BACKBENCHER
Rod Kapunan
9/10-11/2011
When the finance managers of the world conceived the idea of trading money for money, the first rule they did was reduce it to a commodity, and not as a medium of exchange. In that, this new generation of merchants called “money traders” was able to trade currencies with other currencies of whatever denomination at any given moment where they would command higher value. Maybe it was an unconscious effort to resonate the concept of money as a commodity to supersede the burdensome practice of barter, but nevertheless its consequence was far-reaching to man, to his society, and to the world.
The official conversion of money to commodity began when the international finance syndicates through their tightly-noosed World Bank and International Monetary Fund enunciated the policy of defying the biblical prohibition of usury. The abrogation of laws prohibiting usury and punishing those engaged in it resulted in the removal of the last safety valve of compassion for the less fortunate. The two finance institutions pushed whatever progress that was achieved by man back to the Dark Age.
The legalization of usury effectively deregulated the interest rates, and money supply generated through interest earnings tremendously ballooned without or with a negligible increase in production. Money then was automatically detached from production or what conservative economists would traditionally view as the primordial creator of wealth, viz, of mankind’s building block to progress and prosperity.
Like that of globalization or the universalization of free trade, the financial oligarchy of the world deemed it necessary to globalize the practice. To make it work, often by economic pressures and blackmail, countries, through their central banks, were prohibited from fixing the value of their currency.
As a result, less developed countries were pushed deeper into poverty. The World Bank and the IMF pretended to be generous by imposing lower rates of interest compared to other private commercial banks, but seldom did people know of the harsh conditionality of them having to devalue their currency.
For that, people, mostly from the Third World, suffered untold sufferings and hardships because the sudden and increased dependence by the financial oligarchy on that novel business resulted in the erosion in the value of real wages. Production and the trading of manufactured goods became less and less attractive as they generated less profit compared to the wizard-like wealth created by money trading.
The mad rush to save cost by legitimate manufacturers and traders invariably gave birth to a much harsher form of exploitation that contributed further to reduce the cost of wage. Most painfully, the advent of labor-only contracting or contractualization cut short their security of tenure, a milestone in the workers’ movement won through decades by their blood and tears. Concepts as labor-flexibility, outsourcing, and even making a mockery of organizing their already slave-like condition into some kind of labor cooperatives became fashionable. As usual, those quisling labor leaders were the ones that made money out of their deplorable condition.
The workers had no choice because everything was reduced to a struggle for survival. The workers’ international solidarity was lost with the demise of the Soviet Union and the subsequent metamorphosing of the economies of the former socialist states led by Russia and China to free enterprise economies.
The profit generated by money trading emboldened the financial oligarchy to do away with production and manufacturing. Effectively, the workers already receiving a much reduced income ended up in a much worse situation than the slaves US President Lincoln emancipated.
Should the workers starve and die, their capitalist employers would have no reason to be sorry. After all, wages for whatever is its value under the new era of monetary trading was the cash equivalent for their “freedom.” Like an unsold commodity in the market, the slave-like conditions of the contracted-out workers was effectively treated as outside of their employer’s moral responsibility.
The devaluation of the currency resulted in the gradual but continued depreciation in the value of exports that by the same axiomatic principle would cost them more to purchase equipment badly needed to serve as their lynchpin to achieve self-sufficiency through industrialization. Domestically, the practice became more vicious as local banks exacted higher interest rates that made them no different from the international financial vultures.
Of course, the abrogation of usury or the removal of the ceiling on interest rates necessarily would require the abolition of all price regulations, including rental. Everything has to be deregulated if only to allow production cost to cope with the business of usury.
It was an excruciating dilemma lackey states like the Philippines had to take. Should they refuse, instantly all businesses in the country would close, and instead all would just resort to the most convenient business of usury. Besides, there is risk in hiring workers who, at any time might demand a wage increase that if not granted, would resort to strike or engaging in manufacturing that would require them to pour in huge capital investment to build plants. Worse, everything could even end up in waste due to the possible flooding of cheap goods coming from other countries because of free trade.
