SOEs

DIE HARD III

Herman Tiu Laurel

11/30/2012

Daily Tribune

The People's Republic of China's phenomenal resurgence did not come by "privatized" enterprise and "foreign investment." The most crucial element was — and still is — "state planning" of the economy. At the heart of this planned economy is the state or the people's ownership of the "means of production," i.e. the tools and materials by which all productivity is generated. These tools, in turn, are the financial and physical economic enterprises brought about by the state's control of credit, money, and finance, as typified by the Bank of China, which they correctly consider a "public utility" and "state-owned enterprise." This set-up is very much the same in the case of power, water and infrastructure, with such business entities as Sinopec (China Petrochemical Corp.) or State Grid Corp. of China (that has already bought into the National Grid Corp. of the Philippines). As of 2011, 35 percent of business activity and 43 percent of profits came from these companies, and many "private enterprises" have as much as 49 percent state investments.

It is not only China that uses such methods in building progress and growth for its nation. Among other countries doing the same is Singapore, which has an economy primarily guided by the state and where its largest investment corporations are state-owned and run, such as Singapore Investment Corp. and Temasek Holdings or its telecommunications company, SingTel, which invests even here. Although some others mask their national industries under private companies, these are nonetheless mandated by the state, such as Japan and South Korea's respective zaibatsus and chaebols.
These are in stark contrast to the Philippines, where private corporations that are invariably backed by foreign interests suck up to P1 trillion in profits annually, siphoning these out of the system (as admitted by GMA economic adviser Joey Salceda in 2009) — which figure has increased by as much as 25 percent each succeeding year.

In our column entitled, "Opening up RP," our point was "nationalization" as the necessary direction against today's "privatization" and the "opening up" of windows, gates, skirts, and all to "foreign investors," as one Australia "business consultant" (who has no business at all) prescribes.
The Philippines was proud to be the first to accede to the GATT-WTO (General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade-World Trade Organization) model and is now the last in Asia in terms of foreign economic investments and growth after almost 20 years since its signing. The United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) reported last October that the Philippines got only $800 million in 2011. For a country of 95 million people, the said figure is just the same as what Cambodia, having 14 million people, had achieved. China, meanwhile, with its state-controlled strategic enterprises and strict foreign investment guidelines, gets the lion's share of "foreign investments" at $91 billion in the first 10 months of 2012 alone.

The original title of this piece was "LOL (laughing out loud)" after I read a number of reactors lambasting me for being "Chinese," calling me among other things, "gago," an "excrement," a "dickhead" — all of which I enjoyed immensely. For sure, my provocations successfully opened a "can of worms," exposing a host of biological brainless creatures in wild verbal undulations. One reaction was to my depiction of the Aussies' roots, which the Australian government itself, in its Web site article entitled, "Convicts and British Colonies in Australia," narrates: "On 26 January 1788, Phillip raised the British flag at Sydney Cove. Seven hundred fifty-one convicts and their children disembarked, along with 252 marines and their families. Two more convict fleets arrived in 1790 and 1791… From 1788 to 1823, the Colony of New South Wales was officially a penal colony comprised mainly of convicts," which I capped off with a quip of "Need we say more?"

From the 1700s down to 1928, White Aussies massacred native Australian Aborigines. The "Aborigine Genocide" records: "Australian Aborigines suffered genocide at the hands of the European invaders in the 19th and 20th centuries. The indigenous population dropped from about 1 million to 0.1 million in the first century after the invasion in 1788, mainly through violence, dispossession, deprivation and introduced disease. The last massacres of Aborigines occurred in the 1920s. Throughout much of the 20th century there was a policy of forcibly removing Aboriginal children from their mothers, a systematic genocidal policy involving the removal of perhaps 0.1 million children." The Australian government has since officially apologized but the racism still continues, as my friends there report to us quite often whenever they return here. Let's hope the Aussie-philes learn a few historical lessons.

LOL (laughing out loud) is an expression popularized on the Internet but it also frequently has another meaning in Filipino (uLOL) describing a rabid dog.
Not a single one from the pro-"opening up" camp presented any sane argument. Neither have they rebutted the point that so-called foreign investors — in the sense of "finance capital" being the stuff of "foreign investments" in RP (like those going into PLDT or the MRT) and extolled by the late 20th and early 21st Century globalist economists — have destroyed both the US and Europe, where the "Occupy" movement is now gaining ground. It seems they cannot even admit to themselves that Greek protesters have been occupying town halls to protest the bitter fruits of globalization and "foreign investors" in their country. Mga uLOL nga!

(Watch GNN's HTL show, GNN Channel 8, Saturdays, 8:15 p.m. to 9 p.m., 11:15 p.m. and Sunday 8 a.m., and over at www.gnntv-asia.com on "Lessons from Latin America" with Federico Fuentes and Rihanna Melencio as guests; tune in to 1098 AM radio Tuesday to Friday, 5 to 6 p.m., and visit http://newkatipunan.blogspot.com)