CONSUMERS DEMAND!
Herman Tiu Laurel
12/12-18/2011
“Palm off: to conceal in the palm of the hand, as in cheating at dice or cards or in a sleight-of-hand trick; to dispose of or pass off by deception…”
If you’ve been carried away by the massive PR operation to keep your eyes and ears glued to the ongoing BS Aquino vs. Gloria Arroyo media saga, with a side trip to the BS Aquino vs. Renato Corona royal rumble, then you are certain to miss some of the more gargantuan swindles of the people being perpetrated by the current corporatocratic-bureaucratic conspiracy between Big Business and its captive government.
One of the scams being palmed off involves P75 billion by the Power Sector Assets and Liabilities Management Corp. (PSALM), an agency tasked by the Electric Power Industry Reform Act (EPIRA) of 2001 to privatize the nation’s energy sector, specifically the sale of the National Power Corp. (Napocor)’s power generating assets.
The already established scandal is that after 10 years and at least 80% of Napocor’s assets privatized, PSALM has still not erased Napocor’s original debt of $18 billion, which we taxpayers are saddled with. Worse, just last week, we learned that PSALM has sought approval from the Finance Department to borrow P75 billion for 2011 and P85 billion for 2012 to finance its operations, which Secretary Cesar Purisima will undoubtedly oblige.
PSALM president Emmanuel Ledesma Jr., appointed under the present government, is from Big Business. A banker, former managing director and country head of the Royal Bank of Canada, he is only one of many corporate gofers heading the different departments of government today. The others include Energy Secretary Rene Almendras from the Ayala and Aboitiz companies; Public Works Secretary Rogelio Singson who’s worked for Maynilad and was a director of Pangilinan’s Metro Pacific Investments Corp. (MPIC); while Trade Secretary Gregorio Domingo had ties with the Bankers Association of the Philippines, the Sys, Meralco, and a list of banks from Chase to Mellon Bank. Transportation and Communications is, of course, headed by cacique investment banker Mar Roxas, whom Senate staffers say can’t hold back his “mata pobre” streak; while Tourism used to be headed by Bertie Lim of the Makati Business Club, then replaced by Ramon Jimenez who used to sell ice cream and burgers but can’t seem to come up with anything so far to sell the country’s vast tourism advantages. See what I mean by a corporatist-captured government?
Ledesma justifies the PSALM palm off by claiming that his agency is already unable to meet its working capital and cash flow requirements. But what are the tasks of PSALM that it should require these billions to operate? The EPIRA tasks it to “take ownership of all existing (Napocor) generation assets, liabilities, IPP (independent power producer) contracts, real estate and all other disposable assets… formulate and implement a program for the sale and privatization of (these) assets and IPP contracts and the liquidation of (Napocor) Debts and Stranded Contract Costs… calculate the amount of the Stranded Debts and Stranded Contract Costs of NPC… (and) assume all outstanding financial obligations of… government agencies arising from their respective Rural Electrification Program.”
But didn’t the sale of 80% of Napocor’s assets raise any funds for PSALM? Where did all the proceeds go and why is the nation still saddled with an $18-billion debt exactly as it was 10 years ago?
And we haven’t even factored in the sale of Napocor’s vast transmission grid that stretches north to south, carrying power generated from its many plants across the country. If you will recall, the grid was renamed TransCo after the EPIRA was passed; it was sold off in 2008 to a group led by Monte Oro--associated with FVR and regular crony-oligarch Enrique Razon--which brought China State Grid into the picture, with the help of the Ramos-affiliated Carlyle Group. Sometime later, the Henry Sy group took over and it is now named the National Grid Corp. of the Philippines (NGCP).
That sale alone should have fetched $3.95 billion but look at what PSALM says now: “The proposed prepayment of NGCP privatization proceeds, Ledesma said, would allow PSALM to meet its cash flow requirements and avoid incurring additional loans for payment of maturing obligations. The shortfall in cash flow, he said, arises due to the mismatch in the timing of the collection of these receivables and the maturity of debt obligation payments.”
