The bases redux

By Randy David

In September 1991, the Philippine Senate voted to reject a new bases treaty that would have allowed the United States to keep its military facilities in the Philippines. That decision was a watershed in the relationship between the Philippines and its former colonial master. Many thought of it as marking the true beginning of a postcolonial era for the country, which acquired its formal status as an independent nation in 1946. Yet, the US bases issue did not end there.

There has been, since 1991, a determined effort to reverse the effects of the Senate vote. First, our leaders thought we had to appease our American friends. The Visiting Forces Agreement was crafted mainly for that purpose. Because it ran against the spirit of the 1991 vote, the VFA was rationalized as integral to our commitments under the RP-US Mutual Defense Treaty. Then, after 9/11, the global hunt for the al-Qaida terrorist cells in Southern Mindanao extended the scope of the VFA. Visiting American troops subsequently became a regular fixture in Mindanao.

Today, ironically, the justification for regularizing the American military presence in the country revolves around the same reason that had been invoked in the early debates on the US bases—the threat posed by China. What had seemed so ridiculously remote in the late 1960s and ’70s, when China was an underdeveloped agrarian economy hobbled by ideology, now appears so real that if the same bases treaty were submitted to a Senate vote today, it could win handily.

What has changed dramatically is China’s place in the world. In a span of only three decades, the backward country next door has achieved a level of economic prosperity that was thought impossible under Maoist leadership. The key factor was Deng Xiaoping. It was he who made it conceivable for the Chinese Communist Party to preside over the capitalist transformation of that country’s economy.

The rise of China as an economic power has however unleashed its own dynamic. It cannot now afford to stop growing. This unceasing drive for growth has in turn fueled an unquenchable thirst for natural resources wherever they may be found. It is the old story of imperialism. A new rising power starts flexing its military muscles in order to secure resources it cannot obtain through economic cooperation and diplomatic means. That’s where China is today. It seeks to convert the economies of its poorer neighbors into components of its own gigantic economy. This is what it has lately done to Africa. It is what it has tried to do in the Philippines—not by enlisting the help of the local communists but by generously rewarding politicians who are willing to use their powers to accommodate China’s expansionary agenda.

China’s leaders had a cozy relationship with Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo. Today, it is the opposite. China has taken an overtly hostile attitude toward the P-Noy administration. It can wait until P-Noy’s term is over. But, China now has the power to shape events—to intervene, like the United States has done, in the internal affairs of any country. In the next presidential election, China may not be content with simply being a spectator.

I salute the way P-Noy has stood up to Chinese bullying. But it is unfortunate that the assertion of our sovereignty vis-à-vis China is pushing us toward a revival of the colonial relationship that our past leaders had heroically tried to end. It is bad enough that the VFA—which was originally meant only to provide a legal cover for visiting US forces participating in occasional joint military exercises—has been used to legitimize the regular presence in the country of American troops. It is such a shame (not to mention a patent violation of the Constitution) that we are now talking of constructing new facilities in Subic and Clark for the use of foreign troops.

If all this is because we wish to protect ourselves from China, then we need to review our premises. First, the United States is in Asia for its own interests and not for ours. Part of those interests is to contain China’s military power and influence. While we may indeed find common ground with America, we must not delude ourselves into thinking that US troops are here to defend our national interests against those of China. Most of all, we cannot surrender to America the same sovereignty we passionately assert against China.

Second, do we really believe that China’s leaders are prepared to actually start a war over territorial claims in the South China Sea? It is safe to assume that they know such a war would draw the United States into the conflict, and there would be no way of preventing its escalation. Should war with China become unavoidable, US forces would prefer to fight it in Asia, rather than on American soil.

“This rigmarole about protecting the Philippines is window-dressing: is it not?” Sen. J. William Fulbright asked Rear Adm. Draper Kauffman in a 1969 hearing of the US congressional subcommittee on US security agreements and commitments abroad. Admiral Kauffman, then the commander of the US naval forces in the Philippines, stammered and replied thus: “No, sir; I do not think it is window-dressing. I think it is a mutual advantage or else we would probably have to pay rent, something like that, if there were no advantage to them. I think they believe it to be in their advantage from their own defense point of view, but I believe we are there … because these are very fine bases for the United States.”

American interests in the region have not changed much. But, we have changed. We cannot turn our back on what we achieved in 1991 when our senators said “No” to a new bases agreement—emancipation from our colonial past.

