I came across an interesting quote the other day purported to be from the book "The Pentagon's New Map" so I downloaded a PDF and scoured the book. It seems the quote was fake. But good news! This book from 2004 about globalisation has relevant items about the Philippines.
Before diving into what Thomas Barnett has to briefly say about the Philippines it would be good to take a look at the Pentagon's new map.
Can you read that map all right?
Yet a pattern did emerge with each American crisis response in the 1990s. These deployments turned out to be overwhelmingly concentrated in the regions of the world that were effectively excluded from globalization's Functioning Core—namely, the Carib bean Rim, Africa, the Balkans, the Caucasus, Central Asia, the Middle East and Southwest Asia, and much of Southeast Asia. These regions constitute globalization's "ozone hole," or what I call its Non-Integrating Gap, where connectivity remains thin or absent. Simply put, if a country was losing out to globalization or rejecting much of its cultural content flows, there was a far greater chance that the United States would end up sending troops there at some point across the 1990s. But because the Pentagon viewed all these situations as "lesser includeds," there was virtually no rebal ancing of the U.S. military to reflect the increased load. We knew we needed a greater capacity within the ranks for nation building, peacekeeping, and the like, but instead of beefing up those assets to improve our capacity for managing the world as we found it, the Pentagon spent the nineties buying a far different military—one best suited for a high-tech war against a large, very sophisticated military opponent. In short, our military strategists dreamed of an opponent that would not arise for a war that no longer existed.
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Basically everything outside the dotted line (North America, Europe, Australia, and surprisingly Brazil and Argentina!) are functioning countries with robust economies. They are they engine drivers of the world. Everything inside the dotted line is the complete opposite. In fact they are chaotic and often at war and most US military deployments have been to countries which compose that large region which Barnett terms the Gap. The Philippines is inside the Gap. In fact it is right at the very edge which makes it a Seam State.
On a more practical level, it is also important for us to realize that in this global war on terrorism, while many of the political grievances associated with the most prominent transnational terrorist networks are now centered in the Middle East, the operating environments of such groups span the Gap as a whole. The real seam we need to be working lies not just along that Muslim arc, but around the entirety of the Gap. In reality, one of the least-told stories of our global war on terrorism involves just that—the significant increase of bilateral security relations between the United States and a host of countries, or Seam States, that ring the Gap.
What are the Seam States? Classic examples include Mexico, Brazil, South Africa, Morocco, Algeria, Greece, Turkey, Pakistan, Thailand, Malaysia, the Philippines, and Indonesia. Why are they important? Whenever you look at global maps of where terrorist networks are centered, invariably all the ones we care most about are located inside the Gap. Moreover, as we track their movements, or what the military would describe as their "interior lines of communication," these too lie overwhelmingly inside the Gap. How those terrorists access the Core is through the Seam States. This is sort of like the September 11 terrorists who hijacked the planes flying out of Boston boarding those planes previously at a regional airport in Maine. In that instance, Maine, with its looser security rule set, was the "seam state" that was exploited. Since security tends to be higher in the "deep" Core states, terrorists invariably seek access through the Seam States, or gain access to the United States by transiting through Mexico or some Caribbean island nation, as opposed to walking through security at JFK Airport in New York City.
The U.S. security strategy vis-à-vis these Seam States is simple: get them to increase their security practices as much as possible and—by doing so—close whatever loopholes exist. This is what gets the U.S. government involved in helping Brazil achieve better transparency throughout the Amazon Forest, South Africa get a better grip over its banking networks, and Indonesia clamp down on rebels across its far-flung archipelago. Other countries where the Pentagon has increased security assistance since 9/11 include the Philippines, Algeria, Djibouti, Pakistan, and India. All these efforts would have made sense—and in some instances did make sense— on some level prior to 9/11, but thanks to the global war on terrorism all such bilateral security assistance expands with far greater speed and urgency.
This assistance is not so much purposefully focused on these Seam States as it is simply drawn to them by the circumstances of how terrorists seek to avoid our efforts at prosecution. A transnational terrorist organization like al Qaeda will exploit the Gap's disconnectedness to do things like disperse its gold throughout Africa, shift training activities to Asia, obtain guns from Latin American arms smugglers, and tap sympathetic financial networks embedded across the Middle East and—increasingly—Southeast Asia. But in the end, if al Qaeda really wants to bring its war home to America, it will need to exploit globalization's seams, like the Internet, commercial airline networks, and banking networks—plus the Seam States that mark the geographic dividing line between the Gap and the Core. So if America is truly going to wage a global war on terrorism, it needs to work the Gap as a whole and the host of Seam States that surround it.
