Russia, fulcrum for peace

DIE HARD III / Herman Tiu Laurel / April 21, 2014 / Daily Tribune


The West, led by the US, has been on a quarter-of-a-century crusade to impose its global hegemony on the world after its Cold War counterbalancing rival, the Soviet Union, collapsed under the weight of its inefficient and incompetent apparatchiks (political bureaucrats). But that crusade itself has been in collapse since 2008 as the Western economies got to be eaten by the cancer within. That cancer comprises the West’s own apparatchiks — from the corrupt monopoly finance bankers of the Western world’s financial centers, Wall Street, City of London, and European Central Bank, under the aegis of a handful of key banking families (including the Rothschilds and Rockefellers), who have controlled the world through their control of the US Federal Reserve, to the global oil and defense industries and establishments. Only a new world war can save them.

Few Filipinos ponder the implications of the events in Ukraine and the parallels they hold in the Philippines, in China, as well as the China Sea issues. The Philippines is unique in its belligerence as not even Vietnam has taken the “no dialog” stance with its Asian neighbor. Few Filipinos understand that the crisis in Ukraine today was triggered by the last phase in a two-decades-long plan to cripple Russia (“Without Ukraine Russia ceases to be a Eurasian empire,” Brzezinski, 1998). Vladimir Putin put a stop to that with the welcome reintegration of Crimea (including Sevastopol) into Russia to protect his country’s defense perimeter. China’s “superintendence” (not monopoly, as it offers bilateral development) in its own backyard also aims to define its defense perimeter against the West’s domination.

Overwhelming demographic and economic advantages of China ostensibly gave rise to Napoleon Bonaparte’s prescient prediction 200 years ago of the “waking dragon.” Strategic analysts see China as the West’s ultimate rival, although China has always declared that it seeks only respect as a coequal of other world powers.

Russia is the underestimated world power because of its moderate demographic potentials and 20th Century historical debacles, but these notions should now be set aside with Russia now shifting its global geopolitical relations, as seen in Putin’s actions in Ukraine and, more importantly, in his strategic economic vision of “turning to the East” not only rhetorically but in very unequivocal terms.

The 2012 Vladivostok Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (Apec) summit signaled Russia’s move to the East, away from the conflict zones to its West. Two years later, Putin orders a new production-type industrial zone in Vladivostok. Then, this May, Russia and China will sign one of the largest deals ever to realize the pipeline and facilities to supply 38 billion cubic meters of gas per year and 900,000 barrels of oil per day directly to China — using rubles and yuan. Russia and Iran are also discussing 500,000 barrels a day of Iranian oil in exchange for Russian goods. Moreover, Russia’s Rosneft is joining India’s state-run Oil and Natural Gas Corp. in setting up pipelines to supply oil to India over the long-term, circumventing the US dollar. All these spell the end of the US petrodollar hegemony.

And, as everyone should know, as the US dollar wanes, so goes its geopolitical clout. What remains is its military-naval supremacy, which is also fast eroding. US military development, upon which the North Atlantic Treaty Organization depends, also faces dwindling resources. Such uncertainties spawned by the US military’s decline, coupled with the certainty of Russian and Chinese military hardware and technological advances, have contributed to the vacillation of Western Powers in Afghanistan, Syria, Middle East, North Africa, and even East Asia. Only the Philippines is bullish on the US “pivot” to Asia. The decline of the US threat to the global balancing of forces is the best harbinger of durable peace in the world.

Meanwhile, the dwindling prospects of US global trade domination is also being clearly demonstrated in the difficult straits that the US-sponsored Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) has faced even with a client state like Japan foot-dragging in signing on. And that’s because the TPP promotes US corporate interests over and against national economic and political sovereignty, sacrificing popular welfare and concerns in favor of profit and economic control of corporate transnationals.
Russia and China have shunned the TPP while promoting Apec, SCO (Shanghai Cooperation Organization), the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) alliance (with a BRICS Bank to challenge the International Monetary Fund), and the RCEP (Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership).

The year 2014 will see a great shift in geopolitical power relations. Thanks to Russia and its “Look East” policy, Putin’s new Russia has shaken off its infatuation with the Western model and rediscovered its destiny as the great balancer for global peace and development. Russia has become a fulcrum of sorts as the bridge for the New Silk Road to the East (to itself) and then to Europe’s most powerful nation, Germany, and at the same time, wresting the center-of-gravity away from the US (and British) hegemony.

(Tune in to “Sulo ng Pilipino” on 1098 AM, dwAD, Tuesday to Friday, 5 p.m.; catch GNN’s 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., this week on “Ms. Manila revival” and “Bank ‘bail-in’ exposed”; visit http://newsulongpilipino.blogspot.com; and text reactions to 0917-8658664)

UN: Flu, climate and other frauds

DIE HARD III / Herman Tiu Laurel / April 14, 2014 / Daily Tribune


Last week Oxford University reported a study of the UK’s spending on anti-flu drugs — over a billion US dollars between 2006 and 2013 on medicines that had very limited efficacy, and often serious side effects. The United Nations (UN) and World Health Organization (WHO), it must be recalled, raised global swine and avian flu pandemic alerts from 2006 onwards, projecting millions of deaths. Governments then spent billions on useless flu drugs for pandemics that never happened. The Philippine government, for its part, spent at least P3 billion in 2006 for flu meds that never used.