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public.lives@gmail.com

fund-raising for EDSA Uno, Dos &Tres, the book…. (updated)

yes, i’m on fund-raising mode for this third book on EDSA.  an updated english version of Himagsikan sa EDSA–Walang Himala! (2000) that was based on Chronology of a Revolution 1986 (1996).  i wrap it up with a reading of Edsa Dos & Tres — how we could have done them better had we been more informed of and attuned to EDSA Uno’s 10-day template.  yes, 10 days.  my count starts with cory’s launch of the civil disobedience and crony-boycott campaign.

the title of the book is EDSA Uno, A Narrative and Analysis with Notes on Edsa Dos & Tres.  it has a foreword by ninotchka rosca, an afterword by patricio abinales, and blurbs by randy david, peque gallaga, and rene saguisag.  the book is being laid out by designer adam david.  the cover, inspired by stuartxchange.com‘s edsa graphics and executed by merv malonzo, is due for a final tweak.  am doing the index myself (now on day 3) to cut on costs.

so i can sell the book cheap, php 350 at most, so it gets into the hands of as many of the pinoy reading public as possible, i am publishing EDSA Uno independently of mainstream media, and asking kindred spirits for donations — no return-on-investment other than the satisfaction of helping spread the story of EDSA Uno.

i hope to raise some P250,000 at least to cover production costs — artists’ fees, printing costs (1000 copies), and book launch.  the proceeds, after give-aways to media and donors, to pay me a bit for the work.

donors will get a free copy and credits in the book’s acknowledgements and website.

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katrina started emailing family and friends on our mailing list some two, three weeks ago.  maraming salamat kina nancy & dante amador (who kicked it off with a 10K check), lyca benitez-brown, randy david, tom umali, gary salcedo, leilani & art mapili, cielito corpuz, manuel buencamino, baboo mondonedo, sara and nicky santiago, gretchen and jun macabasco, exie abola, j. carlitos g. cruz, kenneth cobonpue, estela navarra, ipat and howie severino, godofredo stuart jr. and leila mariano, delan and jae robillos, gang badoy, and an anonymous one, whose donations add up so far to a stash of some 160, 000 php.

salamat salamat, you all, for the vote of confidence.  and to everyone else reading this, please please feel free to contribute to the cause and to spread the word.

all donations that come in before we go to press will be acknowledged in the book. late donations will be acknowledged on the website in-the-making.  and please please feel free to be generous.  in the happy event that we overshoot the target, we will simply have as many more copies printed, some for distribution to public school and university libraries.

i do hope that you decide to be part of this project.  we go to press around mid-july, and we launch the book on the 21st of August 2013, the 30th anniversary of Ninoy’s assassination.

email katrinastuartsantiago@gmail.com for donation details.

p.s.

thank you, too, for offers to buy advance copies at a discount.  i understand that this is the way some indie publishers go to raise funds for printing. unfortunately it would defeat the purpose of selling cheap, getting the book out to as wide a reading public as possible, and still getting paid some for the research, writing,  and production.

operation snowden

fascinating true-to-life political drama.  the whole world is snowden’s stage, even if we don’t know exactly where he is.  and who to believe.  meanwhile the wired world is on edge. privacy is no small matter.

Edward Snowden: the whistleblower behind the NSA surveillance revelations by Glenn Greenwald, Ewen MacAskill and Laura Poitras

Edward Snowden, NSA files source: ‘If they want to get you, in time they will’ by Ewen MacAskill

My creeping concern that the NSA leaker is not who he purports to be … by Naomi Wolf (Notes)

My creeping concern that the NSA leaker is not who he purports to be … (updated) by Naomi Wolf

Obama’s Infatuation with the Espionage Act by Bill Simpich

Wonkbook: Does Edward Snowden even exist? by Ezra Klein and Evan Solta

The NSA’s Intelligence-Industrial Complex by Valerie Plame Wilson and Joe Wilson

Greenwald Blasts Critics Who Claim He ‘Aided And Abetted’ Snowden: ‘I Call That Investigative Journalism’ by Matt Wilstein

Hide and leak: Where is Edward Snowden?

