Archive for the ‘globalization’ Category
environment & revolution 9
SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT AS
SPIRITUAL AND REVOLUTIONARY PRAXISJunie Kalaw
Toward the end of this century as of the last one, dramatic changes have taken place under the impact of, among others, the industrial revolution, two world wars, struggles for political independence, the internationalization of economics, and the globalization of mass media. These forces have had shearing effects on the fabric of political and economic society, some appearing first as part of the solution, even a boon (like pesticides), and only later as a problem. Through all these changes and upheavals, the structures of oppressive domination have persisted on different levels occasionally changing external form but otherwise entrenched firmly enough in society to continue denying Filipinos and other Third World populations their freedom and autonomy.
Today’s Revolutionary Conditions
Poverty remains the Philippines’ major problem, aggravated by the depletion of our natural resources, the impending breakdown of our life-support systems, and the high rate of our population growth. With our remaining forests down to less than 800,000 hectares, only 20% of our coral reefs in good condition, 18 major river systems biologically dead, 13 provinces severely eroded, fresh-water reservoirs drying up, and the population requiring 40% more food by the year 2000, we face a critical situation and time is not on our side.
The deterioration of the Philippine environment is traceable to economic activities designed to support the consumption needs of other countries. Ecological footprints of the development of industrialized countries are to be seen not only in our degraded ecology but also in the waste that is exported back to us. This historical trail of international trade based on the exploitation of our natural resources by former colonial masters has piled up ecological debts that remain uncompensated. Sadly, this system of “ecological colonialism” has been institutionalized in the present international economic order.
Highlighting the crisis are new perspectives from ecological economists like Herman Daly and Robert Goodland. They see our economic system as an open system functioning with the closed system that is our planet’s biosphere. With the current global economy amounting to about US$32 trillion, we are consuming 40% of the primary production of terrestrial photosynthetic energy from the sun. This means that in one doubling time, we will be using 80%, a condition that with its attendant waste may exceed the “carrying capacity” of the planet. Thus it is posited that there is no room for aggregate economic growth and that sustainable economic growth for everyone is not possible. This raises such issues as the rights of poor countries to their equitable share of remaining clean space, access to their own natural resources, access to information and technology, and bargaining power in markets. Further, inasmuch as the relationship between rich and poor is a function of power, there is nothing to stop the rich from using this self-same power to maintain their wasteful consumption patterns and perpetuate an inequitable system.
Revolution Based on Reconciliation
Pope John Paul II in Rome calls it a “moral crisis,” the lack of a “morally coherent world view.” A lumad datu in Mount Apo ascribes it to a foreign belief system that has exiled God to the heavens so that we no longer see God in the trees, streams, mountains, and animals, nor in our fellow humans. The reference is to the same fundamental gap between our personal ethics and the system’s ethics, and the need for a systems ethics which translates personal decisions in to decisions for the common good. More concretely, it is the gap between what is an honest living for loggers and what is good for the environment and the common welfare. The gap is widened not just by plain greed but also by a moral and ethical blindness to, and lack of comprehension of, the norms for a just and sustainable functioning of bigger systems.
At its worst, the gap renders futile church teachings on honesty and love for the poor on account of its inability to translate doctrine in terms of land reform or equitable wages or conservation of forest and marine resources. In the end we realize that we have not yet found our wholeness. We have yet to manage successfully the integration of personal and social transformation. The exception was the EDSA Revolution, when a critical mass of Filipinos got their inner and outer values together and created the spiritual and political space that made the sharing of pan de sal across military defenses an operative Communion of the People, and that produced transformative political change, but which, unfortunately, we were unable to sustain.
Nowhere is the fundamental gap between personal ethics and systems ethics more dramatic and disastrous than in the policy of equal access to the benefits of creation. Whereas in an ecological system life flows, sustaining and fulfilling the lives of all in a process we can call “ecological justice,” in the current system control over and access to life-giving natural resources are awarded to a privileged few — a situation which has produced the poverty and resource depletion that imperils our life-support systems. Moreover, we have cast the responsibility and accountability for these effects to the impersonal free enterprise and market systems.
