Habito's "analysis paralysis"

INFOWARS
Herman Tiu Laurel
1/24/2008



FVR Neda chief Cielito Habito in a recent column entitled “Suppressing the peso surge” said of countries that fixed their currencies “The very few countries who have pegged their exchange rate (China and Hong Kong, or Malaysia during the Asian financial crisis years, for example) got away with it because they have strong governments who can enforce the law even against the pressure of strong market forces.”; but the point is their fixed exchange policy worked! It saved Malaysia and Hong Kong from being dragged down the abyss of the 1997 financial crash like FVR’s Philippines, Thailand, South Korea and others. Instead, Habito went around options that produced “analysis paralysis”.

Habito mumbles pointless options while biting his fingers: “One approach, then, would be to find a way to get importers to import more. … it means competing local producers would lose out, thereby risking thousands of jobs. But we could selectively liberalize and encourage more imports of things that don't compete with locally produced products, especially things that would boost domestic production activities (like factory equipment, fuels and raw materials).” But we are already liberalized and importing those things! “We could also get Filipinos to travel and invest abroad more, which would lead them to buy more dollars”, which would be capital flight and penalize domestic tourism!

Habito has more “Hamletian” soliloquy, “…cutting our exports or stopping foreign tourists from coming in are obviously not desirable means to do it, as these would imply cutting domestic jobs.… Nor could we suppress the massive inflows of remittances, especially when the peso appreciation has precisely made it necessary for OFWs to boost their remittances to maintain the peso income levels of their families at home… Meanwhile, we had better learn to adjust to a cheaper dollar, because believe me; it will continue to get weaker--and thus cheaper”. In other words, he ends up with no solution and tells the Filipino people there’s just nothing to be done. Mainstream media is as dumbfounded.

The FVR economist who presided over the fall of the Philippine economy during the ’97 does urge that we need “…to fix our country's governance so we can inspire more investments, and thereby boost imports of productive inputs and more importantly, jobs” which can not happen when unprotected domestic industry is pummeled by dumping of now cheaper foreign imports from the U.S. added to cheap imports from China, Thailand et al, while boosting imports helps the foreign economies and penalizes our domestic industries again – a vicious, downward spiral for the Philippine economy if we are to follow the prescription of this U.P. ache-on-omist.

Solutions to the financial and economic disaster the country has progressively sunk into over the decades is so obvious that Habito himself said it, but doesn’t have the courage nor the commitment to do the right thing as is the ailment of most members of the Philippine intelligentsia (who live on direct and roundabout handouts of the foreign financial institutions). The Malaysian, Hong Kong, Chinese and, we must add, Venezuelan and Canadian fixed or firmly planned and managed exchange rate system under the aegis of a protective government environment for domestic industries, is the only solution. It only needs a committed, courageous and strongly nationalist leadership to make it happen.

The task is to establish that leadership, and there’s no need to search for it as it has long been there in the traditions handed down from Mabini, through Gregorio and Salvador Araneta, Quirino, Garcia, Mike Cuaderno, Claro M. Recto, Renato Constantino Sr., Alejandro Lichauco, and strong, pro-people action led leaders that are growing in nationalist insight like President Joseph E. Estrada, Senator Antonio Trillanes IV and General Danilo Lim and their colleagues ranged against the present neo-colonial kleptocracy under Gloria Arroyo and the Makati comprador elite protected by the corrupted AFP and PNP generals. We have the intellectual and physical leadership, the national task is to install them.

Elections as a means of installing leaders for change are unrealistic; elections are means by which the prevailing system perpetuates itself by biasing the rules that sustain the power of money in determining winners. President Estrada, who has been victimized by the system and is latently revolutionary already, is already being blocked from a comeback by rules Gloria’s cabal calculated to block him; i.e. the minimum time of half term served to be disqualified when they culminated the Edsa Dos. When popular will does triumph, they block it by force as in Trillanes’ case, but all these frustrations of popular and, likely revolutionary, will should awaken us and prod more determination.

The growing number of intensely concerned Filipinos here and abroad, especially OFWs who now see the errors of the “floating rate” policy and wisdom of “fixed rates”, should help expose the inutility of policies and economists subservient to foreign interests, and denounce Arroyo hacks singing paeans to so-called “ continuous economic growth” in the face of Filipinos being bled dry by accelerating power, water, tax, consumer price rate increases and job losses due to liberal and “free trade” policies championed by Cory, FVR and Gloria. The U.S. is returning to protectionism, as one can see in the U.S. Democrat’s presidential debates hitting NAFTA etc. – we pre-empt their protectionism or be doomed.

Let’s take action, end the “analysis paralysis” habit.

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