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Robert McNamara’s Second Vietnam |
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by Walden Bello*
The stylized view of Robert McNamara, who passed away a few days ago,
is that after serving as the chief engineer of the disastrous US war in
Vietnam, he went on, in 1968, to serve as president of the World Bank,
seeking to salve his troubled conscience by delivering development
assistance to poor countries.
The reality is, as usual, more complex.
Development from Above?
As president of the Bank, the world’s premier channel for
multilateral aid, McNamara did quadruple the institution’s lending
portfolio to $12 billion. The key beneficiaries, however, were
authoritarian dictatorships. Indeed, the rise to hegemony of
authoritarian regimes in the developing world cannot be separated from
the massive funding that the World Bank under McNamara provided them.
By the late seventies, five of the top seven recipients of World Bank
aid were military, presidential-military, or military-controlled
regimes: Indonesia, Brazil, South Korea, Turkey, and the Philippines.
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Good Nationalism vs Bad Nationalism |
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By Herbert Docena*
As I joined the rest of the country watch the Pacquiao-de la Hoya match yesterday, one question struck me for its seeming silliness: How was it that practically every Filipino automatically – and so passionately – cheered for Pacquiao and not his opponent? Asking this seems foolish because the answer seems obvious: he is “one of us” – meaning, he happened to have been accidentally born like the rest of us in the same patch of islands that as a result of events not of our making became the Philippines (never mind for the moment that he’s pro-GMA unlike most of us). This logic does seem to apply, however, to local contests where we are not likely to automatically root for one contestant just because he was born on our side of the barangay. And yet, when it’s in ‘Vegas, for a Filipino to not root for a Pacquiao remains unthinkable – almost treasonous.
Perhaps no single event in recent memory proves as clearly that nationalism endures. Few things, it seems, can draw it out more easily than a fight.
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Political Round Up: Gloria's 8th SONA and the ghosts of past controversies |
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Growing public distrust and skepticism continue to hound the GMA administration
Notwithstanding the attempts to re-fashion herself as a pro-poor
president who promptly responds to people's needs in times of crises,
majority of Filipinos remain skeptical of President Gloria Arroyo's
performance, with a larger percentage expressing disapproval and
distrust. Results of a recent Pulse Asia survey released a day before
the State of the Nation Address (SONA) show that almost one in two
Filipinos (48%) is critical of President Arroyo's performance and a
majority (53%) distrusts her.
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Research Shows Arroyo Administration Failing to Meet Own Targets |
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by Julie de los Reyes
New
studies by the University of the Philippines - Center for Labor Justice
(UP CLJ) and Focus on the Global South reveal Arroyo's poor performance
in achieving her set targets on economic growth, poverty reduction, and
job generation with only two years left until the end of her term. As
laid out in the Medium Term Philippine Development Plan crafted in
2004, Arroyo promises to generate ten million jobs by 2010, or roughly
1.6 million jobs each year, reduce poverty incidence to below 20%, and
accelerate GDP growth to 7-8%.
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Political Round Up: Politicizing the Bureaucracy, Recycling Political Allies |
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by Mary Ann Manahan
The
recent round of presidential appointments has aroused suspicion over
the motivations and logic behind Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo’s decisions.
Rather than merit, integrity, and competence, political relationships
seem to be the common thread behind these appointments. Government
positions, and the authority over policy and resources that go with it,
appear to be handed out as part of a largesse package that oils a
network of transactional politics.
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