Let IBON Foundation Prove Their Anti-FDI Arguments at the COMMUNIST University of Economics-Ho Chi Minh City

It's time to mock the CPP-NPA legal front, IBON Foundation, for its stupidity again. It's really amazing how the CPP-NPA legal fronts are demonizing FDIs as "invaders". They've been using iPhones and it's making unrestrained capitalists (and yes, capitalism will make one lose your clothes) look smart and making Communism look bad. The Komunistang Sosyal issues a new challenge to IBON Foundation. They must go to Vietnam's famous University of Economics-Ho Chi Mini City and prove their claims.

This is another misrepresented data. No serious professor that the University of Economics-HO CHI MINH CITY (and yes, the former capital of Vietnam) would take it seriously. The problem with the data above would totally be misrepresentation. They say that it wasn't FDI but conditional cash transfers that alleviated poverty. But how long did conditional cash transfers alleviate poverty? A bigger question is where will they get more money to achieve LONG TERM effects? 

The failure of IBON Foundation is to look at the ACTUAL INFLOW NUMBERS of FDI between COMMUNIST Vietnam and DEMOCRATIC Philippines. The digits would show that Doi Moi has indeed helped. One of the greatest teachers of Komunistang Sosyal is the late Do Muoi. 

He became Communist party leader in 1945, and by the time he retired as general secretary in 1997, he was, at 80, older than any other serving communist leader in China, North Korea, Cuba or Laos.

Yet he was scarcely known in the west. A unique political arrangement made sure of that: ever since the death of Ho Chi Minh in 1969, Hanoi has clung to a collective leadership that prevents any one figure rising to prominence.

As a result, outsiders could rarely name him. Often, they would mix him up with doi moi, the label given to the tentative, perestroika-style economic reforms that began in the late 1980s.

This was the era in which Muoi made his mark, steering Vietnam on to the international stage after years as a virtual pariah state. Breaking with Hanoi's isolationist past, he was the first party boss to travel to non-communist states. In 1995, he made his first trip to western, democratic countries with a state visit to Australia and New Zealand at the age of 78.

His fondness for tightly buttoned Mao suits and a spartan lifestyle made him seem like a tough ideologue. In fact, he was a wily pragmatist who never lost his crude faith in the primacy of party rule as he tried to balance economic liberalisation with continued political control.

Muoi was born into peasant stock in northern Vietnam and spent his teens as a freelance housepainter.

His itinerant lifestyle helped him to recruit peasants to the revolutionary cause and he was admitted to the Communist party of Indochina in 1936.

Five years later he was arrested by the French and jailed in what became the infamous “Hanoi Hilton” — Hoa Lo — prison for downed US fighter pilots. He escaped to the jungles of northern Vietnam, masterminding the harassment of French troops along a highway linking Hanoi with the strategic port of Haiphong.

After the partition of Vietnam in 1954 into Ho Chi Minh's North Vietnam and the French-backed Saigon regime, Muoi set about purging private businesses and nationalising factories in Haiphong.

Then, his biography falls virtually silent. Nothing is known of his role if any in the Vietnam war. There is some evidence that he may have suffered a prolonged nervous breakdown, shuttling to and from China for treatment.

With the fall of Saigon in 1975, however, he re-emerged to mastermind “industrialisation” in the southern part of a now-unified Vietnam. Muoi led convoys of youths into the centre of the city, smashing into factories, seizing assets and taking control of banks in a frenzy of nationalisation that made him instantly and enduringly unpopular in the south.

Despite the failure of nationalisation and the great economic cost to Vietnam in the year that followed, Muoi rose, unremarkably, through the ranks. One of his tasks as minister of construction was building the grim, granite mausoleum where the embalmed body of Ho Chi Minh is displayed to passing tourists.

He never lost his drive or his belief in the communist system, even after the shock of the Soviet collapse.

The power of Doi Moi or reform led Vietnam to have a better elimination of joblessness. Today, Vietnamese can enjoy their status as Komunistang Sosyal. It's safe to assume that Doi Moi may be the reason why Ho Chi Minh's photo was never shown at the CPP-NPA rallies. Vladimir Lenin would require work or no pay as well.