The conflict between our economic system and nature’s ecological processes has been a fundamental cause of the destruction of our ecosystems. While natural systems consist of organic unities such as families, communities, cultures, and ecosystems, we manage to evaluate and reward our economic activities according to functional sectors and enterprise organizations. We gauge national development by adding the production of these sectors and industries into a gross national product (GNP); not measured are local community welfare and ecosystem enhancement. This has resulted in a big normative gap between the welfare of corporations, both transnational and national, and the welfare of local ecologies and communities. The bridging of this gap requires more than just environmental protection measures or community projects by business enterprises. It requires a whole re-orientation of the way we do business and a re-discovering of the true essence of hanapbuhay, a truly Filipino concept that searches for the life-flow, like the Kalinga concept of wealth that is based on the enrichment of life rather on a life of personal enrichment. We cannot relegate this revisioning to our economists and government planners alone. We need to take responsibility for our country’s economic development models, policies, and practices, and to participate in the political processes that will enable us to create a just and sustainable future not only for ourselves but for the generations of Filipinos to come.
Politics, whose primordial function is to serve the welfare of the whole, is the human activity that should be most spiritually informed. Most efforts at political reconciliation have as their objective the consolidation of power under the ruling regime. Thus, one presently sees accommodations being made with the forces of he past dictatorship under the pretext of hastening the healing of the nation. What needs reconciliation and healing is not the gap between contending politicians with vested interests but the gap between their interests and the welfare of the people, between the welfare of the state bureaucracy and the welfare of the environment and local communities. This requires the relocation of authority from the ideologies of political parties to the reality of the interdependence of life in an ecology; the re-vesting of power from the centralized bureaucracy of state, party committee, and church to persons in communities; the affirmation of the subsidiarity of parts and the ecological and spiritual solidarity of wholes; and the establishment of a local citizenship and a global polity.
It is a reconciliation that needs to find a new concept of security and management of changes in the shift from national security based on militarization and armaments to a “natural” security based on securing clean water, fertile soil, fresh air, and food. It requires a fundamental re-orientation of power from one based on the accumulation of goods and information to one based on the capacity to make goods and information flow, where power becomes something one does not hold on to but something ope opens up to for the life process to flow in service to others.
Such a reconciliation gives witness to the great lesson of ecology that all life is interconnected and echoes the teachings of all great spiritual traditions that the governance of communities is a sacred task, whether we call it the Christian Mystical Body, the Moslem Uhma, or the Kalinga ili.
Conversion and Renewal
Christian churches are now seeking an alternative to the ruling anthropocentric model of man subduing the earth. The new theological understanding of creation spans a spectrum of interpretations: the sacramentalist model, where everything is a manifestation of God; the stewardship model, which argues for the sustainable use of power, knowledge, and natural resources; the creative model expounded by Matthew Fox, where God is ever “birthing and nurturing creation”; the Franciscan model of kinship of “brother sun and sister moon”; and the evolutionary model of Teilhard de Chardin and Thomas Berry. They all have broadened the praxis of faith to include “justice, peace, and Integrity of Creation” and redefined “a spirituality that integrates our faith and our daily lives and all of Creation.”
Here at home, in defense of what we Filipinos call lupang hinirang (beloved country), the Philippine Independent Church recently announced its advocacy of a total ban on commercial logging for 25 years. Following the Catholic bishops’ pastoral letter “What Is Happening to Our Beautiful Land?” and the involvement of bishops and parish priests in blockading logging trucks on Bukidnon, picketing DENR offices in Nueva Ecija, and apprehending illegal loggers in Cagayan, there is clearly an escalation of activism among Christian churches and a growing concern for the integrity of life on earth.
A more concise expression of the revolutionary message of the Gospel has yet to be made by any church group in the Philippines, but it is important to remember that the times call for a new conversion. In the past, conversion was brought about by mediation between people and the Divine, or between people and other people. Today’s need is a mediation between people and nature, a mediation we call “sustainable development.” It is a conversion that comes from revelations through nature, revelations that link polarities into higher levels of integration and renewal, revelations that affirm the integrity of God’s creation whose truth lies beyond contending ideological positions and is encompassed in an ecology. It will come from re-remembering what our indigenous Filipinos knew about the sacredness of the land, our lupang hinirang. It will come from re-experiencing the tradition of nurturing the Earth, our tipan sa Mahal na Ina. It will come from responding to the biblical revelations to be stewards of the earth. A conversion where “carrying capacity” becomes the operative term for compassion, and the patterns of community life a metaphor for wholeness. It will require the devolution of power away from its institutional sites in the bureaucracies of state, party, and even church, and into people in the communities as the locus of the Mystical Body. It will empower people to participate in the creative act of sustainable development by witnessing the Spirit that runs through all life.
This kind of conversion will gain its meaning from the operationalization of sustainable development strategies, programs, and projects. It will need to find expression on the level of communities, affirming their cultural identity while cherishing diversity by upholding (1) indigenous rights to ancestral land, (2) equal rights for women, (3) social equity through agrarian, aquatic, and urban land reform, and social forestry, and (4) an ecologically sound economic system that is community-based and exports only ecological surplus or excess carrying capacities. It will practice the sustainable utilization of natural resources, clean production technologies, and the proper recycling and disposal of waste. It will come from governance that is based on moral values translated into public good, a democratic participatory process, a system called Pamathalaan — Pamamahalang nakatindig sa sariling taal at nakahandog kay Bathala.
