LIBERAL COÑO POWER & RISING POVERTY

LIBERAL COÑO POWER & RISING POVERTY

Erle Frayne D. Argonza

The Liberal Party is now up in power and neo-liberalism, the same ideology espoused since after the rise of FVRamos, continues to ravage natural, human, and physical resources to enlarge the pockets of billionaires and global oligarchs.

Neo-liberal policies of privatization, deregulation, liberalization comprise the trilogy of evils that have led to a great divide between haves and have-nots in the entire planet. So did the same policies unleash the greater elite powers to slam bang middle and lower classes who would have to satisfy themselves with bread crumbs.

As I’ve been saying in my articles, liberalism is just one step away from fascism. It is in fact a mask used by the same elites to conceal their plutocratic, top-down social control engagement done in the pursuit of their greed. It is a subterfuge for gangland power and warlord power in countries such as PH, the latter being the base of primal-sadistic power by elites in the North.

[Philippines, 17 April 2011]
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LIBERALISM: MORE POVERTY & CORRUPTION

Prof. Erle Frayne D. Argonza
University of the Philippines

Good afternoon, fellows!

The Liberal Party in the Philippines has been bandying lately the good governance agenda. Philosophically bankrupt, the dogmatists of the party could at best parrot the verbiage of university academics who, in reductionist fashion, associated the development problems of the country to bad governance.

Poverty had alarmingly risen from 25% in 2001 to 32% today, as per government statistics. This came at a time when the economy doubled, GDP-wise, and the country had been dubbed as an ‘emerging market’. Can poverty be factored solely to bad governance, as liberal quacks now claim?

Whether the so-called ‘think-tank’ of the Liberal Party or LP possesses the comprehensive grasp of the country’s problems is doubtful. A ‘think-tank’ that is theoretically bankrupt could at best be a coterie of mediocre dudes whose sense of originality in problem-solving engagements is nil.

There surely were episodes in our economic history when poverty expanded. We can concretely site the following periods: 1983-1996, when poverty incidence rose from 35% in ’83 (Marcos era) to 49% in ’89 (Cory Aquino era) to a 60% peak in ’95 (Ramos Era); and, after a period of radical drop, moved up again in 2001 through 2009, from 25% (‘01)to 28% (’04) to 32% (‘09).

The 32% poverty incidence may not even be accurate. As Prof. Cielito Habito (Ateneo University) sited in his newspaper column, the figure could be a high 35%. My own intuitive assessment is that the figure could be much higher at around 45%.

Those high-poverty episodes were actually periods when the country was under the IMF programs’ tutelage. They were times when liberal policy reforms were radically implemented in the country, to note: liberalization, privatization, deregulation, tax reforms, reduced budgets for social services, currency devaluation, wage freeze, and increased utility prices.

Not only did we witness the expansion of poverty during the same episodes, we also saw the rise of corruption. Weak regulatory frameworks at a time of rising total budgets redound to liberalizing graft as well, resulting to larger largesse for bureaucrats & legislators (returns from pork barrel allocations).

Let’s take the case of trade liberalization. As soon as tariff reforms were implemented in full during the Ramos Era, a whopping P300 Billion+ worth of import duties were wiped out, thus reducing revenues so drastically. With nil safety nets in implementation, the tariff reform saw millions of affected small planters, fishers, craftsmen, and farm workers experience large-scale income drops, thus instantly leading to larger poverty incidence.

As commitments to tariff reforms are now binding upon our state, based on signed treaties (ASEAN, WTO), regulatory frameworks for executing projects remain weak. This bad situation ensures the perpetuation of the take of bureaucrats on projects, from the past 10% ‘s.o.p.’ circa 1980s, to the gargantuan 40% today and higher rate tomorrow. E.g. a road project worth P1 Billion will be priced/budgeted at P1.4 Billion, with P400 Million allowance for the grafters (they call it ‘for the boys’).

Note that during the periods of extensive liberal reforms, Hacienda Luisita escaped agrarian reform’s surgical operations. Of course, the regulatory and executory frameworks of the agrarian reform law were so weak, so much that President Aquino’s family estate was accorded special treatment that it enjoys till these days.

Ipso facto, liberal reforms practically destroyed the already weak regulatory frame that we Filipinos have struggled so hard to build since the time of the 1st presidency yet (Aguinaldo, 1898-1900). Curbing poverty and graft, which indeed go together, requires draconian tactics of state interventionism or dirigism, not liberalism.