TransCo was earning around P18 billion (or $400 million) per annum when it was sold and if this had kept flowing in for PSALM, it would have lightened the burden of government and taxpayers considerably.
The sale of TransCo was supposed to bring in cash to the country’s coffers, unburdening the taxpayer; but instead, the people now have to shoulder almost a hundred billion pesos more every year. Meanwhile, the privatized transmission grid now earns $400 million for the new owners.
No wonder when San Miguel’s Ramon Ang (another gofer) was asked for advice by Henry Sy Jr., this was what he (who also got a piece of the action) said, “SMC did not spend even one peso to join that transaction; if I have then I would have to disclose that… I just advised (Sy and Coyiuto) that… it’s a super deal, but I did not participate.” In that same news report, Sy Jr. said that the acquisition will be funded “from equity and debt arranged by a foreign financial institution.”
While they are arranging the debt and earning from NGCP already, we taxpayers are made to pay PSALM to keep it going, with no cash out from the NGCP buyers at all!
Filipino middle class and masa consumers should wise up to the palming off by the oligarchy and corporatist-controlled system of government (the plutocracy or corpo-bureaucracy) of our hard earned moneys in public utilities and tax payments, and stashing them into their private and corporate bank accounts.
If we no longer allow ourselves to be misled by corporate mainstream media, then we will all see the massive exploitation and abuse we are being subjected to and scream out loud that we won’t take it anymore. Only when this reverberates loud enough will the Walls of the Corporate Jericho fall.
(Tune in to Sulo ng Pilipino/Radyo OpinYon, Monday to Friday, 5 to 6 p.m. on 1098AM; Talk News TV with HTL, Saturday, 8:15 to 9 p.m., with replay at 11 p.m., on GNN, Destiny Cable Channel 8; visit http://newkatipunero.blogspot.com for our articles plus TV and radio archives)
Wednesday, December 14, 2011
Monday, December 12, 2011
Yellows rant as GDP crashes
DIE HARD III
Herman Tiu Laurel
12/12/2011
A very recent International Monetary Fund (IMF) study had the Philippines dropping to its lowest level in gross domestic product (GDP) growth from 2005 to 2008 among countries in the Asia-Pacific. Currently ranked No. 22, the Philippines used to be 2nd only to Japan in the 1950s and 15th during the early Marcos years (1965-1968). Today, it has been left behind by Vietnam at 7th place, Indonesia at 10th, Thailand at 13th, and Malaysia at 16th, in a group where China, India, Mongolia, Uruguay and (yes) Argentina (of the debt default fame) are the notable leaders.
This IMF report comes on the heels of an anti-poverty summit on 25 years of increasing poverty in RP, which we have traced to the Yellows and their Edsa I and II counter-revolutions. For a quarter of a century, they have waged “hate campaigns,” first against Marcos, then Erap, and now against one of their own, Gloria Arroyo, all to distract the nation from the continuing GDP crashes they have ushered in since 1986.
The last quarter’s growth rate of 3.2 percent is certainly the nadir to which BSA III’s administration has brought this country. Yet, despite its huge toll, this dire economic reversal is not on the agenda of any mainstream debates — whether in the academe, media, the punditry at large, or the religious sector.
Worse, all the Yellows do is rant about BS Aquino’s purported war against Gloria (despite coddling her for a-year-and-a-half) or his new spat with the Supreme Court (SC) and its chief Justice. Here, the Yellows’ “best minds” are brought in to elevate the play-acting — such as that laughable Jesuit Bernas, who compared Noynoy the wimp to the revolutionary giant, Fidel Castro.
Notwithstanding many people’s insistence on more apt parallelisms between PeNoy and Joshua, Forrest Gump, or Bimby; or between Bernas and Damaso, Rasputin, Richelieu or Cardinal Brady of Ireland (the pedophile-priest coddler), let us elevate this discussion from that small-minded analogy to one honest-to-goodness comparison between Fidel Castro’s Cuba and the Yellows’ Philippines: Cuba in 2011 ranked 51st in the United Nation’s Human Development Index while our country only managed to land 112th.