Page 187-189
The Philippines, according to Barnett, is a Seam State which terrorists can use to easily access the Global Core, or the Western nations. I don't think many Filipino terrorists have used the Philippines to access the West but the Philippines was used as a base of operation for Al-Qaeda in the 90's. It was in Manila where the Bojinka plot was hatched. The plan was to assassinate the Pope, blow up airplanes, and crash an airliner into CIA headquarters. By sheer accident the plan was discovered before it could be put ton action. But the two planners, Ramzi Yousef and Khalid Sheik Mohammed, would become the architects of the September 11th attacks.
If anyone is moving around it is foreign terrorists who are moving to the Philippines. The ease with which terrorists can enter and exit the Philippines puts the nation in danger and SEA at risk. Barnett says:
If anyone is moving around it is foreign terrorists who are moving to the Philippines. The ease with which terrorists can enter and exit the Philippines puts the nation in danger and SEA at risk. Barnett says:
The U.S. security strategy vis-à-vis these Seam States is simple: get them to increase their security practices as much as possible and—by doing so—close whatever loopholes exist.
That would describe exactly the what the US has been doing in the Philippines for the past two decades first with Operation Enduring Freedom and now with Operation Pacific Eagle. As well as with the Enhanced Defense Cooperation Agreement (EDCA) which allows the US military to operate out of Philippine military bases. The Philippines' status as a seam state the and the US military's role of assisting with the security situation has not changed in twenty years and will likely not change in the foreseeable future.
The next mention of the Philippines comes in Barnett's discussion of the movement of labour from the Gap nations to the Core nations. I think you can guess he is writing about OFWs.
The next mention of the Philippines comes in Barnett's discussion of the movement of labour from the Gap nations to the Core nations. I think you can guess he is writing about OFWs.
Given that a lot of people will have to move from the Gap to the Core to keep globalization on track, the question becomes, How can this massive shift be achieved? Immigration is the obvious— and most socially challenging—route, but there are two promising trends that we'll need to promote in addition to permanent immigration: the "virtual migration" of jobs from the Core to the Gap, exemplified by India becoming a "back office" for the U.S. economy; and a "global commute," best displayed by the Philippines' amazingly mobile workforce.
Virtual migration has been around for a while, we just hadn't noticed it. When my wife, Vonne, was working as a unit secretary in a major Virginia hospital in the mid-1990s, she helped send the doctors' audiotaped medical chart logs to India via the Internet for over night transcription. Instead of paying more to have it done in the United States by non-medical experts, the hospital ended up paying half as much for Indian medical professionals to perform the service outside of their day jobs. It's not just the back office-type jobs that have migrated to India and elsewhere, but virtual face-to-face service jobs like customer call centers, where the "Susan" who ends up taking your complaint is really Nishara working in Bangalore. Then there is the huge role Indian software companies have played in the rise of Silicon Valley over time. In effect, India has become the overnight software patch that keeps our information technology industry humming on a daily basis: tasks that would have sat over night in America are now beamed to India for resolution by the next business day. It is often said that Indian information technology workers, the largest single pool on the planet, write half the world's software. Most will never see America, and yet they are an integral part of our nation's computer-fueled productivity gains.
The other positive trend is the emergence of the global commute, and no country exemplifies this development better than the Philippines. The government there has systematically facilitated two-year deployments around the world by a major portion of its labor force (roughly 10 percent of its total population of 76 million). These global commuters are specifically recruited by the government for this program, which mobilizes the OFWs, or Overseas Filipino Workers, in significant numbers for temporary labor duty all over the planet. In 2001, these workers sent back in remittances $6.2 billion, constituting almost a tenth of the national GDP. Factor in the multiplier effect on the national economy (every dollar sent home generates three to four dollars of growth), and you're looking at a flow that shapes a significant portion of their domestic market demand.
Not surprisingly, of the top twenty nations frequented by Filipinos in their global commute, fifteen are Core states (U.S., Japan, Hong Kong-China, U.K., Taiwan, Italy, Canada, Germany, South Korea, Greece, Guam, Switzerland, Netherlands, Austria, and Aus tralia). The rest are rich Gulf states plus Malaysia and Singapore two of the most Core-like states in the Gap. The difference in wage- earning potential is huge: nurses in the Philippines average $15,000 a year, but close to $50,000 in the United States, which has accepted so many of these global commuters as to trigger a nursing shortage in the Philippines.
