Category: aquino admin

OFWs, unite!

patindi nang patindi ang daing ng ating mga OFW sa tuloytuloy na pag-appreciate ng halaga ng piso.  wala na daw silang naiipon dahil kailangang dagdagan maya’t maya ang ipinapadala nila sa mga pamilya nila dito.  bakit parang binabalewala ng administrasyong aquino ang mga bayaning ito, e kung hindi sa kanila, matagal nang bumagsak ang ekonomiya?  sino lang ba talaga ang nakikinabang sa pag-taas ng halaga ng piso?  OFWs should unite and demand depreciation.

Collective impotence and the peso
By Raul V. Fabella 

THE RESOLUTION submitted by the PCCI to Pres. Aquino at the closing of the just-concluded Philippine Business Conference is notable. It called for the arrest of the continuing appreciation of the Philippine peso to safeguard our dollar earning industries. I will not comment on the specific recommendations but only in the general direction — a more assertive attitude towards the value of the peso. When, in early 1994, a group of us (Noel de Dios, Benjamin Diokno, Cayetano Paderanga, Toti Chikiamko and myself together with PHILEXPORT which is celebrating its 20th anniversary on Nov. 30, 2012) called for the deliberate weakening of the peso — a cause carried in a speech by the then Senate President Edgardo Angara at the first plenary session of the 1994 National Economic Summit — we were treated worse than lepers. One mouthpiece of the then central bank governor labelled us the “jukebox economists”: singing any tune the moneybags call. The implied moneybags, IMF and the World Bank, did not even know they were calling our tune; they were, in fact, calling the CB’s tune. They had a catatonic fixation for floating the exchange rate which, at that point of considerable dollar inflow, pointed to appreciation. And PCCI? It was firmly on the CB governor’s side. But even labor unions whose jobs we were trying to save called for our heads. Note that this was after the People’s Republic of China devalued its currency 40% early 1994. The yuan then stayed at about 8.30 per US dollar for 10 years despite ever larger trade surplus and howls of protest from the West. One did not need atomic physics to glean that PRC’s move would devastate Philippine manufacturing and employment. This was a plea for economic survival!

The CB governor himself responded to the proposal with the defiant “Over my dead body!” To the business complaint of high domestic interest rate (to support the overvalued peso), the central bank’s response was: “Borrow in dollars.” It was a counsel for disaster. Borrow with vengeance they did, especially the banks. After all, with appreciation a one way bet, you get low interest rate and a sure appreciation gain! The ‘Over my dead body’ boast being a portfolio inflow come-on and the consequent massive private foreign borrowing forced the peso upwards to ₱24/$. And this omen of an impending debacle was hailed a success! In other words, the Philippine economy got poison disguised as medicine. Two years later, the Asian Financial Crisis, the bitter harvest of private over-borrowing and asset bubbles, wiped out the gains slowly built up the last five years. The CB’s strong peso policy had aborted the Ramos growth momentum!

This rebuff of economic common sense is a source of great sadness for me personally. Toti Chikiamco summed up our collective despondency at the Summit’s rejection: “We lost our balls!” Meaning, we as a people failed a massive collective action test: we let ignorance among our central bankers and among the business community short-change our future. Had we moved the exchange rate as proposed, there would not have been excessive private foreign borrowing and the Asian Crisis would have spared our shores. The banks would have remained whole and the Ramos growth inertia would have continued into the next decade. Instead, we experienced a decade of painful curettage to sweep away the poisonous residues (bank NPAs, etc.) of that abortion. Our romance with sado-masochism marched on.

Such is the power of the CB: it can shatter a budding future. In this case, the strong peso was the sledgehammer. And this was not the first time the CB officiated in the abortion of a potential breakout in the post-EDSA era. The sledgehammer in the first was the interest rate cure administered through the JOBO Bills that shrank the economy to fit the overvalued peso: it found common cause with misguided military elements to abort the momentum of the post-EDSA Philippines. But that deserves its own re-telling.

Fast forward to 2012. The air is once more pregnant with promise. The signs are all pointing in the right direction. As if on cue, however, that same abortive sledgehammer rears its head. Will we overcome the collective action challenge this time? Now that the players and the economic realities have changed. Now that there is a new and more open dispensation in the BSP. Now that even such sworn enemies as the PCCI has switched lanes. Now that OFW remittance is the country’s lifeblood. Now that BPO is the sunshine industry and the big conglomerates have dollar earning assets. Now that the old global monetary consensus has become tired and misguided. Now that the challenge – keep the exchange rate from dipping below ₱42/$1 — is much simpler than in earlier times.