In truth, that Jesuit would no longer be listened to had it not been for the oligarchy-controlled media’s non-stop portrayal of him as a “legal luminary” and “constitutionalist,” when all he has done is to show himself up as a fraud through several of his twisted legal opinions (such as in 2001, which considered a coup d’etat legal for as long as the plotter emerges the victor).
Meanwhile, the Yellow media’s AC/DC (attack-commentary; defend-commentary) on the Arroyo and Corona issues continue to hide the ongoing plunder.
For one, the Power Sector Assets and Liabilities Management Corp. (Psalm), with the prodding of the energy pirates as well as the approval of Finance Secretary and corporate gofer Cesar Purisima, is indebting Filipino taxpayers once more by another P75 billion (for 2011) and P85 billion (for 2012) for its working capital and operational funding — despite the fact that it has already privatized over 80 percent of the National Power Corp. (Napocor)’s power generating assets, aside from $4 billion worth of the nation’s transmission grid.
Despite the sale of all those assets, Psalm is still saddled with practically its original debt of $18 billion, thereby needing more taxpayers’ billions to keep operating.
Why then was there a need to privatize anything at all when not a shred of the debt or operating cost was going to be covered (where even the $4 billion for our transmission assets hasn’t been collected but with the new owners already raking it in with $200 million in annual profits).
Without an iota of doubt, the massive electricity plundering today was set into high gear in Edsa II, where “civil society,” typified by the likes of Conrado de Quiros, conspired with the now proven corrupt politicos and treasonous military (with the oligarchs’ help) to oust a popularly-elected president who rejected all onerous deals; opposed “sovereign guarantees;” brought down Metro Rail Transit fares (which Yellows like Mar Roxas have been trying to raise); and never allowed a single power and water rate increase in his two-and-a-half year term.
Instead, De Quiros and his ilk attempt to write Procrustean (after Poseidon’s son Procrustes, who cut off victims’ legs to force fit into a small iron bed) to redeem themselves and to spite their hated figure, President Joseph Estrada, even when they are shown up as clowns with their distorted versions of history.
As Erap claimed that Gloria’s arrest is his vindication, the anti-Erap De Quiros could only retort that “if Arroyo’s arrest is any vindication at all, it is a vindication not of Erap but of the groups that demanded that Erap be replaced.”
Now how can this still be claimed with all the evidence of a quantum leap in Filipinos’ economic misery, not to mention political turmoil, post-Edsa II? Perhaps, such a pathological need to lie only reflects a deep-seated fear of the evidence that would damn them.
On the other hand, the proclivity for Procrustean narratives applies to the pro-Gloria Yellows, too. One such fellow, Teddy Locsin Jr., praises the seven-percent GDP under Gloria in 2010 when this was mainly due to election spending. He then tries to deflect attention by digging up past allegations against Estrada, even when he knows that, among other things, the delivery of jueteng money wasn’t proved in court, nor was the stock manipulation charge that was denied by the pension funds’ chiefs.
In truth, Locsin even remarked that the evidence tended to exonerate Estrada — it’s just that this, according to him, was no longer the nation’s problem.
They may talk of the “Rule of Law” today. But what did they say when Estrada’s impeachment trial was scuttled and the myth of his “constructive resignation” was upheld by their court? Well, as it is often said of the Yellows: Ibang klase talaga!
(Tune in to Sulo ng Pilipino/Radyo OpinYon, Monday to Friday, 5 to 6 p.m. on 1098AM; Talk News TV with HTL, Saturday, 8:15 to 9 p.m., with replay at 11 p.m., on GNN, Destiny Cable Channel 8; visit http://newkatipunero.blogspot.com for our articles plus TV and radio archives)
Herman Tiu Laurel
12/12/2011
A very recent International Monetary Fund (IMF) study had the Philippines dropping to its lowest level in gross domestic product (GDP) growth from 2005 to 2008 among countries in the Asia-Pacific. Currently ranked No. 22, the Philippines used to be 2nd only to Japan in the 1950s and 15th during the early Marcos years (1965-1968). Today, it has been left behind by Vietnam at 7th place, Indonesia at 10th, Thailand at 13th, and Malaysia at 16th, in a group where China, India, Mongolia, Uruguay and (yes) Argentina (of the debt default fame) are the notable leaders.
