MANILA – "Optimism is soaring that the Philippines is finally becoming an Asian tiger economy, but critics caution a tiny elite that has long dominated is amassing most of the new wealth while the poor miss out.
President Benigno Aquino has overseen some of the highest growth rates in the region since he took office in 2010, while the stock market has hovered in record territory, credit ratings have improved and debt ratios have dropped.
“The Philippines is no longer the sick man of East Asia, but the rising tiger,” World Bank country director Motoo Konishi told a forum attended by many of Aquino’s economic planning chiefs recently.
However economists say that, despite genuine efforts from Aquino’s team to create inclusive growth, little progress has been made in changing a structure that for decades has allowed one of Asia’s worst rich-poor divides to develop.
“I think it’s obvious to everyone that something is structurally wrong. The oligarchy has too much control of the country’s resources,” Cielito Habito, a respected former economic planning minister, told AFP.
He presented data to the same economic forum at which Konishi spoke, showing that in 2011 the 40 richest families on the Forbes wealth list accounted for 76 percent of the country’s gross domestic product (GDP) growth.
This was the highest in Asia, compared with Thailand where the top 40 accounted for 33.7 percent of wealth growth, 5.6 percent for Malaysia and just 2.8 percent for Japan, according to Habito.
According to the Forbes 2012 annual rich list, the two wealthiest people in the Philippines, ethnic Chinese magnates Henry Sy and Lucio Tan, were worth a combined $13.6 billion.
This equated to six percent of the entire Philippine economy.
In contrast, about 25 million people, or one quarter of the population, lived on $1 a day or less in 2009, which was little changed from a decade earlier, according to the government’s most recent data.
Some of the elite families have dominated since the Spanish colonial era that ended in the late 1800s.
Prominent Spanish names, such as Ayala and Aboitiz, continue to control large chunks of the economy and members of the families are consistent high placers on Forbes’ annual top-40 wealth list.
Their business interests range from utilities to property development to banking, telecommunications and the booming business process outsourcing industry.
Many of the ethnic Chinese tycoons, such as Sy and Tan, got their start soon after the country gained post-World War II independence from the United States.
The tendency for the same names to dominate major industries can be partly attributed to government regulations that continue to allow near monopolies and protections for key players.
For decades after independence from the United States in 1946, important sectors such as air transport and telecommunications were under monopoly control, according to a Philippine Institute for Development Studies paper.
Despite wide-ranging reforms since 1981, big chunks of the market remain effective oligopolies or cartels, it said.
Habito said the path to riches for the few is also helped by a political culture that allows personal connections to easily open doors.
The Aquino government’s mantra since succeeding graft-tainted Gloria Arroyo’s administration has been good governance and inclusive growth, and their efforts have been applauded by the international community.
The government is spending more than $1 billion this year on one of its signature programmes to bridge the rich-poor divide.
The conditional cash transfers programme will see 15 million of the nation’s poorest people receive money directly in exchange for going to school and getting proper health care.
However Louie Montemar, a political science professor at Manila’s De La Salle University, said little had been done at the top end to impact on the dominance of the elite.
“There’s some sense to the argument that we’ve never had a real democracy because only a few have controlled economic power,” Montemar told AFP.
“The country dances to the tune of the tiny elite.”
Nevertheless, the government and economists say there are many other reforms that can be taken to bring about inclusive growth.
Analysts said the most direct path out of poverty was improving worker skills, using higher tax revenues to boost spending on infrastructure, and rebuilding the country’s manufacturing sector.
To this end, many economists endorse the Aquino government’s cash transfer programme as well as reforms to the education system, which include extending the primary and high school system from 10 to 13 years.
But for people such as mother-of-five Remy del Rosario, who earns about 1,500 pesos ($36) a week selling cigarettes on a Manila roadside, talk of structural reform and inclusive growth mean little.
With her bus driver husband out of work, the family has no savings and her income is barely enough to cover food, bus fare, and prescription medicines.
“Other people may be better off now, but we see no improvement in our lives,” she said."
http://business.inquirer.net/110413/philippines-elite-swallow-countrys-new-wealth March 3, 2013
Thursday, March 7, 2013
Monday, October 24, 2011
Infamy by Conrado De Quiros
"Today* is the 39th year of the declaration of martial law. It’s a day that ought to have for us the significance of Pearl Harbor for Americans, a day of infamy, a day when someone launched a sneaky attack on this country. It ought to, but it doesn’t. I doubt many of us still remember.
The gap between 1971 and 2011 is the gap between 1921 and 1962. That is not a gap, that is a chasm. That is the difference between foxtrot and the Beatles, that is the difference between the typewriter and the Internet.
I said much the same thing early this year when we celebrated the 25th anniversary of Edsa. The difference between 1986 and 2011 is the same difference for my own generation between 1945 and 1970. That is the difference between Liberation and Woodstock. The terrors of the Japanese Occupation we knew only from what we read in books, seen in the movies and heard from the old folks. Veterans of that War we regarded only the way people normally regard veterans: ancients who clung to the past, regaling those willing to listen to them, or have no choice, in drinking places with tales of their exploits.
Fortunately, or unfortunately, for us, Ferdinand Marcos would soon plunge us into a world very much like it.
It’s not easy to remember what happened 25 years ago or, worse, 39 years ago, particularly for a country in the throes of perpetual amnesia. But remember it we must, if only by repeated cajoling, if only by repeated exhortation. Our future rests on it.
At the very least that is so because the Marcoses are back, in case you haven’t noticed. They won three seats in the last elections, an unthinkable thing not so long ago, which is also the clearest sign Edsa has waned in memory. Imelda Marcos is now a representative, Bongbong a senator and Imee the governor of Ilocos Norte. And they want Ferdinand buried in the Libingan ng mga Bayani.
