Pinoys' daily tsunamis

DIE HARD III
Herman Tiu Laurel
3/18/2011



While the world’s attention has been diverted to the Japan earthquake, tsunami and nuclear crisis, the many tsunamis on Filipinos continue daily, wave upon wave. This month, the final 2010 figure on the nation’s debt servicing for interest and principal payments hit a staggering P690 billion. That’s practically half of the national budget; up 10 percent from 2009. This gobsmacking payment is being made despite Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas (BSP) Gov. Amando Tetangco’s continuing boasts that the country has around $63 billion in foreign exchange reserves simply lying idle in various financial instruments.

Such tsunami of hubris and arrogance can only come from a government that thinks very lowly of the Filipino public, assuming that the people are unable to see through its farce of staying in the good graces of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) while pummeling the people more with burgeoning taxes.

In the wake of what the country is witnessing in the Japan disasters, there has been quite a lot of speculation about how the Philippines could cope if anything similar happened here. Government is, of course, yakking about preparedness for such events. Seriously though, given the financial state of the Philippine government, if anything close to what hit Sendai, Japan were to happen today, the country would just be a little better off than Haiti in the aftermath of its own killer quake.

In particular, if a mega-quake were to hit the coast around the capital, Manila Bay will be drained for a few moments and an equally gigantic tsunami will soon engulf the city up to the limits of Makati and Malabon-Navotas, up to Obando, Bulacan. Even Cavite will most probably see the same devastation as Minami Sanriku, with the death toll reaching the equivalent of the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami.

If we consider the state of preparedness and availability of equipment and leadership that we witnessed during the massive “Ondoy” flood, then the Philippines will be in real trouble if a magnitude 9.0 earthquake and tsunami were to hit us today. During Ondoy, government wasn’t even able to gather enough rubber boats; and we certainly know of the sorry state of our Air Force’s helicopter fleet (which used to number hundreds in Marcos’ time but is today down to two dozens).

A country that is drained of P690 billion (or $16 billion) just for debt servicing will simply never have the resources to prepare itself nor the equipment and supplies necessary for survival and reconstruction from monumental disasters such as what we have seen more frequently around the globe. Just think: The estimated cost of Japan’s devastation at $100 billion is already about the total debt of the Philippines at P4.4 trillion.

Added to this murderous debt servicing is the annual tsunami of the siphoning off of people’s resources to the Big Corporatocracy, which, on record (as Gloria Arroyo economic adviser Joey Salceda pointed out before Big Business in 2010), has swallowed down P1 trillion every year, like huge earthquake fissures chomping down huge trucks and structures. Truly, the Filipino people have long been hemorrhaging even before any epochal physical or tectonic disaster has ever hit the country.

The daily scene in Metro Manila’s streets, for one, is no different from the disaster-ravaged lives in the Sendai Shinruku area today: Children in ragtag clothes shivering in the cold nights (even if there’s no winter here); thousands of homeless in the alleys and side roads; and makeshift houses of cardboard and salvaged tin sheets dotting the landscape of blighted areas.

But that’s not all. Yet another great Philippine tsunami is also at work here — the tsunami of idiocy.

The debate over nuclear power in the Philippines has resurfaced in the aftermath of the feared Fukushima nuclear meltdown. It is right for Mark Cojuangco to back down from his proposal, as he did so already. But the anti-nuke proponents are now making hay in pushing their agenda — the promotion of solar and wind energy.

The problem here is that these baby energy methods (solar and wind) are just as idiotic as the previous insistence of the pro-nukes to borrow $1 billion for nuclear energy given the fact that the Philippines is sitting atop one of the richest hoards of geothermal energy in the world.

This information is backed by no other than the US Geological Surveys agency. Moreover, it is also a well-known fact among the world’s geothermal authorities that the Philippines is a pioneer in this field and has one of the best crops of geothermal engineers and technicians ever. So why is geothermal energy being deliberately side-stepped?

While we have to live with this disaster area called the Philippines because we were born here and grew up here, there comes a time when we need to ask: How much longer can we hang on? This, especially as the tsunami of idiocy has reached all the way to the top, with Aquino III writing off P6 billion in tax debts of an oligarchic company’s power plant in Pagbilao, Quezon, at a time when the Philippines continues to reel from the financial tsunami of the national debt and the continuous exploitation by the corporatocracy.

Maybe a real, physical, tectonic and oceanic tsunami would be a blessing — to wipe off such idiocy from the face of this country, in order to finally allow the authentic Filipino spirit to rise and reign over this land.

(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 “Philippine energy alternatives;” visit http://newkatipunero.blogspot.com for our select radio and GNN shows)