DIE HARD III
Herman Tiu Laurel
8/17/2012
The Fourth Yellow government now under BS Aquino III (the first three being under Cory, FVR and Gloria) is pointing to every Juan, Pedro and Maria to blame for the floods.
If we were to listen to Department of Interior and Local Government (DILG) Secretary Jesse Robredo, then it's 100,000 of them, mainly slum folk of Metro Manila, who constitute up to 60 percent of the metropolis' population today. That's easier said than done; not just in the matter of funding for their relocation.
The problem lies in the fact that the cheap labor for the service and industrial sectors of the economy concentrated in Metro Manila comes from the slum-dwellers. Who pick up the thousands of tons of garbage, for example? Who are the waiters in the restaurants; the kargadors in the markets; or the janitors in the supermarkets? But wait: They're not all there is to the slums, as a multitude of the metro's police force also live there. Thus, a major economic dislocation would be in the offing with this knee-jerk reaction of the fourth Yellow government.
The relocation of at least half-a-million impoverished Filipinos from the slums of the metropolis to even worse living conditions for lack of jobs is not necessarily an unwelcome thought for all. If I were with the New People's Army (NPA) and the Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP), probably the only viable force for the poor to hit back at a system that has been so cruel to them, I would quietly watch and not oppose this proposal to "ethnically cleanse" the homeless poor from Metro Manila.
The forced mass migration will count among the largest in human history, one that even Moses probably would not have imagined; and there would be no promised land for such a massive body of humanity taken away from their jobs.
For once, the "reaffirmists" of the CPP-NDF should cozy up to the "rejectionists" of Etta Rosales, Riza Hontiveros, Ronald Llamas, et.al and murmur into their ears, "That's the right thing to do."
The CPP-NDF can finally find a new base, not conforming to Mao's theory — but a base nevertheless — for recruiting and arming freshly angered dissident forces within striking distance of the center of power in this country.
I read one news report quoting Dennis Murphy, whom I got to know as a young activist under Fr. Jose Blanco, lamenting the fact that the poor are always blamed for the floods. Of course, I would also raise the question as to why they are poor and why there are so many of them when the economy is supposedly growing each year and even hitting 6.4 percent in the first quarter of the current one.
This space is too limited to list all the news of the supposed growth or of the astounding corporate profit spikes but I can list a few here: "Energy unit lifts SMC profits …posted a more than 50-percent rise in second quarter net income, driven by earnings from its energy businesses"; "EDC nets P5.7 billion in first half … Lopez-led Energy Development Corp. (EDC) … driven by electricity sales from subsidiaries First Gen Hydro Power Corp. and Green Core Geothermal Inc., which jumped 32 percent to P15 billion from P11.4 billion a year ago."
Whereas we used to get low cost power decades ago, these companies are now components of the highest power cost in Asia inflicted on the Philippine economy, which has resulted in our ever-growing poverty.
The perennial flood crisis facing the entire Filipino nation (not just Metro Manila) is a legacy of the historic counter-revolution in political and economic democracy that was in its nascent stage in the early 1980s and aborted by the Yellow elite-led and US-backed "color revolution."
Whatever the anti-Marcos Yellow forces say against Marcos, it cannot be disputed that his government was already making headway in its housing for the slums and job generation through intermediate industrialization, as well as the launching of the OCW (Overseas Contract Workers) deployment program.
The tenement housing programs in conjunction with the Pag-ibig Fund and other housing financing saw its birth under Marcos. The housing programs since Cory Aquino has been but a shadow of many a derelict Pag-ibig tenement projects.
It's pretty much the same experience the nation has had with the grand and far-seeing flood control programs of Marcos that has seen Cory and the Yellows all but throw these into the untended sewer systems of the country.
The perennial flood disasters will never be solved under the Yellows because they have not a single ideological framework for building the nation. What they do have in their minds is the continuing coddling of the local oligarchy and its foreign overlords; the continuing emaciation of the national economy by accumulating monopoly of its wealth and patrimony; the constant and systematic campaign to push back the Philippines into deeper and deeper social, economic, political, and moral regression until it is completely prostrate before the new, insidious total re-domination of the entire country; and a people completely defenseless and vulnerable to a final dissolution of their nation-state.
Come to think of it, the floods are the least of the disasters that have come from the Yellows. Their ultimate legacy to the future of this nation is the destruction of the nation's hopes — its last vestige of humanity.
(Watch Talk News TV with HTL, Saturdays, 8 to 9 p.m., with replay at 11:15 p.m. and Sundays, on GNN Destiny Cable Channel 8, this week on "Mines: Theirs or Ours?;" visit http://newkatipunan.blogspot.com)