Bongbong is even gearing up to run for president in 2016. Although I’m not worried about this. For reasons that have nothing to do with this country’s forgetfulness. They have to do with the fact that Bongbong does not only lack his father’s relentlessness, or indeed ruthlessness, he lacks his father’s ability to create a mythical stature for himself. Marcos became president long before he ran for it by creating the myth of being the bravest, most decorated soldier, of World War II. It didn’t just make him president twice; it made him dictator afterward, the generals being in awe of him as the quintessential warrior. Bongbong doesn’t have that. He can spend all the ill-gotten wealth they’ve amassed, but he still won’t make it (back) to Malacañang.
What’s more worrisome is their attempt to turn Ferdinand into a hero, by the not very subtle route of his burying place. Of course much of the public is still against it, even if most of the congressmen are not. But that is little comfort. Not too long ago, that suggestion could never even have been made, let alone supported by the majority of Congress. Time is on their side, not against it. The memory of martial law recedes farther and they will put Ferdinand in the Philippine version of Valhalla. Opening the door to the wholesale revision of history, opening the door to making Filipinos love their chains.
But far more than that, we may forget martial law only at the cost of repeating it. That is a truism that happens to be true, and holds the most enormous consequences for us.
We don’t have to look far to see it, it’s not hypothetical: We have repeated that history by forgetting it. That is in the form of Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo’s rule, or at least the second part of it, an illegitimate rule that produced tyrannical consequences. True enough, history repeats itself first as tragedy and second as farce, though no one is laughing in the case of the second.
I won’t repeat my arguments about why the Arroyo regime was an echo, though not a very faint one, of the Marcos one. I’ve done it repeatedly in the past. More to the point here, which has enormous implications for the future, is how one party to both the Marcos and Arroyo regimes has escaped notice, or vilification. Indeed, has managed to reap accolade afterward. That is the United States.
It was instrumental in propping up both the Marcos and Arroyo regimes.
The first far more patently in Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger warmly endorsing martial law from the start, an endorsement then Vice President George Bush rammed home when he toasted Marcos’ “adherence to democracy” in 1981. It wasn’t till the mid-1980s when Marcos looked finished that the US changed its tune and helped roll the curtains down. For which pains, it turned from conspirator to liberator, Paul Laxalt being toasted afterward for advising Marcos to “cut, and cut cleanly.” Not unlike MacArthur with his, “I shall return.”
The second was less patent, Kristie Kenney smiling her way into the Filipinos’ hearts. Thanks to WikiLeaks we know now that smile was as real as the “smiling authoritarianism” Marcos wanted martial law to be known by. Kenney in fact would supply the perfect image, or metaphor, for American presence in this country, a smiling face masking the duplicitous one behind it. The US propped up Arroyo just as it propped up Marcos for much the same reason: to keep its military presence in the region. But thanks to WikiLeaks too, the US may not find it so easy to turn from conspirator to liberator this time around, Kenney maligning the true hero, though an unwitting one, of this saga, who was Cory, behind her back.
Truly, those who do not heed their history are doomed to repeat it. Those who do not learn from their past will have no future. Those who do not remember anything will never rise to the cusp of victory.
They will always teeter on the edge of infamy."
*There's the Rub column on The Inquirer by Conrado De Quiros
Cebu Daily News, September 22nd, 2011
Martial Law was declared by the then President Ferdinand E Marcos on 21 September 1972.
The gap between 1971 and 2011 is the gap between 1921 and 1962. That is not a gap, that is a chasm. That is the difference between foxtrot and the Beatles, that is the difference between the typewriter and the Internet.
I said much the same thing early this year when we celebrated the 25th anniversary of Edsa. The difference between 1986 and 2011 is the same difference for my own generation between 1945 and 1970. That is the difference between Liberation and Woodstock. The terrors of the Japanese Occupation we knew only from what we read in books, seen in the movies and heard from the old folks. Veterans of that War we regarded only the way people normally regard veterans: ancients who clung to the past, regaling those willing to listen to them, or have no choice, in drinking places with tales of their exploits.
Fortunately, or unfortunately, for us, Ferdinand Marcos would soon plunge us into a world very much like it.
It’s not easy to remember what happened 25 years ago or, worse, 39 years ago, particularly for a country in the throes of perpetual amnesia. But remember it we must, if only by repeated cajoling, if only by repeated exhortation. Our future rests on it.
At the very least that is so because the Marcoses are back, in case you haven’t noticed. They won three seats in the last elections, an unthinkable thing not so long ago, which is also the clearest sign Edsa has waned in memory. Imelda Marcos is now a representative, Bongbong a senator and Imee the governor of Ilocos Norte. And they want Ferdinand buried in the Libingan ng mga Bayani.
Bongbong is even gearing up to run for president in 2016. Although I’m not worried about this. For reasons that have nothing to do with this country’s forgetfulness. They have to do with the fact that Bongbong does not only lack his father’s relentlessness, or indeed ruthlessness, he lacks his father’s ability to create a mythical stature for himself. Marcos became president long before he ran for it by creating the myth of being the bravest, most decorated soldier, of World War II. It didn’t just make him president twice; it made him dictator afterward, the generals being in awe of him as the quintessential warrior. Bongbong doesn’t have that. He can spend all the ill-gotten wealth they’ve amassed, but he still won’t make it (back) to Malacañang.
What’s more worrisome is their attempt to turn Ferdinand into a hero, by the not very subtle route of his burying place. Of course much of the public is still against it, even if most of the congressmen are not. But that is little comfort. Not too long ago, that suggestion could never even have been made, let alone supported by the majority of Congress. Time is on their side, not against it. The memory of martial law recedes farther and they will put Ferdinand in the Philippine version of Valhalla. Opening the door to the wholesale revision of history, opening the door to making Filipinos love their chains.