Making this global commute possible are low airfares and new telecommunications advances, like inexpensive text-messaging, which acts as a cheap but essential lifeline between parents working over seas (two-thirds of OFWs are women) and their families back home, where the government goes out of its way to support OFWs with special events promoting free medical care and celebrating their role as bagong bayani, or "new heroes," of the Filipino economy. Filipinos were prominently represented among the first foreign workers rushed into Iraq as part of the postwar rebuilding process. Why? Ninety percent of Filipinos can read, compared with just two-thirds of Iraqis, and most Filipinos learn English in school as a legacy of a long American occupation in the first half of the twentieth century. As the Philippines' secretary of labor and employment declared in the weeks leading up to the war, "If they're looking for skilled workers, they'll come to us." Wired magazine has described the program as "an example of socioeconomic engineering on an unprecedented scale," arguing that the Philippines is doing nothing less than "creating the world's most distributed economy, where the sources of production are so far-flung it boggles the mind."
The aging Core will need to accept the Gap's desperate ambition for a better life, because in doing so, we shrink the Gap one motivated worker at a time. The importance of this flow of remittances to the Gap is hard to overstate. Latin American workers toiling overseas send home roughly $15 billion a year, or more than five times what the region receives in foreign aid from the Core. Any connectivity that facilitates this flow, whether on a permanent or temporary basis, expands globalization's reach. Conversely, any restrictions placed on such movement in the name of a global war on terrorism will end up doing more damage to America's long-term interest in seeing globalization succeed than any number of suicide bombers can ever hope to achieve.
In effect, this flow of labor from the Gap to the Core is globalization's release valve. With it, the prosperity of the Core can be maintained and more of the world's people can participate. Without it, overpopulation and underperforming economies in the Gap will lead to explosive situations that spill over to the Core. Either way, they are coming. Our only choice is how we welcome them.
Page 212-214
The comments about India apply equally to the Philippines. Much labor has been outsourced here from the West. Particularly business process outsourcing the most common example of which are the numerous call centres.
One of the most dynamic and fastest growing sectors in the Philippines is the information technology–business process outsourcing (IT-BPO) industry. The industry is composed of eight sub-sectors, namely, knowledge process outsourcing and back offices, animation, call centers, software development, game development, engineering design, and medical transcription. The IT-BPO industry plays a major role in the country's growth and development.
Barnett notes that OFWs are lauded as the "new heroes" of the Filipino economy and that in 2001 remittances totalled $6.2 billion making up 10% of the GDP. In 2018 remittances totalled $32 billion and accounted for 9.7% of the GDP.
Further, personal remittances, which grew by 3.0 percent year-on-year, reached US$32.2 billion in 2018, the highest annual level to date. The growth in personal remittances during the year was driven by remittance inflows from land-based OFs with work contracts of one year or more and remittances from both sea-based and land-based OFs with work contracts of less than one year, which rose annually by 2.8 percent and 4.6 percent, respectively. Personal remittances is a major driver of domestic consumption and, in 2018, it accounted for 9.7 percent of gross domestic product (GDP) and 8.1 percent of the gross national income (GNI).
Things aren't going to be changing here anytime soon. Filipinos will continue to search for work overseas where they can earn more.
Barnett's last observation "they are coming" is a right on the dime. Since 2004 the amount of people leaving the Gap for the Core has increased exponentially. All that growth is driven by economic factors meaning not necessarily people looking for jobs but people looking for freebies and handouts. He is right that they are coming. He is right that the only choice is how to welcome them. The fact that countries like Sweden, the UK, Germany, and France have welcomed them with open arms and persecuted those who would speak out has been devastating to the economy, safety, and culture of each of those countries. The USA has also been affected by not just welcoming these stragglers with open arms but actively importing them in large numbers which has resulted in Minneapolis becoming a little Somalia complete with all the crime. The Core was prosperous without migrants from the Gap. It is actually the massive spillover which is what is dragging down the Core nations to the level of those in the Gap.
Barnett's last observation "they are coming" is a right on the dime. Since 2004 the amount of people leaving the Gap for the Core has increased exponentially. All that growth is driven by economic factors meaning not necessarily people looking for jobs but people looking for freebies and handouts. He is right that they are coming. He is right that the only choice is how to welcome them. The fact that countries like Sweden, the UK, Germany, and France have welcomed them with open arms and persecuted those who would speak out has been devastating to the economy, safety, and culture of each of those countries. The USA has also been affected by not just welcoming these stragglers with open arms but actively importing them in large numbers which has resulted in Minneapolis becoming a little Somalia complete with all the crime. The Core was prosperous without migrants from the Gap. It is actually the massive spillover which is what is dragging down the Core nations to the level of those in the Gap.
The elephant in the room is that the captains of industry in the globalist system having been stymied by the sociopolitical rejection of Core industry and production to Gap nations have rigged the world economy to draw the Gap workers to the Core world so they can save on shipping while antagonizing Core workforces with cheaper replacements
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