Finalist-PhilBlogAwards 2010

Finalist-PhilBlogAwards 2010
Finalist for society, politics, history blogs

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Wednesday, June 30, 2010

PHILIPPINES’ NEW PRESIDENT: AKBAR OR NERO?

Erle Frayne D. Argonza


Magandang umaga! Good morning!

The whole Philippine nation is glued today on the event that will see the installation of the new president of the republic, the Hon. Benigno Aquino III or ‘Noynoy’. Whatever this day forebodes let us relegate to active file for the meantime, as my fellow Filipinos bask in the optimistic air created by the election of a new presidency via the first automated elections in the Philippines and the ASEAN.

The problems of the country are gargantuan, with governance problems of graft on top of the list. Tax revenues are falling short of targets, a ballooning budget deficit is threatening another round of fiscal crisis, poverty incidence is at least 1/3 of households, education is in crisis as it remains badly under-funded, grains self-sufficiency goals are a mess, and direct foreign investments or FDIs are negligible (1% of GNP).

Noynoy inherited from the outgoing presidency of Gloria Macapagal Arroyo both boons and banes. The above-stated situations are the primary banes. The boons are the graduation of RP’s economy from poor to middle income, the consistent positive growth befitting an emerging market, the reversal of a fiscal crisis, and the doubling of the economy since 2001.

Furthermore, the economy today has a balance of payments surplus, healthy current account situation, an annual foreign remittance level that breached the $17 Billions mark, while both exports and imports have moved upwards after the 2009 slack. Our Gross International Reserves or GIR stands at past the $45 Billion, enough to buy us worth nine (9) months of imports, beaconing that the old ailment of lack of foreign currencies (US dollar most specially) is now way behind us.

Thus, with the momentum of growth and big projects sustained at pace, the ‘high growth’ stage of our economy can end soon as we graduate to development ‘maturity’ before 2016. That done, we can move on to an ‘overdeveloped’ economy, the last phase of development, before 2025. Expectedly, Luzon will lead in that effort, followed by Visayas and Mindanao respectively.

Roughly, RP’s Gross National Product or GNP will hit $200 Billion by end of this year 2010. The figure uses the nominal value of the peso to the dollar. If we use the more accepted Purchasing Power Parity or PPP method, with multiplier of 4 to get us to our GNP-PPP, the country’s GNP is forecast at roughly $800 Billion (using UNDP index calculations).

Such a GNP figure renders the Philippines wealthier than many European countries for that matter. Even the Dutch, who were once the wealthiest people in Europe, would bow in reverence to us Filipinos for our Herculean efforts expended to get to where we are. Wait till RP gets to ‘overdeveloped’ stage yet when the GNP will hit beyond the $2.5 Trillion mark (PPP), which is now a visible possibility, thus effectively transforming the country into a creditor nation lending funds to cash-starved Western and developing countries.

Banes notwithstanding, the Filipinos had so much gains accrued across many decades of post-war survival. From geophysical to political turbulence the Pinoys experienced in grueling fashion of constant bombardments, yet the nation withstood them all as it now stands tall and confident in the community of nations.

RP has been transformed into a global nation, while its capital region Manila has mutated to a gigantic mega-city that is a constitutive part new global nexus of 35 top megacities in the world. Dr. Jose Rizal, the first Filipino and first global citizen of the humble nation, now possesses the reasons to feel happy over what has become of that nation that he died for (executed by the Spanish regime in 1898).

Now that Noynoy has the presidency in his shoulders, and a liberal-oligarchic alliance has been installed to power, what’s in store for the country? We’ve had decades of liberal reforms before us, with policy impositions from the IMF-World Bank and global oligarchy, so will the Noynoy regime recycle the same austerity measures and policies that led to greater mass poverty and the Filipino diaspora?

Will Noynoy become an Akbar whose reign saw efficiency and good governance that led to the re-emergence of a country from the shambles of fragmentation and neglect to prosperity and fame? Or will he be a Nero of Manila who fiddles in the presidential palace as he watches his polity & economy burn upon his own behest?

Where goes RP’s our gains after Noynoy’s six (6) years of incumbency? At the end of his mandate in 2016, will the Filipinos still sing “should I stay or should I go”?


[Philippines, 30 June 2012]

[See: IKONOKLAST: http://erleargonza.blogspot.com,
UNLADTAU: http://unladtau.wordpress.com,
COSMICBUHAY: http://cosmicbuhay.blogspot.com,
BRIGHTWORLD: http://erlefraynebrightworld.wordpress.com, ARTBLOG: http://erleargonza.wordpress.com,
ARGONZAPOEM: http://argonzapoem.blogspot.com]

Monday, June 28, 2010

LARGE CLASS, MAD DISCOURSE: SAME ROOTS

Erle Frayne D. Argonza


Magandang hapon! Good afternoon!

