Programmed Helplessness

Published on February 21, 2009

Helplessness or refusal to take action?

Overseas Filipino workers are being sent home without finishing their contracts. Workers in export industries such as garments and electronics are being retrenched or made to bear shortened work hours.

Instead of drawing up a comprehensive relief and assistance package for workers, and starting to reorient the economy and restructure local industry towards providing for the needs of the domestic market and, in the process, generate local jobs, the Arroyo government has been issuing false claims that the Philippines has been shielded from the world economic crisis, and giving empty promises of a supposed local stimulus package that would generate local jobs and of allocating a budget for loan assistance for retrenched workers. What it really has been doing is begging companies not to retrench workers with the promise that it would not legislate any wage increase. It has also been frantically begging foreign governments to accommodate more OFWs.

To make matters worse for the Filipino people, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) has been asking the Arroyo government to complete its “tax reform” program (read: raise more taxes). For sure, the Arroyo government would oblige.

The unravelling of the world economic crisis, which is expected to become more severe this year, has exposed the folly of neoliberal globalization and its concomitant policies of privatization, deregulation, and liberalization. In fact, advanced capitalist countries are beginning to implement policies that run counter to globalization and are more associated with Keynesian economics – such as regulation of capital, fiscal pump-priming, and protectionism – which were implemented from the 1940s up to the crisis of the 1970s.

But the Arroyo government has been stubbornly sticking to the same policies and echoing former US Pres. George W. Bush’s defense of free trade and globalization, despite the fact that these are the very same policies that led to the crisis and the worsening poverty in the world and in the country.

To effectively confront these problems and issues, tough but obvious solutions can be implemented. However, the Arroyo government refuses to act decisively, claiming it could not do anything about it or at best, implements peripheral solutions. This is programmed helplessness. Some call it puppetry.(Bulatlat.com)

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