Through this principle, the world saw the rapid rise of a new breed of financial oligarchy. One could not be wrong in judging that the rise of the local financial oligarchy was made possible because of their collaboration with their international counterpart; that as quislings they in fact acted as the local enforcers of the abominable practice that would routinely exact a pound of flesh from their countrymen.
Indeed, the saying that “money begets money” came to full realization. From the elementary practice of lending it soon evolved into a revolutionary concept of trading money for money. Invariably, the value of money became volatile like the price of commodities affected by the indubitable economic law of supply and demand. As that cycle of currency trading went on, the value of the local currency continues to depreciate much faster, making it more difficult for governments to meet their basic obligations to the people.
(rodkap@yahoo.com.ph)
Saturday, September 10, 2011
Friday, September 9, 2011
Garbage — political and otherwise
DIE HARD III
Herman Tiu Laurel
9/9/11
Exasperated with the politics in our country and writing without any hope of any constructive responses from the system, I took some time off to find solace in the development of my own small, hilly nine-hectare farm. The singkamas (jicama) didn’t grow as planned this season with the overdose of rain the past months; but with more sun these days, they’re beginning to catch up again. The luya (ginger), meantime, I hope will keep on schedule, as they’re slated for harvesting by the end of the month.
The orchard is growing well. After years of patient planting and fighting off brush fires that have thrice decimated our mangoes, we’re finally seeing a few hundred trees growing shoulder high. We’ve also got suha (pomelo), guyabano (soursop), calamansi (Philippine lemon), and a dozen more varieties growing; but since we’re averse to using chemically-synthesized farming aids, the problem now is where to get enough organic fertilizers and soil conditioners.
This dilemma then brought me to study many alternatives, including tapping the poultries around the area; but the entire supply of chicken manure had already been reserved for a Department of Environment and Natural Resources (DENR) jatropha experimental farm in the same barangay.
Serendipitously, I had scheduled a cable TV interview with one of our national science and technology institutes and called for a pre-interview visit of its facilities and projects. One of the items I had in mind was to observe the “bioreactor” that converts market waste to soil conditioner and, with a higher addition of dry matter that increases the carbon-to-nitrogen (C:N) ratio, its production of fertilizer. Imagine, how much fertilizer we can possibly produce from converting all the market waste of Metro Manila!
Once there, I was toured around the institute’s many projects, including an experiment on the combination of animal waste with ground-up and dried water hyacinths (water lilies) to produce methane. Then, I was informed of another experiment — a floating shredder for water lilies that can churn and grind the prolific water pest to compact dust for easy transport and use.
When it came to the market waste bioreactor that I was most keen about, I was shown three units and one was covered in canvass, apparently waiting to be delivered. I then learned that it was a unit supposed to have been delivered to a Metro Manila city that was all set for operation when city council members intervened and asked for guarantees, such as on public nuisance complaints, etc., which I thought should be the city’s area of responsibility, being a local government-owned equipment.
The use of this market waste bioreactor would have reduced market waste hauling for up to 90 percent. That apparently is why the city council kept putting obstacles on the device’s way to the markets. It is common knowledge that garbage hauling contracts are one of the main sources of “sidelines” of insatiable city politicians.
These pols are the political garbage that our society still has found no way of disposing. Proliferating from way up in Malacañang down to the lowliest of barangays, they accumulate, grow and clog up the entire social system into stagnation and teeming rot.
And while the said city officials continue to block such a worthwhile project, Malacañang officials, for their part, block budgetary spending, waiting for their own contractors in the Public-Private Partnership (PPP) projects — this, as senators and Philippine National Police (PNP) brass block the real prosecution of the former First Couple in the choppers mess and other scams.
One hopeful development on garbage disposal comes from the revival of an old advocacy of mine — the garbage incinerator. The Clean Air Act and its Implementing Rules and Regulations inserted inane provisions that practically banned municipal incinerators in the Philippines, leading to the horrendous garbage problem all over the country, not to mention repeated deaths in garbage landslides, like Payatas in 2000 (which killed 200) and, recently, the one in Baguio that killed five.
