Baby Brandon, Glyzelle and reality

Baby Brandon, Glyzelle and reality

(Herman Tiu Laurel / DieHard III / The Daily Tribune / 01-26-2015 MON)

 

Last Friday three-year-old Brandon Emmanuel Lao, who suffered from a hole in his heart, along with pulmonary hypertension and a damaged left lung, died at the St. Luke’s Medical Center in Quezon City.  Baby Brandon would have been just another statistic except for the fact that he was the baby at the crowd meeting with Pope Francis at the Mall of Asia Arena over a week ago selected by a Vatican security to be blessed by the pontiff.

 

According to Rappler, “It was a meeting that was never supposed to happen but Pope Francis’ encounter with 3-year-old Brandon gives hope and comfort to his parents, and maybe even the rest of the world.”

 

If only Baby Brandon did not die and lived to his fourth, twelfth, sixteenth, and even more birthdays, the Philippine and Catholic media would have most certainly proclaimed him year after year as “The Miracle” of the latest pontiff’s blessing and the hope to the world.

 

The local Roman Catholic Church, from the bishops down to the laity, would have also trumpeted this as evidence of the “special place” of the Philippines in the Christian world.  But was that meeting of Brandon “never supposed to be” or was it a PR opportunity the Vatican staff are always alert to, which, unfortunately this time, did not end up a “miracle”?

 

Days after Baby Brandon was given a papal blessing, a former street child and ward of a Catholic community-run charity, 12-year-old Glyzelle Iris Palomar, one of the selected youth audience for the papal visit to the University of Santo Tomas, tearfully asked the pope, “Many children get involved in drugs and prostitution.  Why does God allow these things to happen to us?  The children are not guilty of anything.”  The pope, in turn replied, “Let God surprise you,” after which he turned to the audience and said, “She is the only one who has put forward a question for which there is no answer and she was not even able to express it in words but rather in tears.”

 

Glyzelle was actually crystal clear in her words as she obviously had deep personal reflections of a fellow street child’s plight.  It was the Pontiff who was flabbergasted, judging by his failure to comfort and teach.  Perhaps in defense of this deflection, some would say, “But would a 12-year-old understand a serious explanation?”  Glyzelle’s perceptivity would most certainly have allowed her to.  Instead the pope told the audience, “I invite each one of you to ask yourselves, ‘Have I learned how to weep, how to cry when I see a hungry child, a child on the street who uses drugs, a homeless child, an abandoned child, an abused child, a child that society uses as a slave?’”

 

At my age, I have never, ever encountered a more obscurantist answer--never!  Strangely, Francis did not appeal for reforms as people have come to expect, such as in this headline from the UK’s Catholic Herald of May 22, 2014: “Pope Francis warns of the dangers of ‘unbridled capitalism.’”  So what cat got the pope’s tongue here?

 

There are so many evils of unbridled capitalism in the Philippines that have created uncounted numbers of Glyzelles in the country, such as the unbridled electricity industry profits destroying the economy and jobs and the capitalist entertainment culture of sex, crime, and violence despoiling the nation.

 

The Philippine Catholic Church has been silent on the massive profit gouging inflicting the highest power and water rates in Asia that the poor of this society can no longer afford.  I have raised these issues since the late 1990s with church officials to no avail, from Bishops Bacani to Tobias (the latter of whom once agreed that action should be taken but then fell silent on it). A lay Catholic leader, incensed by the profit abuses, wanted to secure a time slot on Radio Veritas to hammer these issues but was told that one of the sacred cows of the radio network is this telecommunications advertiser that also owns a major power utility company.  So there you have it--just learn to weep and cry.

 

The papal visit cost P200 million for security alone, enough for a year of public education for 15,000 children and for feeding 28,571 of the poorest families (as per the NSCB estimate of P7,000 per family) for a month.  Three non-working holidays already cost P3.6 billion in economic losses as thousands upon thousands of workers lost billions in daily wages.  But the worse impact has been cultural--where reality is swept under the rug, as street children were whisked to “resorts” and blissful insanity wafted even into erstwhile critical, progressive intelligentsias’ brains, so much so that after a week, news headlines still imagine or milk papal “assassination” stories for distraction.

 

Even if I stand alone, and I hope I’m not, the denunciation of such “nincom-popes” must be waged.