I dare take heart. A new collective consensus seems a-building. We the people should now take the bull by the horns and not leave it to bureaucrats. Would that this time we will not lose our balls. Let not collective impotence again mock our hopes. Even if it should happen twenty years late!

Raul V. Fabella is the chairman of the Institute for Development and Econometric Analysis, a professor at the UP School of Economics, and a member of the National Academy of Science and Technology. For comments and inquiries, please email us atidea.introspective@gmail.com. To know more about IDEA, please visitwww.idea.org.ph.

 

mindanao, marcos, aquino

sharing a rare angle on mindanao through the lens of a soldier’s wife.

At the Libingan ng mga Bayani 
By Amelia H.C. Ylagan

ANCIENT ACACIAS stretch their limbs to the skies in the exuberant yawns of their leafy canopies. Filigrees of light and shadow from leaves trembling in the slight breeze speckle the grass — while on the horizon, visible waves of steely white heat vibrate silent reverence. Someone up there quietly peers through the acacias in perpetual care of those buried under the mute white crosses at the Libingan ng mga Bayani — the national cemetery for heroes.

Alas, that the sacred silence would be intermittently violated by the crass zoom of low-flying jumbo aircraft landing at the international airport nearby. Maybe the juxtaposition of sound and silence at the Libingan has some meaning: for the majority of those lying under the white stone crosses were soldiers killed in action — in World War II, in Korea, Vietnam and in troubled Mindanao since the Libingan ng mga Bayani was first established in 1947. Somehow the boom from those descending commercial aircraft sounds terrifyingly like whistling war bombs or the thunder of monstrous artillery.

“Killed in action” (KIA) seems incongruous a classification for a dead soldier in a post-war democracy, specially for those who were killed in Mindanao. Initial tally of KIA was said to be at 13,000 in the first four to five years of the 14-year dictatorship of Ferdinand Marcos that started in 1972. In a University of the Philippines study of the Mindanao conflict it was said that “from 1972-1982(?) the 30,000-strong MNLF funded by Malaysia and Libya tied down 70-80% of the Philippine military, inflicting an average of 100 casualties per month.

The United Nations (UN)-inspired Norwegian International Displacement Monitoring Center (IDMC) places the post-World War start of conventional warfare in Mindanao as 1970, when then President Ferdinand Marcos declared an all-out military anti-insurgency campaign, perhaps then conjuring a preamble to martial law. This was after the horrible 1968 Jabidah massacre off the northeastern seacoast, when Muslim Filipino fighters were killed by Marcos operatives, after the Muslim mercenaries discovered that they had been deceitfully hired to infiltrate and kill fellow — Muslim insurgents.

There was no democracy then, in those years of the antithetical dictatorship. Soldiers were marionettes to keep alive a puppeteer’s story of a need to protect the country from threatening powers here and abroad. Sadly, dying was very real, and not play-acting for the soldier. Nor was he aware and in control of any options, aside from the baffling dilemma of renegading towards equally mind-bending communism. Those were the days of cadaver bags quietly ferried from Mindanao to Manila in rattling World War II-vintage C-47 aircraft. On the widows and orphaned families was imposed the vow of silence about their painful, unexplainable loss — to “unduly stir unrest” among the unknowing other citizens would be “subversive.”

And of course there were no obituaries to announce those KIA, for none of the government-controlled newspapers would print them. But the news spread quickly and efficiently by word of mouth, and wakes overflowed with sympathizers silently shaking their heads as they hugged condolences without alluding to the war in Mindanao, exacerbated by the strongman’s political bungling with “peace mediator” Libya. Yet no government stoolie would tell on sincere friends and grieving relatives walking behind the horse-drawn caisson at the funeral of a fallen soldier. No eye would be dry at the plaintive call of the bugle to the soldier’s “Taps” breaking the painful silence at the Libingan ng mga Bayani.

