Seen and heard on Ms. Theary C. Seng's Facebook accounts:
Adel Briones: One of the things that we did in the Philippines to effect the ouster of former dictator Marcos was to boycott products and corporations that supported the dictatorship. Filipinos loved beer, but they refrained from drinking beer (whose company was owned by a Marcos crony) just so to show their displeasure and to register their protest. Others boycotted newspapers. The actions were effective.
3 comments:
boycut and general strike will get nothing from Hyena Hun sen but do something is better than do nothing
http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Globalization/Bad_Samaritans.html
The Myth of Free Trade and the Secret History of Capitalism
by Ha-Joon Chang
Bloomsbury Press, 2008, paperback
People in rich countries who preach free market and free trade to poor countries in order to capture larger shares of poor countries' markets and to preempt the emergence of possible competitors.
p3
In 1961, eight years after the end of its fratricidal war with North Korea, South Korea's yearly income stood at $82 per person. The average Korean earned less than half the average Ghanaian citizen ($179).)The Korean War ... was one of the bloodiest in human history, claiming four million lives in just over three years (1950-3). Half of South Korea's manufacturing base and more than 75% of its railways were destroyed in the conflict... A 1950s internal report from USAID - the main US government aid agency then, as now - called Korea a 'bottomless pit. At the time, the country's main exports were tungsten, fish and other primary commodities.
p3
Samsung, now one of the world's leading exporters of mobile phones, semiconductors and computers, the company started out as an exporter of fish, vegetables and fruit in 1938, seven years before Korea's independence from Japanese colonial rule. Until the 1970s, its, main lines of business were sugar refining and textiles that it had set up in the mid-1950s.
p13
The neo-liberal agenda has been pushed by an alliance of rich country governments led by the ç US and mediated by the 'Unholy Trinity' of international economic organizations that they largely control - the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank and the World Trade Organisation (WTO). The rich governments use their aid budgets and access to their home markets as carrots to induce the developing countries to adopt neo-liberal policies. This is sometimes to benefit specific firms that lobby, but usually to create an environment in the developing country concerned that is friendly to foreign goods and investment in general. The IMF and the World Bank play their part by attaching to their loans the condition that the recipient countries adopt neoliberal policies. The WTO contributes by making trading rules that favour free trade in areas where the rich countries are stronger but not where they are weak (e.g., agriculture or textiles). These governments and international organizations are supported by an army of ideologues. Some of these people are highly trained academics who should know the limits of their free-market economics but tend to ignore them when it comes to giving policy advice (as happened especially when they advised the former communist economies in the 1990s. Together, these various bodies and individuals form a powerful propaganda machine, a financial-intellectual complex backed by money and power.
This neo-liberal establishment would have us believe that, during its miracle years between the 1960s and the 1980s, [South] Korea pursued a neo-liberal economic development strategy. The reality, however, was very different indeed. What Korea actually did during these decades was to nurture certain new industries, selected by the government in consultation with the private sector, through tariff protection, subsidies and other forms of government support (e.g., overseas marketing information services provided by the state export agency) until they 'grew up' enough to withstand international competition. The government owned all the banks, so it could direct the life blood of business - credit.
The Korean government did not vanquish the market as the communist states did. However, it did not have blind faith in the free market either. While it took markets seriously, the Korean strategy recognized that they often need to be corrected through policy intervention.
It's only hurt the poor khmer.
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