Good thing we received this news from Sen. Antonio Trillanes’ media officer, Careen Sapallo: “(In eyeing the) use of incinerators to address… the worsening problem of waste disposal in the country… (Trillanes) filed Senate Bill 225 to revise the law signed in 1999 in light of the ‘trashslide’ set off by heavy rains in Baguio City… (It is a system supported by) advances in emission control designs, along with strict standards and monitoring system, (which) have caused large reduction of pollution in the atmosphere.”
This “new” technology (which I had studied a decade ago) involves the use ceramic filters, catalytic burners, and high heat after-burners in reducing the problem of dioxin emissions to insignificant amounts. And because backyard (or street-side) burning of garbage is the one that produces the most amounts of uncontrolled toxic emissions, municipal incineration aided by new technology thus becomes all the more imperative.
Frankly, the Clean Air Act was a product of ignorance perpetrated by the anti-development, green and global warming scare mongers as well as the electricity oligarchs who wanted no cheap competition from incinerator-generated power. Now, if only we can build an incinerator that will burn to a crisp those dirty politicians and oligarchs on sight, that would be a first!
(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 on “Sci-Tech Innovations: Key to Filipinos’ Economic Emancipation”; visit http://newkatipunero.blogspot.com for our articles plus TV and radio archives)
Herman Tiu Laurel
9/9/11
Exasperated with the politics in our country and writing without any hope of any constructive responses from the system, I took some time off to find solace in the development of my own small, hilly nine-hectare farm. The singkamas (jicama) didn’t grow as planned this season with the overdose of rain the past months; but with more sun these days, they’re beginning to catch up again. The luya (ginger), meantime, I hope will keep on schedule, as they’re slated for harvesting by the end of the month.
The orchard is growing well. After years of patient planting and fighting off brush fires that have thrice decimated our mangoes, we’re finally seeing a few hundred trees growing shoulder high. We’ve also got suha (pomelo), guyabano (soursop), calamansi (Philippine lemon), and a dozen more varieties growing; but since we’re averse to using chemically-synthesized farming aids, the problem now is where to get enough organic fertilizers and soil conditioners.
This dilemma then brought me to study many alternatives, including tapping the poultries around the area; but the entire supply of chicken manure had already been reserved for a Department of Environment and Natural Resources (DENR) jatropha experimental farm in the same barangay.
Serendipitously, I had scheduled a cable TV interview with one of our national science and technology institutes and called for a pre-interview visit of its facilities and projects. One of the items I had in mind was to observe the “bioreactor” that converts market waste to soil conditioner and, with a higher addition of dry matter that increases the carbon-to-nitrogen (C:N) ratio, its production of fertilizer. Imagine, how much fertilizer we can possibly produce from converting all the market waste of Metro Manila!
Once there, I was toured around the institute’s many projects, including an experiment on the combination of animal waste with ground-up and dried water hyacinths (water lilies) to produce methane. Then, I was informed of another experiment — a floating shredder for water lilies that can churn and grind the prolific water pest to compact dust for easy transport and use.
When it came to the market waste bioreactor that I was most keen about, I was shown three units and one was covered in canvass, apparently waiting to be delivered. I then learned that it was a unit supposed to have been delivered to a Metro Manila city that was all set for operation when city council members intervened and asked for guarantees, such as on public nuisance complaints, etc., which I thought should be the city’s area of responsibility, being a local government-owned equipment.
The use of this market waste bioreactor would have reduced market waste hauling for up to 90 percent. That apparently is why the city council kept putting obstacles on the device’s way to the markets. It is common knowledge that garbage hauling contracts are one of the main sources of “sidelines” of insatiable city politicians.
These pols are the political garbage that our society still has found no way of disposing. Proliferating from way up in Malacañang down to the lowliest of barangays, they accumulate, grow and clog up the entire social system into stagnation and teeming rot.
And while the said city officials continue to block such a worthwhile project, Malacañang officials, for their part, block budgetary spending, waiting for their own contractors in the Public-Private Partnership (PPP) projects — this, as senators and Philippine National Police (PNP) brass block the real prosecution of the former First Couple in the choppers mess and other scams.
