RP Christmas gifts for US

DIE HARD III

Herman Tiu Laurel

12/21/2012

Daily Tribune

They were two long and hard battles fought by intellectually honest, caring, and patriotic Filipinos. No, I'm not writing here about the Philippine revolutionaries or the USAFFE soldiers or the Huks of the Fil-American War and World War II (WWII). I'm discussing the civil war over the Reproductive Health (RH) and the sin tax bills.
As it is generally true in all of Philippine History, the mentally and morally corrupt, the collaborators of foreign interests and powers, and the intellectually infirmed and depraved have prevailed — naturally with the hidden as well open interference of the alien interlopers.
This Christmas season, Filipino quislings (traitors) have legislated automatic annual gifts to the magis of America worth P10 billion (or $250 million), not to mention more in RH pork, for "essential medicines" to be bought from US condom-contraceptives makers — while forking perpetual billions to foreign cigarette manufacturers and smugglers.
"RH wins!" declared one newspaper headline. That's certainly the laugh of the year. It is nothing but an unmitigated victory for US strategic political and corporate interests, starting with Henry Kissinger's NSSM (National State Security Memorandum) 200 targeting the Philippines, with 10 other developing countries, for population reduction and preservation of the Third World for US economic interests.

The 30 years of population control crusades of the US, through the UN Population Commission, actually produced success. Philippine population growth rates declined from over three percent down to just 1.8 percent (as per World Bank data) the past years with massive funding from the US Congress. Thus, official funding for UN and NGO-sponsored population programs had been reduced as well. With that, Big Pharma condom and contraceptive firms need to continue having assured markets and profits — and have, unfortunately for us, found our country as the perfect sap.
Media and NGOs are the biggest components of this transnational pharmaceuticals propaganda war in getting distorted messages across — from myths that population growth is the cause of poverty instead of iniquitous economic policy and corruption, to making the issue a "feminist" crusade against the Catholic hierarchy's "male chauvinism," among other glib lines.

Such a campaign — rammed through "porkers" like Edcel Lagman, whose law office handles many of the multinational corporations' lobbying, or through the likes of the batty Miriam Santiago or the daughter of the late self-confessed BW shares scammer — goes to show that the RH campaign is another one of the big frauds committed by politicians again and again at the expense of the people's finances and welfare.
On the Sin Tax war, the onerous and lopsided Cesar Purisima, together with the BAT (British American Tobacco) company won in their machinations to make Filipino tobacco farmers and cigarette manufacturers pay the additional taxes the International Monetary Fund wants from the Philippines.
Though slightly reduced, the new and additional taxes on local tobacco and cigarettes are still more than what the overtaxed Filipino people can absorb, such that more of it will eventually wipe out the Ilocos tobacco sector, especially after the full blown equalization of taxes on foreign and local tobacco products is attained in the next five years. It will be boom times indeed for cigarette smuggling (for which BAT was indicted in an investigation by the British Parliament in 2002) after the passage of the new sin tax rates in the years to come. And Filipinos will be reduced to mere buyers of foreign or smuggled cigarettes, resulting in hundreds of thousands of lost local tobacco jobs.

As it was at the end of WWII when Japanese imperial forces were defeated and the tally of Filipino dead reached over one million, it was not the heroic Filipinos who fought the Japanese who were honored. It was the Filipino collaborators to the Japanese forces who were handed the victory flag and the helms of government in the new "independent" Philippine regime.
Sadly, the quislings almost always win here in this country. WWII Filipino patriots were eventually hounded out of participation in legal political processes (Rep. Luis Taruc and his party were ousted from Congress for instance) and had to continue the struggle via other means.
For Filipino patriots in the struggle to expose the RH law for the swindle that it is, as with the war to save our Philippine tobacco industry, the fight goes on but on a higher and broader plane.

In order to wipe out the quislings from Philippine society (or be wiped out in the process), it is the national revolution that must continue to be waged by letting the sham of the Republic of the Philippines be swept into the dustbin of history.
In the 2013 elections, we can contribute to this patriotic struggle against the quislings by selecting senatorial candidates with clear patriotic records. In the administration coalition line-up, there's only Sonny Trillanes who has shown this spirit; among the unaligned candidates, there's Teddy Casiño; and in the UNA slate, there's only the Estrada legacy to count on.

