RE-ECHOING ROOSEVELT’S ‘PHYSICAL ECONOMY’ SOLUTIONS TO GLOBAL FINANCIAL COLLAPSE

RE-ECHOING ROOSEVELT’S ‘PHYSICAL ECONOMY’ SOLUTIONS TO GLOBAL FINANCIAL COLLAPSE

Erle Frayne Argonza

My beloved country remembers the late Franklin Delano Roosevelt very well. It was his presidency that paved the way for preparing the Philippines as an independent state, by first granting the country the status of a commonwealth with its own constitution (1935 Constitution), and by permitting such domestic government to prepare the legislative measures and policy environment for a future independent state (granted independence in 1946).

Roosevelt’s regime also paved the way for the developmental paradigm that would propel the Philippines along the road to industrialization (we now term this as Import-Substitution Industrialization). The paradigm, based on the works of previous thinkers Alexander Hamilton, Friedrich von List, and the exemplar development policies of Abraham Lincoln, puts great stress on the ‘physical economy’ as the foundation for a prosperous and mighty economy in the long run.

Roosevelt further went on to cogitate that colonialism should fold up after the war, and that all former colonies must follow the road to development and prosperity, this being the road to genuine international peace and cooperation. The international doctrine of Roosevelt became the foundation for post-war cooperation, and buttressed the founding of the Bretton Woods agencies whose mandates were propelled precisely by the physical economy framework, the need for undertaking development in the former colonies, and the need to regulate national currencies via fixed exchange rate backed by the gold standard.

The current circumstance is now too remote from the ‘physical economy’ policy regime of the post-war era. Economic liberalization policies led to globalization and the galvanization of the ‘virtual economy’ based on predatory finance. The ‘virtual economy’ had led to de-industrialization, agricultural decay, decline of S&T, and deteriorating infrastructures in the most affected economies, and had fragmented developing states into ‘failed states’.

The global financial system created by the relentless liberalization of financial, fiscal and monetary policies across borders, had already collapsed and is beyond salvation using the present intervention tools that now seem to be burnt out tools altogether. A global conference must be convened most urgently to carve out a new financial architecture based on a ‘physical economy’ framework, and to decisively criminalize predatory finance.

[Philippines, 27 July 2008]

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Come Visit E. Argonza’s blogs & website anytime!

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MANILA’S EMERGING OBESITY: IGNORE OR ADDRESS IT?

MANILA’S EMERGING OBESITY: IGNORE OR ADDRESS IT?

Erle Frayne Argonza

Nutrition-related issues and problems in the Philippines constitute a long list. Among all the related issues and problems, hunger stands out as the most highlighted today. While there is no question about highlighting hunger and addressing it with determination, over-focusing on this single issue tends to mask the other issues involved.

Among the emerging issues and problems in nutrition, I would handily pinpoint obesity as the most focal. Needless to say, it challenges development stakeholders to highlight the issue as well, and address it on the same level as hunger is being addressed today. Addressing it would mean resorting to public policy tools, strategies and programs at a national level, and creating necessary institutional frames to accelerate the problem’s solution.

While doing the study on fair trade & food security for the KAISAMPALAD in 2005 (this NGO is a national center for fair trade & food security), I stumbled upon both problems of hunger and obesity. At that time, the latest data from the Social Weather Stations regarding hunger indicated a 12% incidence, a figure that I found alarming as anything past the 8.5% index is considered significant. So I included the hunger issue among those food insecurity ailments that must be salved pronto, recommended policy measures, and even recommended the formation of a Hunger Fund as the multi-stakeholder executor of the anti-hunger mission.

The same study made me stumble upon the findings of nutritionists of the state’s Food and Nutrition Research Institute, which indicated a 25% obesity at the turn of the millennium. That average had its expressed distribution among age groups, with varying indices per age bracket. What was alarming at that time was the 25% Phliippine obesity rate was already 5% above the global average of 20% (the USA’s was 66%).

While I was aghast at the obesity incidence, admittedly I wasn’t prepared to tackle it then, and so I remained silent about the matter in the final research report, save for citing indices of over-weight across age brackets. Today the obesity incidence had risen well above the previous 25%, and certain popular media estimates indicate well pass the 30% mark already (we still need some more update nutrition research on the subject).