The peace problem in Mindanao has always been how to distinguish between the mercenary brigands, warring clans and foreign-fed terrorists of Southern Philippines on one end, and on the other, those thinking, principled Muslim Filipinos who are fighting for recognition and deep-rooted culturally identified property rights of since five decades ago. Unfortunately, the soldiers who died in Mindanao, Sulu and Palawan had no time, in the face of ambushes, snipers and massacres, but to fight aggressive, often suicidal terrorists. These foreign-backed rebels brag of superior weaponry contrasted to government soldiers’ failing ammunition and obsolete weaponry.

Perhaps the biggest treachery in history of Muslim Filipino rebels against brother-Filipino Christian soldiers was the massacre of Brig. Gen. Teodulfo Bautista with 34 of his men (including five colonels) in Patikul on Jolo island, in October 1977. Bautista came trustingly for peace talks with Osman Salleh, a rebel leader of the Moro National Liberation Front (MNLF), who promised that 150 of his men would switch to the government side.

KEY QUESTIONS

Today, Bautista’s son, Brig. Gen. Emmanuel Bautista, is commanding general of the Philippine Army. Though he had reportedly repeatedly asked to be assigned to Jolo and other hotbeds in Mindanao in his more junior years, it was probably thought by prudent superiors that a murdered general’s son would be perverted target for perverted rebels in those areas. But does not Bautista, the son, being in his father’s vulnerable shoes today, 35 years gone, beg the key questions that must be answered for peace in Mindanao?

Who is fighting whom, and with whom should the government talk peace? In the five or so “peace agreements” in the post-war government efforts to settle the conflict in Southern Philippines, the internal rivalries, lack of unity and leadership on the Muslim Filipino side held back the implementation of such attempts at peace. “Bangsamoro” (unity of “Moros,” a Spanish name for Muslims) was the goal of the Moro National Liberation Front (MNLF, led by Nur Misuari) when the MNLF and the government were discussing peace for Mindanao. Misuari shed separatist ambitions and participated and won in national local elections for the ARMM (Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao).

While the MNLF suffered Misuari’s vainglory and alleged corruption, the splinter group, the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF), gained respect and wrested political dominance. So, negotiations for peace were then with the reformed, re-engineered MILF, representing the “thinking” side that soon embraced the October 2012 peace agreement with the government of President Benigno Simeon Aquino III — the “Bangsamoro Peace Accord,” to be implemented over four years, coterminus with Aquino’s term.

But now Nur Misuari, resurrected hero of the MNLF, is belly-aching why he was not involved in the Bangsamoro Peace Accord, when Bangsamoro was his battle cry for the earlier, likewise properly agreed talks. Some analysts suggest that the convolution of political changes abroad, like the political fall of Egypt, the liquidation of Libya’s Moammar Khadaffy (said to be supporting MNLF/MILF at some point or other), the suspected ties to terrorist al Qaeda, even to the terrorist of the US 9/11 attack, have had bearings on the shifting power structures in Muslim Mindanao, and on several attempts at peace accords.

So, will this latest peace accord succeed, a Mindanao State University (MSU) anthropology professor, (a Muslim Filipino) was asked at a recent history conference? His cryptic reply: Come to visit me… at your own risk, he added with misplaced mischief. Have you ever been to Jolo, he challenged.

Yes, I have been to Jolo. I brought my husband home to the Libingan ng mga Bayani, many unchanging decades ago.

ahcylagan@yahoo.com

bangsamoro con chacha

it does seem like the anticipated bangsamoro deal with the MILF would have the same problematic provisions as the arroyo admin’s MOA-AD that was struck down by the supreme court back in 2008.

the only significant difference is that the mo-ad was presented as a finished product — requiring only a constitutional amendment to allow a kind of federalist substate and then congress saying yes to the whole deal — samantalang this bangsamoro framework is presented as a work in progress — nothing’s final, but here are the points that the government panel and the MILF panel have come to agree on — and from now on govt is engaging the public, esp the concerned mindanaoans, in a process of transition toward the desired bangsamoro substate-sort-of, how nice.  except that, apart for some tweaking here and there, the roadmap is clearly headed in the same direction as the failed moa-ad.

senator miriam has warned us, it would take two constitutional amendments to legalize the abolition of ARMM and the founding of bangsamoro, and i believe her more than i believe dean leonen who is saying that it would not need charter change, but who himself, In one of the early presscons, brought up the possibility of “people’s initiative” (RA 6735) as a way of amending the charter.  surely he knows that the people’s initiative, enshrined in the 1987 constitution, still lacks implementing rules and regulations.  but who knows, they might be sneaking that in right now while they distract us with cyberlibel atbp.?

there is no doubt that the charter change dance is in progress.  last tuesday, just two days after president aquino’s sunday announcement of a peace accord achieved, malou tiquia attended an afternoon forum on federalism in the house of representatives and tweeted about it.  i jumped in upon the mention of pimentel and abueva,  both ardent federalists.

