing. Then we wonder why we have been left behind and blame the evil Americans for our problems. I myself prefer the democratic socialism of Western Europe, especially Scandinavia, to the dog-eat-dog capitalism of the US and the allegedly scientific socialism of the Soviet Union and Maoist China. But the welfare state requires a productive economy that can generate the taxes to be collected and re-distributed by an efficient and reasonably honest bureaucracy, both of which do not exist at present in this country. ������������������������� WERE not the wages high because the peso was overvalued compared to the dollar at that time? No signature. [email protected] October 29, 2002 MY REPLY. The peso may have been overvalued in the 1960s. But it has been devalued de facto more than twenty times since then, from 2-to-1 in 1963 to 53-to-1 in 2002, without triggering any breakthrough in the economy. The over-valued peso was only a symptom of a disease, the disease being an inward-looking economy that was not interested in the export of manufactured goods until it was too late. If Taiwan or South Korea or Malaysia had followed the Philippine model, they would be poorer than us now, as they were before they deliberately geared their economies towards the export of manufactured goods. �������������������������� HOW WE found ourselves in this rut is a pretty dead issue. Practically we all know why. And the wonder of wonders is that we also know how to get out of this. What grieves most is that we are not doing what we ought to have done a long, long time ago. We are still stuck with politics, politics and politics. The hopelessness is never more obvious than people going for the likes of Estrada and, Heavens forbid, guys like Poe or Lacson. And why not? For those living in the slums all their lives, we have had bright and intelligent leaders. But where did they lead them? To even more grinding poverty. Yes, majority of us are despondent that we are ready to try anything, even take the obvious road to more perdition, hoping against hope that things will turn out for the better � or our miserable lives sooner. (sic) And you know what is so rankling about the whole thing? Even the smallest barangay affair is still graced by a barangay captain or a councilor or a mayor or governor delivering keynote speeches. When can we ever ignore those SOBS and be spared their BS? Jmmd. [email protected] October 30, 2002 MY REPLY. So what have you got against people making keynote speeches? Politicians do that all the time even in rich countries without causing any damage to their economies. �������������������������� I HAVE recently received a number of email deploring how bad the conditions are in the Philippines. The latest one before your �Where We Are Headed� was �Reflections� by F. Sionil Jose, delivered to the Rizal Commercial Banking Corp. clients. This is quite depressing. It seems to be a hopeless situation. I have lived outside of the Philippines since 1967, but I am still interested in what happens to my mother country. The articles cite what is wrong with the country. None has given concrete solutions. I am interested to hear WHAT needs to be done and HOW the solutions are to be implemented. I hope more articles on this come my way. More power to you in your efforts to make the Philippines a better place. M. L. del Rosario. [email protected] October 30, 2002 MY REPLY. There are many ideas or theories on how the Philippines got to where it is, many or most of them mutually exclusive, meaning these ideas and theories are incompatible with each other. Mine is just one of them. You have to decide whose idea or theory makes the most sense to you before you ask the proponents of these ideas or theories what needs to be done. Like the communists, I believe that only a revolution can wipe the slate clean and allow for a new start for this country. The present political system is just not capable of cleansing itself. The entrenched trapos, the entrenched political dysnats, the entrenched businessmen with the right connections, the entrenched jueteng and drug lords will never give up the system that gives them such enormous wealth. Things will get worse rather than better. Unlike the communists, I do not believe that revolution has to be bloody or violent. Read my articles on revolution archived in this website. I know that �revolution� is a dirty word in liberal democratic circles and many upper and middle-class people shake in their boots whenever they hear the R word. But these people have probably forgotten that Corazon Aquino WAS theoretically a revolutionary president from end of February 1986 to middle of September 1987, during which she ruled by decree, the Marcos constitution having been rendered inoperative by the EDSA 1 �revolution.� People have forgotten that Cory was a revolutionary president because she did nothing revolutionary during her watch, which is why more and more people became increasingly disenchanted with her. We were all implicitly waiting for her to do something revolutionary, but she never did. So, if you agree with my premises and ask me what needs to be done, my answer is we need to have a revolutionary president or government who/which is truly revolutionary and who will redefine how we want to be governed. Who should be that revolutionary president or head-of-government, I do not know. But, in my opinion, communists, trapos, showbiz fornicators and criminally inclined ignoramuses need not apply. 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| OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO Reactions to �Where We Are Headed� THIS IS the theory I subscribe to, really close to reality. And I thank you for coming up with this assessment. I attended a lecture of Dr. Bernard Villegas about his assessment of the Philippine economy, his theories why we have become the basket case of Asia, his diagnosis of the Philippine economy, and yet he is the only one upbeat about it � of course, that is what we can expect of him. However, he never came close to reality in assessing the Philippine situation as compared with what you have written. I think your column on that day is a must reading for economics, political science and sociology students and scholars! Magno Simbulan, Baguio City. [email protected] November 11, 2002 MY REPLY: Thank you for the kind words. You must understand that Dr. Villegas, together with Jess Estanislao, was the guru who convinced President Ramos to embrace Free Trade and Globalization without any ifs or buts. They will never admit that their ideological position, since embraced by President Arroyo, ruined our manufacturing sector, causing hundreds of thousands of factory workers to lose their jobs, and is now ruining our agriculture sector as well. At least, GMA has on at least two public occasions criticized rich countries for preaching free trade but practicing protectionism, something which neither Fidel Ramos nor Villegas nor Estanislao would have the honesty to admit. ������������������������������ |
| I ADMIT that I oversimplified it but still basically true. (sic). There was protectionism but a very guided one among the tigers. The proceeds of protectionism were used to wean away the protected industries. That was not what we did. Instead the beneficiaries of protectionism lobbied their way to the permanent hothouse status. Ross Tipon, Baguio City. [email protected]. November 5, 2002 MY REPLY: �Wean away the protected industries�? More than sixty years after the US formally ended protectionism, it continues to practice it to save American jobs in the garments, sugar, steel and lumber industries; they earlier also protected their shoe and motorcycle industries. More than 100 years after the automobile was invented, France and Italy still restrict Japanese cars to only two percent of their domestic market in order to protect their jobs and industries. Why do you criticize the protectionism on Philippine industries, yet say nothing about (or are really ignorant of) the protectionism practiced by the rich countries? ����������������������������� |