US BUDGET CUTS FOREIGN AID: ISOLATIONISM RETURNS!

US BUDGET CUTS FOREIGN AID: ISOLATIONISM RETURNS!

Erle Frayne D. Argonza

The US Congress has cut down budgetary allocations for foreign aid, an act that had caused chagrin on many developmentalist circles across the globe. The bad thing about the allergic congressional aid constriction is that even health research & aid funding for poor countries is also shrinking.

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News has come out openly about the voting patterns regarding the subject. It has turned into a bi-partisan pattern, which contrasts to the 20^th century pattern whereby Republicans were the exclusive bulwark of anti-foreign aid discourse and action.

For those who aren’t familiar with foreign policy frames in America, the term for that allergy to anything foreign and the drive to focus budgets exclusively on domestic affairs is called Isolationism. Republicans are the most afflicted with that “anything foreign is Bogey Man” fanaticism which explicates the predominance of Isolationism in the US Congress’ House of Representatives.

The trouble with Barak Obama is that he lacks a definitive foreign policy frame. He is perceived as having endorse the whole basket of foreign policy initiatives to Sec. Hillary Clinton who exhibits a definitive foreign policy frame: Wilsonian. That framework posits that America’s negotiations in the diplomacy field must be guided largely by the negotiating country’s observance of civil rights.

Wilsonian frame is largely concentrated in the US Department of State, whereas Isolationism’s bulwark is the US Congress. Neo-Conservatism, dominant during the Bush eras, is largely concentrated in the Defense & Intelligence agencies. Nationalism, a hallmark of trade policies in diplomacy, is concentrated in the Department of Trade.

Isolationism’s zealous return means that all other foreign policy frames are lameduck, and that spells trouble for the development stakeholders across the globe as a whole.

[Philippines, 07 March 2012]

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Source: http://www.devex.com/en/news/will-congress-starve-the-2013-foreign-aid-budget-2/77613?source=ArticleHomepage_Headline

Will Congress 'starve' the 2013 foreign aid budget?

By Jenny Lei Ravelo on 29 February 2012

inShare

There is notice from Capitol Hill regarding President Barack Obama’s 2013 foreign aid budget request: It is unlikely to be fully funded.

Senators heard U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on Tuesday (Feb. 28) as she testified before the Senate Appropriations subcommittee and Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Clinton was making the case for the $51.6 billion budget request for the State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development. But Democrat Sen. Patrick Leahy from Vermont, who also sits as chairman of the subcommittee, told Clinton it is going to be “difficult” to get a bill through this year, the Washington Post reports.

Clinton spoke of five budget priorities, including support for the democratic transitions in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan, and the $770 million Middle East and North Africa Incentive Fund. She also made note of America needing to maintain power in the Pacific by building stronger networks and relationships in the region.

In addition, the secretary discussed using diplomacy and development to create American jobs. She said America needs to make strategic investments today to meet its foreign policy goals in the future.

The budget request is likely to face opposition from lawmakers in coming months. While foreign aid is commensurate to the country’s national security and international interests — as history can prove in Colombia and South Korea — it has been a “frequent target” of budget-cutting lawmakers, notes The Foreign Policy Initiative.

Democrat Sen. John Kerry of Massachusetts agrees. He said there are no global “Grover Norquists” pushing a pledge not to slash the State Department budget, nor millions of AARP seniors rallying to protect America’s investments overseas.

In an opinion piece for the Wall Street Journal, Kerry, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said there is nothing “fiscally conservative” in starving the foreign policy budget today to spend a trillion dollars years later in armed conflict. He said all foreign policy initiatives and foreign aid programs account for only one-tenth of America’s annual military expenditure.

“We’ve got a tax code that spans more than 72,000 pages and a federal budget of $3.8 trillion — surely we can find enough tax loopholes to close and wasteful spending to cut in order to preserve the $57 billion required for our global investment,” Kerry said.

Read more:

• 4 points for Clinton’s defense of the foreign aid budget
• US international affairs budget: Requested vs. actual
• Obama’s 2013 foreign aid budget request: The good, the bad and the ugly
• New clues on the future of US aid
• Reform efforts drive fiscal 2013 hiring plans at USAID, State
• Obama’s 2013 budget eyes new fund
• US foreign assistance budget crisis ‘not over’

Read more on U.S. aid reform online, and subscribe to The Development Newswire to receive top international development headlines from the world’s leading donors, news sources and opinion leaders – emailed to you FREE every business day.

