After 25 years: 'No change?'

DIE HARD III
Herman Tiu Laurel
2/25/2011



I looked up on the Internet some cues on “Delusional Disorder Treatments” and found prescriptions ranging from psychotherapy, medication, to psychosurgery. Sadly, I couldn’t find the cure for what I wanted to remedy — the delusional “Edsa I People Power Syndrome” afflicting certain people, which is propagated by the present ruling order. Special among this crop of delunoids are a number of opinion writers in mainstream media. They continue to sing paeans to 25 years of Edsa I in the face of overwhelming evidence against their grand delusion.

Once such indictment against Edsa I came via a dimwitted assertion by their presidential icon Aquino III in his speech at Ocampo, Camarines Sur three days ago, where he said, “After 25 years, was there change? Unfortunately, nothing really changed — corruption is still rampant and the result, the needs of the people were left unattended…” What??? Twenty-five years with trillions of pesos of budgets, and still “no change?”

The fact is, there has been tremendous change over the past 25 years: CHANGE FROM BAD TO WORSE. Corruption isn’t the same; it has worsened geometrically. In the Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP), for instance, as Linggoy Alcuaz can attest to (since he was with a communications company supplying equipment to the AFP during Marcos’ time), military comptrollers used to get only 1 percent of the 10 percent set aside for “intermediation.” But since Cory Aquino’s time, as attested to by retired Gen. Romeo Padiernos and reported in mainstream media this week, military corruption has expanded by leaps and bounds, leading to what we now shockingly witness in the Gen. Carlos Garcia “pabaon” mess.

Marcos could not have subdued the MNLF (Moro National Liberation Front) and the NPA (New People’s Army) if the rate of AFP corruption seen during the Cory years down to the FVR and GMA regimes had already prevailed then. Now, the AFP can’t even provide decent boots.

Cory Aquino became the dog that was wagged by the AFP tail during her time. Afterwards, the military was led by none other than the chief of the Philippine Constabulary and the entire AFP, Fidel Ramos. One retired general told me over a regular breakfast meet with other retired officers: “When FVR took over the AFP and visited the camps for inspection, he would have a stack of envelopes with money to hand out to the officers saying, ‘Go improve your image.’” That same general said the practice of conversion became rampant only after Mrs. Aquino became Commander-in-Chief.

Yet the profligacy that followed her assumption to office was not only limited to the AFP; it swept the entire Cabinet. While Marcos had only 12 Cabinet secretaries, Cory had a whopping 34 and cost P4.4 billion yearly to maintain because every Big Business and “civil society” faction wanted a seat.

A major and fundamental change that overcame the Philippines after Edsa I has been the rapid transition of the country from a rice self-sufficient nation and occasional exporter to its status today as the “world’s top (and most expensive) rice importer.” Now, that’s something to be proud of, isn’t it? It’s a question I’d like to address to some of my fellow columnists in the other papers fawning over Cory Aquino and her “democracy” (as if economics and rice aren’t fundamental to human rights and human dignity).

Never mind that we had the beginnings of a car industry already thanks to Marcos, at a time when South Korea was still dreaming of it, or that electricity sufficiency for 25 years had already been planned with the Bataan Nuclear Power Plant already set to operate in 1984, seven years before the People’s Republic of China’s first nuclear power plant in 1991.

A month’s worth or eight 1,000-word columns of mine couldn’t summarize the deterioration from what the Marcos era left behind in terms of socio-economic infrastructure, along with the devastation Mrs. Cory Aquino and the succeeding Yellow regimes wrought later. Marcos’ prescient energy program included geothermal, dendro-thermal, bio, and solar energy; we were growing cotton and grapes to achieve self-sufficiency in these; ship building was starting with Baseco, far ahead of South Korea; cultural centers were built, and never duplicated since.

In contrast, Cory Aquino, “civil society,” and the Makati Business Club only brought in factories of delusions, such as Conrado de Quiros’ “We are the one country that invented people power” — a really shameless historical plagiarism of France’s Storming of the Bastille or Korea’s April 19 Movement against Syngman Rhee, (among many) precedents to Edsa I of deposing elite or US-backed tyrants.

The facts of history must be learned: The 21st century’s rising stars, ranging from China, Singapore, to Malaysia, strengthened their growth by way of nationalist authoritarian governance. Political and economic laissez -faire merely led to the internal collapse of the 20th century superpower, the USA.

Another lesson is that popular insurrection mistakenly called revolutions, and daubed with whatever color, can lead to rightist-elitist victory as well as popular-progressive triumph. Venezuela had the latter under a populist leadership, where nationalization of state assets proceeded posthaste; Ukraine, meanwhile, had the elitist, Western-oriented version and, like the Philippines, saw its own corruption and impoverishment multiply within a decade of its reversing course.

Western-nurtured “people power” are for Western interests only; hence, the privatization of a nation’s wealth. Only nationalist people power benefits the nation.

“NO CHANGE” is unacceptable; we need REAL CHANGE for the better. Onwards with True People Power… the spirit of Edsa III continues!

(Tune in to Sulo ng Pilipino, Monday, Wednesday and Friday, 6 to 7 p.m. on 1098AM; TNT with HTL, Tuesday, 8 to 9 p.m., with replay at 11 p.m., on GNN, Destiny Cable Channel 8, on “National Development versus Yellow Economics” with Charito Planas and Linggoy Alcuaz; visit http://newkatipunero.blogspot.com and watch or listen to our select radio and GNN shows)