But far more than that, we may forget martial law only at the cost of repeating it. That is a truism that happens to be true, and holds the most enormous consequences for us.
We don’t have to look far to see it, it’s not hypothetical: We have repeated that history by forgetting it. That is in the form of Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo’s rule, or at least the second part of it, an illegitimate rule that produced tyrannical consequences. True enough, history repeats itself first as tragedy and second as farce, though no one is laughing in the case of the second.
I won’t repeat my arguments about why the Arroyo regime was an echo, though not a very faint one, of the Marcos one. I’ve done it repeatedly in the past. More to the point here, which has enormous implications for the future, is how one party to both the Marcos and Arroyo regimes has escaped notice, or vilification. Indeed, has managed to reap accolade afterward. That is the United States.
It was instrumental in propping up both the Marcos and Arroyo regimes.
The first far more patently in Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger warmly endorsing martial law from the start, an endorsement then Vice President George Bush rammed home when he toasted Marcos’ “adherence to democracy” in 1981. It wasn’t till the mid-1980s when Marcos looked finished that the US changed its tune and helped roll the curtains down. For which pains, it turned from conspirator to liberator, Paul Laxalt being toasted afterward for advising Marcos to “cut, and cut cleanly.” Not unlike MacArthur with his, “I shall return.”
The second was less patent, Kristie Kenney smiling her way into the Filipinos’ hearts. Thanks to WikiLeaks we know now that smile was as real as the “smiling authoritarianism” Marcos wanted martial law to be known by. Kenney in fact would supply the perfect image, or metaphor, for American presence in this country, a smiling face masking the duplicitous one behind it. The US propped up Arroyo just as it propped up Marcos for much the same reason: to keep its military presence in the region. But thanks to WikiLeaks too, the US may not find it so easy to turn from conspirator to liberator this time around, Kenney maligning the true hero, though an unwitting one, of this saga, who was Cory, behind her back.
Truly, those who do not heed their history are doomed to repeat it. Those who do not learn from their past will have no future. Those who do not remember anything will never rise to the cusp of victory.
They will always teeter on the edge of infamy."
*There's the Rub column on The Inquirer by Conrado De Quiros
Cebu Daily News, September 22nd, 2011
Martial Law was declared by the then President Ferdinand E Marcos on 21 September 1972.
Saturday, November 28, 2009
The Ruthless Political Entrepreneurs of Muslim Mindanao
COMMENTARY: by Francisco Lara, Jr.
Friday, 27 November 2009 12:19
LONDON (MindaNews/26 Nov) -- The Maguindanao massacre predicts the eruption of wider violence and conflict as the nation heads towards the 2010 elections. Yet to dismiss this incident as “election-related” is to miss the fundamental political and economic implications of this evil deed. The massacre is rooted in the shift in politico-economic sources of violence and conflict in Muslim Mindanao. It signifies the emergence of new-type warlords whose powers depend upon their control of a vast illegal and shadow economy and an ever-growing slice of internal revenue allotments (IRA). Both factors induce a violent addiction to political office.
Mindanao scholars used to underscore the role of “local strong men” who were an essential component of the central state’s efforts to extend its writ over the region. The elite bargain was built upon the state’s willingness to eschew revenue generation and to grant politico-military dominance to a few Moro elites in exchange for the latter providing political thugs and armed militias to secure far-flung territories, fight the communists and separatists, and extend the administrative reach of the state.
The economic basis of the elite bargain has changed since then. Political office has become more attractive due to the billions of pesos in IRA remittances that electoral victory provides. The “winner-takes-all” nature of local electoral struggles in Muslim Mindanao also means that competition is costlier and bloodier. Meanwhile, political authority may enable control over the formal economy, but the bigger prize is the power to monopolize or to extort money from those engaged in the lucrative business of illegal drugs, gambling, kidnap-for-ransom, gun-running, and smuggling, among others. The piracy of software, CDs and DVDs, and the smuggling of pearls and other gemstones from China and Thailand are seen as micro and small enterprises. These illegal economies and a small formal sector comprise the “real” economy of Muslim Mindanao.
The failure to appreciate how this underground economy, coupled with entitlements to massive government-to-government fund transfers, shapes prevailing notions of political legitimacy and authority in the region partly explains the inability of the central State to deal with lawlessness and conflict.
Political legitimacy in Muslim Mindanao has very little to do with protecting people’s rights or providing basic services. People rarely depend on government for welfare provision, and are consequently averse to paying any taxes. People actually expect local leaders to pocket government resources, and are willing to look the other way so long as their clans dominate and they are given a small slice during elections. Legitimacy is all about providing protection to your fellow clan members by trumping the firepower of your competitors, leaving people alone, and forgetting about taxes.
There were positive signs in the recent past, especially among the Moro women and youth who bore the brunt of conflict and who sought a different future. But achieving their aspirations depends on their ability to rise above clan structures and the dynamics of hierarchy and collective self-defense that bound its members. This dilemma was painfully exposed in the Maguindanao massacre, where Moro women who usually played a strategic role in negotiating an end to rido became its principal victims.
The sad thing about the recent massacre is that it could have been avoided. Everyone in Central Mindanao knew about the looming violence between the Ampatuan and Mangudadatu clans as early as March 2009, when the latter’s patriarch Pax Mangudadatu confronted Andal Ampatuan in a public gathering and made known his clan’s intention to challenge the latter’s political hold on Maguindanao. This threat was in turn based on the knowledge that Ampatuan was planning to undermine the Mangudadatus by fielding a challenger against them in Sultan Kudarat.
In short, the “looming” rido which pundits are predicting today actually started more than six months ago. Yet neither Malacañang nor the COMELEC, PNP, and the AFP made any attempt to monitor their activities, disarm their private security, demobilize their loyalists within the police and military, and ring-fence their camps.
Why?