One hopeful development on garbage disposal comes from the revival of an old advocacy of mine — the garbage incinerator. The Clean Air Act and its Implementing Rules and Regulations inserted inane provisions that practically banned municipal incinerators in the Philippines, leading to the horrendous garbage problem all over the country, not to mention repeated deaths in garbage landslides, like Payatas in 2000 (which killed 200) and, recently, the one in Baguio that killed five.
Good thing we received this news from Sen. Antonio Trillanes’ media officer, Careen Sapallo: “(In eyeing the) use of incinerators to address… the worsening problem of waste disposal in the country… (Trillanes) filed Senate Bill 225 to revise the law signed in 1999 in light of the ‘trashslide’ set off by heavy rains in Baguio City… (It is a system supported by) advances in emission control designs, along with strict standards and monitoring system, (which) have caused large reduction of pollution in the atmosphere.”
This “new” technology (which I had studied a decade ago) involves the use ceramic filters, catalytic burners, and high heat after-burners in reducing the problem of dioxin emissions to insignificant amounts. And because backyard (or street-side) burning of garbage is the one that produces the most amounts of uncontrolled toxic emissions, municipal incineration aided by new technology thus becomes all the more imperative.
Frankly, the Clean Air Act was a product of ignorance perpetrated by the anti-development, green and global warming scare mongers as well as the electricity oligarchs who wanted no cheap competition from incinerator-generated power. Now, if only we can build an incinerator that will burn to a crisp those dirty politicians and oligarchs on sight, that would be a first!
(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 on “Sci-Tech Innovations: Key to Filipinos’ Economic Emancipation”; visit http://newkatipunero.blogspot.com for our articles plus TV and radio archives)
Tuesday, September 6, 2011
Info consumers beware
CONSUMERS DEMAND!
Herman Tiu Laurel
9/5-7/2011
Every human being is an information consumer. We eat, drink, and sleep sopping up information, with much of it paid for by ourselves--through newspapers and cable TV subscriptions we get--or by advertisers, PR agents, political spin masters, religious sects, foreign-funded social media groups, ad nausea.
Behind every bit of information bombarding everyone is an angle the issuer wants imprinted in the public mind, be it to sell a product, build an image, or reinforce an ideology.
But most people simply are not aware of their being information consumers and think nothing of whatever is dished out to them, which their brains absorb without discrimination.
Consumers in the traditional sense are more educated about their food choices, examining labels for ingredients and expiration dates, than about the information they swallow--often hook, line, and sinker.
Wave of (Dis)Information
The current wave of (dis)information emanating from international mainstream media on Libya, for instance, is carried out through massively tainted feeds that reach the world’s population.
A prime example of this is a BBC video documentary report, where a humongous demonstration was portrayed as a 200,000 strong pro-rebel demonstration in Tripoli’s “Green Square” last August 22, which was, on closer inspection, actually a demonstration in India with the Indian tri-color flag that is very similar to Libya’s being waved by the massive throng.
That was done at a crucial psychological moment as NATO transported its Al-Qaeda cohorts into Tripoli by sea and, with its special forces taking the lead, helped them take over the crucial center of the country.
Although they succeeded, what’s worse is only few outside of those with critical perspectives of western information manipulation who follow anti-imperialist and anti-globalist websites such as the Centre for Research on Globalization know the real score.
Information Distortions
From the history-changing disinformation campaigns like the one cited above to more domestic developments, we can point out the main info distortions that Filipinos are subjected to everyday.
One current disinformation scheme I am detecting in the local scene concerns the Comelec and its continuing role in foisting manipulated “democratic” elections in the country. A campaign to boost the credibility of a certain Comelec official as a no-nonsense, straight shooter is again underway.
A scenario is being staged between the new Comelec chief and the election body’s erstwhile legal department head for the latter’s transfer to the “navy” so to speak, or his being put on “floating status” for being “hard headed.”