Obesity is markedly higher than hunger in the Philippines, surpassing the latter by over double the incidence. The problem with hunger studies is that the methodology is often subjective, since they employ surveys (e.g. asking the informant if s/he has been eating sufficiently or not. In contrast, obesity measures are objective and very exact, as calibration entails the use of weighing scales administered by licensed nutritionists.

I admit that I still am relatively unprepared to tackle the issue as of this day, that is as a development issue. I can only think now of the typical lifestyle intervention to address it, such as combining physical regimen with diet program and a total lifestyle change. Being athletic and a health buff (I was formerly Silver Medalist in national powerlifting –middleweight division), I often offer myself as a prototype of an optimally balanced physical-nutritional wellness person, even as I can easily lecture on lifestyle change and personal intervention to address obesity.

I would end this piece by tossing the query to my fellow Filipinos in the country and to friends overseas: will Manila continue to ignore obesity altogether?

[Philippines, 28 July 2008]

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Come Visit E. Argonza’s blogs & website anytime!

Social Blogs:

IKONOKLAST: http://erleargonza.blogspot.com

UNLADTAU: http://unladtau.wordpress.com

Wisdom/Spiritual Blogs:

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Website:

PROF. ERLE FRAYNE ARGONZA: http://erleargonza.com

DEPOPULATION, GENOCIDE: GLOBAL OLIGARCHY’S POPULATION AGENDA

DEPOPULATION, GENOCIDE: GLOBAL OLIGARCHY’S POPULATION AGENDA

Erle Frayne Argonza

Good morning from Manila!

Those more aware fellows on Earth may be reflecting right now about the long-term agenda of the global oligarchy regarding population. We note the rise of the neo-Malthusians within and outside the UN and international bodies from the 70s onwards, their position buttressing the toxic ‘greenies’ demonization of humans as the cause of the planet’s predicament.

The greenies’ and Malthusian’s causes do tie up, as they are among the paid Pied Pipers of the global oligarchy for the long-term agenda of depopulating the planet. The global elite’s disdain of masses of humans, who they refer to as ‘useless Eaters’, do make sense when we reflect about the wars,  pandemics, induced cyclones and earthquakes, and many more phenomena that tend to reduce the populations en masse at any given instance.

Below is a summary of the said long-term agenda, culled from the database of the Executive Intelligence Review.  See also:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ylIoU_Hnt4k

[28 July 2008, Quezon City, MetroManila]

WORLD DEPOPULATION IS TOP NSA AGENDA: CLUB OF ROME

A Timely Repost:

The Haig-Kissinger depopulation policy by Lonnie Wolfe

Special Report EIR (Executive Intelligence Review) March 10, 1981

Investigations by EIR have uncovered a planning apparatus operating outside the control of the White House whose sole purpose is to reduce the world’s population by 2 billion people through war, famine, disease and any other means necessary. This apparatus, which includes various levels of the government is determining U.S. foreign policy. In every political hotspot — El Salvador, the so-called arc of crisis in the Persian Gulf, Latin America, Southeast Asia and in Africa- the goal of U.S. foreign policy is population reduction. The targeting agency for the operation is the National Security Council’s Ad Hoc Group on Population Policy. Its policy-planning group is in the U.S. State Department’s Office of Population Affairs, established in 1975 by Henry Kissinger. This group drafted the Carter administration’s Global 2000 document, which calls for global population reduction, and the same apparatus is conducting the civil war in El Salvador as a conscious depopulation project.

“There is a single theme behind all our work-we must reduce population levels,” said Thomas Ferguson, the Latin American case officer for the State Department’s Office of Population Affairs (OPA). “Either they [governments] do it our way, through nice clean methods or they will get the kind of mess that we have in El Salvador, or in Iran, or in Beirut. Population is a political problem. Once population is out of control it requires authoritarian government, even fascism, to reduce it “The professionals,” said Ferguson, “aren’t interested in lowering population for humanitarian reasons. That sounds nice. We look at resources and environmental constraints. We look at our strategic needs, and we say that this country must lower its population-or else we will have trouble.

So steps are taken. El Salvador is an example where our failure to lower population by simple means has created the basis for a national security crisis. The government of El Salvador failed to use our programs to lower their population. Now they get a civil war because of it…. There will be dislocation and food shortages. They still have too many people there.”