The answer lies in the newfound role of Muslim Mindanao to national political elites. The region is known for a long history of electoral fraud. The difference today lies in its ability to provide the millions of votes that can overturn the results of national electoral contests, a situation brought about by the creation of a sub-national state (ARMM) and reinforced by the sort of democratic political competition in the post-Marcos era that makes local bosses more powerful and national leaders more beholden to them. This was the case in the presidential elections of 2004 and the senatorial race in 2007. It will serve the same purpose in 2010. Whose purpose is served by arresting Ampatuan in an election year? Certainly not those of the ruling coalition.
This partly explains the foot dragging and the lame treatment of principal suspects in the massacre. And to those pressing for limited martial rule in Maguindanao, beware what you wish for. Having a surfeit of troops on the ground can provide a superficial peace at best. At worse, it may facilitate the same type of electoral fraud in 2010, or leverage the firepower of the dominant clan over another.
In a region where the rebellion-related conflict between the GRP and the MILF received all of the national and international community’s attention and aid, NGOs such as International Alert and the Asia Foundation have often decried the ignorance and indifference of the government and donor agencies to community-based inter and intra clan violence. As International Alert asserts, it is time to focus on the confluence between both types and sources of violence and conflict. Indifference will only lead to more death and destruction as the election approaches, when a convergence between rebellion-related, and inter and intra clan conflict occurs as military forces and armed rebels take sides between warring clans and factions.
Mindanao scholars such as Patricio Abinales, James Putzel, and John Sidel have previously noted how local strong men made Mindanao, and how the region provided an ideal case of the country’s “imperfect democracy” and “political bossism”. More recently, the conflict scholar Stathis Kalyvas called attention to the birth of “ruthless political entrepreneurs” who shape and are shaped by the dynamics between states, clans, and conflict. The viciousness of the Maguindanao attack shows how these phenomena resonates here. It demonstrates the weak and narrow reach of the central Philippine state in Muslim Mindanao, and how the continued reliance on local strong men will not end the cycle of violence.
(Francisco Lara Jr. is Research Associate at the Crisis States Research Center, Development Studies Institute, London School of Economics.)
Friday, 27 November 2009 12:19
LONDON (MindaNews/26 Nov) -- The Maguindanao massacre predicts the eruption of wider violence and conflict as the nation heads towards the 2010 elections. Yet to dismiss this incident as “election-related” is to miss the fundamental political and economic implications of this evil deed. The massacre is rooted in the shift in politico-economic sources of violence and conflict in Muslim Mindanao. It signifies the emergence of new-type warlords whose powers depend upon their control of a vast illegal and shadow economy and an ever-growing slice of internal revenue allotments (IRA). Both factors induce a violent addiction to political office.
Mindanao scholars used to underscore the role of “local strong men” who were an essential component of the central state’s efforts to extend its writ over the region. The elite bargain was built upon the state’s willingness to eschew revenue generation and to grant politico-military dominance to a few Moro elites in exchange for the latter providing political thugs and armed militias to secure far-flung territories, fight the communists and separatists, and extend the administrative reach of the state.
The economic basis of the elite bargain has changed since then. Political office has become more attractive due to the billions of pesos in IRA remittances that electoral victory provides. The “winner-takes-all” nature of local electoral struggles in Muslim Mindanao also means that competition is costlier and bloodier. Meanwhile, political authority may enable control over the formal economy, but the bigger prize is the power to monopolize or to extort money from those engaged in the lucrative business of illegal drugs, gambling, kidnap-for-ransom, gun-running, and smuggling, among others. The piracy of software, CDs and DVDs, and the smuggling of pearls and other gemstones from China and Thailand are seen as micro and small enterprises. These illegal economies and a small formal sector comprise the “real” economy of Muslim Mindanao.
The failure to appreciate how this underground economy, coupled with entitlements to massive government-to-government fund transfers, shapes prevailing notions of political legitimacy and authority in the region partly explains the inability of the central State to deal with lawlessness and conflict.
Political legitimacy in Muslim Mindanao has very little to do with protecting people’s rights or providing basic services. People rarely depend on government for welfare provision, and are consequently averse to paying any taxes. People actually expect local leaders to pocket government resources, and are willing to look the other way so long as their clans dominate and they are given a small slice during elections. Legitimacy is all about providing protection to your fellow clan members by trumping the firepower of your competitors, leaving people alone, and forgetting about taxes.
There were positive signs in the recent past, especially among the Moro women and youth who bore the brunt of conflict and who sought a different future. But achieving their aspirations depends on their ability to rise above clan structures and the dynamics of hierarchy and collective self-defense that bound its members. This dilemma was painfully exposed in the Maguindanao massacre, where Moro women who usually played a strategic role in negotiating an end to rido became its principal victims.
The sad thing about the recent massacre is that it could have been avoided. Everyone in Central Mindanao knew about the looming violence between the Ampatuan and Mangudadatu clans as early as March 2009, when the latter’s patriarch Pax Mangudadatu confronted Andal Ampatuan in a public gathering and made known his clan’s intention to challenge the latter’s political hold on Maguindanao. This threat was in turn based on the knowledge that Ampatuan was planning to undermine the Mangudadatus by fielding a challenger against them in Sultan Kudarat.
In short, the “looming” rido which pundits are predicting today actually started more than six months ago. Yet neither Malacañang nor the COMELEC, PNP, and the AFP made any attempt to monitor their activities, disarm their private security, demobilize their loyalists within the police and military, and ring-fence their camps.
Why?
The answer lies in the newfound role of Muslim Mindanao to national political elites. The region is known for a long history of electoral fraud. The difference today lies in its ability to provide the millions of votes that can overturn the results of national electoral contests, a situation brought about by the creation of a sub-national state (ARMM) and reinforced by the sort of democratic political competition in the post-Marcos era that makes local bosses more powerful and national leaders more beholden to them. This was the case in the presidential elections of 2004 and the senatorial race in 2007. It will serve the same purpose in 2010. Whose purpose is served by arresting Ampatuan in an election year? Certainly not those of the ruling coalition.
