Aquino’s Legacy: Exclusive Growth, Ineffectual Bureaucracy

An Assessment of the Aquino III government (2010-2016)

James Matthew Miraflor

Vice President, Freedom from Debt Coalition

The verdict is in.

If there is one catch-phrase that can summarize the legacy of President Benigno Simeon Aquino III in his half-a-decade rule, it is this: “exclusive growth via an ineffectual bureaucracy”. A growth dictated by the moods of global market amid worsening poverty and stagnating inequality levels, and the failure of the bureaucracy to even spend the money it was able to collect to arrest poverty – these cap the legacy of who was once touted as a savior of Philippine democracy and commonweal from the dark years of President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo.

Did Aquino III measure up?

We argue that this is not just an accident of history that Aquino III failed to fulfill his mantra of “kung walang korap, walang mahirap”. Granting that we have made strides in the fight against corruption – a statement that is made with some reservation given the proliferation of patrimonialism in Congress and the national government agencies – it would have been simply illogical to assume that those strides alone will translate to better welfare for the rest of the Filipino people. Rather, we insist that the failures of Aquino III are deeply rooted to its philosophy of government – the vision it constructed when it translated its “social contract” into the 2010-2016 Philippine Development Plan (PDP).

Progressive groups such as the Freedom from Debt Coalition (FDC) already criticized the 2010-2016 PDP from its inception, saying that it is weak on asset reform and fails to construct the economic underpinnings of a true “straight path” and “inclusive growth”. NEDA, under the neoliberal Director-General Cayetano Paderanga, basically ripped-off the agenda of Arangkada Philippines, a document prepared by the Joint Foreign Chambers of the Philippines (see letter from JFC to Paderanga here). This meant that the resulting PDP basically champions the interest of big capital over the interest of the Filipino masses. That the Aquino administration would end its term with increasing number of poor citizens in a growing economy demonstrates the bias it has set for itself when it began.

The World according to Friedman: 2012 Geopolitical Analysis on US, China, Germany, and Japan

Clearly, for geopolitics, 2012 did not signal the world's end, but only its tumultuous continuity. Major economies of the world had seen their governments either replaced or reestablished - Barack Obama in the United States, Xi Jinping in People's Republic of China, and Shinzō Abe in Japan. Newsweek issued its last print issue, with the iconic hashtag sounding the death knell to non-online publishing. European Union remains to be stuck in a debilitating debt crisis. The UN General Assembly approves a motion granting Palestine non-member observer state status.

From here.

As we close this year, it is but fitting to listen to one of the world's best geopolitical minds  as he speaks on the state of the world, as well as the history and future of US, China, Germany and Japan. Let us all take a peek at the important insights George Friedman of Stratfor shared to us in 2012: 

The State of the World: A Framework 
By George Friedman | February 21, 2012

Editor's Note: This is the first installment of a new series on the national strategies of today's global power and other regional powers. This installment establishes a framework for understating the current state of the world. 

The evolution of geopolitics is cyclical. Powers rise, fall and shift. Changes occur in every generation in an unending ballet. However, the period between 1989 and 1991 was unique in that a long cycle of human history spanning hundreds of years ended, and with it a shorter cycle also came to a close. The world is still reverberating from the events of that period.

On Dec. 25, 1991, an epoch ended. On that day the Soviet Union collapsed, and for the first time in almost 500 years no European power was a global power, meaning no European state integrated economic, military and political power on a global scale. What began in 1492 with Europe smashing its way into the world and creating a global imperial system had ended. For five centuries, one European power or another had dominated the world, whether Portugal, Spain, France, England or the Soviet Union. Even the lesser European powers at the time had some degree of global influence.

Hegemony of Globalization

This is a simple movie clip on the hegemony of economic globalization, and the often chain of unintended consequences it brings. Enjoy!



Not exactly a "butterfly effect" (of Chaos Theory) given that capitalist dynamics and impacts had more or less been already described and predicted, but it nonetheless describe how seemingly unrelated events are actually connected by causal relations, albeit complex.