BOOST PHILIPPINES’ BUDGET TO 2ND WORLD LEVEL

Erle Frayne D. Argonza


I wish so much to write notes about the planet and all the world’s regions, but I surely find it so irresistible to write reflections about my own country. I’m sure my friends and readers will understand this, me being a patriotic lover of my country and people despite our collective imperfections.

That said, let me focus this time around on the matter of budget. We have a new presidency, a new set of leaders from national to local levels, and I don’t want to miss out on delivering unsolicited advises to our new government concerning budgets.

By the end of this year 2010 our Gross Domestic Product or GDP will hit P8.25 Trillion more or less (it was P7.67 Trillion in 2009). That’s roughly U.S. $183 Billion (nominal value). Add the $18 Billion forecast Net Factor Income from Abroad or NFIA (read: overseas remittances), and the total figure yields $201 Billion.

$201 Billion national income is a 2nd World or ‘middle income’ country level of wealth. Let us stick to the figure and level so we won’t get detracted by the Gordian knots of discourse. This being so, the Filipinos deserve to see their state funded at 2nd World level and not any level otherwise.

Let us, for the sake of minimalist discourse, peg an annual budget at 30% of the GNP. The 30%-50% figure is known in scientific parlance as ‘critical mass’. To simplify our discourse, a ‘critical mass’ of budget will provide ample space for fiscal maneuverability, fund social services in fat sums, build more infrastructures, and pay up for state debts.

Any budget that is below ‘critical mass’ is direly undernourished, even as it could jeopardize our way to development ‘maturity’ and higher incomes for our households by 2016. Remember, we can no longer go back to the days of austerity that kept us mired in poor country status for a long time, so let’s better spend—with the expectation that spending will stimulate other sectors to grow.

The budget allocation for this year is a measly P1.5 Trillion. Measly in that it only grew by P100 Billion, or 7.14% from the P1.4 Trillion budget of 2009. A budget, to make sense and impact, must grow by at least 10% ever year.

30% of GNP means that our budget should not be lower than $60 Billion to qualify as ‘middle income’ country budget. Using the P45.50 to the dollar as our conversion rate, the expected budget should be Philippine P2.73 Trillions. That indexical calculation instantly renders RP’s 2010 budgetary appropriation short of P1 Trillion to make sense and impact at all.

Another unsolicited advise is that education, my favorite sector being an educator (teacher & social scientist), should get the largest share of the pie. And this should be at least 5% of the GNP. Let me stress that the benchmark should be GNP and not GDP since the latter unjustly leaves out the overseas workers & entrepreneurs in the equation.

The annual budget for education should therefore be at least U.S. $10 Billion, or Philippine P455 Billions. Contrast that figure to the P150 Billion allocated for education in the 2010 budgetary appropriation, and one can easily see why Philippine education is mired in cesspools.

The P455 Billions could be split up into the following: P250 Billions for primary education, and P205 for tertiary education. The total figures don’t include yet those budgets allocated by local governments for education, which when added to national appropriations could yield a figure much higher—at past 7% of GNP—appropriated for education alone.

Where to get the funds is another question for that matter. Let the question be tossed to the legislature, treasury/finance departments, and central bank to settle. It is important that I have delivered the message here very clearly: that a second world economy must affix budgets at figures befitting a 2nd world budget.

[Philippines, 30 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]

OLYMPIC PLAYERS ARE MADE BY SPORTS SCIENCE

Bro. Erle Frayne Argonza

Magandang hapon! Good afternoon!

The term ‘Olympic player’ is synonymous with the term ‘world-class player’. No agency, institution or country today can ever make claims to being world-class without passing through the baptizing fires of the Olympics games and winning medals in them, and any claim to the contrary will be laughed off with guffaws as mere delusional braggadocio. Play the games, be among Top 10 at least, and the team can be considered ‘world class’.

As a development expert, I was asked no more than once to express my opinion about what is the formula to make good athletes. I am very firm on this formula till these days, a formula that I learned since the late 80s yet (when I began my weight training), which I will sum up in a semi-aphorism below:

· SPORTS SCIENCE makes Olympic athletes, while
PHYSICAL EDUCATION makes athletes.

In my own country, which has a very long tradition of physical education or PE institutionalized by the Americans more than a century back yet, we have never been lacking in good PE trainers. I am very certain about this, being an athlete myself (Powerlifter, middleweight division, competed 91-92). However, to my mind, the PE track is not the best pathway to optimize the conversion of ‘raw warm bodies’ into world-class athletes. The formula lies more in Sports Science or Sportsci which is the raging fire in the sports world of the North today.