This official, touted as the Comelec man who was at the center of the “overpriced ballot folders” exposé (when in fact it was to the credit of whistleblower Atty. Melchor Magdamo), only got into it because he had no other choice but to pursue the investigation when the scandal came to light.
Staged Scenario
I know a scenario is being staged as I have seen it done with the same Comelec man once before--when Magdamo was put “in the freezer” during the 2004 elections for being uncooperative in the cheating believed to be carried out by the Comelec for Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo.
Still, despite what he conceivably could have been privy to, he actually did nothing nor exposed anything.
While I fell for the ploy and helped build this individual up through my columns and radio programs before, in the 2010 elections, when, as chief of the Comelec’s legal department, he went full blast in promoting the Hocus PCOS machines of Smartmatic, declaring that all “human errors” were already impossible with the machines despite expert opinions of the late Mano Alcuaz, an IT specialist, and numerous information experts of the University of the Philippines, my suspicions were confirmed beyond doubt.
As Comelec’s legal chief, he was also instrumental in justifying the removal by the Comelec of at least 12 major safety features which the election automation law required of the voting machines, despite this being a blatant legal violation.
Election Manipulator
Given all these, the first thing that easily comes to my mind is a “stalking horse.”
Defined as “something serving to conceal plans; a screen, consisting of a figure of a horse behind which a hunter hides while stalking game; a cover, covert, concealment, screen (or) a covering that serves to conceal or shelter something,” a “stalking horse” is indeed an appropriate term for the role being played by this Comelec man for the big-time manipulators of Philippine elections.
Another factor that I noted in this act is a certain Filipino-American Internet PR man, Perry Diaz, who posted in his mailing list, “Rafanan, the ex-future people's champion in the Comelec,” a puff piece that was fittingly criticized by Ado Paglinawan, a maverick Filipino and Hocus PCOS opponent residing in the US.
Factoring my experience with Diaz in past political struggles where I found him to be an FVR PR man, it wasn’t hard for me to put two and two together.
The Issue of Electricity
Of course, the one major information centerpiece that has had a continuous run of distortions over the past 10 years is the issue of electricity in the Philippines.
ABS-CBN and the entire mainstream media industry conspired (with some possibly being hoodwinked) into promoting the “reform” theme of the EPIRA (Electric Power Industry Reform Act) as a major move to lower electricity rates in the country.
This, by the way, is the same tact they are using to promote the RE or Renewable Energy law nowadays, which is going to charge us four times higher than the regular generation cost.
Alas, 10 years since the EPIRA, the public now knows that we have the highest power rates in Asia.
So, information consumers beware: The information you are absorbing everyday needs closer scrutiny. As our editor said in her column in the last issue, “Read between the lies.”
(My new e-mail: mentong2011@gmail.com. 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 on “Sci-Tech Innovations: Key to Filipinos’ Economic Emancipation” with DoST NCR Director Tess Fortuna and DoST innovators; visit http://newkatipunero.blogspot.com for our articles plus TV and radio archives)
Herman Tiu Laurel
9/5-7/2011
Every human being is an information consumer. We eat, drink, and sleep sopping up information, with much of it paid for by ourselves--through newspapers and cable TV subscriptions we get--or by advertisers, PR agents, political spin masters, religious sects, foreign-funded social media groups, ad nausea.
Behind every bit of information bombarding everyone is an angle the issuer wants imprinted in the public mind, be it to sell a product, build an image, or reinforce an ideology.
But most people simply are not aware of their being information consumers and think nothing of whatever is dished out to them, which their brains absorb without discrimination.
Consumers in the traditional sense are more educated about their food choices, examining labels for ingredients and expiration dates, than about the information they swallow--often hook, line, and sinker.
Wave of (Dis)Information
The current wave of (dis)information emanating from international mainstream media on Libya, for instance, is carried out through massively tainted feeds that reach the world’s population.
A prime example of this is a BBC video documentary report, where a humongous demonstration was portrayed as a 200,000 strong pro-rebel demonstration in Tripoli’s “Green Square” last August 22, which was, on closer inspection, actually a demonstration in India with the Indian tri-color flag that is very similar to Libya’s being waved by the massive throng.