This IMF report comes on the heels of an anti-poverty summit on 25 years of increasing poverty in RP, which we have traced to the Yellows and their Edsa I and II counter-revolutions. For a quarter of a century, they have waged “hate campaigns,” first against Marcos, then Erap, and now against one of their own, Gloria Arroyo, all to distract the nation from the continuing GDP crashes they have ushered in since 1986.
The last quarter’s growth rate of 3.2 percent is certainly the nadir to which BSA III’s administration has brought this country. Yet, despite its huge toll, this dire economic reversal is not on the agenda of any mainstream debates — whether in the academe, media, the punditry at large, or the religious sector.
Worse, all the Yellows do is rant about BS Aquino’s purported war against Gloria (despite coddling her for a-year-and-a-half) or his new spat with the Supreme Court (SC) and its chief Justice. Here, the Yellows’ “best minds” are brought in to elevate the play-acting — such as that laughable Jesuit Bernas, who compared Noynoy the wimp to the revolutionary giant, Fidel Castro.
Notwithstanding many people’s insistence on more apt parallelisms between PeNoy and Joshua, Forrest Gump, or Bimby; or between Bernas and Damaso, Rasputin, Richelieu or Cardinal Brady of Ireland (the pedophile-priest coddler), let us elevate this discussion from that small-minded analogy to one honest-to-goodness comparison between Fidel Castro’s Cuba and the Yellows’ Philippines: Cuba in 2011 ranked 51st in the United Nation’s Human Development Index while our country only managed to land 112th.
In truth, that Jesuit would no longer be listened to had it not been for the oligarchy-controlled media’s non-stop portrayal of him as a “legal luminary” and “constitutionalist,” when all he has done is to show himself up as a fraud through several of his twisted legal opinions (such as in 2001, which considered a coup d’etat legal for as long as the plotter emerges the victor).
Meanwhile, the Yellow media’s AC/DC (attack-commentary; defend-commentary) on the Arroyo and Corona issues continue to hide the ongoing plunder.
For one, the Power Sector Assets and Liabilities Management Corp. (Psalm), with the prodding of the energy pirates as well as the approval of Finance Secretary and corporate gofer Cesar Purisima, is indebting Filipino taxpayers once more by another P75 billion (for 2011) and P85 billion (for 2012) for its working capital and operational funding — despite the fact that it has already privatized over 80 percent of the National Power Corp. (Napocor)’s power generating assets, aside from $4 billion worth of the nation’s transmission grid.
Despite the sale of all those assets, Psalm is still saddled with practically its original debt of $18 billion, thereby needing more taxpayers’ billions to keep operating.
Why then was there a need to privatize anything at all when not a shred of the debt or operating cost was going to be covered (where even the $4 billion for our transmission assets hasn’t been collected but with the new owners already raking it in with $200 million in annual profits).
Without an iota of doubt, the massive electricity plundering today was set into high gear in Edsa II, where “civil society,” typified by the likes of Conrado de Quiros, conspired with the now proven corrupt politicos and treasonous military (with the oligarchs’ help) to oust a popularly-elected president who rejected all onerous deals; opposed “sovereign guarantees;” brought down Metro Rail Transit fares (which Yellows like Mar Roxas have been trying to raise); and never allowed a single power and water rate increase in his two-and-a-half year term.
Instead, De Quiros and his ilk attempt to write Procrustean (after Poseidon’s son Procrustes, who cut off victims’ legs to force fit into a small iron bed) to redeem themselves and to spite their hated figure, President Joseph Estrada, even when they are shown up as clowns with their distorted versions of history.
As Erap claimed that Gloria’s arrest is his vindication, the anti-Erap De Quiros could only retort that “if Arroyo’s arrest is any vindication at all, it is a vindication not of Erap but of the groups that demanded that Erap be replaced.”
Now how can this still be claimed with all the evidence of a quantum leap in Filipinos’ economic misery, not to mention political turmoil, post-Edsa II? Perhaps, such a pathological need to lie only reflects a deep-seated fear of the evidence that would damn them.