The main difference between PE and Sportsci is this: while PE can improve one’s ‘kinetic intelligence’, Sportsci improves emotional, social, and mental intelligence as well. During the dinosaur years of the Victorian Era, athletics was looked down upon as mere physical talent thing, and that ancient era (ancient relative to today’s Information Age) gave rise to PE. Unfortunately, that ancient toolery of PE was the one planted by Americans in the Philippines, which is taught as a subsidiary of pedagogy (education), and we got stuck up into it. Bad, too bad, very bad! America had already moved to Sportsci a long time back, while the former colony is stuck up in the mud.

We development experts know our lessons very well concerning our field, and development includes sports & leisure among its facets. The most important aspect of development is the institutional-‘social capital’ side (the stuff of ‘social technologies’), which comprises of over 77% of the success stories of prosperity. Raw materials constitute a measly 5% (the stuff of biotech), while infrastructures-physical intervention comprises 18% (the stuff of physical technology). Among all intervention measures for development, 77% comes from ‘social technologies’—from methods, tools, strategies, tactics of intervening in social capital, capacity-building, human resources and the likes. Build your people well and you’ll build your prosperity well.

Take the case of Japan and Singapore. These countries do not even have a natural resource base to embark on ambitious development pursuits, but hey! look at where they are now. That’s because they knew the development formula well. Natural resources, to repeat, do not constitute the decisive factor in development, which the World Bank & international agencies proclaimed as forming only 5% of development prosperity’s yardsticks. A country such as Burma is so wealthy in natural resources, yet so poor economically and likewise a poor performer in international sports, see?

In today’s context, the moron reasons of ‘lack of money’ and ‘lack of information’ to explicate weak institutions (eg. weak sports capabilities) are simply that: MORON. Those ‘problems’ were the problems of the ancient past. What we have today is a global situation of (a) exceedingly huge money stocks (which in economics is termed as ‘excess liquidity’) and (b) excessive information. Let me stress that: only MORONS keep on saying outmoded lines that do not cohere with reality. And incidentally there are too many of them in society, though I’d prefer not to pinpoint anybody out there lest I be accused of slandering.

In the Philippines for instance, in order to re-engineer our athletics well, all of our trainers have to be re-tooled in the ‘social technologies’ of Sportsci. All new professionals from the university who will handle athletics should get degrees in Sportsci as well, and they should better sustain this with enormous self-studies and a PhD at the maximum. Not only the trainer, but the TRAINING TEAM should be constituted to take charge of the formal training of athletes who should better begin training even as grade schoolers. The TEAM comprises of the Trainer, Nutritionist, Psychologist, Sociologist, Physiologist/Doctor, and not just the old-fogey Trainer of dinosaur days. The TEAM should then be backed up by sufficient provisions at the input level (backward linkage) and output level (forward linkage), the inputs & outputs thus depending on the sport concerned.

This is surely a tall order for the Philippines. Indeed, it is very tall an order, very challenging. It amounts to waging a ‘sports Revolution’, which it is. But what choice do Filipinos have, and likewise those underperforming athletes of powerhouses of emerging markets such as India, Brazil, Argentina, Mexico, Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, South Africa, than to go the way of a ‘sports Revolution’, a total innovation or re-engineering of the sports & leisure field.

Even without examining or evaluating the sports successes of Korea, China and Japan, I believe that these countries performed well precisely because they seriously undertook a ‘sports Revolution’ via the technologies of Sportsci. Rather than wallow in cesspools of indecision and mediocrity (eg. MORON reasoning of ‘lack of money’ and ‘lack of knowledge/ information’), the experts of these countries took the challenges head on, first by Japan, then followed by Korea (Seoul), and lastly by China. Look at how their athletes perform today, they lead Asia’s players by many folds!

If one were to ask me today what to do with the dinosaurs, I’d honestly and strongly cogitate to “KILL ALL DINOSAURS BEFORE THE DINOSAURS WILL KILL US.” And yes, we underperformers in sports are dying of SHAME each year, and each time an Olympics comes, precisely because we refuse to kill the ‘dinosaurs of our minds’ concerning our reality modalities such as sports & leisure. Let’s all ‘sustain’ our being dinosaurs, and all the more shall we heap up shame and guffaws from the world community.

As for the peoples of developed countries, better be vigilant about your advances in Sportsci. Don’t ever loosen on your cutting edge, never be lackadaisical in your attitudes, but never be arrogant and condescending too. By being otherwise, you too will become dinosaurs of the morrows, and will see your country slide from Olympic fame to the Hades of shame every time the games are held.

So much for those reflections. Have a nice day again!

[27 August 2008, Quezon City, MetroManila]