Oligarchy's paper

CRITIC'S CRITIC
Herman Tiu Laurel
6/13-19/2011



My apology for the typo error at the beginning of my column in issue # 42, I am my harshest critic. It was a hectic week and my volunteer editor, Lawrence, was also overtaken by many tasks, too.

Such are the travails of “mind guerillas”, as there are few sponsors for truly journalism against the Establishment controlled mainstream media.

Aside from writing, and we have to really work to keep our information guerilla war going.

Our targets are the mainstream newspapers and broadcast networks that serve as mind conditioning and control tools of the domestic ruling oligarchy and their Western hegemonic overlords – the neo-cons who have wreaked havoc in the world by neo-colonial conquest, economic and financial domination, two world wars and threatening a third – all to maintain and expand its hegemony.

Justice in Reporting
A noble epigraph from UNESCO’s preamble echoes in me since high school, “Since wars begin in the mind of men, it is in the minds of men that the defenses of peace must be established.” The defense for peace is comprehensive truth and justice in reporting.

Last week, I started the campaign here against one mainstream newspaper’s Op-Ed page that consistently projects a pro-neocon, pro-oligarchy bias dishing selective information, outright disinformation and misinformation to displace vital historical, factual and holistic information and perspectives.

Neocons and oligarchy are the sources of social and global injustice and war.

I wrote “Inquirer, Conrad and Revillame” likening to Revillame’s shows the Inquirer Op-Ed pages and De Quiros’ columns thriving on repetitions of hackneyed distractive themes of anti-Marcos and anti-Erap, human rights, anti-third World’s independent governments, and such views fashioned from Western eco-political perspectives, overlooking critical national and people’s issues of survival in predatory electricity, water, food, transport and toll ways rates, and oligarchy’s culpability.

Meralco Profits
The recent June 9, 2011 Op-Ed pages of the Inquirer is an example: aside from its absolutely misleading news item on the latest power rate development by its reporter Amy R. Remo headlined “Expect lower power rates”, page A4; June rates are up by 0.50 centavos/kWh the latest ERC approved Meralco PBR (performance based rate) of P 1.58/kWh - doubling the original RORB (return-on-rate base) of P 0.76/kWh.

Meralco doubled its profits every year since 2008, and that PBR will go up to P 1.90/kWh by 2015 – unless we (our coalition against the Meralco and ERC abuse) succeed in stopping this and reverting to the RORB.

Given these rate issues and other Meralco outrages, including its recent call to raise funds to reimburse our billions in “meter deposits” (which shows they misused the “deposit” the consumers put in their trust) and the COA mandated refunds, the amount it owes to the public would run over P 100-B.

Propaganda Mantras
You won’t read of these power issues in the Inquirer Op-Ed pages but, like Conrado de Quiros latest column entitled “Relevant” on Rizal’s birth anniversary, you won’t fail to find in the many editorials and columns gratuitously, irrelevantly inserted propaganda mantras in its many materials like this: “Today Filipinos have gotten educated… and have taken over government.

But our rulers continue to look upon their tenure …: as an opportunity to make hay while the sun shines … mind-boggling corruption particularly during the despotic rules of Ferdinand Marcos and Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo and the brief, but benighted, one of Joseph Estrada.”

Under Marcos power consumers enjoyed the lowest rates the country’s history, the State set up the energy development program to ensure energy supply and its stability (which de Quiros’ idol Cory Aquino scuttled), while Erap earned the ire of the oligarchs for refusing to allow power rate increases posthaste.

A Solomonic Decision
The Inquirer editorial that same day concentrates its fire on Marcos too in connection with Vice President Jojo Binay’s “solomonic decision” to have military honors for Marcos but burial in Ilocos.

It said, “Instead of seeking balance, Binay should have chased context: Who is Marcos, and what is he in Philippine history? Where are the experts who can refute the evidence of massive fraud behind his bogus medals and alleged military exploits? … what did Marcos do to the military? He turned it into his own private army; he set back the professionalism of the armed services by at least a generation;.… To bury Marcos with military honors is a moral, national, historical outrage.” What are the facts of history?

Take away all the medals and Marcos was still, at very least, a genuine soldier; unlike Inquirer’s idolized Aquino family led by the Japanese puppet government’s Kalibapi head Benigno S. Aquino, Sr. and its women’s bureau chief Mrs. Aurora Aquino.

Some Truths
Boni Gillego was a key figure in discrediting the Marcos medals. But he admitted to me (when he and I were with Manglapus’ CSM) he worked for the Americans - we know the US wanted Marcos out after his 11 industrial projects and demand for US bases rentals.

The Inquirer should interview soldiers from Marcos’ time about corruption in the AFP, but Inquirer can turn to one of its own favorites to find out some truths here.

Linggoy Alcuaz attests that while corruption did exist in the AFP in Marcos’ time it never reached the level it did under Cory Aquino and Ramos.

Alcuaz’s father-in-law was an army colonel and he visited his fiancée in the modest quarters of the officers’ families.

During Marcos’ time the it was the PC that was notoriously corrupt, which was under Fidel Ramos.

An objective study of this must be done, but 25 years after EDSA I they have had the authority and resources but haven’t done such a study.

About military professionalism, Inquirer should remember that Marcos’ AFP defeated both the NPA and the MNLF at the time when both were supported by foreign powers.

Vindicated
The Inquirer and its Op-Ed stable can’t face the fact that despite their 30 years of anti-Marcos demonization Filipinos have compared Marcos and Cory Aquino, realizing that everything after EDSA I were only for the benefit of the oligarchy and the foreign powers – and Marcos has been vindicated.

Inquirer’s idols like Cory Aquino, Fidel V. Ramos, Gloria Arroyo, Eggy Apostol et al, are mere utusan of foreign interests and the oligarchy.

More on this next issue, on: Patrick Pierce’s interfering “President Aquino should lead move to probe Burma”, the author is associated with the International Center for Transitional Justice funded by Ford and MacArthur Foundations, Carnegie Corporation, Rockefeller Brothers Fund.

The other by Polish foreign minister Radek Sikorski from Project Syndicate (funded by George Soros’ Open society fund), “The front line of democracy” who wrote “…. Peoples in transition from authoritarian rule—peaceful in Poland in 1989, bloody in Libya today— How should the former regime’s worst wrongdoers ... be treated?” while US and NATO are killing civilians in Libya.

(Radyo OpinYon, Monday to Friday, 5 to 6 p.m., and Sulo – M-W-F 6 to 7 p. m. on 1098AM; TNT with HTL, Tuesday, 8 to 9 p.m., replay at 11 p.m., GNN, Destiny Cable Channel 8; visit http://newkatipunero.blogspot.com and http://hermantiulaurel.blogspot.com for TV/radio archives)