What we learned: UN bureaucrats, beholden to powerful member-governments that are beholden to big business in their home countries, are often used as tools in gigantic money-fleecing schemes of global big business.

The UN led the charge against “population explosion” since the 1990s. It wasn’t known until later that the US was behind the anti-population campaign. That was when Henry Kissinger’s National State Security Memorandum (NSSM) 200 was declassified, revealing the US view that population growth in 11 underdeveloped countries — the Philippines among them — threatened US access to their raw material resources.

With US-initiated population control funding for the UN and others like USAID, Third World governments were compelled to add their own and buy from US-invested contraceptives companies. That funding dwindled with the US financial crisis of 2011; and that was when the Reproductive Health (RH) bill was torpedoed in the Philippines.

The Supreme Court last week declared the RH Law “not unconstitutional.” Both anti- and pro-RH partisans declared themselves winners from the High (or Hyde) Court’s decision. Known “porkers” in Congress, such as Edcel Lagman, spoke for the solons: “A grateful nation salutes the majority of the justices.” It was a gratefulness that Dinagat Island Rep. Kaka Bag-ao expressed more honestly: “For as long as the State is still mandated and empowered to implement a reproductive health program with the appropriate funding… the historic Supreme Court decision is still a victory for the people, albeit incomplete.” In the final analysis, it is the people’s money at stake, and billions of pesos of it.

Given the supposed “end” of the “pork barrel,” the RH Law will certainly offset the expected losses of our senators and representatives. When it was last debated in Congress, the amount earmarked for an RH program was upwards of P10 billion per annum that government is obliged to provide under the law. That’s several hundreds of millions of dollars for big pharma for condoms, contraceptives, etc., as well as millions for PR agencies behind the pro-RH campaign every year, and millions more for NGOs and women’s organizations of the “Akbayad” stripe; while no specific earmarks for the biggest health scourges of the land such as tuberculosis, dengue, and many other diseases including the “unemployment” epidemic, which is the real driver of poverty and disease.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which issued new alarmist projections, is like the WHO and the UN Population Commission. Its roots and money go back to Britain’s Prince Philip and The Netherlands’ Prince Bernhard, both of Royal Dutch Shell, setting up the World Wildlife Fund in 1961, from which clubs and networks of the man-made global warming campaign sprung. Later WWF associate Maurice Strong (“the international man of mystery”), Rockefeller trustee and oil magnate, set up and sat as first executive director of the UN environmental program, from which rose multilateral government and corporate funding for “global warming” campaigns and an IPCC-Al Gore Nobel Peace Prize to hype Antropogenic Global Warming.

New climate alarmism is being spread by “green” crusaders, including Western PR darling Bishop Desmond Tutu equating the climate change campaign with the anti-Apartheid crusade. (By the way, South Africa’s Apartheid persists, with 70 percent of that nation’s resources still owned by Whites as of 2006, and with Black unemployment five times higher than that of Whites).

But even as IPCC alarmist projections are six times higher than factual temperature increases the past decade, there is a “warming pause” that these alarmists are hard put to explain: “Physicist and Arctic research expert Syun-Ichi Akasofu of the International Arctic Research Center at the University of Alaska Fairbanks in the US predicts that the temperature in 2100 will be 0.5C± 0.2C higher than today, rather than the 4.0C± 2.0C predicted by the IPCC.”

Following the money leads to these: Friends of the Earth got $5 million from the EU between 2007 and 2009; Coca-Cola donated $24 million to WWF in 2008 alone; in 2007, Conservation International raised $9.4 million from corporations, about 5 percent of its total revenues of $176.6 million; WWF took in about $7 million in corporate grants, about 4.3 percent of its $161 million in revenues in 2007; A Wiki report projects “carbon trading” revenues to hit $50 billion if UN and Kyoto Protocol carbon caps are implemented (Gore’s company GIM earned $218 million between 2008 and 2011); Washington Examiner reports that the leaders of 15 top Big Green environmental groups are paid more than $300,000 — up to half a million dollars for the top “earner.”

I wish I could be that poor.

(Tune in to “Sulo ng Pilipino” on 1098 AM, dwAD, Tuesday to Friday, 5 p.m.; catch GNN’s 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.; visit http://newsulongpilipino.blogspot.com; and text reactions to 0917-8658664)

Puzzled by Alunan et al.