 

(Listen to Sulô ng Pilipino, 1098 AM, dwAD, Tuesday to Friday, 5 p.m. to 6 p.m.; watch GNN Talk News TV with HTL on Destiny Cable Channel 8, SkyCable Channel 213, and www.gnntv-asia.com, Saturday, 8 p.m. and replay Sunday, 8 a.m.; search Talk News TV and date of showing on YouTube; visit http://newkatipunero.blogspot.com; and text reactions to 0917-8658664)

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Rockstar PR and cynicism

Rockstar PR and cynicism

(Herman Tiu Laurel / DieHard III / The Daily Tribune / 01-19-2015 MON)

 

At our Sunday runners’ group breakfast at the Salcedo Market, a number of us had this to say about the Pope Francis media coverage: “Dozens of TV and radio ads punctuated each segment of the pope’s sermon; the telcos and privatized public utilities were hogging the limelight with the pope.”  Another recounted his conversations with taxi drivers, one of whom reportedly said, “After the pope, corrupt, corrupt again,” referring to life in the Philippines.  For my part, I wondered how much this rockstar tour with 50,000 police security et al. is costing us taxpayers.

 

It’s been months of PR hype and weeks of monomaniacal coverage for the pope, from his pre-arrival to his one-week stay, courtesy of the oligarchy-controlled Philippine media.  Naturally, a “bandwagon effect” follows.  This came after a “possessed” month of preparations and procession of the Black Nazarene as masses tried to rub towels on the icon to bless their increasingly sordid lives, where the only ascension to the heavens involves the price of basic utilities.  Is it a coincidence that the MRT/LRT and tsunami of water rate hikes came at a time that these two high points of Catholic in the Philippines came in full swing, supposedly to drown out public protests?

 

For the Philippine Catholic hierarchy, the visit of the pope was a much needed shot in the arm after its debacles the past year, i.e. its defeat in the fight against the Reproductive Health (RH) Law.  One would think: How could they have lost if God was on their infallible side?  But the actual winners of that RH fight were not the pro-RH advocates either; it was the subsidiaries of the Carlyle group producing birth control devices.  Of course, the total losers are the Filipino taxpayers who will have to shell out taxpayers’ money to fund the contraceptive devices and drugs, allocations from which politicians will get their share via a new system of “pork barrel.”

 

The proportion of Catholics among Filipinos, which used to be 85 percent, is now reported to go as low as 65 percent, even as the general proportion of Christian Filipinos (including adherents of sects like the Iglesia ni Cristo) may still be at 85 percent to 90 percent.  Of course, “baptized Catholics” constitute 80 percent to 85 percent of the population since baptism remains to be a perfunctory practice among many Filipino families.  There are, however, many deviations from mainstream Catholicism.  A friend of mine, for instance, refers to himself as a “Born Again Catholic,” which he explains is more “evangelical” and “democratic” than catholic, which is still perplexing.

 

For sure, the mass religious gatherings have taken a minimal toll this year, with two dead at the Black Nazarene procession (a heart attack right on the Black Nazarene carriage and another crushed by either the carriage or under the feet of mesmerized devotees) and one death in Tacloban as hasty preparations there for the pope’s sermon caused part of the scaffoldings for the papal stage’s sound system came crashing down.  But no matter the abbreviated Leyte trip due to threat of the approaching typhoon, last year’s “Yolanda” victims were just too good an international scene not to be taken advantage of.

 

Pope Francis created a global stir when asked of his reaction to the Charlie Hebdo incident.  He said freedom of expression “has its limits,” likening the insult to faith to “a curse word against my mother,” upon which the offender “can expect a punch.”  Whoa!  Whatever happened to “turning the other cheek”?  Was this then the justification for the Philippine Catholic Church’s cry for blood in calling for the jailing of Carlos Celdran (who damned the “Damasos” but not the Catholic faith)?

 

Actually, there is intense dissension in the Church today caused by Francis’ forcing of “reform” for the survival of Catholicism, which is in steep decline in Europe as well as in North and South America; and this is in contradiction to the conservative principles of “the Last Pope.”

 

But then I remember this from the 1970s rock opera “Jesus Christ, Superstar,” where the titular character exclaimed, “Why waste your breath moaning at the crowd?  Nothing can be done to stop the shouting!  If every tongue were stilled, the noise would still continue!  The rocks and stones themselves would start to sing!”