On the other hand, the proclivity for Procrustean narratives applies to the pro-Gloria Yellows, too. One such fellow, Teddy Locsin Jr., praises the seven-percent GDP under Gloria in 2010 when this was mainly due to election spending. He then tries to deflect attention by digging up past allegations against Estrada, even when he knows that, among other things, the delivery of jueteng money wasn’t proved in court, nor was the stock manipulation charge that was denied by the pension funds’ chiefs.
In truth, Locsin even remarked that the evidence tended to exonerate Estrada — it’s just that this, according to him, was no longer the nation’s problem.
They may talk of the “Rule of Law” today. But what did they say when Estrada’s impeachment trial was scuttled and the myth of his “constructive resignation” was upheld by their court? Well, as it is often said of the Yellows: Ibang klase talaga!
(Tune in to Sulo ng Pilipino/Radyo OpinYon, Monday to Friday, 5 to 6 p.m. on 1098AM; Talk News TV with HTL, Saturday, 8:15 to 9 p.m., with replay at 11 p.m., on GNN, Destiny Cable Channel 8; visit http://newkatipunero.blogspot.com for our articles plus TV and radio archives)
Friday, December 9, 2011
25 years of worsening poverty
DIE HARD III
Herman Tiu Laurel
12/9/11
Early this week, another one of those “summits” on the dire economic straits of the country was in the news — this one convened by religious and “civil society” leaders together with a leading member of the Edsa I political crowd (who is also a counsel of choice of the oligarchs). Archbishop Antonio Ledesma and Christian Monsod had a three-day “summit on poverty, inequality and social reform,” which, as expected, grumbled and griped about RP’s impoverishment.
“Our nation,” the archbishop said, “is in an explosive situation… Poverty is mounting, streets… are teeming with beggars and dislocated indigenous peoples…” And this probably why the other intoned in his keynote, “The task today is no less heroic than at Edsa — it is liberation from the yoke of poverty that would make democracy more meaningful to the poor… Twenty-five years after Edsa, where are we on that promise?”
Where indeed is the country today after those Edsa coup cohorts of the US and the oligarchy took over the reins of government?
Monsod should be the first to know. Didn’t he lawyer for what is touted as one of the most exploitative businesses in the country? Didn’t he preside over the dramatic deterioration of the electoral system when he, as chairman of the Comelec (Commission on Elections), removed party representation in the Board of Election Inspectors while allegedly padding the voters’ list prior to the 1992 polls, which (many say) enabled Fidel Ramos to steal victory and spawned worsening election cheating ever since?
Heck, Monsod and his wife were even at the forefront of Edsa II, which ousted the only Philippine president in the past 25 years who never approved — but, in fact, vigorously disapproved — any power or water rate increases in his attenuated two and a half year term. And hasn’t his wife been the poster girl of globalization economics in the country all these years?
Together, the two only embody the prevailing economic-political-corporatist system of the past 25 years under the Yellow banner.
Meanwhile, Archbishop Ledesma, I am told, is genuinely for the poor. But the religious “bleeding heart” rhetoric and busy “good Samaritan” activities of these well-intentioned human beings (like the antics of running priest, Fr. Robert Reyes) seldom translate into actionable programs that uproot the sources of poverty and its consequent moral decline.
Even during periods of ideological radicalization within the Roman Catholic Church (such as the flowering of liberation theology), the geopolitics of Rome (which has always been intricately linked with the western oligarchy’s pre-eminence) always gets in the way. Although the Vatican has chastised capitalism in many encyclicals of popes past, to this day, it ultimately yields to the power of capital, especially in its politics.
Back here, the situation is no different as the Catholic Church still persists in harping on government corruption when, in fact, it is the corruption of unfettered and extreme, globalized capitalism that systematically concentrates wealth and power in fewer and fewer hands.
The Church spearheaded the ouster of Marcos who, in his 21 years of authoritarian government, began laying the foundations for economic democracy in building publicly owned energy, water, irrigation, transport, health, shelter, as well as social and physical infrastructures.
