Back blasts on NFA critics

CRITIC'S CRITIC
Mentong Laurel
4/18-24/2011



There is a campaign by local globalist underlings to vilify and demonize the National Food Authority (NFA) as an organization and public service institution, despite the agency’s long 37-year history of serving the nation well. Chief among these detractors are two ranking members of PeNoy Aquino’s Cabinet, Finance Secretary Cesar Purisima and Budget and Management Secretary Butch Abad.

Both have pointed their accusing fingers at the NFA, branding it as corrupt for over-buying stocks of rice, causing inventories to rot, and losing government close to P500 million in delivery expenses just to deliver an eighth’s worth of those stocks to warehouses. But thanks to the National Food Authority Employees’ Association (NFA-EA) and its very well-researched documentary exposés, the claims of those two are now exposed as outright lies. I had Mr. Roman Sanchez and Mr. Larry Tan, NFA union president and vice-president, respectively, together with Marilyn Qui, also of the NFA-EA, as my guests on my cable TV show “Politics Today” on GNN last week.

PeNoy Aquino III’s inaugural address on July 1, 2010 highlighted the alleged corruption at the NFA, lambasting it with all sins imaginable. His speech writers were obviously following a decade-long script, since this anti-NFA line has been part of the official government spiel for the past 10 years, silently egged on by multilateral agencies, the World Bank, ADB, and their local consultants. In it, PeNoy said, “In 2004: 117,000 metric tons of rice was the shortage in the supply of the Philippines . What they (NFA) bought were 900,000 metric tons. Even if you multiply more than seven times the amount of shortage, they still bought more than what was needed…”

What PeNoy may not have known (or is incapable of knowing) is that Cesar Purisima was already a member of the NFA Council--the agency’s deciding body--way back in 2004 and was a party to the decision on the importation. So the question now is: Why did PeNoy appoint a culprit in that alleged over-purchase of rice in 2004? Also, now that he and his Cabinet have been told of Purisima’s complicity, when will they ever investigate and fire the guy?

Purisima showed his utter hypocrisy in following up on his boss’ inaugural statements regarding the NFA when he said this, which appeared on the July 29, 2010 page 1 of the Manila Standard Today’s “Malacañang may abolish rice agency as debt balloons” story: “‘Gross mismanagement’ had seen that debt (of NFA) balloon to more that P170 billion this year…”

Well, now that we know Purisima, as a member of the NFA Council, was a party to that “gross mismanagement,” we ask him: Why didn’t you object and expose this “gross mismanagement” at that time? For sure, Purisima didn’t resign from the Gloria Arroyo Cabinet until mid-2005 when the Hyatt 10 sensed signals coming from the US Embassy of its dissatisfaction with the “Hello Garci” tenant in Malacañang. But as has been the practice of the Yellow regimes, from Cory Aquino to Gloria Arroyo, they have appointed to different agencies people who would best exacerbate the corruption and misdirect the policies to ensure these agencies fall into discredit--or, a sabotage, in simple terms--just as Cory Aquino brought Napocor to ruin when she appointed power oligarch Ernesto Aboitiz to be president of that state firm. And as Purisima helped sully the NFA from the inside; now, he wants to dismantle it from the outside.

The NFA-EA also catches Jesuit political acolyte Butch Abad in his contradictions. The NFA-EA position paper entitled, “NFA privatization and decoupling--A deliberate move to endanger food security,” its manifesto on House Bill (HB) 4284 entitled, “The National Food Authority Reorganization Act of 2011,” reports: “To justify the shutting down of NFA, Secretary Abad cited data from the World Bank that it costs the NFA as much as P8.60 to deliver P1 of low-priced rice. Translating Abad’s fantasy would imply that in 2009, where the NFA delivered nationwide P49.2 billion worth of low-priced rice, the agency would therefore incur P423 billion cost in disposing of the same. In that year, the NFA only spent about P10 billion on subsidy, interest payment, personnel salaries and wages, and other (operating costs). So, the ration should be 1:4.95 or NFA spends P1.00 to deliver P4.95 worth of low-priced rice.” Ateneo has obviously not taught the acolyte to lie as “Jesuitically” as he should.