 

(Listen to Sulô ng Pilipino, 1098 AM, dwAD, Tuesday to Friday, 5 p.m. to 6 p.m.; watch GNN Talk News TV with HTL on Destiny Cable Channel 8, SkyCable Channel 213, and www.gnntv-asia.com, Saturday, 8 p.m. and replay Sunday, 8 a.m.; search Talk News TV and date of showing on YouTube; visit http://newkatipunero.blogspot.com; and text reactions to 0917-8658664)

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Ce sont des hypocrites

Ce sont des hypocrites

(Herman Tiu Laurel / DieHard III / The Daily Tribune / 01-14-2015 WED)

 

The response of many anti-war, anti-imperialist, human rights, and peace activists expressing themselves on alternative media to the “Je suis Charlie” slogan has been “Je ne suis pas Charlie” (We are not Charlie), a clear denunciation of the hypocrisy of those rallyists, writers, pundits, and global political leaders who uphold the wrong principle by calling for the wrong response (vengeance) and maintaining the wrong message (discrimination) in light of the Charlie Hedbo incident and the cry of the oppressed peoples.

 

A surviving member of the Charlie Hebdo cartoonists’ group, Dutch-born Bernard Holtrop, said this of the many personalities who joined the Je suis Charlie Paris unity march: “We vomit on all these people who suddenly say they are our friends.”  Indeed, with personalities like Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu, who thinks nothing of bombing to death Palestinian children and women; or the US State Department’s Victoria Nuland, who triggered the Ukrainian coup that has now killed 5,000 ethnic Russian civilians in East Ukraine; or French leaders who’ve caused 50,000 deaths in Libya and destroyed that nation, I, too, vomit.

 

MailOnLine reports that Bernard Holtrop found the new fame of Charlie Hedbo “laughable.”  Alternative media have published many articles of genuine freedom advocates: Justin Raimondo’s “March of the Hypocrites” (http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article40681.htm); Chris Hedge’s “Message from the Dispossessed” (http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article40677.htm); and Dr. David Halpin’s “Je suis Ali Abbas: The Forgotten Victims of State Terrorism” (http://www.globalresearch.ca/je-suis-ali-abbas-the-forgotten-victims-of-state-terrorism/5424384).

 

It should not escape the serious analysts of such terror events that there are sufficient newspaper accounts of how the four “terrorists” involved in the Charlie Hedbo and Kosher store attacks have histories with Islamist rebel-terrorist groups operating in Syria, Yemen, and other countries where such movements are supported by Western funding, training, and arms supply, and under close surveillance by the Western authorities.  Read “Charlie Hebdo Killers Armed and Trained in Syria--Terrorism Made in France?” from the Activist Post, and you’ll get the sense that the events were somehow allowed to happen by elements in the security apparatus.

 

GlobalResearch’s report, “Ankara Mayor Gökçek: ‘Mossad is Behind the Paris Attacks’,” alleges that the deadly attacks in Paris “are the result of France expressing support for Palestine, and that Israeli intelligence is behind the attacks,” as the semi-official Anadolu news agency reported.  We must recall that just prior to the Paris attacks, several European states had already signified support for Palestine’s membership in the UN.  This incident now puts France in a difficult position vis-à-vis its population already brainwashed by mainstream media’s anti-Muslim take of the Charlie Hebdo and Kosher store attacks.

 

The main argument of the “Je suis Charlie” multimillion marchers is that they are marching for Western civilization values of “freedom of speech” and the “use of the pen against bullets.”  But the 500 year-old history of Western nations using the cannon to invade Third World nations (that continue today with drones), maiming and killing thousands upon thousands in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Somalia, Sudan et al. should show these historically-dumbed down Western peoples that the rest of the world may not see them in the same light that they do.

 

The West is now getting its comeuppance of sorts from centuries of imperialist policies.  So long as Western populations fail to reflect upon these truths and their ruling classes’ continuing oppressive, murderous, imperial adventures on the rest of the world, the carnage will continue as more zeroes will be added to the number of the dead.

 

It is the duty of global media, and especially alternative media, to educate Western populations with the true story of global terrorism and the West’s provocateur role, in the face of the blowback of Islamist “shock and awe” inevitably rising in frequency and severity.

 

Unless Western peoples learn the whole truth and force their ruling powers to cease the oppression and murders by their armed and covert forces in the Third World (most victims of which are Islamic), their protests against terrorism and bigotry will amount to nothing but sheer hypocrisy--Ce sont des hypocrites--as there will be no peace anywhere in the world and in these Western peoples’ homelands.

