Aquino III: The face of cruelty

DIE HARD III
Herman Tiu Laurel
09/24/2010



Behind the quaint portraiture of Aquino III’s supposed modesty and frugality; behind that tired “wang-wang” spiel to the most recent juxtaposition of his “measly” P25-million US trip to Gloria Arroyo’s P1-billion junkets last year, lies a face that the three-headed miscommunications hydra is so desperately trying to hide from the public. That face, with its characteristic smirk and misplaced grin, dreadfully bespeaks a cruel, dehumanizing, and heartless government dead-set on fully implementing a so-called “legacy” that has brought this nation to ruin.

Such legacy, summed up in three decades of economic and political policy “reform” measures a.k.a. “neo-liberalism,” has put in place the following “deforms:”

1) Liberalization of the economy and the absolute rule of the market — which means total control of society by Wall Street, i.e. the Philippine Stock Exchange in local terms, as well as by Big Business in general; the removal of tariffs; and “trickle down” economics, or letting the big guys get all the goods while letting the crumbs trickle down ever so slowly (which has not even happened at all);

2) Cutting public expenditure for social services (such as education and health care, maintenance of roads, bridges, water supply, etc.) — reducing, if not eliminating, government’s role and increasing private corporatist control over these;

3) Deregulation — reducing government supervision and control of anything that may diminish corporate profits, including protecting the environment and ensuring food and job security, as well as public safety;

4) Privatization — selling state-owned enterprises, goods and services (including banks, key industries, railroads, toll ways, electricity, schools, hospitals and even fresh water) to private investors;

5) Eliminating the concept of “The Public Good” — replacing it with so-called “individual” or “corporate responsibility,” leaving the small and powerless to fend for themselves, then branding them as “lazy” for their joblessness and poverty;

6) Globalization under the rule of the Gatt-WTO — embodied in the policy that the West imposed on the rest of world through the United Nations’ various trade organizations.

The Philippines, which the past governments of Fidel Ramos and Gloria Arroyo had proudly declared to be the most globalized in the region, now has the highest electricity cost in Asia (and among the highest in the world), and the same in terms of water, port services, and toll fees — public services that were started to be privatized during Cory Aquino’s watch, after the so-called “People Power” of 1986.

Last week, upon prodding from Serge Osmeña III (the power industry’s Senate avatar) among others, Aquino III’s Bureau of Internal Revenue (BIR) withdrew the senior citizens’ exemption from the 12 percent value-added tax on electricity and water. Despite this just being one of the few token humanitarian concessions given to one of society’s most vulnerable sectors — the elderly who rely on measly retirement benefits of contracting real value — the BIR chief still hurriedly withdrew it without any qualms.

One of Aquino III’s spokesmen, Edwin Lacierda, then countered: “The Aquino administration is willing to sacrifice its overwhelming popularity in exchange (for) implementing revenue generation measures,” thus vividly replicating Judas sacrificing Christ for 30 pieces of silver!

I am using the term Aquino III and not PeNoy because I want there to be no mistake that I am writing any of these in jest. The cruelty and inhumanity of this administration is but an escalation of the previous Arroyo regime’s ills. From its progressing impoverishment of the nation; its diminution of every government capability to support public welfare; to its systematic devaluation of the people’s citizenship in a Republic for overseas and corporate slavery — all these are vintage Aquinorroyo.

The last is even worse as the fate of our citizens has been consigned to the International Monetary Fund-World Bank and mega corporations while these are merely kept alive by our sovereign guarantees, as well as tax money, to amortize over generations all our unjust debts (such as the P950-billion universal charge in electricity and the growing P140-billion public-private partnership projects).

Kim Henares must be proud of this dehumanization of our countrymen while she cavorts with her beloved hubby in their nice convertibles and grand motor bikes (as one lifestyle magazine showed).

I hope the 90 million Filipinos, especially those fooled into voting for this “good man” now being revealed as an ogre, will learn from their repeated mistakes from the time of Edsa I and Cory Aquino. Some, like Teddy Locsin on Karambola, are beginning to admit their grievous sin in the continuing perfidy of proclaiming the Aquinos and other Yellows as a bunch of saints.

I cannot go beyond writing and raging about these since I am already a known dissident, but those who are yet unrevealed should take action to stop this cruel social and economic violence committed by these ogres against Philippine society. If something isn’t done soon, there will be no redeemable nation by the end of the term of this “last Aquino,” who will by then have succeeded to drag the entire country down with his sorry self.

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