This partly explains the foot dragging and the lame treatment of principal suspects in the massacre. And to those pressing for limited martial rule in Maguindanao, beware what you wish for. Having a surfeit of troops on the ground can provide a superficial peace at best. At worse, it may facilitate the same type of electoral fraud in 2010, or leverage the firepower of the dominant clan over another.
In a region where the rebellion-related conflict between the GRP and the MILF received all of the national and international community’s attention and aid, NGOs such as International Alert and the Asia Foundation have often decried the ignorance and indifference of the government and donor agencies to community-based inter and intra clan violence. As International Alert asserts, it is time to focus on the confluence between both types and sources of violence and conflict. Indifference will only lead to more death and destruction as the election approaches, when a convergence between rebellion-related, and inter and intra clan conflict occurs as military forces and armed rebels take sides between warring clans and factions.
Mindanao scholars such as Patricio Abinales, James Putzel, and John Sidel have previously noted how local strong men made Mindanao, and how the region provided an ideal case of the country’s “imperfect democracy” and “political bossism”. More recently, the conflict scholar Stathis Kalyvas called attention to the birth of “ruthless political entrepreneurs” who shape and are shaped by the dynamics between states, clans, and conflict. The viciousness of the Maguindanao attack shows how these phenomena resonates here. It demonstrates the weak and narrow reach of the central Philippine state in Muslim Mindanao, and how the continued reliance on local strong men will not end the cycle of violence.
(Francisco Lara Jr. is Research Associate at the Crisis States Research Center, Development Studies Institute, London School of Economics.)
Thursday, October 22, 2009
A nation of dimwits By Juan Mercado
Viewpoint
Philippine Daily Inquirer [First Posted 00:49:00 10/22/2009]
Filed Under: Books, Education, Government
Opinion Most Read RSS
Close this CAGAYAN DE ORO—For over a decade, Antonio Calipjo-Go skewered error-studded textbooks, bought with our taxes and hefty World Bank IOUs. The battered academician, this month, won vindication of sorts. Grudgingly, the Department of Education issued a 28-page booklet to more than half a million public school teachers. “Teaching Notes” correct “more than 450 errors found in 10 English textbooks,” the Inquirer reported.
Grade 1 to Grade 6 students use these books. And Go pinpointed most of those flaws. Use “Notes” for “correcting errors that may be [found],” Education Undersecretary Vilma Labrador gingerly wrote.
“Books are the carriers of civilization,” historian Barbara Tuchman said. “Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled, thought and speculation silenced,” said the author of “The Guns of August.”
In December 2008, Go tossed in the towel in the battle to prevent our kids from sliding into a nation of dimwits. It led to nowhere, the 57-year-old whistleblower wearily said.
“Go sowed the wind by documenting multiple errors in books, from science, grammar, social studies to history,” Viewpoint noted. “He reaped the whirlwind.”
So did other whistleblowers before him. Ensign Philip Pestaño denounced, in 1997, misuse of Navy boats to haul illegal lumber and drugs. A Senate probe concluded he was murdered. But in the last 22 years, the military ombudsman hasn’t budged beyond securing counter-affidavits.
Rodolfo “Jun” Lozada testified on how a $132-million ZTE broadband contract ballooned to $329 million. Lozada has been fired, sued and harassed.
“If you have money, even the spirits will turn the mills for you,” the Chinese proverb says. And there’s big bucks in textbook publishing. DepEd last year bought 21.2 million English textbooks for grades 1 to 6. The bill: P666.6 million. Just one firm cornered P383 million for six books.
Big publishers and corrupt officials choreographed a smear campaign against Go. Some columnists didn’t take issue with errors he pointed out, like “Paoay is a province.” But they assailed Go’s integrity with charges that proved baseless.
Accord Go the right of reply, the Philippine Press Council asked. Go’s rejoinders have been ignored up to now. This is failure at self-regulation by individual newspapers.
Most papers, in contrast, scrupulously ensure fairness. But this lapse may yet sap media’s defense against the threat of compulsory right-of-reply measures, like HB 3306 and SB 2150.
“You shall know the truth,” Aldous Huxley once joshed. “And the truth will make you mad.”
Flawed textbooks infuriated parents, educators and private citizens. But their protests slammed against shekel power.
Frank Hilario drew up a timeline that depicts resistance to reform in “horror of errors in Philippine textbooks.” Read and weep:
1996. German national Helmut Haas finds 1,341 errors in his daughter’s textbooks: 194 in “Science and Health” and 420 in “Civics and Culture.” Rep. Raul del Mar prods the House to adopt corrective legislation.
1999. Enter Matt Dizon and Go. They pinpoint 950 factual errors and 550 typographical errors in a book sold to Marian School of Quezon City. The publisher incorporates corrections, but he does not acknowledge the work of Dizon and Go.
2000. Go finds flaws in books, from “Effective Language” to Asian history. In 2001, the series “Science and Technology for The Modern World” for high school students is scrubbed because of errors.
2002. In a full-page newspaper ad, Go points to 400 textbook errors and calls for reforms. In an Inquirer ad, in 2004, he fingers 431 factual and grammatical errors in the social studies and history textbooks, approved by DepEd.
2007. Two years after errors in history textbooks were revealed, the Senate discovered the same errors repeated. Another 100-plus “errors of fact” studded a new batch of Grade 3 social studies books.
Gross errors in chemistry in a General Science book is found by Sigrid S. Rodolfo, who holds a doctorate from Purdue University. Sen. Panfilo Lacson introduces Resolution 53 to probe a problem that refused to go away.