It is all too easy a kindergarten stuff to forecast that under a liberal regime, poverty will swell to higher incidence (beyond 40%). As budgets and projects increase, so will graft move up, probably eating as much as 60% of total appropriations at certain junctures.

The ‘walang korupsyon’ (no corruption) flaunted by the liberal quacks is nothing but empty propaganda. Bereft of creative approaches to diminishing corruption, the ‘walang korupsyon’ line merely re-echoes an age-old line of traditional politicians or trapos desperate to gain electoral victories by duping a gullible electorate.

‘Walang korupsyon’ isn’t even liberal nor populist a line, but hyper-conservative. Conservatism serves the interests of Big Business, Big Landlords, Big Church (biggest landlord in the Philippines), and foreign capital.

We are therefore not surprised that the leaders and groups representing Big Business, Big Landlords, Big Church (Jesuits, Opus Dei, bishops), and foreign capital have openly supported Noynoy Aquino & the Liberal Party.

The LP of the Philippines now appears more as a copycat of the fascistic Liberal Democratic Party of Japan. Don’t ever be surprised that both parties are good friends within the Liberal International league.

A liberal regime will most likely be saddled with enormous graft and poverty problems that, within a couple of years of its incumbency, patriotic soldiers and populist groups would alternately shake it down to rubbles. A veteran of civil society campaigns myself, I would most likely be marching the streets again to oppose moralist pretenders who are in fact greedy crocodiles.

Liberalism doesn’t represent the interest of the nation and people, and should be rejected in the coming polls and the next ones to come.

[Philippines, 13 April 2010. Prof. Erle Argonza is an economist, sociologist, and international consultant. He’s a member of the very prestigious Eastern Regional Organization for Public Administration or EROPA.]
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LIBERAL INQUISITIONISM: FASCIST TENDENCIES REVEALED

Erle Frayne D. Argonza

Good evening!

It is night time as I write this piece. The prominent cloudless black night outside my window is akin to reality being concealed by subterfuge or ‘illusions’ (to use Freud’s term), so it may prove worthy for us to reflect on what is being concealed by the resort of the Liberal Party to moralistic jingoism in its latest poll campaigns.

It would be fitting to begin with the behavior of the presidential  candidate Noynoy Aquino, who, just a couple of nights back, made a public declaration about the Ampatuan family’s support for the Noynoy presidency and his Liberal Party or LP. The Ampatuan family is being indicted for mass slaughter of political adversaries and media persons in Maguindanao province, besides that it had shown how it could cheat in the polls as support for a presidential candidate in 2004 (Gloria Arroyo).

That the LP is openly supported by a family with sociopathic, hostile, and/or antisocial members is indubitably confounding to the unsophisticated folks. However, to more knowledgeable observers, notably behavior analysts, it isn’t surprising for a sociopathic gang to converge in interest with Noynoy Aquino who, as per classified internal information now filtering out, suffers from psychological disorder conditions.

Gangster-type antisocial, hostile, sociopathy is the base of recruitment for fascist and racist movements. Hitler knew that formula well, so his ideologues hastened to recruit unreformed malefactors who would constitute the Nazi party’s mass membership and SS cadres.

Lenin himself revealed that the dividing line between liberalism and fascism is thin. Unfolding events proved him right in Europe, when the first fascist movement, led by Mussolini, seized power in Italy. To recall, the Italian fascists were rabidly moralistic in their campaigns, and bullied their way to power.

I wish Lenin were still alive, so I could argue with him that there really is no dividing line between liberalism and fascism, that the dividing line is merely an illusion. The philosophers Felix Guattari and Gilles Deleuze demonstrated, in the case of schizophrenics, that the dividing line between rationality and irrational (e.g. manic-depressive) behavior is non-existent, by using  ‘schizoanalysis’ as their theoretical rampart.

If we were to follow Deleuze & Guattari well, we would say that, in the case of Noynoy Aquino and the criminal Ampatuans, the dividing line between the sane and the mad has been effectively erased. I would further advance that Noynoy is just but an infinitesimal representation of a much larger reality, the members of the Liberal Party, who are concealing their own authoritarian personality traits behind a mantle of moralism (i.e. good governance cliché) discourse.

To be fair to the LP officialdom, it would be more fitting an exercise to let the party top brass at least be tested for ‘authoritarian personality’ tendencies. In behavioral science we call this the Adorno Scale, developed by the late Theodore Adorno and Max Horkheimer and tested on very large samples in Europe and the Americas.

