Light, Blight or Best and Bright Brigade

DIE HARD III
Herman Tiu Laurel
3/31/2006



In my fourth year in high school I won first place in declamation, my piece was “Charge of the Light Brigade”. I still know it by heart : “… Their’s not to reason why, their’s but to do and die… Into the Valley of Death rode the Six Hundred…” Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo speaking at the PNPA graduation quoted from Lord Alfred Tennyson’s poem stressing the lines that demand blind, and quite arguably, stupid obedience of soldiers. The Charge of the Light Brigade is recorded in military history as a stupid disaster. It is eulogized only by the Briton Lord Tennyson to mitigate the shame.

Only a mental lightweight like Gloria, and obviously the deliusional intellectuals around her and military advisers (like Ermita or Esperon, maybe, who’ve been quoted on some of these issues), can misunderstand the fiasco of the Charge of the Light Brigade which was the result of a miscommunicated order of British commander Lord Fitzroy Raglan down to the Cavalry Brigade under Lord George Lucan who is described as a “volatile, ill-tempered and easily provoked to bluster when under pressure… who ordered the advance towards the main Russian position instead of isolated redoubts…”

Lucan’s Cavalry Brigade was decimated, with Russian “..canons to the left of them, canons to the right of them, canons in front of them, volleyed and thundered, stormed up with shot and shell… into the mouth of hell….” The officer under Lucan, Lord Cardigan protested but was overruled by Lucan, and the rest is military disaster history. It was a tragic-comedy of errors and reread in history that such stupidity would not be repeated. Gloria the lightheaded wants the soldiery to follow even if she corrupts and divides the AFP and PNPA to the core, and delivers the country to the enemy.

The country is still charging down the abyss of no return, unless the genuine revolution comes about. Anybody who doubts the seriousness of the situation should look at employment statistics of U.P. Solair’s (School of Labor and Industrial Relations) Dr. Rene Ofreneo. Sixty-five percent of the country’s workforce is now employed in the informal sector; 479,000 in farming, hunting and forestry (back to primitive economics) while 102,000 was in local private households. These informal sector jobs are mainly unpaid workers being absorbed on part-time basis into menial family livelihood tasks.

Government figures shows the fishing sector lost 5,000 jobs last year; mining 9,000; manufacturing 18,000; health and social work 32,000 and construction 73,000. NEDA and DOLE chiefs who are supposedly very well educated individuals suffer from the same affliction of Gloria – heavyweight lying, claimed that unemployment has declined from the 2001-2004 average of 11.3% down to 7.7% last year. The most alarming thing is Ofreneo’s caveat that we are losing “mission critical” jobs, like health professional and aviation techs (like PAL) which society builds on towards progress.

The Philippines is progressively regressing into the primitive stage and its people relapsing “bearers of water and hewers”. This process of retrogression is what this column has been describing as “Africanization” where the socio-economic-cultural collapse will lead this country into a state of affairs similar to Uganda, Zimbabwe, Congo and others where poverty, ignorance and disease overwhelm their societies. Failed societies they are called, as we are already failing today. Ofreneo’s figures confirm this disastrous state of affairs in our country.

This dismal state of affairs is the result of a set of exploitative and oppressive policies initiated from the time of Cory Aquino, accelerated by FVR and now carried to extreme intensity by Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo. This is the globalization policy that consists of the downgrading of the role of the State in leading and developing the resources of society, the transfer of public utilities and services to corporations (like power, water, and eventually even national security services), elimination of trade tariffs emaciating public resources, free trade that demolishes national economic sovereignty.

The consequence of these policies is impoverishment of the countries, and nothing exemplifies the exploitative character of these policies than the privatization of public utilities which they call “reforms”. For example, despite the bitter and very damaging impact of the power sector “reforms” in the country that has made electricity cost in the country the highest now in Asia, the international finance agencies (actually attack dogs of global finance oligarchs and corporatocrats like the Rothchilds and George Schultz) like S & P warns that delays in the Transco privatization “hurts RP ratings”.

The Transco earned P 16.5-B last year; privatizing it is clearly a big swindle of the public. This is being repeated in so many sectors, such as water, transport, finance, etc. This globalization policy, consisting of liberalization, deregulation and privatization, plunders the country and the people. It is plain p-loot-ocracy, the looting of the nation by the few who rule the globe with local dummies. A country that does not resist this vulture will be picked to the bone, like Africa where not only power and water but oil, gold, copper, diamonds are taken by foreigners while the people starve.

The country has been led by treasonous leaders like Gloria’s Blight Brigade. The nation needs its best and brightest leaders, uncompromising in commitment to its sovereignty and the prosperity. Where to find the Best and Bright Brigade? They’re the one fighting Gloria’s Blight Brigade.