The NFA-EA has given back blasts to the malicious criticisms against the NFA. Now, it is the PeNoy government and Cabinet members who are on the defensive, unable to explain the many contradictions of their claims and positions. PeNoy’s appointed NFA chief have not only once, not twice, but on multiple occasions somersaulted on his claims about the NFA rice stocks--at one time saying NFA bodegas were bursting at their seams, then the next time around saying the country needs to import more; also, claiming huge amounts of rotting rice, which were nowhere to be seen later when the “huge” pile was requested by media to be documented.

PeNoy’s Cabinet execs stumble over each other with contradictory claims: Agriculture Secretary Alcala on April 7, 2011 said, “We will not be importing additional rice for 2011. Harvest is good,” only to be contradicted by NFA administrator Lito Banayo’s declaration on April 11, 2011 that “(the) Philippines will import an additional 300,000 metric tons of rice to prevent a shortage in the latter part of the year.”

Despite all their blunders and obfuscations, the privatization of the NFA has long been planned, as shown by a timeline provided by the NFA-EA:

• 1980: WB Structural Adjustment Program (SAP) $200-million loan - phase out of price control and subsidy for farm inputs including fertilizer;
• 1983: Increase of loan to $300-million - on condition that the private sector is allowed to export rice, as price controls for rice and corn are dismantled;
• 1985: US PL-480 conditionalities - liberalize fertilizer imports (which led to the death of PhilPhos), privatize wheat/flour imports and non-grain trading, thus reducing NFA revenues;
• 1986: Dismantling of government-supported monopolies in international trading of rice, corn, wheat;
• 1993: ADB loan agreement leading to complete subsidy withdrawal in 1998;
• 1998: USAID-AGILE study on privatization of NFA;
• 1999: Required privatization of rice importation, etc. in exchange for ADB’s $175-million loan grant;
• 2001: Incorporation of AGILE plan to dismantle NFA under Arroyo’s Medium Term Development Plan;
• 2010: Proposed zero budget for NFA under PeNoy as the WB recommends the Conditional Cash Transfer (CCT) program instead of rice rationing so that the US and transnational corporations can control rice trade and sell their surplus rice to the poor.

The consequence of all past privatizations like power, water, tool ways, and ports have been very dire for the people as costs have shot up, making these services beyond the reach of ordinary folks. When this happens to rice supply, we can imagine the social turmoil we’ll face in the future.

It’s a chilling prospect but a desired explosion of a social volcano nonetheless for the foreign powers to pick up the pieces.

(Tune in to Radyo OpinYon, Monday to Friday, 5 to 6 p.m., and 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 “Yellow Hypocrisy vs Willing Willie?”; visit http://newkatipunero.blogspot.com for our articles plus select radio and GNN shows)

Jesus' bane: Money changers

DIE HARD III
Herman Tiu Laurel
4/18/2011



This week the nation remembers the suffering and death of the historic Jesus Christ under the Roman Empire and the money changers of the temples of his time. It reminds me of the present era of Imperia Americana, with its retinue of money masters, under which many nations have experienced untold suffering and slow death.

Globally and nationally, we are witnessing this continuing passion play of the yoke of imperial tyranny with the US’ 800 military bases across the globe, its NATO sidekicks, the IMF, and even social networks conjuring “Twitter revolutions left and right, while the New Imperium refurbishes old puppet regimes with new versions. Undoubtedly, one such case is Egypt.

On infowars.com, Kurt Nimmo’s “Banksters Cook Up Economic Snake Oil for Egypt” describes Egypt in the aftermath of its so-called “people power” revolution (with “banksters” denoting the Shylocks of these times, the banker-gangsters). The writer cites an Agence France Presse report detailing that “the World Bank, the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, the African Development Bank, and the Islamic Development Bank are pledging to have an ‘action plan’ outlined by the end of May… an effort that will lock the victims of the so-called Arab Spring into perpetual debt…”

Further, “The international bankers have agreed ‘to develop a joint action plan for aligning their investments toward a new vision to support the aspirations of citizens for inclusive and sustained growth,’” with the IMF at the forefront. However, according to Nimmo, what the reports do not say is that “prior to the so-called revolution, the globalists considered Egypt an ‘economic miracle’… in other words (it) followed orders and privatized…”

Back in the 1990s, Egypt privatized its state-owned industries and held fire sales that sank it into poverty. Such precedent, coupled with US food policies that pushed hunger massively higher everywhere beginning in the 2000s, accounts for why “The uprisings in Egypt, Morocco, Algeria and elsewhere in the Arab world are due in large part to escalating food prices--prices jacked up by bankster speculation.”