Civil wars are somewhat drawn-out ways to reduce population, the OPA official added. “The quickest way to reduce population is through famine, like in Africa or through disease like the Black Death,” all of which might occur in El Salvador. Ferguson’s OPA monitors populations in the Third World and maps strategies to reduce them. Its budget for FY 1980 was $190 million; for FY 198l, it will be $220 million. The Global 2000 report calls for doubling that figure. The sphere of Kissinger In 1975, OPA was brought under a reorganized State Department Bureau of Oceans, International Environmental, and Scientific Affairs– a body created by Henry Kissinger.

The agency was assigned to carry out the directives of the NSC Ad Hoc Group. According to an NSC spokesman, Kissinger initiated both groups after discussion with leaders of the Club of Rome during the 1974 population conferences in Bucharest and Rome. The Club of Rome, controlled by Europe’s black nobility, is the primary promotion agency for the genocidal reduction of world population levels. The Ad Hoc Group was given “high priority” by the Carter administration, through the intervention of National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski and Secretaries of State Cyrus Vance and Edmund Muskie.

According to OPA expert Ferguson, Kissinger initiated a full about-face on U.S. development policy toward the Third World. “For a long time,” Ferguson stated, “people here were timid” They listened to arguments from Third World leaders that said that the best contraceptive was economic reform and development. So we pushed development programs, and we helped create a population time bomb. “We are letting people breed like flies without allowing for natural causes to keep population down. We raised the birth survival rates, extended life-spans by lowering death rates, and did nothing about lowering birth rates.

That policy is finished. We are saying with Global 2000 and in real policy that you must lower population rates. Population reduction and control is now our primary policy objective- then you can have some development.”Accordingly, the Bureau of Oceans, International Environmental, and Scientific Affairs has consistently blocked industrialization policies in the Third World, denying developing nations access to nuclear energy technology–the policies that would enable countries to sustain a growing population. According to State Department sources, and Ferguson himself, Alexander Haig is a “firm believer” in population control.

“We will go into a country,” said Ferguson, “and say, here is your goddamn development plan. Throw it out the window. Start looking at the size of your population and figure out what must be done to reduce it.”If you don’t like that, if you don’t want to choose to do it through planning, then you’ll have an El Salvador or an Iran, or worse, a Cambodia.” According to an NSC spokesman, the United States now shares the view of former World Bank President Robert McNamara that the “population crisis” is a greater threat to U.S. national security interests than “nuclear annihilation.” “Every hot spot in the world corresponds to a population crisis point,” said Ferguson who would rename Brzezinski’s arc of crisis doctrine the “arc of population crisis.”

This is corroborated by statements in the NSC Ad Hoc Group’s April 1980 report. There is “an increased potential for social unrest, economic and political instability, mass migration and possible international conflicts over control of land and resources,” says the NSC report. It then cites “demographic pressures” as key to understanding “examples of recent warfare in India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, El Salvador. Honduras, and Ethiopia, and the growing potential forinstability in such places as Turkey, the Philippines, Central America, Iran, and Pakistan.” Through extraordinary efforts, the Ad Hoc Group and OPA estimate that they may be able to keep a billion people from being born through contraceptive programs.

But as the Ad Hoc Group’s report states, the best efforts of the Shah of Iran to institute “clean programs” of birth control failed to make a significant dent in the country’s birth rate. The promise of jobs, through an ambitious industrialization program, encouraged migration toward “overcrowded cities” like Teheran. Now under Ayatollah Khomeini, the “clean programs” have been dismantled. The government may make progress because it has a program “to induce up to half of Teheran’s 6 million residents to relocate, as well as possible measures to keep rural migrants from moving to the cities.” Behind the back of the President Ferguson and others involved with the OPA and NSC group maintain that the United States will continue a foreign policy based on a genocidal reduction of the world’s population.

“We have a network in place of cothinkers in the government,” said the OPA case officer. “We keep going, no matter who is in the White House.” But Ferguson reports that the “White House” does not really understand what they are saying and that the President “thinks that population policy means how do we speed up population increase. “As long as no one says differently,” said Ferguson, “we will continue to do our jobs. “

[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]