In the final analysis, sustainable development depends on the personal conversion, commitments, and communion of everyone. It needs a conversion that translates into personal choices regarding what to consume and what lifestyle to live. In a post-modern age, it will mean making a conscious choice from among the diversity of options brought about by modernization. Many of these options will be offered by expert systems where people have little control over processes, whether these be biogenetic systems that program the sex of our offspring or communications systems that tell us we are what we consume. They will involve matters disembedded from space-time locality so that we no longer directly experience the consequences of our actions. Such will be the landscape of a “post-modern revolution.” The future will therefore need the wisdom of our historical traditions, the moral anchors of our faith, and our living communion with all people and God’s creation.
Enviroscope, Haribon Foundation Bulletin, December 1993
do not delete (economic provisions)
verrrry interesting that it took that angry (complete with expletives) december 12 multisectoral anti-chacha rally to provoke former leftist now gma apologist-loyalist alex magno into revealing the real score behind the arroyo administration’s kulit campaign for charter change. apparently, suko na siya (sila), sort of.
Yesterday’s march was an event of bigotry. It was undertaken in the spirit of rejecting even a mere discussion of proposals for Charter change. It is act trapped in the presumption of malice. It does not enrich our democratic culture.
I did say, in one televised interview, that I have lost hope constitutional reform will ever happen in my lifetime. A freshly-elected administration has no incentive to surrender its electoral victory to Charter change. A sunset administration, when it does initiate a constitutional reform process, will always be suspect.
We saw that in the case of Pirma at the end of the Ramos period. We see that today.”
so. ang solusyon ni propesor magno? kalimutan na ang change from presidential to parliamentary, kalimutan na ang ambisyon ni gma na maging prime minister, gayon din ang ambisyon ng mga representatante na maging members of a unicameral parliament. pero, wow, huwag na huwag kakalimutan ang economic provisions na dapat daw i-delete na from the constitution.
In one recent public forum organized by civic groups sympathetic to constitutional reform, I suggested that if there is anything that is politically feasible it has to be narrowing down the debate to only the economic provisions in the 1987 Charter.
Forget about reforming our institutional arrangement. That will always be divisive because there will always be vested interests finding themselves on opposite sides of any political question. The Senate will always oppose any shift to a unicameral assembly. Oligarchic interests will always oppose a shift away from the presidential system because any other option will be a lot harder for them to control.
The only possible aspect of the constitutional reform agenda where some amount of consensus may be forged is that section that “constitutionalizes” our nation’s economic policy.
That section is anomalous to begin with. A constitution should never prescribe economic policy. Economic policy ought to be an evolving thing, shaped by the continuing process of legislation and policy-making.
In the scenario I propose, the House majority could simply pass a resolution deleting the provisions in the 1987 Constitution that preempt economic policy-making. With a limited scope, the Senate has to agree with the revision. No one, except the ideologically blinded, wants our economic policy to be fixed like religious dogma.
I call this the “Delete Option.”
Because the provisions to be removed will not be replaced, there is no need to debate wording. The debate on economic policy, henceforth, will occur where it must: in both chambers of Congress.
It is a simply, surgical operation that will not disturb the institutional arrangement. It will not endanger the political ambitions of those who now so vociferously oppose constitutional reform.
One might call it Constitutional Appendectomy.
The necessary reform of our economic architecture has been delayed because deleting the economic provisions has been tied up with the other messy political issues in the Charter change agenda. There is an immediate benefit in liberalizing the economic architecture the soonest to help us cope with the global recession.”
it’s a whole lot of crap, the assertion that deleting the economic provisions will help us cope with the global recession. hindi totoo. it will only open us up completely and absolutely to the free-market kind of speculative capitalism that brought down wall street and the american economy with it, and we are expected to lie back and enjoy it.
and who really stands to benefit from magno’s delete option? why, the arroyos of course. check out patricio mangubat’s “The fiefdom of A“:
Sources within the palace told me that the real reason behind the lifting of these economic provisions is not to really grow the economy. No. In fact, if we think about it, the reverse would happen. If we allow foreign ownership of land and property in the Philippines, the profit that they will be getting from using these lands would definitely be taken outside the country anyway. The local economy would not benefit from it. It would just be like what Mike Defensor did when his Chinese-owned mining company bagged that multi-billion contract to mine a mountain full of gold in Zambales.