The Adorno Scale is available anytime for testing, it uses a very innovative approach to testing that combines quantitative and qualitative methods, and we have the experts (psychology, sociology, psychiatry) who can team up to administer the test on Drilon, Noynoy, Abad, Roxas, Gascon, and other party stalwarts. It would be much fairer if the stalwarts of other parties undergo the same test.

In my preliminary analysis, the Liberal Party will have the highest scores on Adorno Scale, indicating the ‘authoritarian personality’ type among its leaders and cadres. The result is as predictable as the sun would shine tomorrow. In layman’s parlance, ‘authoritarian personality’ means fascistic personality.

Fascism is on the rise again globally, and global fascism is not a remote phenomenon to ascend phoenix-like. Fascism often ascends at the tail end of an economic crisis—of a 60-year cycle called the Kondratieff Wave. In the early 19^th century, Bonapartism emerged so suddenly as a scourge of Europe, while White racism (Ku Klux Klan) emerged before and after the American Civil War.

Fascism and Nazism occurred at the tail end of a K2 wave (Kondratieff wave’s downward end phase). The Weimar Republic (Germany was then the greatest industrial power) collapsed, hyper-inflation ate up the folks’ pockets, and lo and behold! Mussolini and Hitler arrived on the political terrain.

Moralistic inquisitionism, which employs good governance cliché to witch-hunt political adversaries today, is for me an indubitable sign of an underlying fascism, both individually (among leaders) and collectively in the Yellow Forces’ camp. It just takes a matter of provoking mass panic, e.g. poll failure, added to a Bogey Man, e.g. General Bangit declaring a coup, to ignite a hysteria that would find catharsis via social upheaval or equivalent.

With sociopaths and manic-depressives at the head of a party such as the LP, and with Noynoy and Mar Roxas winning the presidential and vice presidential posts, the country would surely be in trouble.

Mar Roxas was involved just some couples of years back in supporting Christian militias to counterveil against the Muslim rebels (MILF). He did made public statements about the matter, and he was among those legislators role-playing barriers to the signing of a peace concord between the GRP and MILF.

Christian militia members are terribly antisocial types, with so many who are borderline personalities (below average intelligence), who would become criminals if not trained to do productive work properly. The Tadtad, for instance, has a track record of genocidal massacres against simple Muslim folks, and they’re intact organizationally.

In case that a local fascist movement is bound to arise in this country, don’t ever search for them now among Erap’s forces or Villar and Red forces. Search for them inside the Yellows, particularly inside the LP leadership. Administer to them the Adorno Scale and see for yourself what I’m discoursing about.

Hardly have they won, and many LP candidates are already beginning to behave like medieval Inquisitors who would take down grafters very soon. Their faces look grim when they discourse, like the grim Nazi propagandists Goebbels and ideologues, or better still the Knights Templars and Teutonic Knights whose arrogance and hubris were so colossal and who were emulated by the Nazi leaders themselves.

Inside the LP think-tank/directorate are university professors, in like vein that university mentors formed the Nazi Party and molded Hitler & partisans into mad Nero-types. They are so low profile, the public wouldn’t even notice their presence. I do personally know some of them, know their levels of narcissism, egoism, arrogance, and authoritarianism, and they secretively are powerful inside the party.

When imbalanced personalities would lead a political party and flaunt inquisitionism so openly, we may be experiencing the ‘sign of the times’. Democracy may again take the back seat, as a new cycle of authoritarianism becomes ascendant. Such an authoritarianism, now gelling inside the Liberal camp, could converge with other fascisms toward a consolidated global fascism and the rise of a global Bonaparte.

[Philippines, 23 April 2010. See also: IKONOKLAST: http://erleargonza.blogspot.com; UNLADTAU: https://unladtau.wordpress.com.]

LIBERALISM: MORE POVERTY & CORRUPTION

Prof. Erle Frayne D. Argonza

University of the Philippines

 

Good afternoon, fellows!

The Liberal Party in the Philippines has been bandying lately the good governance agenda. Philosophically bankrupt, the dogmatists of the party could at best parrot the verbiage of university academics who, in reductionist fashion, associated the development problems of the country to bad governance.

Poverty had alarmingly risen from 25% in 2001 to 32% today, as per government statistics. This came at a time when the economy doubled, GDP-wise, and the country had been dubbed as an ‘emerging market’. Can poverty be factored solely to bad governance, as liberal quacks now claim?

Whether the so-called ‘think-tank’ of the Liberal Party or LP possesses the comprehensive grasp of the country’s problems is doubtful. A ‘think-tank’ that is theoretically bankrupt could at best be a coterie of mediocre dudes whose sense of originality in problem-solving engagements is nil.