 

(Listen to Sulô ng Pilipino, 1098 AM, dwAD, Tuesday to Friday, 5 p.m. to 6 p.m.; watch GNN Talk News TV with HTL on Destiny Cable Channel 8, SkyCable Channel 213, and www.gnntv-asia.com, Saturday, 8 p.m. and replay Sunday, 8 a.m.; search Talk News TV and date of showing on YouTube; visit http://newkatipunero.blogspot.com; and text reactions to 0917-8658664)

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Modernizing faith

Modernizing faith

(Herman Tiu Laurel / DieHard III / The Daily Tribune / 01-12-2015 MON)

 

Last December, at a round table discussion on Philippine-China issues for a visiting professor from Yonsei University held at the Ricardo Leung Center for Chinese Studies at the Ateneo de Manila, one comment arose: “The number of mainland Chinese Catholics is growing.”  My reaction: “Do we want to see China become an economic backwater like Catholic-dominated Latin American countries or like the Philippines in Asia?”

 

That said, the basic conditions of human existence and ethical and moral behavior is indeed a gnawing need of all peoples.  Even the atheistic communist leadership of China understands this.

 

In 1980, supreme leader Deng Xiaoping enunciated the “socialist spiritual civilization” (reemphasized by Jiang Zemin in the 1990s), an ideological drive to reflect the improving material conditions of society in social transformation, raising political consciousness and morality to mitigate “nihilism, commercialism, hedonism and consumerism… in the course of modernization.”

 

It is estimated that mainland China has 100 million Christians today and projections about its growth are hyped by Western media, even though it can decline as well with further economic advances as in most parts of the world.

 

A mainland Chinese cousin, whom I and another Chinese-Filipino cousin had the pleasure of entertaining, recently visited the Philippines.  When the subject of religion came up, this cousin of ours declared himself a Christian (without distinguishing between Catholic and non-Catholic).  This, he said, is because Christianity promises an afterlife if he behaves.  My other cousin interjected: Isn’t Christianity (lumped with Catholicism) called “tsia kaw” (Hokkien for “eating religion”) because Christian missionaries offered food for conversion at a time when “old China” was plagued with famine?

 

According to Albert Einstein, “If people are good only because they fear punishment, and hope for reward, then we are a sorry lot indeed.”

 

I am, at 64 years of age this year, at the pre-departure as seniors would like to joke; but I felt more terror about the problem of death in my youth.  As an acolyte serving mass, I remember squeezing out tears to show piety.  But in light of my rational mind, I have come to terms with what Einstein once said: “The religion of the future will be a cosmic religion.  It should transcend personal God and avoid dogma and theology.  Covering both the natural and the spiritual, it should be based on a religious sense arising from the experience of all things natural and spiritual as a meaningful unity.”

 

The distance from faith in the Black Nazarene and Jesuit anthropologist Teilhard de Chardin’s effort to reconcile his Catholic faith with scientific experience (an irreconcilable contradiction that led him to be near excommunication) was what started me toward seeking spiritual truth in scientific insight.  There I discovered that we can find solace and our basis for a moral structure and spiritual optimism.

 

Max Planck, the father of quantum physics, held that “All matter originates and exists only by virtue of a force which brings the particle of an atom to vibration and holds this most minute solar system of the atom together.  We must assume behind this force the existence of a conscious and intelligent mind.  This mind is the matrix of all matter.”

 

But that mind isn’t in the form of a brain that humans conceive but a “cosmic brain” that is formed by the stuff that makes up the universe, including each and every human being and living thing.

 

As such, three modern scientific insights led me to my “religion” today: Quantum mechanics and its “spooky actions” such as quantum entanglement; “biocentrism” where the universe is an unfolding consciousness and our human consciousness participating in creating it; and the theory of the “morphogenetic universe” where all living things and human individuals are in a “field” (visualize iron filings forming fields around a bar magnet) and our decisions and actions are retained in the “field” as specie lessons for all time.  From these scientific insights I conclude that elements that constitute “me” are indestructible and my moral acts have permanent consequences in the “field.”

 

But the all-important question to 99.9 percent of human beings is “What happens after death?”  Do I go on living as “I,” in heaven or hell; do I exist no longer as “I” with eternal life around dozens of virgins?  My answer: “Did you exist when you were conceived in the womb and before the world molded your personhood?”

 

As there was no “person” then, why should there be an afterlife?  Nonetheless, the force that gave life is still there and that is what or who we really are, waiting to be reborn.  That’s Buddhism’s view and ideal (which Einstein says is closest to that cosmic religion)--to be and act as one before one became an “ego.”