The real story is the purpose of the establishment of a Hongkong-based holding company. Allegedly, this holding company which is named after a reputable historical figure “Ashmore” is owned by the First Golfer and his associates. Ashmore is an off-shore investment firm which was built solely to be the conduit between foreign companies wanting to own lands in the Philippines and a real estate firm called “Alphaland”, which, again, is owned by a hotelier associate of the First Golfer.
The insider said that what the First Golfer and his associates intend to do is, make profit selling Philippine property to these foreigners using Ashmore and that Alphaland will be the authorized seller of these properties. They intend to get billions out of this.
What the First Golfer and his associates intend to do is monopolize the selling of prime Philippine property (including agricultural lands) and make a quick buck from it. Bad? Not entirely except that this smucks of bad odor and immoral since most of those behind this scheme are living inside the palace.
And you know who is helping the First Golfer and his associates build a veritable fiefdom in the Philippines? Reportedly, that person is Roberto Ongpin. (Ongpin used to be an associate of the late Ferdinand Marcos. His brother, that Ongpin during Cory’s term, reportedly committed suicide because he’s ashamed of what his brother did).”
so please, utang na loob, kalimutan na for good yang pagbabago ng economic provisions ng saligang batas. the restrictions have been there since quezon’s time at least. even marcos did not have the heart to delete them, knowing that to do so would not bode well for the country.
besides, foreigners are already doing good business here. they can lease land for 50 years, extendable for another 25. but why are we still poor? among other things, because foreigners are allowed to repatriate all profits home. nothing is plowed back into the economy, which says a lot about our economic fundamentals. i’ve said this before in a letter to the inquirer editor published back in july 2005 and i’m saying it again:
There’s nothing sound about our economic fundamentals. Nothing sound about the endless borrowing. OFW remittances are the only thing that’s been keeping the economy afloat for many many years now, at such cost to our families, marriages, the children. That’s fundamentally sound? What would be sound would be if the elite, the rich, who invest their millions in China, Vietnam, the U.S., start investing here at home. What would be sound would be if the elite were to start plowing back business profits into the local economy instead of piling it up in foreign banks or behaving like foreign investors quick to pull out their money at the first sign of unrest.”
professor benjamin diokno agrees. invest heavily here, he urges big business.
FILIPINO businessmen should invest heavily in the country in order to generate jobs and not wait for the government to shield the country against the ill effects of the global economic meltdown, economist Benjamin Diokno said over the weekend….
He said many Filipino businessmen have invested heavily in neighboring countries and even deposited their money in Switzerland and the Cayman Islands.
Instead of letting their money sleep in the banks, Diokno said they can use at least the interest of their money to put up business in the country and help fellow Filipinos to get a decent job as well as keep the economy working.”
only when the rich-who-say-they-love-their-country start putting their money where their mouths are will this country have a hope of making it through the global slump.
feeling the fall of america
wow. who would have thought that we would see the american economy collapse like a house of cards, bringing the whole world down with it. diyata’t hindi pala invulnerable ang superpower na ito. diyata’t nagkakamali rin, pumapalpak, bumabagsak. at ngayo’y nangangapa, ikot ang puwet, trying to figure out how to reboot a financial-economic system that has crashed.
to get a handle on what happened and why, read
francis fukuyama’s the fall of america, inc.
john gray’s a shattering moment in america’s fall from power
walden bello’s a primer on the wall street meltdown
nobel laureate joseph stiglitz’s how to get out of the financial crisis
the question is: tayong mga bilib na bilib sa amerika — we who allow america to dictate our economic policies — what lessons should we be taking away from this? it’s not enough to breathe a sigh of relief that our banks are relatively sound — that’s only because praning na sila after having been burned by the asian meltdown in 1997.
at the very least we should be seeing, and acting on the fact, that america’s kind of deregulated and globalized and greedy free-market capitalism is no longer the appropriate model for li’l 3rd world us, not if we truly aspire for economic recovery and stability and prosperity for the majority of filipinos.
otherwise, things are just going to get worse. those foreign investments that government expects to come in from middle east now that america and europe are in financial doldrums are, as usual, not going to make that much difference to the poor, not in the long run, if the same discredited rules and systems continue to apply.
economic growth will continue to be a myth, except for the already-rich. what will grow for sure lang besides would be the population, hunger, joblessness, and the diaspora, which is the saddest of all. we’re a country of broken families, broken hearts, no thanks to economic policies that serve the interests of the few at the expense of the many.
what to do to turn things around? said john bellamy foster, editor of the socialist-anti-imperialist monthly review, when asked by pagina/12 what kind of policies the u.s. government should implement to sort out the crisis, how to bail out the people and not just the banks:
I don’t think anyone knows how to “sort out” or stop this crisis. What we are seeing is a lot of improvising while the house is falling down around us. There is no possibility of avoiding a very severe world economic crisis at this point….