2008. Sen. Pia Cayetano follows suit. Nothing happens. Erika Sauler reports in an Inquirer series that despite a DepEd order, private schools use uncorrected texts. Sen. Manuel Villar gets into the act with Senate Resolution 822.
The Inquirer won this year a Citizens Mass Media Award for its textbook series.
Why is the pace of reforms so stretched out? Governments face a choice, Harvard University’s John Kenneth Gailbraith explained. Change one’s mind or prove there is no need to do so. “Almost everybody gets busy on the proof.”
The country is in debt to whistleblowers who, like Go or Lozada, slug away. The unsavory reality is that, like Somali pirates, bandits here often win. The targets vary—from jueteng, as Erap knows, to fertilizers, as Joc-joc Bolante can attest to.
But the bottom line is constant: crime pays handsomely. Thieves are not ostracized. They buy first places at table. Indeed, “the ultimate perversion is to call evil good.”
“Mangled textbooks mangle young minds,” noted Viewpoint on Dec. 3, 2008. “Miseducation sentences kids to life sentences in twilight ignorance. This locks them into poverty and unfulfilled potentials. And as these youngster go, so does the nation.”
(Email: juanlmercado@gmail.com)
Philippine Daily Inquirer [First Posted 00:49:00 10/22/2009]
Filed Under: Books, Education, Government
Opinion Most Read RSS
Close this CAGAYAN DE ORO—For over a decade, Antonio Calipjo-Go skewered error-studded textbooks, bought with our taxes and hefty World Bank IOUs. The battered academician, this month, won vindication of sorts. Grudgingly, the Department of Education issued a 28-page booklet to more than half a million public school teachers. “Teaching Notes” correct “more than 450 errors found in 10 English textbooks,” the Inquirer reported.
Grade 1 to Grade 6 students use these books. And Go pinpointed most of those flaws. Use “Notes” for “correcting errors that may be [found],” Education Undersecretary Vilma Labrador gingerly wrote.
“Books are the carriers of civilization,” historian Barbara Tuchman said. “Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled, thought and speculation silenced,” said the author of “The Guns of August.”
In December 2008, Go tossed in the towel in the battle to prevent our kids from sliding into a nation of dimwits. It led to nowhere, the 57-year-old whistleblower wearily said.
“Go sowed the wind by documenting multiple errors in books, from science, grammar, social studies to history,” Viewpoint noted. “He reaped the whirlwind.”
So did other whistleblowers before him. Ensign Philip Pestaño denounced, in 1997, misuse of Navy boats to haul illegal lumber and drugs. A Senate probe concluded he was murdered. But in the last 22 years, the military ombudsman hasn’t budged beyond securing counter-affidavits.
Rodolfo “Jun” Lozada testified on how a $132-million ZTE broadband contract ballooned to $329 million. Lozada has been fired, sued and harassed.
“If you have money, even the spirits will turn the mills for you,” the Chinese proverb says. And there’s big bucks in textbook publishing. DepEd last year bought 21.2 million English textbooks for grades 1 to 6. The bill: P666.6 million. Just one firm cornered P383 million for six books.
Big publishers and corrupt officials choreographed a smear campaign against Go. Some columnists didn’t take issue with errors he pointed out, like “Paoay is a province.” But they assailed Go’s integrity with charges that proved baseless.
Accord Go the right of reply, the Philippine Press Council asked. Go’s rejoinders have been ignored up to now. This is failure at self-regulation by individual newspapers.
Most papers, in contrast, scrupulously ensure fairness. But this lapse may yet sap media’s defense against the threat of compulsory right-of-reply measures, like HB 3306 and SB 2150.
“You shall know the truth,” Aldous Huxley once joshed. “And the truth will make you mad.”
Flawed textbooks infuriated parents, educators and private citizens. But their protests slammed against shekel power.
Frank Hilario drew up a timeline that depicts resistance to reform in “horror of errors in Philippine textbooks.” Read and weep:
1996. German national Helmut Haas finds 1,341 errors in his daughter’s textbooks: 194 in “Science and Health” and 420 in “Civics and Culture.” Rep. Raul del Mar prods the House to adopt corrective legislation.
1999. Enter Matt Dizon and Go. They pinpoint 950 factual errors and 550 typographical errors in a book sold to Marian School of Quezon City. The publisher incorporates corrections, but he does not acknowledge the work of Dizon and Go.
2000. Go finds flaws in books, from “Effective Language” to Asian history. In 2001, the series “Science and Technology for The Modern World” for high school students is scrubbed because of errors.
2002. In a full-page newspaper ad, Go points to 400 textbook errors and calls for reforms. In an Inquirer ad, in 2004, he fingers 431 factual and grammatical errors in the social studies and history textbooks, approved by DepEd.
2007. Two years after errors in history textbooks were revealed, the Senate discovered the same errors repeated. Another 100-plus “errors of fact” studded a new batch of Grade 3 social studies books.
Gross errors in chemistry in a General Science book is found by Sigrid S. Rodolfo, who holds a doctorate from Purdue University. Sen. Panfilo Lacson introduces Resolution 53 to probe a problem that refused to go away.
2008. Sen. Pia Cayetano follows suit. Nothing happens. Erika Sauler reports in an Inquirer series that despite a DepEd order, private schools use uncorrected texts. Sen. Manuel Villar gets into the act with Senate Resolution 822.
The Inquirer won this year a Citizens Mass Media Award for its textbook series.
Why is the pace of reforms so stretched out? Governments face a choice, Harvard University’s John Kenneth Gailbraith explained. Change one’s mind or prove there is no need to do so. “Almost everybody gets busy on the proof.”
The country is in debt to whistleblowers who, like Go or Lozada, slug away. The unsavory reality is that, like Somali pirates, bandits here often win. The targets vary—from jueteng, as Erap knows, to fertilizers, as Joc-joc Bolante can attest to.