 

(Listen to Sulô ng Pilipino, 1098 AM, dwAD, Tuesday to Friday, 5 p.m. to 6 p.m.; watch GNN Talk News TV with HTL on Destiny Cable Channel 8, SkyCable Channel 213, and www.gnntv-asia.com, Saturday, 8 p.m. and replay Sunday, 8 a.m.; search Talk News TV and date of showing on YouTube; visit http://newkatipunero.blogspot.com; and text reactions to 0917-8658664)

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Justice is beyond the courts

Justice is beyond the courts

(Herman Tiu Laurel / DieHard III / The Daily Tribune / 01-07-2015 WED)

 

Monday morning I joined the different Bayan groups in filing the motion to stop the mass transit system fare increases imposed by the Department of Transportation and Communications (DoTC).  In an update the day later I was told that the Supreme Court (SC) would convene on January 9 to consider the matter.

 

The filing of the motion, assisted by the National Union of People’s Lawyers (NUPL), was a significant act that succeeded in galvanizing public opinion against the fare hikes.  It shed light on the fraudulent claims of government in justifying the fare increases and exposed the scams behind the build-lease-transfer scheme engineered by Philippine finance oligarchs in cahoots with their controlled politicians.

 

While the TRO on the MRT fare hike is awaiting the SC’s deliberations, another court has decided that the 2013 water rate hikes implemented by the two private water concessionaires for Metro Manila and its environs--acts that were deemed illegal by the water regulatory agency, Metropolitan Waterworks and Sewerage System (MWSS) due to disallowed charges to water consumers (such as the corporate income taxes of the two companies)--are to be upheld.  This court, the International Chamber of Commerce (ICC), is the arbitration venue that the two private firms, namely, Maynilad and Manila Water, brought their case to in 2013 and which this column predicted that same year would decide against consumers’ interest.

 

Water rate hikes for the opening of the year 2015 now consist of a double whammy--the first from the Foreign Currency Differential Adjustment (FCDA) clause of the concession agreements despite the peso strengthening against most currencies (that is, hikes up to P9.12/30 cu. m.) and the second, the 2013 water rate hike upheld by the ICC arbitration court in a decision dated Dec. 29, 2014 as Filipinos were preparing for New Year’s celebrations, announcing that “the Appeals Panel... upheld the alternative rebasing adjustment of Maynilad.”  As a result, the company’s stock price went up, and Filipino water consumers will now pay a 9.8-percent increase on P31.28/cu. m.

 

The other private company’s appeal with the same body is awaiting decision early this year and is expected to favor the water oligarchs again.  Manila Water in 2013 proposed a P5.83/cu. m. increase in its basic water charge of P24.57/cu. m., although then it was ordered by MWSS to reduce tariffs by P7.24/cu. m. due to disallowances of many of its expenditures.

 

All these increases will become retroactive and charged on a “staggered” basis, supposedly to mitigate the negative impact on consumers and the economy.  That they have to “stagger” the rate hikes shows that these water companies and the MWSS know how debilitating these increases will be for Filipino households.

 

The effect of all these rate hikes will be a further erosion of the purchasing power of the Filipino working classes and a dampener to consumer spending on other commodities that would have otherwise fueled a wider base of the productive economy.  The little hopes of consumer upticks from the oil price crash dividend would be significantly wiped out by these increases in water and the MRT-LRT fares, and more of the poorest would be alienated from these basic services.

 

This is simply a suicidal economic policy designed to sate the greed of transnational financial oligarchs, who continue to be fed by the prevailing economic paradigm of privatization and globalization made into law by our legislature.

 

While the ICC arbitration court has confirmed our prediction that any consumer welfare case raised before it will inevitably lead to defeat and satisfaction of the global financial oligarchy’s interest, the Philippine courts still present an image of reliability.

 

However, from my experience in raising such issues before the SC, we, consumers, lose 9 out of 10 cases; and the one case we would win would be a Solomonic decision in favor of the oligarchs--such as the December 2013 case of “market manipulation” by a power distributor, which the SC treated only as a “market failure,” with the culprits getting off without even a slap on the wrist.

 

Still, raising these consumers’ issues before the courts generates enough public interest, raises the level of public consciousness, and prepares us for the next level of collective action that could someday lead to real physical occupation of the political and economic spaces by the people and their genuine avatars.

 

(Listen to Sulô ng Pilipino, 1098 AM, dwAD, Tuesday to Friday, 5 p.m. to 6 p.m.; watch GNN Talk News TV with HTL on Destiny Cable Channel 8, SkyCable Channel 213, and www.gnntv-asia.com, Saturday, 8 p.m. and replay Sunday, 8 a.m.; search Talk News TV and date of showing on YouTube; visit http://newkatipunero.blogspot.com; and text reactions to 0917-8658664)

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