That was done at a crucial psychological moment as NATO transported its Al-Qaeda cohorts into Tripoli by sea and, with its special forces taking the lead, helped them take over the crucial center of the country.
Although they succeeded, what’s worse is only few outside of those with critical perspectives of western information manipulation who follow anti-imperialist and anti-globalist websites such as the Centre for Research on Globalization know the real score.
Information Distortions
From the history-changing disinformation campaigns like the one cited above to more domestic developments, we can point out the main info distortions that Filipinos are subjected to everyday.
One current disinformation scheme I am detecting in the local scene concerns the Comelec and its continuing role in foisting manipulated “democratic” elections in the country. A campaign to boost the credibility of a certain Comelec official as a no-nonsense, straight shooter is again underway.
A scenario is being staged between the new Comelec chief and the election body’s erstwhile legal department head for the latter’s transfer to the “navy” so to speak, or his being put on “floating status” for being “hard headed.”
This official, touted as the Comelec man who was at the center of the “overpriced ballot folders” exposé (when in fact it was to the credit of whistleblower Atty. Melchor Magdamo), only got into it because he had no other choice but to pursue the investigation when the scandal came to light.
Staged Scenario
I know a scenario is being staged as I have seen it done with the same Comelec man once before--when Magdamo was put “in the freezer” during the 2004 elections for being uncooperative in the cheating believed to be carried out by the Comelec for Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo.
Still, despite what he conceivably could have been privy to, he actually did nothing nor exposed anything.
While I fell for the ploy and helped build this individual up through my columns and radio programs before, in the 2010 elections, when, as chief of the Comelec’s legal department, he went full blast in promoting the Hocus PCOS machines of Smartmatic, declaring that all “human errors” were already impossible with the machines despite expert opinions of the late Mano Alcuaz, an IT specialist, and numerous information experts of the University of the Philippines, my suspicions were confirmed beyond doubt.
As Comelec’s legal chief, he was also instrumental in justifying the removal by the Comelec of at least 12 major safety features which the election automation law required of the voting machines, despite this being a blatant legal violation.
Election Manipulator
Given all these, the first thing that easily comes to my mind is a “stalking horse.”
Defined as “something serving to conceal plans; a screen, consisting of a figure of a horse behind which a hunter hides while stalking game; a cover, covert, concealment, screen (or) a covering that serves to conceal or shelter something,” a “stalking horse” is indeed an appropriate term for the role being played by this Comelec man for the big-time manipulators of Philippine elections.
Another factor that I noted in this act is a certain Filipino-American Internet PR man, Perry Diaz, who posted in his mailing list, “Rafanan, the ex-future people's champion in the Comelec,” a puff piece that was fittingly criticized by Ado Paglinawan, a maverick Filipino and Hocus PCOS opponent residing in the US.
Factoring my experience with Diaz in past political struggles where I found him to be an FVR PR man, it wasn’t hard for me to put two and two together.
The Issue of Electricity
Of course, the one major information centerpiece that has had a continuous run of distortions over the past 10 years is the issue of electricity in the Philippines.
ABS-CBN and the entire mainstream media industry conspired (with some possibly being hoodwinked) into promoting the “reform” theme of the EPIRA (Electric Power Industry Reform Act) as a major move to lower electricity rates in the country.
This, by the way, is the same tact they are using to promote the RE or Renewable Energy law nowadays, which is going to charge us four times higher than the regular generation cost.
Alas, 10 years since the EPIRA, the public now knows that we have the highest power rates in Asia.
So, information consumers beware: The information you are absorbing everyday needs closer scrutiny. As our editor said in her column in the last issue, “Read between the lies.”
(My new e-mail: mentong2011@gmail.com. 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 on “Sci-Tech Innovations: Key to Filipinos’ Economic Emancipation” with DoST NCR Director Tess Fortuna and DoST innovators; visit http://newkatipunero.blogspot.com for our articles plus TV and radio archives)
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