Such publicly owned utilities are at the heart of economic democracy, where capital from taxes, utilities payments, and profits are plowed back for the expansion and development of these shared assets and services. Without economic democracy as a foundation, any political democracy can only be a farce.
Edsa I and II reversed our budding economic democracy when these assets — financed by past and future taxes of the people — were handed over to the voracious profit-seeking local oligarchy and western corporatocracy, effectively privatizing the profits while socializing the capitalization of these privatized assets.
In the ouster of President Joseph Estrada, the Catholic Church also fell prey to the schemes of the foreign and local corporatist-swindlers. It must never be forgotten that the central issue in the ouster of Erap was not jueteng, which 10 years later is still rampant in the country. The real goal was the massive privatization of our state assets, beginning with the power generating plants.
The evidence is there: The singular focus of the Edsa II regime of Gloria Arroyo was the passage of the Epira (Electric Power Industry Reform Act) that was railroaded through the lame duck Congress in May 2001, allegedly through the carrot of $300 million in ADB loans and millions of lobby money distributed by then and current Speaker Sonny Belmonte. That’s why it is no longer a surprise to hear power oligarch Erramon Aboitiz say (before the Management Association of the Philippines) that “We considered the privatization process as a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.”
The oligarchs never had it so good when they took over our nation’s cheapest and natural energy resources (such as our hydroelectric and geothermal plants); then hiked their production cost, making our rates “the highest in Asia” (four times higher than Vietnam or China); then distributed such electric power at prices that are lopsided against residential consumers by a ratio of as much as 20:1, in favor of commercial and industrial users (like giant malls and factories).
So, should Christian Monsod and Archbishop Ledesma still wonder why the “The nation’s top 1 percent of… families — 185,000 — have an income equal to (that) of the bottom 30 percent of poor families numbering 5.5 million,” or that “the percentage of hungry families at 21.5 percent (has risen) from 15.1 percent in July?”
True, their summit may have dwelt on such issues as Hacienda Luisita, the conditional cash transfers, or the conflict in Mindanao. But, the simple truth is that all these will still have to hinge on the resolution of one fundamental injustice: The socialization of costs and the privatization of profit.
What they did to power, they did to water, toll ways, telecoms, ad nausea. These people can summit all they want; but they who created the problem can never be expected to provide the solution.
(Tune in to Sulo ng Pilipino/Radyo OpinYon, Monday to Friday, 5 to 6 p.m. on 1098AM; Talk News TV with HTL, Saturday, 8:15 to 9 p.m., with replay at 11 p.m., on GNN, Destiny Cable Channel 8; visit http://newkatipunero.blogspot.com for our articles plus TV and radio archives)
Herman Tiu Laurel
12/9/11
Early this week, another one of those “summits” on the dire economic straits of the country was in the news — this one convened by religious and “civil society” leaders together with a leading member of the Edsa I political crowd (who is also a counsel of choice of the oligarchs). Archbishop Antonio Ledesma and Christian Monsod had a three-day “summit on poverty, inequality and social reform,” which, as expected, grumbled and griped about RP’s impoverishment.
“Our nation,” the archbishop said, “is in an explosive situation… Poverty is mounting, streets… are teeming with beggars and dislocated indigenous peoples…” And this probably why the other intoned in his keynote, “The task today is no less heroic than at Edsa — it is liberation from the yoke of poverty that would make democracy more meaningful to the poor… Twenty-five years after Edsa, where are we on that promise?”
Where indeed is the country today after those Edsa coup cohorts of the US and the oligarchy took over the reins of government?
Monsod should be the first to know. Didn’t he lawyer for what is touted as one of the most exploitative businesses in the country? Didn’t he preside over the dramatic deterioration of the electoral system when he, as chairman of the Comelec (Commission on Elections), removed party representation in the Board of Election Inspectors while allegedly padding the voters’ list prior to the 1992 polls, which (many say) enabled Fidel Ramos to steal victory and spawned worsening election cheating ever since?
