Consumers, Occupy the World!

CONSUMERS DEMAND!
Herman Tiu Laurel
10/17-19/2011



While Filipinos are now conducting sporadic protests on the power price gouging issue, as various groups did with the FDC (Freedom from Debt Coalition) Oct. 11 “Lights Out” campaign, and with others planning for more major moves such as the “Occupy Malacañang Freedom Park” vigil, in the US, the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) movement, as reported by PressTV, has already spread its “tent cities” to at least 1,400 events all across that country.

While OWS still has to consolidate around a central issue and leadership, the diverse targets of protesters have one thing in common, which we in the country also share: The disgust over and rage against the prevailing political-economic system of greed and corruption, as well as a mainstream media that protects the interests of the aristocracy of money.

Financial & Political Clout
The targets in the US are pretty clear: The Federal Reserve, Wall Street, and its finance capitalists, and the bankrupt Republican-Democratic political system.

Those targets have, in fact, really a lot more in common with the issues that we Filipinos are bedeviled with in the past 25 years since the so-called EDSA I “revolution.”

Let’s fast forward to one current major issue in the Philippines: The MRT subsidy and fare hike, which few people realize involve the machination of Goldman Sachs which bought out the original “investors,” the Ayalas, Sobrepeñas, and Agustines, and used its financial and political clout to browbeat the Philippine government into buying it out in turn with an instant 15-percent profit, depositing the debts with the Philippine government again.

Flashing back 10 years to EDSA II, we have the World Bank-ADB pressure for the approval of the EPIRA (Electric Power Industry Reform Act) in exchange for a $300-million loan to Gloria Arroyo’s fledgling usurper government that led to our “highest power rates in Asia” today.

Meanwhile, another 15 years back, we remember the US-AIG-installed Cory Aquino initiating the massive transfer of state assets to the local oligarchy.

1-2-3 Schemes
The economic deconstruction of the US today that spurred the spreading joblessness and economic hopelessness there was inflicted 25 years earlier in the Philippines by the Western finance capitalists who manipulate the global monetary and credit system.

Their thrust -- to enrich the wealthy through financial plunder of the real economy -- is carried out through exotic financial formulations such a “derivatives,” “credit default swaps,” “commodities (including energy) futures,” “secondary and tertiary mortgages,” ad nausea, which are essentially giant Ponzi or one-two-three schemes.

In the Philippines, we have seen many sectors taken over by local oligarchs’ one-two-three schemes (in cahoots with corrupt politicians): The 90-percent privatization of Napocor (National Power Corp.) assets that left its original debt of $17 billion unchanged after 10 years; the Wholesale Electricity Spot Market (WESM) auctions run by power companies themselves that jack up power rates by up to 600 percent, and many others.

Those one-two-three schemes in the power sector fleeced the nation of $10 billion, of which the biggest beneficiaries were US companies like Mirant which then sold out to a Japanese consortium led by Marubeni, complicating any effort to pursue Mirant in the future.

Changed Hands 4x
The same scheme also took over the expressways funded by public money during the time of Marcos.

Upon privatization, toll fees were raised exponentially despite only a minimal expansion of the roads.

Then, ownership changed several times over to convolute any effort to pinpoint the culprits for the abuse and exploitation of commuters.

The South Expressway, for instance, has changed hands four times -- the last to the largest dummy in the world who’s been the channel of worthless US dollars from Obama’s “quantitative easing” to convert into valuable real assets in the Philippines.

Now certain corrupts in the Philippine Congress want to convene a “bicam con-ass” to convert more depreciating dollars to real estate assets in behalf of US, Korean, Chinese, and other foreign interests?

What scums!

All the Rage
Unless we put a stop to their designs, the world’s financial capitalists will be occupying the entire Philippines--completely -- from our electricity, roads, and water, to every nook and cranny of our lands and our lives.

Yet all the rage of the peoples of the Philippines and of the world will come to naught if the central issue is not threshed out.

Even now, OWS is struggling to find its unified identity and goal for even the US oligarchs such as George Soros, Warren Buffet; conservatives and progressives; the Tea Party; socialists, and the pro- and anti-Obama et al. are prodding their own factions to lead the OWS in whatever direction.

If OWS as a movement does not manage to find its bearings, then it will be doomed to go the tragic way of the Arab Spring, where a counter-revolution in Egypt may already be in full swing.

Similarly, with several major streams of genuine opposition groups rallying against the oligarchic and exploitative system, the same may be true in the Philippines.

The Greatest Saboteur
One major stumbling block -- the “tactical collaboration” between potentially genuine change agents and elements of the Establishment -- has consistently been the greatest saboteur of a unified ideological movement.

The “tactical collaboration” of, say, Akbayan with the Yellow traditional elite-aristocracy is admittedly a major distraction to the consolidation of forces against the neocolonial oligarchic system for it lends an “activist” aura to the otherwise corrupt and aristocratic (cacique) character of the powers-that-be.

It merely postpones the crystallization of the focus of genuine systemic change, which, in the case of the power sector, we advanced as the “cooperativization” of the nation’s vital industries.

Still and all, the message of the demonstrators worldwide is this: The people are sick and tired of the way things are. They now want to take back control over their economies, basic utilities (including money), and lives.

After all, they’ve worked hard for all of it with their blood, sweat and tears.

Power of Alternative Media
From these movements, the shepherds or leaders who can make these ideas mainstream will soon arise.

It is only through the power of alternative media that the people (most especially, the masses) can discern true leadership that represents the values of human love and sharing.

It is only through our efforts that people will be eschewed from the love of hedonist gimmickry by shunning such commercialized idols as Buffet or Steve Jobs, and instead embrace revolutionaries like Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Gautama Buddha, and the socialist builders of Singapore and China’s socialist-market system, where the nation and the public count for more than the moneyed few.

People of the Earth, Occupy the World!

Let’s do our share; let’s OCCUPY MALACAÑANG FREEDOM PARK!

(Tune in to Sulo ng Pilipino/Radyo OpinYon, Monday to Friday, 5 to 6 p.m. on 1098AM; Talk News TV with HTL, Saturday, 8:15 to 9 p.m., with replay at 11 p.m., on GNN, Destiny Cable Channel 8; visit http://newkatipunero.blogspot.com for our articles plus TV and radio archives)