Karma and liberation

DIE HARD III
Herman Tiu Laurel
11/22/2004



Noynoy Aquino appealed over radio for the families of the Luisita massacre not to “parade” their fourteen murdered relatives’ coffins in the plaza. Texters to my radio program reacted asking why Noynoy would deny these bereaved families the right to show the world the brutal end of their loved ones when the Aquino family started that practice when they displayed Ninoy Aquino for a week and then paraded him down Quezon Avenue and all over Metro-Manila before burying him. I could only think that the Aquino family is now suffering Karma.

The fate of Hacienda Luisita is clearly following the same karmic pattern. Cory Aquino opened the Philippines to globalization and its false promises, over the vehement objections of many honest economists and patriots who warned of the devastating consequences of opening up the economy without safeguards and preparations. In contrast, other countries in the region hedged and dragged their feet on globalization; buying time through negotiations and pleadings while Cory Aquino and her protégés Ramos and Gloria rushed headlong into it.

Despite all the machinations of Cory Aquino’s corporate advisers and foreign investors to the Hacienda Luisita operations, the whole hacienda has been in financial ICU for years now. It’s been hemorrhaging profusely although the power and prestige of the Aquino family has been there for the business to ride on. The onslaught of globalization was, however, too devastating for even this centuries old enterprise built on capital finagled from Philippine revolutionary funds and established on a past of feudal exploitation and continued through the fraud of “corporatization”.

Globalization brought pressure from cheap foreign sugar coming from countries which supported and subsidized its industries. Globalization brought into the country cheap or high-quality candies from Indonesia, cookies from Singapore, preserved canned fruits from China, sweetened drinks and fruits preserves from Thailand, and a host of sugar-based products that took an increasing share of the domestic market for sugar products. Philippine sugar farmers and millers suffered, and withered. Cory Aquino had embraced globalization with open arms; her Hacienda has been strangled by it.

The full cycle to the story of globalization in the Philippines has been reached. The Cory Aquino-led elite that brought in globalization in the globalist-bourgeois revolt of 1986 is now its victims. The Philippine economy as a whole is going the way of Hacienda Luisita, where workers and entrepreneurs are all marginalized by the flood of imported cheap goods as well as by the direct extraction from oppressive privatization and abuse of exorbitant, unjust and onerous payments for public utilities services, government taxes and fees, debt and currency depreciations.

Atonement is one way to escape bad Karma, but from the Aquino’s reactions trhis doesn’t seem to be forthcoming. Acceptance of guilt and remorse is a pre-requisite for liberation from past failures, to deny them would sink the mortal further into bad Karma. One can see this happening in the Philippine situation: while many are beginning to see the errors of globalization, it chief architects still refuse to admit the grievous fault and we sink still deeper into the mire of suffering for it. Time will come when there is no choice but to excise those responsible from the nation if liberation is to be attained.

Karma cuts many different ways, for those who have suffered unjustly there are good things in return. As Cory Aquino dives into the abyss, Ferdinand Marcos’ karma rises, as Filipinos look back with understanding and enlightenment on the nation-building policies of that era. President Joseph E. Estrada is being looked upon with sympathy by many of those who once condemned him, and the victories in the Sandiganbayan case (despite odds against him) vindicate those who believe that good karma will be granted Erap for refusing the “sovereign guarantee” principle the oligarchs demanded.

The nation’s Karma is tied up with all the lives of those who have ruled it, as well as those who yet who rule that we do not know waits just around the next turn in history. In the light of the nation’s history, the past two decades is but a wink in time. It’s time to wake up, open our eyes, recognize the truth, and take the path towards righteousness and courage. The nation needs to recognize the truth and follow it, that globalization must be left behind and the path to national renewal be taken. Villains and heroes of the past must be revised so that our symbols no longer misleads the people.

All religious redemption appreciates the role of suffering. We have suffered and are suffering, there’s just one last stage of the cross we need to walk – that is the walk away from globalization and all the policies in imposed, i.e. liberalization, deregulation and privatization. We must again walk in the path towards nationhood and rebuilding our national economy, taking care of our people, making decision ourselves and eschewing the “market” and its “invisible hand” which is nothing but that of the devil of imperialism and the oligarchy.

Corazon C. Aquino can help our liberation if she makes an admission of error, but this doesn’t seem forthcoming. Then we must march on and leave them to their fates, while the nation meets with its destiny as a free, sovereign and prosperous country that has discarded globalization.

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