The Manila Times

Globalization’s monster: Covid-19

By Rigoberto D. Tiglao

April 3, 2020

TIME was when the Philippine elite’s mantra, what they saw as nearly the cure-all for everything that
ailed the country, was “globalization.”

It was former president Fidel Ramos who practically made it a national policy. He ingrained the doctrine so
much into the ruling class’ consciousness that the capture of even our key telecommunications industries
by “global” companies like Hong Kong’s First Pacific Co. Ltd. and Singapore’s Temasek Holdings Pvt. Ltd. —
even through a patent violation of our Constitution — has been nonchalantly accepted, even to this day.

In the globalist ideology, nations are remnants of the 20th century. In the 21st century, there would be a
borderless world in which global companies source their materials and labor power from whatever part of
the globe that is most efficient. Top corporate executives and millennials boasted that they were “global
citizens” rather than parochial Pinoys. Children of the elite were sent to Ivy League schools in the United
States and boarding schools in the United Kingdom to be our contributions to the world’s global citizens.

Guess what, most of the world have now shut down their borders to keep out the horrible coronavirus
disease 2019 (Covid-19) pandemic.

Accounts of its swift spread in Italy, as an example, show that it was in part because of the northern
territory’s globalization. Its industrial and fashion centers, such as Milan, had extensive ties with Wuhan,
China, where products designed by expensive Italian fashionistas were mass-produced by cheap Chinese labor.
Sunny Spain, romantic France and glorious England were the playgrounds of the global citizens; now these
are becoming ghost towns.

Perhaps there might be other reasons — in previous columns I speculated that Southeast Asians may have
some form of immunity or that the warm temperatures of the tropics kill Covid-19 faster — but look at
the top 10 countries where the most cases of Covd-19 are. Except for China and Iran, these are countries —
led by the world’s leader in globalization theory and practice, the US — that are at the hub of the
globalized world they created since World War 2.

Global citizens
Even in our country — and I condole deeply with their families — anecdotal evidence show that many of
those who died of Covid-19, who might have even been super-carriers, are the well-off who traveled to
Europe in recent days; our global citizens. The village of a relative in Cavite that seemed to be a secure
shangri-la from the plague was penetrated by Covid-19 — brought by a Filipina married to a British man
who just came from London.

Covid-19 has become globalization’s monster.

New York is the center of the globalized world. New Yorkers boasted that when one walks in Times Square,
you’d hear more than a dozen languages in conversations. It has now become the epicenter of the pandemic in
the US, which has 85,000 cases, half of which is in New York city.
Because of its leaders’ incompetence, but also because of its tight embrace of democratic rights that
Americans refused “guidelines” to stay at home, the US — the leader of the globalized world — has been
reduced to a desperate nation, its president nonchalantly announcing that he would have done a “very
good job” if those killed by the virus didn’t exceed 100,000.

The nightmare that globalization has become is not lost on its champions. “The pandemic could be the straw
that breaks the camel’s back of economic globalization,’” wrote Robin Niblett, director of the Chatham
House think-tank.

He added, “The architecture of global economic governance established in the 20th century was at risk,”
raising the prospect that political leaders might “retreat into overt geopolitical competition.”

But Robert Kaplan, one of globalization’s ideologues, sees recent events as merely the end of phase 1 of
globalization: “[The] coronavirus is the historical marker between the first phase of globalization and the
second… Globalization 2.0 is about separating the globe into great-power blocs with their own burgeoning
militaries and separate supply chains, about the rise of autocracies, and about social and class divides that
have engendered nativism and populism.

Realities
Whether globalization is strengthened in a different form through this plague or whether it will still
prove as the most efficient system for the world’s economy, the plague has demonstrated certain
incontestable realities.

First, when push comes to shove, when hundreds of thousands of a nation’s citizens are threatened, it’s
every country for itself. The Beatles’ “imagine there’s no country” is an infantile wish of the rich.

While China has demonstrated remarkable global solidarity in sending assistance to Italy, the Philippines
and the US, remember that they have been able to do this only after it had put its own epidemic under
control.

The European Union (EU), the supposed template for globalization, is nowhere to be seen, with each European
country deciding on its own when it banned travel to and from their nations, with only a trickling of EU
help to such ravaged countries as Italy and Spain.