Classes have resumed here in Manila/Philippines, and our campuses are again swarming with pupils, students, teachers. Focused on their tasks, the same stakeholders are barely aware of what’s going on in the world around them, a world that is changing fast at confusing rate.

While the rugs under our feet our changing, the old context of large classes (class sizes of 100-250) are still in vogue in many universities worldwide. Some other universities that may have abolished them in the past, are re-instituting the large class platform.

As I’ve said in a previous article, the large class platform belongs to the past ages of medievalism and industrialism. To implement it now, at this time, is a regressive decision.

The large class, which unconsciously glues students to the ‘Herd instinct’, is anathema to the overall evolutionary movement of the human psyche towards greater individuation. University education is supposedly an opportunity field for the flourishing of that individuation.

The ‘mad discourse’ is finding expression in many venues today. The large class platform feeds inputs to the mad discourse, and is subtly rooted in it in fact. Its rationale hides under the rubric of technocratese language, but any sharp observer will easily unveil the illusion and show the large class platform’s connection to the ‘mad discourse’.

Imagine if all students are subjected to the same large classes, where they cannot air feedbacks or questions at all as they are consigned to passive receivers of inputs from a lecture professor. Imagine exposing freshmen students to this platform for 4-5 years, and assess the degeneration of the same students into the hovels of passivity.

Such a regimentation is just but one step short of what the Phase III cybernetics is up to these days: chipping humans. Phase III cybernetics had worked out to erase the dividing line between human behavior and machine behavior, with practical uses aimed at chipping all humans in the future.

The same chipped humans can then be put under the control of mega-computer systems, their behavior eventually reprogrammable to make them more in tune with what the System demands. They can be sent to war fronts as armies and technicians, and will experience no fear as fear will be deleted or subjugated by mega-control commands from their own psyche.

Wars and police states of the near future will be easily justified with every technocratese language conceivable, rendering them as typical ‘mad discourse’ in the argot of Michel Foucault. Mad, in that the erasure of the boundary between reason and the irrational has been effectively erased or deleted.

If there is anything that university policy makers must do now, it is to abolish all large classes while there is still time. Globally, we concerned citizens are doing what we can to deter moves by elites to install nazi-type regimes in the West, leading to a global state later that will be in need of compliant citizens.

Let us all do our tasks now to take down school platforms that will be the launching pads for compliant humans who can be chipped in couples of years’ time. The VeriChip by Verizon Corp is now out, and before 2015 a more perfected prototype will be out, ready to be implanted to humans via syringe (by trained doctors/medics).

We still have the time to act, to note. Any decision that infringes on human liberties is dangerously fascistic, such as re-instituting or maintaining large classes.

Failing to act in time, we shall watch in horror as new ‘das boots’ kids will be churned out from our youth, commanded via chips to participate in building a Draconian deux ex machina of the near future. And they’re products of our universities, products of large classes.

By then, I will be having the last laugh. With resonating guffaws will I declare “I told you so.”


[Philippines, 27 June 2012]

[See: IKONOKLAST: http://erleargonza.blogspot.com,
UNLADTAU: http://unladtau.wordpress.com,
COSMICBUHAY: http://cosmicbuhay.blogspot.com,
BRIGHTWORLD: http://erlefraynebrightworld.wordpress.com, ARTBLOG: http://erleargonza.wordpress.com,
ARGONZAPOEM: http://argonzapoem.blogspot.com]

Wednesday, June 23, 2010

LARGE CLASS IN UNIVERSITIES: OUTDATED, AUTHORITARIAN!

Erle Frayne D. Argonza


It’s late afternoon as I write this piece, and it’s the longest day in the northern hemisphere too (summer solstice). I will devote this piece to the matter of large university classes that are the mode of instruction in many academic institutions across the globe.

Large classes are a thing of the past. The large class modality was referred to as ‘Great Man pedagogy’ in Europe, and was critically challenged by the youth and professors during the stormy youth heydays of the 1960s and ‘70s.

The human psyche is rapidly evolving towards greater individuation. As we humans become more individuated, the educational instruction fit for us is one that should account for and enable our individuality, even up to the point of providing ample space for eccentricity in each one.

In the olden days, when the Herd Mind or folk mind was the characteristic psyche of the people, the modality of instructions was one that would fit them well. Large classes evoked the ‘Herd instinct’ (Nietszchean label for the same), and unconsciously provided a semblance of community for peoples of those ancient times who were cut off from family & village to study in the university.

