‘Pagod’

by Emmanuel Doy Santos

Who would have thought that 36 years after the EDSA ‘People Power’ revolt of 1986, we would face another election where the leading candidates include one Ferdinand Marcos, Jr. and a widow, turned politician aligned with the Aquinos?

Having lived through Martial Law, I cannot really fathom what is unfolding. Within what I thought was my own circle of tight knit friends, bonds that have lasted decades have snapped. People have left our group because they can’t stand the rhetoric of some of its members. Friends whom I had never known to be political are now quite vocal about their views and judging those who don’t share them.

I’ve never really seen such partisanship before. People are taking their politics in such a deeply personal manner, the way they treat religion. I mean, if anyone should take it that way it ought to be me. My late father Emmanuel Tiu Santos was a bona fide EDSA figure.

Having campaigned for Ferdinand Sr in 1961 and gotten Imelda as a sponsor at his wedding in 1967, he turned when Marcos declared Martial Law in 1972. Having sponsored the bill of political, social and economic rights in the Con-Con, as well as the provisions setting up the Ombudsman, he realized that he needed to take a stand.

He decided to throw his hat in the ring in 1978. He co-founded the political party Lakas ng Bayan (LABAN) and ran with Ninoy Aquino. They contested seats for the national capital region in the Interim Batasan Pambansa elections and faced off with his ninang Imelda and her KBL slate.

My father together with his crew helped engineer the noise barrage that swept the capital prior to election day. He and many others considered this to be the first battle cry of EDSA (see ‘Laban ’78 to EDSA ’86', Inquirer, April 23, 2016).

I personally visited Ninoy in Times Street when he was under house arrest. Our family went to Boston in the summer of 1981 and spent three days with Ninoy and Tita Cory going around Harvard, Bunker Hill and other local sites.

After EDSA, dad literally dodged bullets and a grenade that was hurled at him while delivering a speech at his ‘miting de avance’ on the eve of the elections of 1988. He stood for election having been the appointed governor of his home province Nueva Ecija. This was an election that locals to this day maintain was stolen from him.

If anyone should hold strong views about a potential return of the Marcoses and their cronies to power, it ought to be people like me. But somehow, I’m not as affected, as some of my friends, who growing up, never really spoke of politics.

I do know that the outcome of this election does matter. When I see Marcos Jr polling ahead, it does affect me. I sleep uneasily at night and wake-up the following morning worrying for my country. But one thing I cannot bring myself to do is criticize nor condemn my friends who are Marcos loyalists.

The reason for that is simple. I recognize that the Marcoses were a product of their time and the internal contradictions of Philippine society that began at its founding when the Spanish friar lands fell into the hands of a few. As Iyer and Maurer (2009) pointed out, wealth became even more concentrated after the American colonial government partitioned and distributed these lands between 1903 and 1918.

“The ‘landed elite’ appears to have been broadened at the expense of smallholding families,” they wrote. This gave rise to the Old Society, where in the words of Ninoy “the few enjoy the fat of the land, and the many suffer.”

I’ve come to recognize a truism (and I mean no disrespect to those aggrieved by the late dictator). Yes, thousands were confirmed to have been abducted, summarily executed, mutilated, raped and tortured during that dreadful period under Marcos Sr. But this horrendous and horrific suffering is itself dwarfed by the tens of thousands that die in our country every year due to lack of basic human and health services, malnutrition, and natural disasters.

Yes, billions were siphoned off by the Marcoses to overseas bank accounts, and only a fraction was returned. But that too is a fraction of the billions wasted and stolen by corrupt officials today. How can we be so intolerant of one kind of abuse, yet turn a blind eye to the other?

The Marcoses, as dreadful as they are, as shameless as they are, are not the real problem. They are merely a symptom of the problem. The fact that their political fortunes have reversed, points to the failings of the post-EDSA neoliberal state that replaced them. The reason why I can’t engage in this gratuitous display of faux revulsion at the Marcoses, is that both sides are equally to blame for the perpetuation of our people’s suffering.

After all these years of political squabbles, I’ve grown weary of the circus that goes on at elections, while the fundamental basic needs of our people remain overlooked. For once, I’d like for us to take their problem seriously. Stop pretending that it will go away, the moment we vanquish the other side. No, it won’t go away. It hasn’t.

It is clear that what we need to do is see through the illusion of a dualist world view where the competing narratives of either side battle it out, and deal with the reality of ordinary people's lives where the true battle for survival persists. The best way to prevent a repeat of the past is not to promote a confected golden age by one side or the other, but to step out of the cycle of reactivity and retribution, to end the cycle of poverty, and attend to the fierce urgency of now.

The author is a development economist completing his doctoral studies in policy innovation at the University of New England in Australia. He supports Isko Moreno for president.

A Penchant for Redistribution

I am taking the liberty of recycling the following article from my drafts bin from three years ago when the debate in America was raging over healthcare. This post could have been written yesterday given the way things have played out, which is why I am posting it here:

Many commentators have opined that America under Pres Obama is re-casting itself in the mould of European socialist regimes. As Alan Wolfe observes,

the covers of National Review ("OUR SOCIALIST FUTURE"), The Nation ("REINVENTING CAPITALISM, REIMAGINING SOCIALISM"), and Newsweek ("WE ARE ALL SOCIALISTS NOW") have--respectively--lamented, heralded, and observed the coming rise of socialism (Obama vs Marx, The New Republic, April 01, 2009).