DIE HARD III / Herman Tiu Laurel / April 9, 2014 / Daily Tribune


April 2 was a big day for the China Sea-West Philippine Sea issue. It was the day of the much-talked-about forum entitled “Understanding 21st Century China: All Under Heaven?” sponsored by such big-named institutions as Asia Society, Harvard Kennedy School Alumni Association of the Philippines, Tufts Fletcher School Alumni Association-Philippines, the hangers-on Ramos Peace and Development Foundation Inc. (where did FVR get the money?), and former senior government officials (hangers-on to hangers-on-governments dragged along by Uncle Sam). It had to be held, of course, in the corporate cadre training center, the Asian Institute of Management (AIM).

Despite the corporate aura that I do not care for, the forum did offer unique and substantive insights from the depth of knowledge and experience of three speakers: Professor Marwyn Samuels of Syracuse University (married to a Chinese and teaches in China, according to Chito Sta. Romana); Dr. Liping Zheng of the Asian Development Bank, who provided in-depth understanding of China’s economic situation; and, of course, Chito Sta. Romana himself, the fountainhead of understanding and wisdom on China for Filipinos, who balances off the official attack dogs under the US leash like Rafael Alunan, Roilo Golez, Fidel V. Ramos, Albert del Rosario, Voltaire Gazmin, and the Philippine mainstream media.

We are thankful to Jerry Quibilan, a retired corporate executive, who has become a web-journalist e-mailing and recounting his travels and his participation in kapihans (from Melo Acuna’s at the Aristocrat every Monday to the Rembrandt and to wherever else these are held), for sending us the summaries of the forum talks and various exchanges of views he had on the Internet with his AIM alumni friends.

Jerry’s summary of summaries: The forum dwelt on the recent development in the socio-economic landscape of China; how China’s changing geopolitics and national politics affect other Association of Southeast Asian Nation economies; and how we strengthen people-to-people relations with China in spite of the ongoing issues on the West Philippine Sea.

But some of the public reaction at the forum addressed to Jerry in the e-mails reveal even much more truth. For example, from a certain Alex to Jerry reacting to Alunan and FVR: “I noticed something very different from the forum today compared to the forum of anti-China activist Raffy Alunan, Roilo Golez and President Ramos also at the AIM in December. They got former commodores and commanders of the US 7th Fleet to tell us Filipinos we have to prepare for war with China and shed our blood. We got videos on recycled airplanes and ships to buy for the coming war with China… videos on the Korean war where 10,000 Filipinos allegedly killed 40,000 Chinese. Today President Ramos laughed at the Philippines’ decision to buy 12 new jet planes to use against China. That shook me up. My impression is that Raffy Alunan and President Ramos have noticeably lost their belligerence. They were as nice to China as apple pie. Both said Filipinos should try to understand China and restore normal relations soonest. I am quite puzzled to say the least.”

I’ll suggest an answer to Puzzled Alex: The P20-billion deal to buy the used FA-50 from South Korea has already been signed and sealed; and so the syndicate can now relax the propaganda scare-mongering.

Here’s another from Charlie, a Filipino expat, which I translate to English from Tagalog: “P’reng Feliz, You’re right! From our very safe haven in Canada and in the USA, you and I need not be bothered at all about how China reacts from a ‘shaming’ by the Philippines. We are the noisiest and most war-freakish against China because we are not going to be bombed by China and penalized with economic sanctions. Let’s hear it from our brothers back in the Motherland. They are the ones who will have to face the Chinese. Let us go by their decision and be as supportive to them as any expatriate Filipino can be.”

The trouble with US steak commandos such as Loida Nicolas-Lewis and Rodel Rodis is they merely want the Philippines to act as cannon fodder. And, Charlie, the US and Canada will get their share of intercontinental ballistic missiles too.

Back to the forum, the real gem came from Chito Sta. Romana, as summarized by Jerry: “‘If China does not respect any decision of the UNCLoS, which Professor Samuels also says will happen, the Philippines will have no choice but to negotiate with China directly, the Chinese way. People-to-people contacts and friendships between the Chinese and the Filipinos will continue as usual’” but Chito confirmed that China will not give any FDIs or economic assistance to the Philippines for the foreseeable future.”

Then came this quip from one reactor in the forum, Wilson Lee Flores: “We were colonized four times —the Spanish, the British, the Americans, and the Japanese. Filipinos were killed and the country’s resources were plundered. On the other hand, what have the Chinese done in over a thousand years here? They just traded and gave us siopao, siomai, mami, and lomi.”

(Tune in to “Sulo ng Pilipino” on 1098 AM, dwAD, Tuesday to Friday, 5 p.m.; catch GNN’s Talk News TV with HTL on Destiny Cable Channel 8, SkyCable Channel 213, and www.gnntv-asia.com, Saturday, 8:00 p.m. and replay Sunday, 8 a.m., this week on “Meralco siphoning capital out of the country” with Butch Junia and “Mayor Erap kicks out Big Oil”; visit http://newkatipunero.blogspot.com; and text reactions to 0917-8658664)