Migrante International's Really Bad Economic Literacy
>> Further opening the country’s economy to foreign ownership and control will worsen the exploitation of our people and the environment without creating a sustainable and pro-people economy capable of developing the industrial and agricultural sectors to create decent jobs in the country.
I guess these people are bound to get hostile if quotes by the late Lee Kuan Yew are mentioned. I have my assumption that they're still bitter with Singapore. A pity really, since the late Fidel Valdez Ramos and Rodrigo Roa Duterte, both former Philippine presidents, have patched things up. Both Ramos and Duterte made the mistake of thinking Flor was innocent. Later, both former presidents renewed ties with Singapore. Singaporean Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong, son of Lee Kuan Yew, shook hands with several former Philippine presidents already from Rep. Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo and the late Benigno Simeon Cojuangco Aquino before Ferdinand Romualdez Marcos Jr. became the new Philippine president.
The late great founder of Singapore's development would beg to differ with Migrante even after his death
I guess people at Migrante would be too bad (and too sentimental) to read from Lee Kuan Yew's best-seller, From Third World to First. My guess is that they are still too sentimental over the death of Flor Contemplacion. Is it me or has Migrante really canonized Flor like she was that virtuous heroine? Think about it March 17 has become some kind of feast like Flor is some patron saint to them. Added to that, they also honor the "three martyrs of China" who died last 2011. The three martyrs died near the end of March 2011 for drug smuggling.
Singapore didn't open to FDI only because it was a country with very few natural resources. Even Vietnam, a country rich in natural resources, is very FDI-friendly. Instead, these quotes from Lee Kuan Yew's book would totally shake foundations and not just about the Marcoses:
Pages 57-58
After several years of disheartening trial and error, we concluded that Singapore's best hope lay with the American multinational corporations (MNCs). When the Taiwanese and Hong Kong entrepreneurs came in the 1960s, they brought low technology such as textile and toy manufacturing, labor-intensive but not large-scale. American MNCs brought higher technology in large-scale operations, creating many jobs. They had weight and confidence. They believed that their government was going to stay in Southeast Asia and their businesses were safe from confiscation or war loss.
I gradually crystallized my thoughts and settled on a two-pronged strategy to overcome our disadvantages. The first was to leapfrog the region, as the Israelis had done. This idea sprang from a discussion I had with a UNDP expert who visited Singapore in 1962. In 1964, while on a tour of Africa, I met him again in Malawi. He described to me how the Israelis, faced with a more hostile environment than ours, had found a way around their difficulties by leaping over their Arab neighbors who boycotted them, to trade with Europe and America. Since our neighbors were out to reduce their ties with us, we had to link up with the developed world-America, Europe, and Japan-and attract their manufacturers to produce in Singapore and export their products to the developed countries.
The accepted wisdom of development economists at the time was that MNCs were exploiters of cheap land, labor, and raw materials. This "dependency school" of economists argued that MNCs continued the colonial pattern of exploitation that left the developing countries selling raw materials to and buying consumer goods from the advanced countries. MNCs controlled technology and consumer preferences and formed alliances with their host governments to exploit the people and keep them down. Third World leaders believed this theory of neocolonialist exploitation, but Keng Swee and I were not impressed. We had a real-life problem to solve and could not afford to be conscribed by any theory or dogma. Anyway, Singapore had no natural resources for MNCs to exploit. All it had were hard-working people, good basic infrastructure, and a government that was determined to be honest and competent. Our duty was to create a livelihood for 2 million Singaporeans. If MNCs could give our workers employment and teach them technical and engineering skills and management know-how, we should bring in the MNCs.
Page 66
Our job was to plan the broad economic objectives and the target periods within which to achieve them. We reviewed these plans regularly and adjusted them as new realities changed the outlook. Infrastructure and the training and education of workers to meet the needs of employers had to be planned years in advance. We did not have a group of readymade entrepreneurs such as Hong Kong gained in the Chinese industrialists and bankers who came fleeing from Shanghai, Canton, and other cities when the communists took over. Had we waited for our traders to learn to be industrialists we would have starved. It is absurd for critics to suggest in the 1990s that had we grown our own entrepreneurs, we would have been less at the mercy of the rootless MNCs. Even with the experienced talent Hong Kong received in Chinese refugees, its manufacturing technology level is not in the same class as that of the MNCs in Singapore.
Pages 68-69
If I have to choose one word to explain why Singapore succeeded, it is confidence. This was what made foreign investors site their factories and refineries here. Within days of the oil crisis in October 1973, I decided to give a clear signal to the oil companies that we did not claim any special privilege over the stocks of oil they held in their Singapore refineries. If we blocked export from those stocks, we would have enough oil for our own consumption for two years, but we would have shown ourselves to be completely undependable. I met the CEOs or managing directors of all the oil refineries-Shell, Mobil, Esso, Singapore Petroleum, and British Petroleum on 10 November 1973. I assured them publicly that Singapore would share in any cuts they imposed on the rest of their customers, on the principle of equal misery. Their customers were in countries as far apart as Alaska, Australia, Japan, and New Zealand, besides those in the region.