But the bottom line is constant: crime pays handsomely. Thieves are not ostracized. They buy first places at table. Indeed, “the ultimate perversion is to call evil good.”
“Mangled textbooks mangle young minds,” noted Viewpoint on Dec. 3, 2008. “Miseducation sentences kids to life sentences in twilight ignorance. This locks them into poverty and unfulfilled potentials. And as these youngster go, so does the nation.”
(Email: juanlmercado@gmail.com)
Sunday, October 4, 2009
Three - There's the Rub by Conrado de Quiros
"...indeed to this hour, what government we have is courtesy of the private sector where voluntarism has sprung like wildflowers. That is the bright spot in all this, the light amid the darkness, the blazing sun after the storm. Truly the Filipino rises to his finest self during trying times, the more trying the times, the finer the rising. Or it is in times of disaster that the Filipino ceases to be a disaster, thinking of others first before self."
Shared via AddThis
Photo credit: from internet email forward.
Wednesday, September 9, 2009
Word of the Lourd: Social Commentaries on YouTube
This one is Wang Wang ng Ina Mo!
"Daily newscast of TV5 which ventures into a fresh way of delivering the day's top stories...and MORE.
Monday - Friday, 11:00 pm
Name: TEN
TEN: The Evening News
Daily newscast of tv5 which ventures into a fresh way of delivering the day's top stories...and MORE.
Monday - Friday, 11:00 pm
Country: Philippines
Companies: tv5
Website: http://www.tv5.com.ph
by TV5EveningNews @ YouTube. Will definitely look out for more of the social commentaries of this guy... great use of technology.
Wednesday, July 8, 2009
Footnote to a false note
Theres The Rub [A column] By Conrado de Quiros
Philippine Daily Inquirer
First Posted 02:22:00 05/11/2009
Filed Under: Music, Entertainment (general), history, Customs & Traditions
I beg to disagree with some friends on this. “This” is the way Martin Nievera sang “Lupang Hinirang” in the Pacquiao-Hatton fight, which has brought him into a brawl with preservers of Filipino tradition. The fight has so far been lopsided, with many authority figures, from congressmen to historians, knocking him down with a chorus of irate voices.
I myself have no problems with it. In fact I have a couple of reasons for liking it.
The first has to do with the barb that Nievera went the route of show biz by aping the American singers (mostly black) who make the “Star-Spangled Banner” sound like Motown each time an American boxer takes to the ring. Which, as the nastier remarks go, is probably because Nievera is an American at heart and on paper. I leave others to argue where Nievera’s loyalties lie, though given all the open and closet “statehooders” here—Filipinos who long for the country to become a state of the United States—not least among the congressmen, I wouldn’t advise pressing this point too loudly.
But even if Nievera went show biz, what of it? Boxing is pretty much show biz, of the loud and glittery type. And though Nievera did not sing “Lupang Hinirang” traditionally, he did not disrespect it either, to use a word much favored by African-Americans.
The reason Americans do not mind their National Anthem sung like gospel (or its modern reincarnations; I wouldn’t be surprised if it becomes hip-hop one day) is that they are secure in their patriotism. They are secure in their sense of country. They are secure in their loyalty to flag and country. Enough to withstand Jimi Hendrix’s “sacrilegious” interpretation of the “Star-Spangled Banner,” which he did in Woodstock, his awesome guitar blaring out the din of discord in protest against the Vietnam War. That version has since been elevated to iconic status by baby boomers.
Our prissiness with orthodoxy is in fact a symptom of an affliction as worrisome as swine flu. We like revering tradition because we prefer form over content, because we like showing our love of country in ritual rather than in practice. We like to build busts and monuments to the heroes without liking to follow their ideals and actions, which is really the best tribute to them. The religious equivalent of this is that we like to hear Mass and receive the sacraments without liking to live lives that are not given to lying, cheating, stealing and murdering.
It’s like that line in “Lupang Hinirang:” “Ang mamatay nang dahil say iyo” (“to die for you”). I’ve always said that was a perfect, if ironic, commentary on us. We’ve never had problems dying for country, we’ve always had problems living for it. I’ve always suggested—utter sacrilege!—changing it to, “Ang mabuhay ng dahil sa iyo” (“to live for you”).
My second point is: Why on earth should we regard tradition as intractable or unchangeable?
Even the Rock, or the Church, changes. I still remember the time when the Mass, which used to unfold with Latin incantations, gave way to idiomatic English. Or indeed, horror of horrors, when the Gregorian chant gave way to the “Guitar Mass.” Once things that threatened to make the faithful faithless, plain language and (middle-of-the-road) pop (if not rock) are rock-solid orthodoxy in Masses now.
In the case of historical tradition, I should think changes should not just be acceptable to us, they should be welcome to us. I say this because our lack of sense of history—truly notorious in that we can’t even remember the recent past—owes in great part to our tendency to embalm history. To treat it as something dead and gone and remembered only on the historical equivalents of All Saints’ Day. One natural consequence of this is to turn history into sacred text and the heroes into untouchable objects of worship.
I still remember how we used to look at Jose Rizal, Andres Bonifacio, Apolinario Mabini and the other heroes that way, courtesy of high school and college. Something the new wave of historians led by Renato Constantino corrected, turning them into ordinary folk who did extraordinary things in their time and place. No less, or more, than the activists did in their time and place. The process of demystification, or “humanization,” would culminate in historians like Ambeth Ocampo who would make Rizal et al. as contemporary as, well, Nievera’s rendition of the National Anthem.