Explaining his view on why Mubarak was destabilized, Nimmo says, “In May of 2010, the Egyptian government (Mubarak) announced that the sale of state assets to investors had effectively ended.” A year later, the “Twitter revolution” transpired. “Soon after the CIA orchestrated revolution,” Nimmo adds, “the people of Egypt were subjected to military rule little different than the rule of the brutal dictator Mubarak.” This was exactly what I saw when I wrote “From US frying pan to US fire” months ago. Everyone would thus be better off to know that another kind of menace corollary to US imperialism, but one that goes largely unnoticed, is these banksters’ imperialism.

In several forums, analysts such as Robert Wenzel, Alex Newman, and Ellen Brown of the Economic Policy Journal, New American, and Global Research, respectively, expound on the first act of the Libyan rebel “Transitional Council” of organizing a new Central Bank. Newman notes “…the rebels’ seemingly odd decision to establish a new central bank to replace dictator Muammar Gadhafi’s state-owned monetary authority (as) possibly the first time in history that revolutionaries have taken time out from an ongoing life-and-death battle to create such an institution.”

Brown, meanwhile, cites a Russian source which I looked up that said, “Mummar Ghaddafi became the main initiator of (the) idea of refusing (the) dollar and euro. He called (the) Arabian and African world to start (using) one new currency--golden dinar… (backed by a population of around 200 million)… uniting African countries into one powerful federative state… strongly approved by many Arabian countries and almost all African countries… last year (2010).”

To compare, after the 1986 Edsa I “People Power” revolution in the Philippines, one of the first acts of the Cory Aquino regime was to convene a handpicked Constitutional Commission that added--as one its first revisions--the word “independent” to qualify the Central Monetary Authority, which, contrary to present claims, was never in the 1973 Constitution--Section 14, Article XV of which read: “The National Assembly shall establish a central monetary authority…”

The Aquino regime then tampered with the Monetary Board and increased private sector representation to the detriment of government. Those two acts insulated the central bank, now known as Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas (BSP), from accountability to and audit of government, making it subservient to private banking interests.

After 25 years, the Philippines only became poorer and poorer until it reached a new nadir under the present regime. Just imagine: “Gov’t stockpiling fuel,” a headline designed to save government’s face, trumpeting Aquino III’s declaration of building up a “strategic oil” reserve of (get this)…50 liters, amid government’s recent oil subsidy embarrassment. But look how pitiful it is.

A 50-million liter fuel stockpile for 6.6-million registered vehicles won’t even last three hours of a given day with only a 5-liter ration per vehicle. That’s the “strategic” breath of PeNoy?! In Marcos’ time the fuel stocks were kept at 45-day levels.

Consider this other one: “5 soldiers hurt as chopper makes emergency landing in Rizal.” The report mentions “PAF spokesman Lt. Col. Miguel Okol in a dzBB interview (claiming that) the incident will not cripple the AFP’s fleet of Huey-type helicopters, saying it has ‘seven airworthy helicopters of different types.’” What?! Only seven? During Marcos’ time, it was over a hundred! Truly, everyone has gotten worse off under the world’s money masters.

Jesus was tried, suffered and died essentially under the hands of the money changers. They were the ones who took vengeance and called for his death after he chastised them at the temple. While they now go by the name of IMF-WB, with their enforcers--the Pontius Pilates of yore--today’s Barack Obama, the world is still very much under the power of these money masters. Let us reflect and be mindful of this throughout the Lenten Season and beyond.

(Tune in to 1098AM, Monday to Friday, 5 to 6 p.m., and Sulo ng Pilipino, Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, 6 to 7 p.m.; TNT with HTL, Tuesday, 8 to 9 p.m., with replay at 11 p.m., on GNN, Destiny Cable Channel 8, on “Money Masters and the Death of the Body?”; visit http://newkatipunero.blogspot.com for our articles plus select radio and GNN shows)