This decision increased international confidence in the Singapore government, that it knew its long-term interest depended on being a reliable place for oil and other business. As a result, the oil industry confidently expanded into petrochemicals in the late 1970s. By the 1990s, with a total refining capacity of 1.2 million barrels per day, Singapore had become the world's third largest oil-refining center after Houston and Rotterdam, the third largest oil trading center after New York and London, and the largest fuel oil bunker market in volume terms. Singapore is also a major petrochemical producer.
To overcome the natural doubts of investors from advanced countries over the quality of our workers, I had asked the Japanese, Germans, French, and Dutch to set up centers in Singapore with their own instructors to train technicians. Some centers were government-financed, others were jointly formed with such corporations as Philips, Rollei, and Tata. After 4 to 6 months of training, these workers, who were trained in a factory-like environment, became familiar with the work systems and cultures of the different nations and were desirable employees. These training institutes became useful points of reference for investors from these countries to check how our workers compared with theirs. They validated the standards of Singapore workers.
Lee Kuan Yew would call these people a third-world mentality. People like them held to the mentality that FDI equals exploitation. He had every right not to be impressed. It's a good thing that Lee Kuan Yew decided to invite Dutch economist Albert Winsemius to prove their local economists wrong. That's what I'm doing now. I'm now citing an economist from a first-world country to refute the third-world ideals that have been in the Philippines for decades.
More economic nonsense from Migrante International that's pretty much a third-world mentality
Ironically, Migrante International has branches in countries that developed via FDI. What's really their excuse anyway? There's a Migrante International branch in Canada. Canada is a country that greatly benefits from FDI. Yet, they would afford to make the mistake of thinking that FDI is bad. One of the press statements written last month in February also writes this:
As another neoliberal agreement, RCEP will further expose the country’s already fledgling agriculture and manufacturing sectors to competition from member-countries in the Asia-Pacific region. Such competition has proven disastrous for Filipinos, who have been forced to contend with soaring prices of rice and other agricultural products, lack of industries to employ the swelling ranks of the country’s unemployed, among other economic, social and political problems.
The RCEP is another step away from the only viable path to meeting Filipinos’ basic needs and creating decent jobs in the country: government investment in, and support for, agriculture and manufacturing primarily in order to service local demand. The country has been limiting the government’s role in the economy in trying to compete for foreign investors for decades and has been suffering because of this.
After decades of free-trade agreements like the RCEP, the Philippine economy now has two “bright spots” — labor export and the Business Process Outsourcing sector. Both do not meet the basic needs of Filipinos and, while they put food on the table of the households of those employed, do not generate decent employment, make Filipinos vulnerable to abuse, and cause a “brain drain” in the Philippines.
RCEP is a continuation of the neoliberal policies that have been implemented by the Philippine government for decades, and have brought the country to its sorry state at present. It is business as usual, and does not embody change. It is sheer bullshit for the Marcos regime, its so-called economic managers, and its rubbert-stamp Senate to claim that RCEP will finally bring about development to the country.
Are these guys deluded or what? Or are they lying because they've got some agenda to maintain their so-called relevance? I would like to stress objections to this statement made by Migrante. There's really a lot of what I'd call misinformation on the part of Migrante. For decades, they still continue to lie that Singapore mistreated Flor. Now, I'd like to raise up the nonsense that they've posted. I would like to write my common sense refutes:
- It seems that Migrante International would want to believe that competition ruins the economy and will cause an increase the prices. Have the members of Migrante International realize that it's all about supply and demand when it comes to the prices of goods and services? Common sense will tell us that if the utility supplies are scarce and demand is high--the costs will naturally increase. Yet, Migrante International insists that competition with foreigners will cause soaring prices.
- Their idea of job generation is absolutely nonsense. They think that government investment and protectionism for agriculture will boost jobs. This idea was already tested by Mao Zedong of China. The so-called Great Leap Forward only resulted in further collapse. Deng Xiaoping knew where jobs are. Deng decided that the idea of government-protected local industries was going nowhere. Deng did was that he welcomed FDIs to invest in Communist China. The results have been different. China went from a country impoverished by Mao's ideals to Deng's realism. Deng knew that his own brand of socialism needed competition. If anything, a lack of competition is what drove the Philippines into scarcity.
- The real reason behind labor export is all about the lack of jobs. If people at Migrante are serious about ending labor export, why not welcome FDI to produce more jobs for Filipinos? Instead, they still insist that government investment and protectionism to "produce jobs". May I need to repeat that Mao attempted that and only led to the Great Leap Forward as a failure. Deng's decision to welcome FDIs into China caused the real Great Leap Forward.
- Maybe I also mention that decades of protectionism that has caused the Philippines to be in its sorry state.