 

pinoy education: from bad to worse, k-12 and all

read conrado de quiros’s Making the grade, part of which dwells on the allocation for debt payments being 3 times larger than that for education:

… our schools are getting worse. Only the University of the Philippines remained among the top 100 of 300 schools in Asia. Ateneo de Manila University, De La Salle University and the University of Santo Tomas, though still in the middle ranges, slipped during the past year. Specifically, UP improved from 68th to 67th while Ateneo fell from 86th to 109th, La Salle from 142th to 151th, and UST from 140th to 150th.

Rep. Luz Ilagan, a former university professor, says this is due to schools preferring quantity to quality. Many universities are really just diploma mills offering popular courses based on public demand. Poor-quality elementary and high school education lead to poor-quality students entering college. Some of them have barely passable comprehension and writing skills.

Rep. Antonio Tinio says it’s funds, or the sore lack of them. “In Asia, public universities rule. In order for our higher education sector to become competitive, the government must drastically step up its funding and other support for our state universities and colleges. Unfortunately, government higher education policy over the last two decades has gone in the other direction, towards budget cuts, contractualization of faculty and commercialization.”

Ric Reyes of the Freedom from Debt Coalition puts the case of lack of funds for public education more forcefully. Last year, the budget for debt payments was P739 billion, three times more than the budget for education, which was only P224.9 billion. The latter was only 2.2 percent of GNP, well below the world benchmark of 6 percent. Unesco notes that the Philippines has the lowest expenditure for education in proportion to total budget. Since 1955, education has dropped from 30.78 percent of the budget to 15 percent post Edsa. This year’s education budget at 14.97 percent is lower than the post Edsa average of 15 percent.

I share their sense of apprehension, if not alarm, at the state, and future, of our education. With some caveats.

Certainly, I agree that we need to revise the budget and give education the utmost, ultimate, first-and-last priority it deserves. Which, not quite incidentally, the Constitution decrees. Debt payments are not the national priority, education is. Which, not quite incidentally as well, shows the continuing horror of martial law: To this day we are still paying for the Marcoses’ debt. Next time Imelda throws a party, know that you and your children are paying for it.

I don’t care if government makes all sorts of excuses to defer payment (“Sorry, but we have mouths to feed and minds to open”), or more conciliatorily negotiates to restructure payments again and again, but education should be three times more than debt payments. Hell, education should have half the budget, if we are going to have half the chance to curb, if not eradicate, poverty….

and read ben kritz’s Expanded program getting off on the wrong foot, mostly about k12 and how it’s meant, not to improve the quality of education, but to prepare students for overseas foreign work.

Rep. Luz Ilagan of Gabriela party-list criticized the government for “only adding quantity, not quality” with the implementation of the K-12 program, in reaction to a recent ranking that placed only five (down from 14 a year ago) Philippine universities among the top 300 universities in Asia. Ilagan’s contention is that the quality of Philippine higher has declined because of the poor preparation of incoming freshmen students and a fixation “on getting many students to graduate from popular courses that markets demand”; not nearly enough attention has been paid to improving the quality of the primary and secondary curriculum, in Ilagan’s view, therefore the K-12 program as it has been presented will have no real positive effect in improving the Philippines’ al reputation.

Ordinarily I regard the viewpoints of acknowledged leftists with a high degree of skepticism, particularly those expressed by the Migrante group, which has the seemingly incompatible objectives of promoting the interests of overseas workers while working towards eventually ending the labor export phenomenon. Over the weekend, however, I attended the annual parents’ orientation meeting at the private school where my three children are enrolled, and I was surprised, to say the least, at the “official” point of view towards the K-12 program. The academic director of our school—which already had a robust academic and extra-curricular program, as well as a good reputation for producing college entrants—in addressing the K-12 program offered the opinion that it “would better prepare students to find work overseas because of its focus on vocational training, and the fact that the students will be 18 [years old] [and thus legally employable] when they graduate high school.”

Knowing how diligently our school’s administration coordinates its management with Department of (DepEd) policy, it would now appear as though the complaints of Migrante’s Martinez and Ilagan have considerable substance. And if, in fact, the enhancement of the Philippines’ human export resource is a priority of the K-12 program, then the fears of many that the extended curriculum was implemented for all the wrong reasons are completely valid.

back in july 2010, then ateneo president fr. bienvenido nebres criticized the aquino admin’s k-12 plans, recommending instead that extra years be added to “select college courses”.  fr. ben was ignored, of course, as the agenda, it would seem, has always been to perpetuate the pretense of “sound economic fundamentals” via OFW remittances.