My own view is that the sole object at this point — though it is hard to imagine this in the United States at present due to the weakness of labour and of working-class organisations in general — should be to reorganise social and economic priorities to meet the needs of those at the bottom. It is a fact that the US economy over decades has drastically weakened the conditions of the wider population, which is at the root of the whole problem. So addressing those conditions is the real key.
But even if that were not the case, the goal of those who identify with the great majority of the population, with the working class, the propertyless, the poor, should be clear: to put the employment, food, nutrition, housing, health, education, environmental conditions of those at base of society first. This is simple humanity and justice.
Why flood the financial world (which means first and foremost the rich, the near-rich and corporations) with trillions of dollars ultimately at taxpayer expense, probably to no avail, when something might be done for the greater population?
Marx said, in one of his ironic moments, that the only part of the national wealth that was held in common amongst all the people was the national debt.
If the wealth is not shared, why should the public take on more debt, supporting the opulence at the top while the great majority of the people are seeing their basic conditions deteriorate?
Let the system take care of itself; let us devote our public resources to the people. More good would be accomplished that way. Of course what this means is a reactivation of class struggle from below; something we haven’t really seen in the United States in a long time.”
interesting. now that america is down, we’re so like america.
jun lozada, gma, and the rice crisis
jun lozada should rethink his campaign to expose gma’s involvement in the nbn-zte bribery scandal.
the rice crisis simply trumps all other issues and naturally we are distracted, not just by the implications for the very poor and the not-so-poor and the medyo-poor who have long been barely able to buy the cheapest rice, but also our minds are busy trying to make sense of the information offered by media about rice supply and demand, and government subsidies, and global shortages, the better to get a grasp of what’s really going on and why.
jun can’t blame us if we have stopped to watch gma do her thing, praying she can find ways to remedy the situation short-term and long-term, because this time really we don’t want her to fail, or we would be facing prospects of food riots.
it doesn’t mean that we don’t want her to resign or be ousted for her sins against the constitution and the seventh and eighth commandments, but until more nbn-zte whistleblowers come out jun would be wise to go with the flow, expand his rhetoric, get into the rice problem, explain it as a failure of policy, a consequence of gma’s blind embrace of globalization, which clearly indicates a lack of foresight and vision.
not everyone loves jun lozada. still there is no denying that he has the ear of the nation. if he would polish his act and upgrade his message, he would do the nation a great service.
decoupling a dream, IMF hits panic button
there’s a lot of hoping and praying going around that asia has truly decoupled, i.e. weaned itself, from the u.s. economy. ibig sabihin kasi, it would be possible for the rest of the global economy to roll on despite the u.s. recession (ok, slowdown, maybe). china and india, the new big trading partners of the world, could take up the slack, provide what the humungous u.s. consumer market used to provide but can provide no more because its credit has run out (sub-prime pala in more ways than one).
it is true that we have decoupled somewhat from the u.s. economy, but just a little. cielito habito writes:
If we count China and Hong Kong as one country (even though the trade statistics still separate the two), the US has already been dislodged as our largest export market, whose 17-percent share of our exports is now just second to China-Hong Kong’s 23 percent. Contrast this to only 10 years ago, when the US took more than one-third (35 percent), while China-Hong Kong took less than one-twentieth (5 percent). Our vulnerability to a US recession via an export slowdown is therefore far less than what it would have been 10 years ago.
“But let’s look more deeply into the details, particularly the destinations of our top exports. Electronic products, which account for two-thirds of all our export earnings, are now well distributed among our top four buyers for these products, with the US taking only 14 percent. China-Hong Kong takes 23 percent, Japan takes 15 percent, Western Europe takes 14 percent, and even Singapore and Malaysia take sizable shares of about 8 percent each. On the other hand, the US takes up the bulk (79 percent) of our garments exports, our second (but a far second) largest export. Mineral exports to the US hardly matter, with most going to our neighbors. Woodcraft and furniture, another top export earner, mostly go to Japan, with only 20 percent going to the US.”
problem is, all these markets to which we export goods – japan, western europe, china, singapore, malaysia – also have sizeable exports to the u.s. chances are, if they lose that market, they’re going to cut back on our products, too. and really, our exports have been down since the peso started rising (falling), so we have to look elsewhere for salvation. (more…)