(Watch GNN's HTL show, GNN Channel 8, Saturdays, 8:15 p.m. to 9 p.m., 11:15 p.m. and Sunday 8 a.m., and over at www.gnntv-asia.com on "2013: The World and Philippine Economy;" tune in to 1098 AM radio Tuesday to Friday, 5 p.m. to 6 p.m., and visit http://newkatipunan.blogspot.com)

Looking back

DIE HARD III

Herman Tiu Laurel

12/17/2012

Daily Tribune

The end of 2012 is in sight and it's another month of looking back and assessing our triumphs as well as setbacks. Failure is not in my lexicon, for as long as one is alive any obstacle to a goal is only momentary difficulty.
At this juncture I can say with satisfaction that we have made positive contributions to the public welfare this year, and these are in the triumph against the DoTC's previously announced rate hike plan, a plan the BS Aquino III government had wanted to implement as far back as 2011. We indefatigably and persistently bared the facts about the Metro Rail Transit (MRT) and Light Rail Transit's (LRT's) financial situation; i.e. that it is not losing money, that it in fact is making a profit given the operations and maintenance (O&M) cost of only P9.11/pax/trip against the P10 to P15 the MRT charges.
The LRT is equally viable without increases as the "farebox" ratio analysis of its cost of 1.39 for LRT 1 and 1.01 for LRT 2 as Arnold Padilla of "A Radical's Nut" blog explains, "A farebox ratio of 1.0 means that fare revenues cover 100 percent of O&M. … which means that collections from passengers cover more than 100 percent of O&M. This provides more statistical evidence to our argument that fare revenues can cover O&M but the total costs are bloated by debt." The bloated debt of LRT 1 and 2, and the MRT, comes from the onerous contracts entered into by the FVR and Arroyo governments.
The MRT and LRT projects have been sold many times over with profit being made each turnover while the commuters continue to subsidize these profits of the "oligarchs."

The second contribution we can report to our readers and our people is — the successful exposé of the Hocus PCOS (precinct count optical scan) scam in the 2010 elections. It took all of three years, from the time before the elections itself when we, along with watchdogs like the Philippine Computer Society, the CenPeg and the AES Watch, to the post election years, before the whole truth was revealed, and as the saying goes: "Truth Will Out," and ironically the culprits were caught by their own mouths. "A fish is caught by its mouth."
When PCOS provider Smartmatic TIM filed a suit against Dominion Voting Systems Inc. (DMSI), its hardware and software design provider, it stated that DMSI "failed to deliver fully functional technology for use in the 2010 Philippines national election," "failing to place in escrow the required source code, hardware design, and manufacturing information."

The Smartmatic suit against its technology supplier reveals that, contrary to its claims to qualify to supply the PCOS machines in the 2010 elections, it is only a marketing firm and not the owner of a voting system technology. That explains all the last minute problems, revisions and removal of safety features in 2010 when the real technology company didn't support Smartmatic. Now all is clear why Smartmatic and the Commission on Elections (Comelec) EC gave all sorts of excuses just to avoid an unconditional third party testing of the PCOS and source code; they put obstacles to access to the source code; removed the ultra-violet lamp ballot verification, the voter confirmation of votes receipt and the Board of Election Inspector's digital signature components because the Smartmatic machines were "make do" machines as they did not have the technology and design.

It must be recalled that the Comelec under Chairman Melo then repeatedly affirmed by various assertions Smartmatic's claim that it is the owner of the technology for the voting machine (PCOS), now it is clear that it is only a marketing company and that it lied along with the Comelec. It is also now confirms my suspicion of Melo's sudden resignation right after the 2010 elections — he knew this would blow up and provided himself an escape hatch by resigning early. Now Melo is ensconced comfortably as director with a grand sinecure at the Bases Conversion and Development Authority. A new development on this score is retired Gen. Flor Fianza's additional exposé of Melo's operations that undermined the 2010 elections which appeared in his column "Duty Calls," all about the "national service" misused in the 2010 elections.

In 2010 a group which included myself, lawyer Bono Adaza, Mr. Ado Pagliinawan and several others filed a petition with the Supreme Court (SC) to annul the results of the 2010 Elections due to the countless infirmities it suffered. The SC has not resolved the petition in the two years and a half that has passed. The SC is in a dilemma and is frozen into paralysis in this case because there can be no denying, given the factual bases to condemn the 2010 Elections, that democracy was waylaid in 2010. We're ready to force the issue in the New Year with the new evidence in hand.

