Money, debt, freedom

DIE HARD III

Herman Tiu Laurel

1/25/2013

Daily Tribune

The BS Aquino government is nearing its full third year in power. Despite the hullabaloo about the so-called seven-percent growth and more in the coming years from government, the Yellow parrots, and the international finance cliques, along with up and coming credit upgrades, it is still acknowledged without any doubt that the Filipino people are getting poorer and hungrier. And even as the Senate still squabbles over money gifts from savings that should have reverted to the people, the humongous burden carried on the backs of the populace has just grown heavier by tons and tons. In less than three years, outstanding Philippine government debt has already grown to P5.381 trillion, almost P500 billion from the last year of Gloria Arroyo when it stood at P4.9 trillion — this when Aquino boasts of lending $1 billion to Greece to aid in its financial debacle.

This week, a trumpeted delegation of US business personages, claiming to be on the hunt for investment opportunities, arrived in Manila. Led by former Ambassador to the Philippines John Negroponte (1993 to 1996), the group is under the auspices of what has been described as a non-profit entity called the US-Philippine Society.
Certainly, putting "non-profit" beside such big names and giant corporations is oxymoronic, especially in light of the fact that many of these are tainted with scandals.

Let us make a short run-through: Citigroup collapsed in 2008; Chevron imposed on us the grossly one-sided Malampaya deal; JP Morgan Chase has just paid $153.6 million to settle a US fraud case; and Maurice Greenberg was indicted for fraud by former New York attorney general Eliot Spitzer. Those are just for starters.
Federal Express closed its hub in the Philippines in 2009 (and no one thinks it will return); Peregrine Development International is suspected of being a British Virgin Islands registered company; US Education Finance Group is a lobby group; GE also collapsed in 2008 but got a $140-billion bailout; while Spence, which is in seafoods, is alleged by McLarty's site to have only six dozen employees and advisors but wants to get multibillion-dollar PPP (public-private partnership) businesses in this country.

These US transnationals are seeking investment prospects in the country alright, but haven't they been investing in the Philippines the past century and with a vengeance in the last decades in the power industry, like Mirant cashing in and getting out pronto?
What the initial reports of the aims of the delegation did not mention were two worrying agenda items. The first, a meeting with SC Chief Justice Maria Lourdes Sereno for "American businessmen to get a feel of how legal issues will play out in the Philippines over the next few years (something foreign businessmen have always complained about in the past)."

Just what is a chief magistrate doing meeting with foreign businessmen whose issues can definitely reach the highest court of the land one day? That will surely compromise the SC, especially when the CJ faces the super-special envoy of the US (Negroponte) known for being the alleged "butcher of Honduras" in the "dirty war" there in the 80s and the alleged "butcher of Iraq" in the "Iraq surge" of 2005, where it will be another case of "sheep justice" arising from it. The second alarming item: Lobbying for the TPP (trans-Pacific partnership) agreement proposed by the US for a new economic community countering the Apec (Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation) forum and explicitly excluding China, which plan was reiterated to the Asia-Pacific community by Obama in 2012 but was roundly rejected by its target nations.

David Goldman writes in Asia Times ("Post-US world born in Phnom Penh"): "It is symptomatic of the national condition of the United States that the worst humiliation ever suffered by it as a nation, and by a US president personally, passed almost without comment last week. I refer to the Nov. 20 announcement at a summit meeting in Phnom Penh that 15 Asian nations, comprising half the world's population, would form a Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership excluding the United States." So is the US now trying to break Asian unity through the Philippines?

In a country where the people carry the debt and where politicians and business oligarchs have all the money, with the US controlling the political-economic ruling class — conditions that have prevailed over the past decades — all one has to do is put one and one together to know the primary causes of the Philippines' financial, economic and political crisis. Unless these basic conditions change, poverty and decay will continue to rule.
Thus, we need to end the rule of money in our politics, starting with the end to the "pork barrel," as well as a drastic cut to the national debt using our Gross International Reserves surplus, in order to start the path toward economic independence.

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