Heck, Monsod and his wife were even at the forefront of Edsa II, which ousted the only Philippine president in the past 25 years who never approved — but, in fact, vigorously disapproved — any power or water rate increases in his attenuated two and a half year term. And hasn’t his wife been the poster girl of globalization economics in the country all these years?
Together, the two only embody the prevailing economic-political-corporatist system of the past 25 years under the Yellow banner.
Meanwhile, Archbishop Ledesma, I am told, is genuinely for the poor. But the religious “bleeding heart” rhetoric and busy “good Samaritan” activities of these well-intentioned human beings (like the antics of running priest, Fr. Robert Reyes) seldom translate into actionable programs that uproot the sources of poverty and its consequent moral decline.
Even during periods of ideological radicalization within the Roman Catholic Church (such as the flowering of liberation theology), the geopolitics of Rome (which has always been intricately linked with the western oligarchy’s pre-eminence) always gets in the way. Although the Vatican has chastised capitalism in many encyclicals of popes past, to this day, it ultimately yields to the power of capital, especially in its politics.
Back here, the situation is no different as the Catholic Church still persists in harping on government corruption when, in fact, it is the corruption of unfettered and extreme, globalized capitalism that systematically concentrates wealth and power in fewer and fewer hands.
The Church spearheaded the ouster of Marcos who, in his 21 years of authoritarian government, began laying the foundations for economic democracy in building publicly owned energy, water, irrigation, transport, health, shelter, as well as social and physical infrastructures.
Such publicly owned utilities are at the heart of economic democracy, where capital from taxes, utilities payments, and profits are plowed back for the expansion and development of these shared assets and services. Without economic democracy as a foundation, any political democracy can only be a farce.
Edsa I and II reversed our budding economic democracy when these assets — financed by past and future taxes of the people — were handed over to the voracious profit-seeking local oligarchy and western corporatocracy, effectively privatizing the profits while socializing the capitalization of these privatized assets.
In the ouster of President Joseph Estrada, the Catholic Church also fell prey to the schemes of the foreign and local corporatist-swindlers. It must never be forgotten that the central issue in the ouster of Erap was not jueteng, which 10 years later is still rampant in the country. The real goal was the massive privatization of our state assets, beginning with the power generating plants.
The evidence is there: The singular focus of the Edsa II regime of Gloria Arroyo was the passage of the Epira (Electric Power Industry Reform Act) that was railroaded through the lame duck Congress in May 2001, allegedly through the carrot of $300 million in ADB loans and millions of lobby money distributed by then and current Speaker Sonny Belmonte. That’s why it is no longer a surprise to hear power oligarch Erramon Aboitiz say (before the Management Association of the Philippines) that “We considered the privatization process as a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.”
The oligarchs never had it so good when they took over our nation’s cheapest and natural energy resources (such as our hydroelectric and geothermal plants); then hiked their production cost, making our rates “the highest in Asia” (four times higher than Vietnam or China); then distributed such electric power at prices that are lopsided against residential consumers by a ratio of as much as 20:1, in favor of commercial and industrial users (like giant malls and factories).
So, should Christian Monsod and Archbishop Ledesma still wonder why the “The nation’s top 1 percent of… families — 185,000 — have an income equal to (that) of the bottom 30 percent of poor families numbering 5.5 million,” or that “the percentage of hungry families at 21.5 percent (has risen) from 15.1 percent in July?”
True, their summit may have dwelt on such issues as Hacienda Luisita, the conditional cash transfers, or the conflict in Mindanao. But, the simple truth is that all these will still have to hinge on the resolution of one fundamental injustice: The socialization of costs and the privatization of profit.
What they did to power, they did to water, toll ways, telecoms, ad nausea. These people can summit all they want; but they who created the problem can never be expected to provide the solution.
(Tune in to Sulo ng Pilipino/Radyo OpinYon, Monday to Friday, 5 to 6 p.m. on 1098AM; Talk News TV with HTL, Saturday, 8:15 to 9 p.m., with replay at 11 p.m., on GNN, Destiny Cable Channel 8; visit http://newkatipunero.blogspot.com for our articles plus TV and radio archives)
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