(Watch GNN's HTL show, GNN Channel 8, Saturdays, 8:15 to 9 p.m., 11:15 p.m. and Sunday 8 a.m., and over www.gnntv-asia.com: "A China-Philippines Update" with Chito Sta. Romana; tune to 1098AM radio Tuesday to Friday 5 to 6 p.m. http://newkatipunan.blogspot.com)

Why our laws deteriorate

BACKBENCHER

Rod P. Kapunan

12/15/2012

Manila Standard Today

The greatest tragedy of our time is catalyzed by that most pathetic role of our politicians to give in to the demands of every sector in our society. It is a tragedy as it is essentially wrong much that the mandate we gave to our elected officials is not anchored on that system of accommodating the various interests of people in a pluralistic society.

It is from this standpoint why through the years our political values have deteriorated, and badly. Such was bound to happen because we have overblown our understanding of freedom. We could no longer establish boundaries between freedom and mandate, which undoubtedly are indivisible to our understanding of the mechanics of democracy. We say this because we embraced the Western concept of freedom as unbridled.

From that point of view, we began to accept that equally wrong postulate of mandate as wholly emanating from the people, and not as something that needs some kind of political quantification. For instance, our conventional notion of a mandate begins in our understanding that it is the people that bestowed it upon our elected officials based on that stereotype notion called "democratic process".

Thus, when we begin to disagree with the policies of our elected leaders, especially on the laws they legislate, readily we feel justified in withdrawing our mandate either by not electing them in the next election or by booting them out of office. It never crossed our mind that the mandate we extended to our elected leaders is based only on that exclusive privilege to freely elect them. We never entertained the thought that our mandate could metamorphose to one of authority for them to fix and synchronize all the interests of the people so we would end up having a harmonious and progressive society.

This now explains why most of them fail to come out with laws designed to put order to our society. The thinking of both the executive and the lawmakers has been canalized to one of accommodating and satisfying the wishes of the people. Such emasculation and/or diminution of rights invariably trigger conflicting claims. Often, we wrongly take the dominance by one class as a vested right for, as usual, we equate their assertiveness as representing the majority. The great majority of our people have now been cowed down by this unconventional notion about our power. To question that would amount to an intrusion to one's freedom such that to regulate their interest now becomes taboo.

Since our elected officials are foremost politicians, the laws they legislate is now principally geared towards accommodating every sectoral demand. This in turn encouraged the most outrageous practice of "epalism" or the habit of wanting to be known to the public as responsible for the enactment of that law or for the accomplishment of that project. The race to accomplish something unwittingly caused many of our lawmakers to act as executive officials, forgetting that they were elected to enact law. They all want to implement and execute the laws dealing with projects or in protecting the rights of certain segments, hoping that come election day, the people would repay their gratitude by reelecting them.

Politicians will find every conceivable way to be known or to be identified with the project as though the money spent came directly from their pocket, and not as taxpayers' money. Any proposed laws are narrowed down to what will serve to advance their interest, and any law that is hinted of seeking to impose discipline for the purpose of putting order to society is most abhorred.

The effect is the moral and political decay of society. Our politicians tremble at the fear of not being elected; that in their attempt to please their constituents, they come out with hodgepodge approach all meant to superficially please their constituents. Thus, aside from living up to their role as politicians, they act like showbiz personalities or some kind of clowns.

Of course, there are exceptions to these self-serving laws their legislate. These exemptions include revenue raising laws and imperialist-dictated laws. Politicians would never budge to the demands of the people to lower taxes or to scrap existing ones. Even if at times if might trigger adverse reaction, revenue-raising bills are vital because they enable them to remain in power. The pork barrel generated by those laws is mainly intended to cater to the parochial demands of their constituents. After all, people easily forget that the taxes and fees imposed on them is the one politicians use to fray them. And then there are those so-called imperialist-dictated laws. It is not the money or their positive effects it will have on our people, but of the politicians' fear of being politically isolated by powerful pressure groups controlled by the US.

Good cases are those laws that dismantled all forms of subsidy, laws that deregulated the prices of goods and services, laws that increased taxes to assure payment to our international debt obligation, laws on population control including the now controversial reproductive health bill, our enactment of the Anti-Money Laundering Act, and our ratification of the International Criminal Court.

These are laws that have no immediate impact on our people. Nor could they help improve their economic well-being. Just the same, they are legislated for fear of possible retaliation from the US which has the power to single out politicians known for their anti-imperialist stand. This explains why through the years, the kind of laws our politicians have legislated have deteriorated. They have become so callous, and their political instinct have all but been reduced to just measuring whether their proposed bills would serve to promote their ambition to institute their own political dynasty.

rpkapunan@gmail.com