Many countries are competing against each other to secure face masks, personal protective equipment and
ventilators. Countries are refusing desperate pleas from luxury cruise ships and even two mighty US
aircraft carriers with Covid-19 victims to touch their shores.

The second reality and the most important for us to understand is this: in this era of human evolution, it is
the nation-state that is the most important organization that determines whether a human life or dies,
lives a prosperous life or a miserable one.

Kingdoms
Thousands of years ago, it was the tribe and then, starting in the Middle Ages, kingdoms supposedly became a
deity’s proxy for his or her perfect and just rule on earth.
It was only in the last 200 years or so, starting with the 1789 French Revolution, that nation-states emerged
as such all-powerful social organizations to which humans depended for the kind of lives they will live. Or
whether they are killed painfully by a virus.

It is not nongovernment organizations, corporations, the Church, not even the family or — for the
extremely foolish — the Communist Party that will determine peoples’ fates. It is the nation-state. That is
the big, big lesson of the current pandemic.

Hundreds of thousands of people will die of the Covid-19 disease in the US, Italy, Spain, Iran and many
European nations because their nation-states failed them. China has saved the lives of hundreds of
thousands of its citizens, as Japan and South Korea — and, I dare say, the Philippines — has or will.
There is an old-fashioned term for this notion that it is the nation-state that is, in this era, the most
important organization that determines the fate of men: nationalism.
A more fancier term I had coined for this two decades ago: The Strong Republic*.

*This is explained in detail in the 13th chapter of my 2016 book Debunked.

Editorial, Opinion-Editorial

Time to start easing the restrictions

Published July 4, 2020, 11:13 PM
by Manila Bulletin

The coronavirus pandemic is essentially a health problem, but it is leading to an economic crisis
because of the lockdowns that have suspended or even closed down economic activities of all kinds
all over the world, United Nations Secretary General Antonio Guterres said at a round-table
discussion the other day on “Rebirthing the Global Economy to Deliver Sustainable Development.”

He said: “COVID-19 is a human crisis. But it also became a development and financing crisis as
developing countries face vastly increased demands for public spending exactly at the same time as
tax and export revenues, inward investments, and remittances are plummeting.”
He added: “We are on the cusp of a widespread debt crisis, with many countries faced with an
impossible choice between servicing their debt or protecting their most vulnerable communities
and fighting the pandemic….”

The Philippines was among the earliest countries in the world to order lockdowns. This has helped
to limit the spread of the killer virus, but the government has had to spend billions of pesos to
help all those who have lost all means of income.

At the same time, tax collections went down because business operations ceased. Export revenues
went down because the entire world market was down. Remittances of our Overseas Filipino
Workers were down; so many of them have now been forced to return home as their host countries
have been hit hard by the pandemic.

Secretary General Guterres saw the big picture of so many nations, mostly developing ones but
also many middle-income countries, which have defaulted in their debt payments and are now
unable to get access to the financial markets.
The Philippines is as only a small part of this big picture, but it is our own big problem and it is
shared by our government, our business and industry, and every individual Filipino whose life has
been upset by the coronavirus.

Last Thursday, presidential spokesman Harry Roque, meeting with the national media, said that if
the country does not reopen soon, many businesses will go bankrupt and many people may die due to
loss of livelihood.

Finance Secretary Carlos Dominguez III also said at a meeting of the Inter-Agency Task Force on
Emerging Infectious Diseases that the “we need to shift from our priority on health to opening the
economy because unless we do, people will simply die because of lack of livelihood.” He said the
nation must face the reality that the virus is not going away soon and we should really begin
opening the economy. He suggested that lockdowns be limited to the level of barangays and
companies with high cases of coronavirus.

The virus first emerged in China in December, 2019, spread around the world, and is now be surging in
some countries. We have had our share of infections and deaths but we have not suffered as much as
certain other countries like the United States, Brazil, Russia, India, and the United Kingdom.

After various levels of lockdown since March 15, it may be time to reopen more of our economy,
before we fall victim to the financial crisis that UN Secretary General Guterres warned about.
 Philstar global

The end of globalization

BREAKTHROUGH - Elfren S. Cruz (The Philippine Star) - May 24, 2020 - 12:00am

A few years ago, I wrote columns whose main message was that globalisation was harmful to the
average citizen of the world. The world’s leading business and financial publication the Economist
has written a cover story with the title Goodbye Globalisation: A nationalistic and self-sufficient
era beckons. It won’t be richer or safer.

