Why not expropriate PAL? Part 1

OK, for starters, I'm not saying in anyway that the Philippine government should takeover Philippine Airlines. What I'm saying is the entire workforce of PAL should takeover the airline. That includes all senior management staff down to the contractual employee. It might sound as a crazy idea. At best it's a quixotic attempt at empowering the workers; and at worst, it's a recipe for disaster (if you ask the business community).

However, we should ask ourselves, are the current business models potent solutions to the problems of wealth distribution, massive unemployment, and contractualization in the sector? We could even frame the question this way, how effective are Corporations and other enterprises such as State enterprises in pushing for development?

Undoubtedly there is this consensus, at least with most middle class and business leaders, that the solution to poverty is to start your own country and be your own boss. No one can really deny that most employees who're sulking in their own jobs right now think of the day they can be bosses too and raise their income so they can buy an new house, send their kids to good schools (if they have kids), get married, travel around the world, etc. I'm not saying I'm against that. I think people should strive for that and plan for the future. What I am skeptical and usually cynical about is that these kind of dreams of being bosses one day usually come from business people who ought to have been good bosses in the first place. Let's take for example Henry Sy of SM, we know for a fact most if not all of his employees are contractual. No way could they even have the chance of owning their own companies one day unless you had the DBP and other Government Financial institutions launch a massive program of lending to small entrepreneurs. So what kind of business are we really talking about? The kind maybe we call the underground economy employing millions of Filipinos but too small (even when taken in together) in capital to even make a dent in wealth distribution.

I agree with many who say that SMEs have contributed a lot in getting people out of poverty. They have done a lot in spurring the domestic market to offset our dead manufacturing industry. However, people who place their trust in it to solve our deficit and maybe create an economic miracle, have to wake up and concede that not everyone has an idea for a business, sufficient capital, and to compound that even more, some industries would require a business model which would be larger than most SMEs. Maybe the size of corporations. But then we'd have to go back to the scenario of the corporate employee sulking about his/her fate.

So I think I should make a proposition. One that is rooted in pragmatism, common sense, and one which we tend to neglect as a form of enterprise. I'm talking about the cooperative. When I first shared this idea to a friend, he simply laughed it off and said that most cooperatives are multi-purpose cooperatives of employees who just use it to augment their salararies, get a loan, or even buy goods and foodstuffs at lower prices. There wasn't just big coops that can have thousands of employees, imagine one vote per employee, he said. Of course that would be true, if only it were not true. Let's take the example of the 7th largest enterprise in Spain. The Mondragon Cooperative Corporation (Don't mind the word "corporation), employing 85,000 employees. All of them are owners. All of them are employees. Even the CEO is an employee who is elected by the workers. But this might be a badly managed company you might ask. No way can employees run a good company. They're 7th largest probably because they get state subsidies. Well, they're actually a very efficiently run company with no government help, even in the 2008 great recession some of their employees in a few affiliated coops within MCC voted for a pay cut just to save the company. Yes, their employees voted for a pay cut. There wasn't any CEO to lie about it for them to do that. They're aware of the financial health of the company. They have to, they're all owners. Oh, and they also run a university, manufacture high-tech machinery that even Germany imports, run retail stores, and other businesses. They do have some companies which aren't cooperativized yet since they have to adjust their business models to other countries with existing operations. But they are planning to cooperativise soon and turn their ordinary employees to part-owners.

And it isn't just in Spain, India has the Indian Coffee House, Ltd. the largest cooperative in the world and one of the oldest coffee chains in the world. There's Granot Central Cooperative in Israel which produces agricultural products and employs about 8,000-9,000 employee-owners (maybe we can turn Hacienda Luisita into something like this, this ought to shut those landlords up whenever they say parceling the estate is a threat to food security), then there's Fonterra, you know that company that produces anchor butter and anmum milk for your gerriatric grandparents. Then there's Florida Natural Growers, a known American brand and competitor of Tropicana, they even have a marketing strategy which goes something like, "We own the land, We own the trees, We own the Company."

Closer to home, even the port services in the Cebu International Port is run by a cooperative of at least 2,000 employee owners.

I'm just trying to point out that the prospect of having a democratically-run enterprise in the country can be a success.

(To be continued)

The collapse of the American facade

The 2010 American midterm elections speaks for itself. The inmates have kicked out the jailguards and now they're running the asylum.

The good thing about this is the reality of American politics has already been laid bare. No more illusions. No more mirrors and lights to confuse us. We can now see American politics for what it really is: Corporate control.

The US Supreme Court ruling granting corporations and other juridical persons the right to donate to political campaigns practically gave legal trappings to what was already common practice. Now lobbyists working for huge multinational corporations need not go through backroom deals to secure the votes of politicians, they can now practically buy them via campaign donations running in the billions. The recently concluded elections spent more than 4 billion dollars in campaign dollars mostly coming from corporate donors. It's no wonder Tea Part militants running for office could easily beat their more experienced, albeit more traditional opponents, since they've benefited the most from the war chest provided by USA, Inc.

What is even more startling is the fact that with a ration of 7:1, the Republican party which is the party of big business, has outgunned their Democratic rivals in campaign donations.

Sure, one can argue that the Democrats are also recipients of corporate funding. But this doesn't bode well for independent candidates or third party candidates that now have to surmount this huge wall of dollars in order to get votes on top of the already impossibly hard access to ballots in ever state that they have to worked on.

But most of all, this is definitely bad news for the voters. This election alone had one of the lowest voter turnout with little more than 40% turnout of all eligible voters. The voters are literally abstaining from voting due to the electoral exercise being hijacked by corporate interest.

Well, there's always been low voter turnout for the US with usually 50% on average.

At least now, we have solid evidence to prove that the US is indeed the Corporate States of America.

2010 issues and more

With the approach of the 2010 elections many Filipinos are preparing for their list of candidates to vote. Many are already doing their homework on the background, experiences, and program of government of the candidates. As for those who already done their research months before, the next step is to look at the basic issues that they would want to be tackled and how their favorites will tackle them (or how they hope they will tackle them). As expected, the two main issues of poverty and corruption will remain the issue most urgent. Poverty will be a concern largely of the poor, obviously; while corruption will be the concern of those better off or at least not wealthy enough to benefit from anomalous deals. As for those who aren't poor and have largely accepted corruption is a systemic and not a personality based problem, other issues come to mind.

First important issue would be the Reproductive Health Care Bill. Although 70% of the population support it, it seems most politicians don't understand statistics. The numbers that they do understand is the one that written across a candidate's name when votes are being counted. So, they still fear some backlash from the Catholic Church if they do support the RH bill (although there are others who hold the same view as the Catholic Church with the same devotion). This election will be a testcase of the "Catholic vote", the vote that has never existed since 1986. Well, 1986 was the election that Cory would almost never lose. I mean, even if the Church endorsed Marcos, Cory would still win. In the event that the Catholic vote is disproved, and it will be, the flood gates would be open for the public debate of other pertinent issues such as LGBT rights.

The second important issue is economic reform. No not the "reform" free market fundamentalists like to claim. I'm talking about regulation of unfettered capitalism. With the two main candidates having Leftists (well at least one of them claims the other is counterrevolutionary) as key allies, expect that many of the current administration's economic policies, including those dating back to Ramos, to be discussed. One important issue would be regulation of the banking industry and possible government intervention in micro-credit for MSMEs. Another is the obvious reassesment of the Oil Deregulation law and asset reform. there might even be a potential review of current plans to sell off GOCCs (I would sure like to see some GOCCs kept under public ownership and run efficiently, after all privatization or private enterprise doesn't always mean efficiency. Look at MRT.)