Tuesday, February 17, 2004

Booty capitalist
Raul Rodrigo writes today about the happy life of Danding Cojuangco as a rentseeker:

By dint of astute, sharp-elbowed maneuvering, Danding built one monopoly after another: coconuts, soft drinks, beer, and so on. When Marcos fell, he was on the verge of building a new sugar monopoly. The Boss’s modus operandi remained the same, whether in Marcos’s time or Erap’s: use other people’s money to create monopolies, leverage these monopolies into wangling even more power and influence, and all the while keep enough resources flowing to the powers-that-be to keep them looking the other way.

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