The coming of the Industrial Age, right after the conclusion of the 30 Years War (1618-48), ushered the ‘assembly line’ of mass production of articles of manufactures. The ‘assembly line’ method found its concomitant equivalent in the Great Man pedagogy which churned out collegiate graduates like commodities for sale in a rapidly expanding labor market.

Up until the late 19th century, during the Victorian Era that is the nadir of the modern age, Great Man pedagogy was a largely unquestioned modality of instruction. As the crisis of the early 20th century set in, the same pedagogy found perfect compatibility with the nascent totalitarian ideologies and systems of that era (fascism, Nazism, communism).

Indubitably, the success of ‘assembly line’ classes was effective only insofar as the psyche remained as more folk-mind or herd-oriented. As the psyche mutates to more individuated type, it will militate against anything that brings it back to the Herd: subject to manipulation and shaping by authoritarian if not sociopathic interest groups and persons.

Sure enough, as the youth rebellion of the 60s set in, the students of the Sorbonne in Paris burst out in revolt against the Great Man pedagogy circa 1968. Other universities quickly caught up the fiery flames of the revolt and followed suit in a tempo of upheavals that were largely unplanned and spontaneous.

Accustomed to bureaucratism and pork barrel largesse that went with mainstream political power, the French Communist Party was caught flat-footed by that revolt. Tailing behind the event that indicated its being mired in intellectual bankruptcy and betrayed its archaic mindset, the communists lose relevance almost overnight.

Had the communists grasped that event quickly and seized the opportunity by siding with the anti-large class youth, the sociopolitical landscape of France and Europe could have changed forever. A social revolution of a new kind, bred by a fusion of working class militancy and youth revulsion against archaic pedagogy and culture, could have been registered in the annals of history as worth our positive valuation.

It is shocking to find out that the large class modality is still around with us today. It is anathema to the goal of human liberation, even as it could be a launching ground to breed new ‘boot camp’ babies for certain interest groups of a fascistic/authoritarian nature.

The Industrial Age had now passed away, and the Post-Industrial/Postmodern Age has brought along with it an erasure (sous rapture) of the dividing line between Reason and Madness. Fascism is resurgent worldwide, and before we’d notice it a global state would be in the offing that is orchestrated by an ideological force of global Bonaparte.

If the large class modality is re-introduced in any university whatsoever, it should only be on an interim phase. It is a regressive move, and running counter to the gamut of psychical individuation, it will erode in time and be abolished across the globe.

Should there be a youth revolt against this antiquated pedagogy in my own home country, I will be glad to make my presence in the barricades to be set up.

[Philippines, 21 June 2012]

[See: IKONOKLAST: http://erleargonza.blogspot.com,
UNLADTAU: http://unladtau.wordpress.com,
COSMICBUHAY: http://cosmicbuhay.blogspot.com,
BRIGHTWORLD: http://erlefraynebrightworld.wordpress.com, ARTBLOG: http://erleargonza.wordpress.com,
ARGONZAPOEM: http://argonzapoem.blogspot.com]

Monday, June 21, 2010

ISLAMIC BANKING RECONSTRUCTED


Erle Frayne D. Argonza



Islamic banking is part of the totality of ‘best practices’ that originated from Asia. Being among the strong proponents of the ‘Asian way’ as the way out of our capitalist economic malaise and crises of our times, I’d share my own notes of hallelujah to Islamic banking.

I am among those development practitioners and social scientists who propose that let’s all undertake a review of Islamic banking. This banking practice is based on zero-interest banking. The challenge is for us to reconstruct the practice to suit the current context of information society.

Usury is among the proscriptions of spiritual masters and sages of the East. It is within the context of a non-usurious finance, embedded in spiritually-guided livelihood practices, that Islamic banking emerged in Western Asia.

Zero-interest financing contributed immensely to accumulating wealth for the Asiatic polities that engaged in them in antiquity. The same wealth was utilized for social services, ambitious projects, building cities, and advancing the arts, sciences, and philosophy.

Usury is alien to Asia, even as its massive introduction to the continent brought untold miseries to the marginal folks. It had also tied up Asian economies in debt peonage to the financial cartels of the West and their local banking/financial partners.

Before the Asian economies, notably the emerging markets, will go down the drain and lose their growth gains due to usury and predatory finance, their own stakeholders should rethink their borrowed paradigms. They better review those golden Asiatic economic principles taught by spiritual masters, and make ways to re-carve their financial systems following such principles.

