2014: The worst of 2013

DIE HARD III / Herman Tiu Laurel / January 6, 2014 / Daily Tribune

The year 2013 ended with a really big bang — not from the noisy firecrackers that ushered in the New Year but from the shocking way by which the country's preeminent light and power utility which resulted in increased power rates yet again. Behind this move without a doubt is the labyrinthine law known as the Electric Power Industry Reform Act (Epira).

The law created a mechanism whereby electricity is traded as a commodity. Named the Wholesale Electricity Spot Market (WESM), this later proved to be the perfect cover for power price manipulation by giving various independent power producers (IPPs) the wherewithal to price power up to P65 per kilowatt-hour (kWh), even when the same is produced by the National Power Corp. at a cost of around P5/kWh and even when small emergency home generators could generate power at half of WESM's cost.

Compelled by public demand, government sought to cut that ceiling to P32/kWh from P65/kWh. The Philippine Independent Power Producers Association (PIPPA) in turn threatened power "shortages."

Clearly, that naked blackmail should be the best argument to take away the power sector from these profit-hungry private companies.
So what are the Filipinos to do now? Those IPPs will never give up the most profitable business in the world without a fight; that's for sure.
For a decade and a half this space has consistently exposed power piracy in its many forms. But the task has been made most difficult by some of the Epira's media apologists, who only serve to muddle the issue.

Randy David of the Inquirer, for instance, wrote: "This is an issue beyond the control of the President. Indeed it is. This falls under the jurisdiction of one of the regulatory boards (the Energy Regulatory Commission or ERC) specifically mandated by law to administer public utilities. Such boards are autonomous within their jurisdictions…"

That is certainly not the case according to law professor Raffy Tuvera, who wrote: "All quasi judicial and administrative bodies like the ERC are under the control of the president. They're not independent bodies like the constitutional commissions. Their decisions can be overturned by the President."
The 12th Congress passed the Epira after House Speaker Feliciano Belmonte's office released a P500,000 per solon payola in order for Gloria Arroyo to sign it into law on June 8, 2001 as a trade-off for a World Bank $800-million "standby loan."

If a corrupt Congress and Palace occupant can pass Epira into law, certainly, a "daang matuwid" president can repeal it through a Congress that he coaxed to oust a Supreme Court chief justice.

BATASnatin online law library states: "HOW LAWS ARE REPEALED: 1. Expressly — by direct act of Congress. 2. Impliedly — occurring inconsistencies on… between a prior and a subsequent law."

And since Epira is inconsistent with the Constitution, BS Aquino can most definitely have it repealed or amended. The problem is he won't.
To date, many commentators have joined in criticizing the ERC. Even Manila Times foreigner-writer Ben Kritz described the agency as a victim of "regulatory capture," i.e. controlled by the power companies it is supposed to regulate. Although correct, the assessment is "so yesterday" as the truth is we have an entire government that is captured by the powerful vested local Big Business interests, with the US-British financial mafia as patrons. Not only is the ERC captive, but the National Economic Development Authority, the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas, the Department of Foreign Affairs, the Armed Forces of the Philippines, and the whole of government.

Governmental capture is nothing new. That was, and is, the whole mission of the US and its Western allies. In his book, The Grand Chessboard (1997), Zbigniew Brzezinski stated in Chapter 1: "Hegemony of a New Type … The American global system emphasizes the technique of co-optation (as in the case of defeated rivals — Germany, Japan and lately even Russia (and in 1910, the Philippines) to a much greater extent than the earlier imperial systems did. It likewise relies heavily on the indirect exercise of influence on dependent foreign elites."
In contrast, Asian and Latin American countries that have progressed economically, such as Vietnam, Venezuela, Brazil, etc., first threw off US control of their governments and military institutions.

The future is the past: 2014 will be 2013; only worse than ever before. The GDP, or gross domestic pain, will be much worse. The power price gouging issue will be judged in favor of the power oligarchs and their voracious profit seeking. The so-called Disbursement Acceleration Program, the mother of all "pork barrel," will pass the Supreme Court, confirming finally our thesis that the original "Million Man March" of 80,000 Yellow petite bourgeois with a smattering of Leftists was engineered by Malacañang PR, thus exposing the "stars" of the anti-pork campaign, namely, Peachy Bretaña, Manny Lopez, Inday Varona, Junep Ocampo et al., as patsies, dupes, or colluding with the oligarchs' media and BS Aquino.

There is no change in the Philippines unless the past ends. US colonialism and its many vestiges should be vanquished by a movement that seeks to revive the unfinished Philippine Revolution of 1896, to mark a new future for our land beginning in 2014.

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