Today, the rise in income inequality has been attributed to globalization. We have reached a point
where 67 individuals around the world have a total wealth equivalent to the bottom 50% of the
world’s population. Think about this: 67 individuals have as much wealth as 3.8 billion people.

Income inequality has been one of the main reasons for the rise of populism. We kept reading reports
that economies were growing and that GDP was rising. The only problem was that a few people
became fabulously rich; but, most of the population were experiencing a stagnant real income. The
culprit is that there was a philosophy that as the wealthy became wealthier, their “wealth”
would trickle down to the masses. This “trickle down,” the essential defense for capitalism, never
happened. Increased GDP growth did not translate into better lives for most people.

There was a time when the same “trickle down” was believed to be applicable to nations. As certain
nations became richer they were expected to share their wealth with the poorer countries of the
world. This was the dream of international organizations like the United Nations. Instead, the
rich Western nations continued to enrich by further exploitation of poor countries. The Third
World countries were developed solely as sources of raw materials for the goods and services of
the Western imperial powers.

Today China – the new economic giant – is following the same imperial pattern of the Western
powers. It’s Belt and Road initiatives are aimed at securing reliable sources of raw materials and
markets for its economy. The primary objective is to continue the economic growth of China.
This was my second message in my globalization articles years ago. I wrote that I did not believe
China could sustain its economic growth through the exploitation of globalization. China had
become the manufacturing center of the world.

I used to call China a “parasite” economy because it thrived at the expense of others. The country
created jobs, not through new technologies or exploiting raw materials, but by offering wages
lower than those in other countries. The jobs created in China came from the flight of jobs from
other countries to China.

I once wrote that this “parasitic” economic practice surely could not be tolerated by other
countries for too long. As GDP growth accelerated, real income continued to stagnate not only in
countries like the Philippines; but, even in rich countries like the United States.

In the poor countries, business leaders were able to keep wage low by repeatedly warning that in
the age of globalization, the nation had to keep wages low to be able to remain competitive. In the
meantime, many of these same business leaders were outsourcing their manufacturing to China.

The classic example is the footwear industry where manufacturing was hard hit by Chinese low
cost competition. The few footwear companies outsourced their manufacturing to China and were
able to continue marketing their brand.

When I would write and advocate about the need to protect local industries to protect local jobs,
I was told that I was still advocating protectionism and economic nationalism. These concepts were
supposedly anti-business and obsolete in this globalized world. I would argue that this “trickle
down” theory did not work and business was losing jobs in our economy. This was the time when the
overseas workers became “heroes.” My question then was why were jobs being created abroad and
not here in the Philippines?

China was once a heavily protected economy until it was able to build an industrial and financial
base that could compete with the rest of the world. Now it has suddenly become the champion of
open markets and globalization. The United States and Japan were once champions of globalization
and open markets. But now that they are losing their competitive edge, these two countries, along
with many other countries, have elected governments that are advocating economic nationalism
and protectionism. The United States has launched a trade war with China. This is not just Trump. I
hear the same rhetoric from Democrats. This is what I expected to happen; but, I thought it would
happen sooner. In the meantime Japan is offering financial incentives to hundreds of Japanese
companies in China to return to Japan.
The article in the recent issue of the Economist about globalization actually does not attack nor
condemn globalization. Its theme is apparently that for better or for worst globalization is
coming to an end. It says:

“Even before the pandemic, globalization was in trouble. The open system of trade that had
dominated the world economy for decades had been damaged by the {2008} financial crash and the
Sino-American trade war.... As economies reopen, activity will recover, but don’t expect a quick
return to a carefree world of unfettered movement and free trade. “It concludes that this new
world of nationalism will “enfeeble the recovery, leave the economy vulnerable, and spread
geopolitical instability.”

Three years ago, the Economist had an article entitled: “Left Behind: How to Help the Places Left
Behind by Globalization.”

I fail to see how any system – like globalization – can be beneficial if it leads to terrible income
inequality and the rise of populism.