Many of our political leaders have used class warfare to divide the affluent from the lesser affluent in Philippine society as smokescreen for their plunder.

Poor peasants and sincere capitalists have been used and abused by incompetent, scheming, and corrupt politicians for too long and the noble Agrarian Reform is one of the latter’s many vehicles for plunder.

Now with the Hacienda Luisita issue we cannot help wonder whether this is but another political smokescreen to divide, rule and rob us even more.

Why doesn’t Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo include Eduardo ‘Danding’ Cojuanco’s vast tracks of lands and haciendas in Negros and why do other sugar and cassava plantations escape the same kind of scrutiny?

We have to be more discerning and united as a people regardless of social class. Let us keep a watchful eye on our political leaders and representatives so that they may adhere to the genuine intention and noble spirit of our Agrarian Reform Program.

Nakakalungkot ngang isipin. Sana hindi lang tayo sa internet mahusay makipagbalitaktakan. Sana may magawa pa tayo para sa bayan natin maliban sa pagpapalitan ng kuro kuro sa mundo ng internet. Sana . . . . . .

But then I am very confused too! An daming magagaling na pinoy pero yung bansa natin kulelat eh….

Just observe what China has been doing to drive away people from their land in preparation for the Beijing Olympics.

Otherwise, his followers, should not have brought capitalism back to the country, months after he was gone.

Poor people in China now are demonstrating since the government started taking their lands away to give way to industrialization and modernization.

Political will or authoritarianism?

Kung nasa Tsina ka noong kapanahunan ni Mao, matututo ka sigurong kumain ng rationed na bigas na may amoy, sira
at kakarampot dahil nabrainwash sila na kailangang ireserve ang bigas para sa giyera.

Kausapin ninyo ang mga Tsinong may edad na nagmigrate na sa
ibang lupain, hindi yong mga propaganda ng mga sumusulong ng
mga adhikain na yan. tssk tssk.

Deng’s policies may have been unorthodox in the sense that they did not follow IMF or laissez faire prescriptions but we cannot go so far as to call it ‘non-market’. Anyway, maybe the issue is just semantics so you can judge for yourself with this description from Robert Cosbey’s ‘Watching China Change’:

“…The big change was eliminating the commune as a political, social and economic structure. Ownership of the land reverted to the government, meaning, practically, local government. The use of the land was contracted out to individuals or families or small groups. For example, one farmer might contract to grow rice in a certain field, guaranteeing to give the village ten per cent more rice than it had been getting, and keeping any surplus as his own, to sell to the government on the open market…”

“…The rural contract system that supplanted the communes made it possible for millions of peasants to decide individually for themselves what kind of work they would do, what hours they would keep, what they would do with their money, where they would go to sell their products or to look for work. In the cities more and more people set up their own small business…”

In #41 above, i haven’t come across Stiglitz saying that a free market ‘never existed’. Could it be he was referring to the idealized model of ‘perfect competition’, which requires assumptions such as the individual possessing perfect information which are impossible to achieve in real life? This does not mean the model is useless, but economists should be (and often are) mindful of what assumptions are being broken in the real world and how this affects the model’s relevance. Also, from what i read, what Stiglitz objected to was free movement of financial capital which can wreak havoc on economies like what happened in Thailand and South Korea in 1997 and 1998. He was not against free trade, but against the US and Western Europe bullying weaker countries in order to get trade concessions.

As to #45, i’m totally with you on that one. Thanks for linking to the Kagan and Sen exchange.

I read the piece three or more times and came away a little frightened. Her words resonated with the ideas being put forth by Dick “Mad Dog” Cheney on the establishment of a Muslim Caliphate. She presented her arguments virtually agreeing with Huntington that the war on terror is a war of civilization. A very dangerous conclusion. Her mindset will probably determine the way ABS-CBN would and could present perspectives in covering terrorism. This in light of recent attempts of the government to abolish the Bill of Rights and relate ity to terrorism.

Amartya Sen pointedly says that the U.S. has repeatedly in the past supported dictators for their narrow self interest and this narrow interest has led to an arrogance of parochialism of western triumphalism over other countries history. This has indirectly led to the rise of Islamic fundamentalism. Secular muslims who are in the majority have been marginalized by this. It is a fact that 15 of the 20 or 21, 9/11 Al Qaeda operatives came from Saudi Arabia. Usama Bin laden’s entire family were rounded up in the U.S. and flown out by the U.S. government right after 9/11 per request of the Saudi government. Culturally Saudi Arabia is living in old testament times. We live in interesting times, an old Chinese expression is actually part of a curse.

I strongly suggest everyone refer to this very interesting discourse between Robert Kagan senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and transatlantic fellow at the German Marshall Fund. Amartya Sen is the Lamont University Professor at Harvard and the winner of the 1998 Nobel Prize in Economics.
http://www.slate.com/id/2140932/entry/2141222/

Raghuram G. Rajan (I.M.F. and N.B.E.R.)
Luigi Zingales (Harvard University, N.B.E.R. & CEPR)
Why is underdevelopment so persistent? One explanation is that poor countries do not have
institutions that can support growth. Because institutions (both good and bad) are persistent,
underdevelopment is persistent. An alternative view is that underdevelopment comes from poor
education. Neither explanation is fully satisfactory, the first because it does not explain why poor
economic institutions persist even in fairly democratic but poor societies, and the second because it
does not explain why poor education is so persistent. This paper tries to reconcile these two views by
arguing that the underlying cause of underdevelopment is the initial distribution of factor
endowments. Under certain circumstances, this leads to self-interested constituencies that, in
equilibrium, perpetuate the status quo. In other words, poor education policy might well be the
proximate cause of underdevelopment, but the deeper (and more long lasting cause) are the initial
conditions (like the distribution of educational endowments) that determine political constituencies,
their power, and their incentives. Though the initial conditions may well be a legacy of the colonial
past, and may well create a perverse political equilibrium of stagnation, persistence does not require
the presence of coercive political institutions. On the one hand, such an analysis offers hope that the
destiny of societies is not preordained by the institutions they inherited through historical accident.
On the other hand, it suggests we need to understand better how to alter factor endowments when
societies may not have the internal will to do so.