Asia is indubitably the driver of the global economy today. It is time for Asia to set the trends by beginning with new financial paradigm such as the one offered by Islamic banking.

[Philippines, 07 June 2010]

[See: IKONOKLAST: http://erleargonza.blogspot.com,
UNLADTAU: http://unladtau.wordpress.com,
COSMICBUHAY: http://cosmicbuhay.blogspot.com,
BRIGHTWORLD: http://erlefraynebrightworld.wordpress.com, ARTBLOG: http://erleargonza.wordpress.com,
ARGONZAPOEM: http://argonzapoem.blogspot.com]

Wednesday, June 16, 2010

BAILING OUT AILING BANKS IS IMMORAL/CRIMINAL

Erle Frayne D. Argonza


Good afternoon, fellows!

Bailing out ailing banks with people’s money (taxes) is immoral and criminal. I have already stated this contention in previous articles, and I’d re-echo it again in light of the financial fiasco going on in Europe right now.

We’ve had more than enough bad experiences in past crises that point out to massive speculative engagements by banks that have contributed to economic downturns and crash. Japan started the ball rolling by salving big banks with taxpayers’ money in the 1990s, and this practice is awefully wrong and immoral.

Fast forward to the year 2007, when we saw big banks implode as the bubble economy of the USA burst. The same ‘Japanese solution’ at salving ailing banks with taxpayers’ money was again repeated, this time in the USA.

Taxpayers’ money is hard earned revenue for the state for purposes of advancing the general welfare. The priorities for revenues should be infrastructures, social services, pump priming, and ensuring ‘safety nets’ for the marginal classes and groups against the impacts of financial volatilities on the productive sectors.

The solution to ailing banks lies in strengthening regulatory mechanisms. The first agenda on the line is to ban banks from engaging in speculative engagements notably those hedge funds operations. Another agenda is to institute good corporate governance and instilling public accountability by the banking sector.

Bailing out ailing banks in Europe, through taxpayers’ money, can only mitigate the systemic crisis for a while. Also, it will push more folks down grinding poverty due to austerity measures. It is part of the ‘rule of madness’ that now governs ‘late’ capitalism as a whole.

[Philippines, 07 June 2010]

[See: IKONOKLAST: http://erleargonza.blogspot.com,
UNLADTAU: http://unladtau.wordpress.com,
COSMICBUHAY: http://cosmicbuhay.blogspot.com,
BRIGHTWORLD: http://erlefraynebrightworld.wordpress.com, ARTBLOG: http://erleargonza.wordpress.com,
ARGONZAPOEM: http://argonzapoem.blogspot.com]

Friday, June 04, 2010

SCUTTLE EU NOW, BEFORE 4TH REICH OPTION AWAKENS!

Erle Frayne D. Argonza


Magandang hapon! Good afternoon!

I have no wish to intervene in the internal affairs of Europe. However, judging by the flow of events in the continent, from the signing of the earlier treaties through the monetary union and the Lisbon Treaty, there has been a clear sign of concurring agreements without the benefit of public consensus.

True, there were debates about the formation of the Union from its earlier days as an energy coalition through the birth of the Eurozone and finally the Lisbon Treaty. But the signing of treaties has been a monopoly of bureaucrats and technocrats who do not the least show accountability towards the great mass of struggling Europeans.

Now that the Eurozone is in trouble, which further threatens the continent with a gigantic crash that could be worst than the USA’s, the prospects of more Draconian measures of implementation and austerity measures imposed on member countries are getting more real.

Let us just hope that the increasing chaos of events in the EU won’t lead to the dreaded hyper-inflation, an ailment that crippled the late Weimar Republic and paved the way for Hitler’s rise to power. Already, the doors of Europe are opening for new fascist movements arising, movements that could very well serve the interest of the bureaucrats & technocrats working for the fat financiers led by the House of Rothschild.

If there is any unsolicited advise I can offer to the Europeans, it is this: scuttle the Union now while there’s still time. A gigantic maelstrom is gathering in your backyard, which could lead to the rise of a 4th Reich of sorts.

Let me share to you a past blog article about the 4th Reich possibility.