Which makes me wonder why Ambeth in particular should disapprove of that rendition. I recall that when he was pilloried by purists for “watering down” history with his “pop” version of it, I wrote a column saying that far from detracting from the worth of history, he added to it. Specifically by making the past present, by making the dead living, by making history not history in the idiomatic sense of “we’re outta here” but history in the sense of current events. The power of history lies precisely in its being living history, or a “continuing past,” as Constantino put it. One would imagine that a continuing past uses the idioms or idiosyncrasies of the flowing present. That’s what makes the past worth remembering. That’s what makes the past worth living.
It’s not just that I don’t think Nievera has done any harm by his version, it is that I think he has done much good with it. Anything that hooks the youth in particular of this amnesiac country to their past, even if it feels like a right hook to those who take that past reverentially, is fine by me. History has been known to rock, history has been known to roll. Sometimes, history has even been known to OPM.
In any case, I have a lot of friends who’ve always thought the National Anthem wasn’t “Lupang Hinirang” but Juan de la Cruz’s “Ang Himig Natin.”
---------------------
Thanks to Bernadette for bringing this to my attention. FB is great!
Philippine Daily Inquirer
First Posted 02:22:00 05/11/2009
Filed Under: Music, Entertainment (general), history, Customs & Traditions
I beg to disagree with some friends on this. “This” is the way Martin Nievera sang “Lupang Hinirang” in the Pacquiao-Hatton fight, which has brought him into a brawl with preservers of Filipino tradition. The fight has so far been lopsided, with many authority figures, from congressmen to historians, knocking him down with a chorus of irate voices.
I myself have no problems with it. In fact I have a couple of reasons for liking it.
The first has to do with the barb that Nievera went the route of show biz by aping the American singers (mostly black) who make the “Star-Spangled Banner” sound like Motown each time an American boxer takes to the ring. Which, as the nastier remarks go, is probably because Nievera is an American at heart and on paper. I leave others to argue where Nievera’s loyalties lie, though given all the open and closet “statehooders” here—Filipinos who long for the country to become a state of the United States—not least among the congressmen, I wouldn’t advise pressing this point too loudly.
But even if Nievera went show biz, what of it? Boxing is pretty much show biz, of the loud and glittery type. And though Nievera did not sing “Lupang Hinirang” traditionally, he did not disrespect it either, to use a word much favored by African-Americans.
The reason Americans do not mind their National Anthem sung like gospel (or its modern reincarnations; I wouldn’t be surprised if it becomes hip-hop one day) is that they are secure in their patriotism. They are secure in their sense of country. They are secure in their loyalty to flag and country. Enough to withstand Jimi Hendrix’s “sacrilegious” interpretation of the “Star-Spangled Banner,” which he did in Woodstock, his awesome guitar blaring out the din of discord in protest against the Vietnam War. That version has since been elevated to iconic status by baby boomers.
Our prissiness with orthodoxy is in fact a symptom of an affliction as worrisome as swine flu. We like revering tradition because we prefer form over content, because we like showing our love of country in ritual rather than in practice. We like to build busts and monuments to the heroes without liking to follow their ideals and actions, which is really the best tribute to them. The religious equivalent of this is that we like to hear Mass and receive the sacraments without liking to live lives that are not given to lying, cheating, stealing and murdering.
It’s like that line in “Lupang Hinirang:” “Ang mamatay nang dahil say iyo” (“to die for you”). I’ve always said that was a perfect, if ironic, commentary on us. We’ve never had problems dying for country, we’ve always had problems living for it. I’ve always suggested—utter sacrilege!—changing it to, “Ang mabuhay ng dahil sa iyo” (“to live for you”).
My second point is: Why on earth should we regard tradition as intractable or unchangeable?
Even the Rock, or the Church, changes. I still remember the time when the Mass, which used to unfold with Latin incantations, gave way to idiomatic English. Or indeed, horror of horrors, when the Gregorian chant gave way to the “Guitar Mass.” Once things that threatened to make the faithful faithless, plain language and (middle-of-the-road) pop (if not rock) are rock-solid orthodoxy in Masses now.
In the case of historical tradition, I should think changes should not just be acceptable to us, they should be welcome to us. I say this because our lack of sense of history—truly notorious in that we can’t even remember the recent past—owes in great part to our tendency to embalm history. To treat it as something dead and gone and remembered only on the historical equivalents of All Saints’ Day. One natural consequence of this is to turn history into sacred text and the heroes into untouchable objects of worship.
I still remember how we used to look at Jose Rizal, Andres Bonifacio, Apolinario Mabini and the other heroes that way, courtesy of high school and college. Something the new wave of historians led by Renato Constantino corrected, turning them into ordinary folk who did extraordinary things in their time and place. No less, or more, than the activists did in their time and place. The process of demystification, or “humanization,” would culminate in historians like Ambeth Ocampo who would make Rizal et al. as contemporary as, well, Nievera’s rendition of the National Anthem.
Which makes me wonder why Ambeth in particular should disapprove of that rendition. I recall that when he was pilloried by purists for “watering down” history with his “pop” version of it, I wrote a column saying that far from detracting from the worth of history, he added to it. Specifically by making the past present, by making the dead living, by making history not history in the idiomatic sense of “we’re outta here” but history in the sense of current events. The power of history lies precisely in its being living history, or a “continuing past,” as Constantino put it. One would imagine that a continuing past uses the idioms or idiosyncrasies of the flowing present. That’s what makes the past worth remembering. That’s what makes the past worth living.
It’s not just that I don’t think Nievera has done any harm by his version, it is that I think he has done much good with it. Anything that hooks the youth in particular of this amnesiac country to their past, even if it feels like a right hook to those who take that past reverentially, is fine by me. History has been known to rock, history has been known to roll. Sometimes, history has even been known to OPM.
In any case, I have a lot of friends who’ve always thought the National Anthem wasn’t “Lupang Hinirang” but Juan de la Cruz’s “Ang Himig Natin.”
---------------------
Thanks to Bernadette for bringing this to my attention. FB is great!
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