There surely were episodes in our economic history when poverty expanded. We can concretely site the following periods: 1983-1996, when poverty incidence rose from 35% in ’83 (Marcos era) to 49% in ’89 (Cory Aquino era) to a 60% peak in ’95 (Ramos Era); and, after a period of radical drop, moved up again in 2001 through 2009, from 25% (‘01)to 28% (’04) to 32% (‘09).

The 32% poverty incidence may not even be accurate. As Prof. Cielito Habito (Ateneo University) sited in his newspaper column, the figure could be a high 35%. My own intuitive assessment is that the figure could be much higher at around 45%.

Those high-poverty episodes were actually periods when the country was under the IMF programs’ tutelage. They were times when liberal policy reforms were radically implemented in the country, to note: liberalization, privatization, deregulation, tax reforms, reduced budgets for social services, currency devaluation, wage freeze, and increased utility prices.

Not only did we witness the expansion of poverty during the same episodes, we also saw the rise of corruption. Weak regulatory frameworks at a time of rising total budgets redound to liberalizing graft as well, resulting to larger largesse for bureaucrats & legislators (returns from pork barrel allocations).

Let’s take the case of trade liberalization. As soon as tariff reforms were implemented in full during the Ramos Era, a whopping P300 Billion+ worth of import duties were wiped out, thus reducing revenues so drastically. With nil safety nets in implementation, the tariff reform saw millions of affected small planters, fishers, craftsmen, and farm workers experience large-scale income drops, thus instantly leading to larger poverty incidence.

As commitments to tariff reforms are now binding upon our state, based on signed treaties (ASEAN, WTO), regulatory frameworks for executing projects remain weak. This bad situation ensures the perpetuation of the take of bureaucrats on projects, from the past 10% ‘s.o.p.’ circa 1980s, to the gargantuan 40% today and higher rate tomorrow. E.g. a road project worth P1 Billion will be priced/budgeted at P1.4 Billion, with P400 Million allowance for the grafters (they call it ‘for the boys’).

Note that during the periods of extensive liberal reforms, Hacienda Luisita escaped agrarian reform’s surgical operations. Of course, the regulatory and executory frameworks of the agrarian reform law were so weak, so much that President Aquino’s family estate was accorded special treatment that it enjoys till these days.

Ipso facto, liberal reforms practically destroyed the already weak regulatory frame that we Filipinos have struggled so hard to build since the time of the 1^st presidency yet (Aguinaldo, 1898-1900). Curbing poverty and graft, which indeed go together, requires draconian tactics of state interventionism or dirigism, not liberalism.

It is all too easy a kindergarten stuff to forecast that under a liberal regime, poverty will swell to higher incidence (beyond 40%). As budgets and projects increase, so will graft move up, probably eating as much as 60% of total appropriations at certain junctures.

The ‘walang korupsyon’ (no corruption) flaunted by the liberal quacks is nothing but empty propaganda. Bereft of creative approaches to diminishing corruption, the ‘walang korupsyon’ line merely re-echoes an age-old line of traditional politicians or trapos desperate to gain electoral victories by duping a gullible electorate.

‘Walang korupsyon’ isn’t even liberal nor populist a line, but hyper-conservative. Conservatism serves the interests of Big Business, Big Landlords, Big Church (biggest landlord in the Philippines), and foreign capital.

We are therefore not surprised that the leaders and groups representing Big Business, Big Landlords, Big Church (Jesuits, Opus Dei, bishops), and foreign capital have openly supported Noynoy Aquino & the Liberal Party.

The LP of the Philippines now appears more as a copycat of the fascistic Liberal Democratic Party of Japan. Don’t ever be surprised that both parties are good friends within the Liberal International league.

A liberal regime will most likely be saddled with enormous graft and poverty problems that, within a couple of years of its incumbency, patriotic soldiers and populist groups would alternately shake it down to rubbles. A veteran of civil society campaigns myself, I would most likely be marching the streets again to oppose moralist pretenders who are in fact greedy crocodiles.  

Liberalism doesn’t represent the interest of the nation and people, and should be rejected in the coming polls and the next ones to come.

[Philippines, 13 April 2010. Prof. Erle Argonza is an economist, sociologist, and international consultant. He’s a member of the very prestigious Eastern Regional Organization for Public Administration or EROPA. See: http://erleargonza.blogspot.com; https://unladtau.wordpress.com, http://erlefraynebrightworld.wordpress.com.]