[Philippines, 24 May 2010]


4TH REICH IS A TRANS-ATLANTIC 2-HEADED TOTALITARIAN MONSTER

Erle Frayne Argonza y Delago
Good morning, Fellows across the globe!
Let me continue to write awareness-raising materials about peace, cooperation and development, by focusing on the machinations of the financier oligarchs. The Empire is rising again, the logic being that it is a most fit governance machine for global oligarchic games and forthcoming conflicts.
Guessing gamers have been busy releasing speculations about the next financiers’ great war, and the state machinery that will undertake it. Lacking sophistication in political economy, the guessing gamers end up with superstitious sloganeering and fear-mongering, or reactive behaviors that hardly possess merit and serious attention by the more adroit minds of younger generations.
Following the historic patterns of Empire formations, it has always proved fruitful to wage synchronized conflicts and fatten the oligarchic purses in the process, if an empire formation would do the hot-work jobs for the oligarchs. The last Empire that did the massive aggression for the Anglo-Dutch oligarchs was dubbed as 3rd Reich by its created abomination, Hitler & Nazi movement.
The same Anglo-Dutch financiers, who control at least 80% of the world’s total financial flows, are itching to create a 4th Reich totalitarian state. It is time for a great war, the result of which will flatten the economies and enterprises of contending nations. The wrecked enterprises will then be bought at dirt cheap price by the same oligarchs, and the flattened economies funded back to life by the same financiers.
The question is, just exactly what oligarchic state formations to employ? The EU and USA each produce over 22% of the world gross product, or altogether produce 45% of GDP. The Anglo-Dutch financiers, on the other hand, control over 80% of the global financial flows. Using such data, it is very easy to see the congruence of continental economies and financier interests.
In my analysis, using a combination of institutional analysis and political economy, the combined EU-USA force would be excellent for creating the draconian 4th Reich. Of course, the possibility of a North American Union can be examined, but such a Union doesn’t have the purse power to leverage political strength, do understand this. On the other hand, the EU cannot impose its will on the USA without public dissent being aroused to hell fires, and so no USA-EU political integration is in the offing.
The web of institutional arrangements will see a mega-alliance of USA-controlled North America and a Brussels-based European Union. The trans-Atlantic alliance is a last-ditch effort of the same financiers to exhibit muscle power over the planet, and only the USA-EU axis remains as the loyal consenter to the financier machinations. Japan can still veer away from the axis, while the emerging markets’ giants—China, India, Brazil—are beyond the ambit of such machinations.
The institutional plan calls for the implementation of the final treaty in Europe, the Lisbon Treaty, that will see the advanced unification of the continent. Synchronically, a North American Union, with a common currency called Amero, will replace the NAFTA, complete the political unification process, and form the American bulwark of the new fascist axis. That done, the 4th Reich will be in place, rock-solid in armaments and awash with liquidities for more ambitious, gigantic war efforts.
Part of the governance innovations will be to abolish nations in both continents. Region-states will rise to replace the nations, each region being almost of equal population and size. With no more nations in Europe, the nuclear arsenal of France and UK will be placed in the custody of Brussels, thus transforming Brussels into a nuclear power overnight.
Transformed into police states, both continents will then wage population-control campaigns in the neighborhoods. Gangster groups will logically be deputized to augment police in searching for guns, drugs, insurgent evidences, terrorist cells, petty criminals, and other perceived enemies of the state. Those young ones engaging in binge drinking and sex orgy parties will also most likely be apprehended.
To accelerate public compliance toward the new order, riots can be engineered in cities across both continents. Food price hikes, oil price hikes, massive unemployment, social welfare cuts, overnight hyper-inflation are the most contentious issues that easily inflame quiet neighborhoods into angry urban mobs. Any high school student taking up a subject on sociology can very facilely see this possibility today. It has already been tried and tested across the globe in fact most recently.
While the continental backyards are being provided draconian order by police forces, the military assets will then flex their muscles for huge wars overseas. To ensure that competing regions and continents will be mowed down fast, inter-regional wars will be engineered. The Sunni-Israel versus Iran-Shiite war is now on the pipeline, waiting for a go-signal, a conflict that will see the weakening of the Semitic military establishments and economies, thus paving the way for less costly involvement there.
Other continents will surely see their own war fireworks fanned to the maximum most likely. It would be an instructive work to analyze and forecast the shaping of events there. For instance, the China-Taiwan and inter-Korean conflicts may ensue again on their 2nd phases. Japanese aggression may also be pursued on a 2nd phase, which could see the Japanese islands devastated with nukes combined with the Tesla Earthquake Machine to put an abrupt end to its zealous militarism.
To cap the article, it is a Trans-Atlantic 4th Reich that is now fast rising. How fast the citizens of both America and Europe can neutralize the abominations now shaping up in their backyards remains to be observed. One this is sure here: it doesn’t matter who will be president of the USA or EU. The financiers and their paid technocratic-political subalterns have already ensured that the oligarchy is in control of the situation.
[Writ 22 June 2008, Quezon City, MetroManila]