The EDSA System refers to the event that is “EDSA Revolution”. “EDSA Revolution” in which the rebellion triggered a chain of events that ended with Marcos’s ouster and the inauguration of a new election-based political system. Actually, this is the system of governance that many feel is now in terminal condition, following the elections of May 2004. The administration and opposition slates were made up of candidate pirates from one another’s ranks; yesterday’ s enemies are today’s comrades. This explanation is one of attracts paragraph that to be interested to me as a reader that I do not know more about historical of the Philippines.
The authors stated that since EDSA 1 there has been no fundamental change in the Philippines, the fundamental reality being of an unchanging class structure with grossly inequitable income distribution. Rather, under the direction of international funding agencies such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, successive Philippines governments during this period have focused on implementing neoliberal economic solutions, especially trade liberalization, deregulation, and privatization which have done tremendous damage the Philippine economy, society and environment. More a detail explanation is that the Philippine condition is not better than before after as active playing in global market with all of the rules in which should be obey with the countries that is the members of global market. Instead, the Philippines trapped in depending condition on foreign aid.
Bello argues that “what developing countries and international civil society should aim at is not to reform the WTO but, through a combination of passive and active measures, to radically reduce it power and make it simply another international institution co-existing with and being checked by other international organizations, agreements and regional groupings. It is in such a more fluid, less structured, more pluralistic world with multiple checks and balances that the nations and communities of the South will be able to carve out the space to develop based on their values, their rhythms, and the strategies of their choice”. This statement his point out when he gave critics regarding to practice of international organizations.
Next, the history of agrarian reform in the Philippines in which colored with the sad story such as dominated by landlords and rent seeking, unequal distributions or control of land. The authors mentioned that there is pattern of agrarian reform made by President Aquino, ironically, President Aquino is not allow if her own huge family estate to be included in the program that is agrarian reform.
The Philippines under President Ramos followed into liberalization program. Ramos pursued the program of liberalization, deregulation and privatization along the line of Adam Smith’s dictum that “that government is best that governs is least”. The result was a series free-markets reform, including capital account liberalization, which left the economy extremely, vulnerable when the Asian financial crisis hit in 1997, with the government standing on the side as speculative capital fled the country and brought down the economy. The authors also document how the Philippines was made to jump through painful hoops in order to join the WTO, thus exposing itself to free trade and monopolistic competition by developed countries. In-dept analysis of WTO agreement on agriculture demonstrates how the US and the European Union demand that underdeveloped countries like the Philippines eliminate trade barriers and government subsidies while hypocritically continuing to use them to bolster their own agribusiness sectors.
The chapter talked about corruption and poverty is interested. The chapter’s central thesis is that corruption is wrongfully blamed for being the primary cause of failed economic development in the Philippines. The economics elites find corruption discourse a useful tactic because it allows them to keep the public’s attention focused on corruption rather looking at the real source of poverty in the Philippines. From the book: the more convincing explanation for the country’s poverty and underdevelopment lies more with the ruling elite factions control over people, productions, markets, and resources and successful subordination of the state to their interests. The country has failed to develop and so many of its people are mired in poverty because the state, strangled it is by competing factions demands, has been rendered too powerless to even chart the country’s direction, much less subordinate ruling elites under its control.
Finally, the authors offer the following proposed elements of a successful post-EDSA social and economic transformation that are more state, focusing on the internal market as the driver of development, development of a strategic national development policy, taking sustainable development seriously, coordinating the Philippines national development strategy and transforming system of global economic governance.
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