From his statements, Richard W Stevenson surmises the intent of Obama to reshape capitalism by

diminishing the consumerism that has long been the main source of growth in the United States, and encouraging more savings and investment. He would redistribute wealth toward the middle class and make the rest of the world less dependent on the American market for its prosperity. And he would seek a consensus recognizing that an activist government is an acceptable and necessary partner for a stable, market-based economy (Redefining Capitalism After the Fall, New York Times, April 18, 2009).

A High Tolerance for Inequality

Politically the cover for undertaking redistributive policies in the US is being provided by the current crisis. According to Alberto Alesina and Paola Giuliano who have studied income and wealth inequality, Americans are less “inequality intolerant” by nature compared to the Europeans. This is due to the perception that prevails in the US that social mobility is possible (the World Values Survey found that 60%, compared to 40% in Europe, believed in the possibility of improving their standing income-wise).

Only during the “Great Compression” lasting from the mid-40s to the 70s has the US seen inequality decline continuously; that is apart from what seems now to be a blip that lasted from the mid-90s to the early 2000s. Franklin Foer and Noam Scheiber write in The New Republic that

(b)eginning in 2004, the data gradually began to undermine the Clintonites' central assumption: that the benefits of growth would accrue to the poor and middle class ... Workers' wages had once tracked productivity growth. Now workers were producing more, but only the wealthy were reaping the rewards; everyone else's income had basically flattened out.

Alesina and Giuliano tell us that by August 2008, inequality in the US had returned to its previous level in the 1920s. Following the crisis which is widely perceived to be the fault of financiers at the top of the income pyramid less tolerance for inequality will ensue as

voters (will) demand especially strong action to reduce inequality, even in a country like the US, where inequality is much more tolerated than in Europe.

While there is a greater appetite for social levelling, it is the extent of that levelling that will be determined soon. Alesina again:

(w)ill Americans turn into “inequality intolerant” Europeans? Probably not, but this crisis may imply a turning point towards more government intervention and towards redistribution.

Of Wedding Feasts and Famines

In the media-driven frenzy of royal-watching, the wedding between Kate and Wills harks back to a time when the pomp and pageantry of the monarchy provided a diversion from the daily struggles of their subjects. In England, as late as the 1930s, poor families struggled with the problem of hunger. Yet as George Orwell wrote, 

The basis of their diet, therefore, is white bread and margarine, corned beef, sugared tea and potatoes -- an appalling diet. Would it not be better if they spent more money on wholesome things like oranges and wholemeal bread or if they even, like the writer of the letter to the New Statesman, saved on fuel and ate their carrots raw? Yes, it would, but the point is that no ordinary human being is ever going to do such a thing. The ordinary human being would sooner starve than live on brown bread and raw carrots.

The May/June 2011 online version of the magazine Foreign Policy is devoted to the problems associated with food price inflation and the impact this would have on poverty and hunger. The development aid community has flagged this as a potential cause for dragging many in the middle to low income countries into poverty.

Calls have been issued to address this pressing problem. But in a piece written by Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo, the general consensus regarding the issue is challenged. What if the experts are wrong, they ask.What if the problem of hunger is not caused by the lack of affordable food? Nobel Prize winning economist Amartya Sen has famously pointed to the fact that famines have only occurred in recent times in countries that lacked democratic institutions of accountability. Poor governance rather than a lack of food supply creates extreme hunger.

In India where Sen is from, despite the rise in per capita income, per capita caloric intake has declined. The piece points out that

(t)he change is not driven by declining incomes; by all accounts, Indians are making more money than ever before. Nor is it because of rising food prices -- between the early 1980s and 2005, food prices declined relative to the prices of other things, both in rural and urban India. Although food prices have increased again since 2005, Indians began eating less precisely when the price of food was going down.

What if the problem of hunger is not driven by a lack of affordable food, but the fact that the poor demand a different variety of food? They use one example to bear this out:

Using price data from the Philippines, we calculated the cost of the cheapest diet sufficient to give 2,400 calories. It would cost only about 21 cents a day, very affordable even for the very poor (the worldwide poverty line is set at roughly a dollar per day). The catch is, it would involve eating only bananas and eggs, something no one would like to do day in, day out. But so long as people are prepared to eat bananas and eggs when they need to, we should find very few people stuck in poverty because they do not get enough to eat.

To provide more evidence of this, they cite a study conducted in two regions of China where researchers offered randomly selected poor households a large subsidy on the price of basic staples believing this would result in greater consumption of food. Instead they found that:

(o)verall, the caloric intake of those who received the subsidy did not increase (and may even have decreased), despite the fact that their purchasing power had increased. Nor did the nutritional content improve in any other sense. The likely reason is that because the rice and wheat noodles were cheap but not particularly tasty, feeling richer might actually have made them consume less of those staples. 

They go on to point out the possible reasons why the poor might be eating less. Better water and sanitation for instance may lead to a lower incidence of nutrition depleting diseases. Women in rural villages which now have access to water no longer need to spend a good deal of effort fetching water to and from rivers. Aside from that is the penchant of the poor to spend on non-essentials like vices and other forms of entertainment (televisions, DVDs, mobile phones, movies, etc).

Many programs aimed at boosting protein and iodized salt intake have been met with a dismal response from poor households. It seems that when it comes to deciding what to spend their income on, they seem to have other priorities.