Malou Tiquia ‏@maltiq
On deck at HOR is Forum on Citizen’s Participation on Consti Reform. forum covers federalism. M one of reactors. #Federalism

Malou Tiquia ‏@maltiq
Bangsamoro, Bangsabicol, Bangsavisaya, BangsaIlocos…n the forum starts on federalism…

Malou Tiquia ‏@maltiq
Nene Pimentel presented a complete n very comprehensive plan on federalism. Pepe Abueva on deck.

Malou Tiquia ‏@maltiq
“What is good for Moro ppl is good for all ppl”- Dr. Jose Abueva

angela ‏@stuartsantiago
@maltiq parang we’ve heard that all before. sana someone presents too the negative side.

Malou Tiquia ‏@maltiq
@stuartsantiago which is?

angela‏@stuartsantiago
@maltiq ay, mahabang usapin, let me find links from last time’s debates

Malou Tiquia ‏@maltiq
@stuartsantiago ur own views? What do u fear frm federalism

angela ‏@stuartsantiago
@maltiq not going to change status quo. the powerful ones now will still be the powerful ones in a federal system.

angela ‏@stuartsantiago
@maltiq and the costs of setting up federal govt for every region will be huge. and okay for rich regions with money. what abt poor regions

Malou Tiquia ‏@maltiq
@stuartsantiago that can be dealt with by revising present regional set up where rich n poor can form one fed state

angela ‏@stuartsantiago
@maltiq sounds good on paper, but when did rich ever really share equitably with poor

Malou Tiquia ‏@maltiq
@stuartsantiago valid point!

angela ‏@stuartsantiago
@maltiq Federalism: Issues, Risks and Disadvantages

Malou Tiquia ‏@maltiq
@stuartsantiago thanks! Will raise agam agam

if that’s happening in the house of reps, can the senate be far behind?  what was that wednesday dinner hosted by the president and attended by all but 3 senators really all about kaya.  so it wasn’t about an enrile ouster, obviously, or he wouldn’t have been invited, too.  still it’s hard to believe senator drilon when he says it was just a thank you dinner for their votes to oust corona all of 4 months ago.  we weren’t born yesterday.

senator enrile of course is already a part of the dance, stepping up to contradict senator miriam (who else would dare?) re constitutional amendments.  charter change won’t be needed, he says, while evincing great interest in this experiment in parliamentary govt.

this should remind us that not too long ago, post-corona, pre-brady, pre-memoir, when he was smelling so good and wise, enrile and speaker belmonte joined forces and tried to convince the president about amending the constitution and making national defense a higher priority than education and — the ruling elite’s holy grail – setting the economy free from protectionist provisions.

it’s too bad that the bangsamoro dream keeps getting hijacked to serve the chacha dream of the powers-that-be.  the bangsamoro people deserve autonomy, but only as much autonomy as every other local government unit deserves and isn’t getting either in luzon, the visayas, and other parts of mindanao.  poverty, along with landlessness and joblessness,  is a nationwide affliction, and it is the fault not of the moros and other rural and urban poor who make up, what, maybe 70 %, maybe 80? of the population, rather it is the fault of imperial manila, of a central government that is loathe to share its considerable powers and resources with local governments, despite the Local Government Code of 1991 that mandates decentralization, devolution, and autonomy, complete with implementing rules and regulations.

ARMM is a failure not simply because muslim leaders are corrupt and crooked (hindi lang naman sila), but because aside from “having negligible powers, it was also hostage to the power-brokers in Malacanang.”

Since it was created, the ARMM has been led by local politicians who had been “anointed” by whoever sits in the presidential palace. The first regional governor was the local stalwart of Pres. Aquino’s Laban ng Demokratikong Pilipino (LDP). The second one was a Maranaw protégé of Pres. Fidel V. Ramos. During the third ARMM elections, the FPA with the MNLF has just been signed. MNLF Chairman Nur Misuari was persuaded by Pres. Ramos to run for ARMM governor. Misuari ran virtually unopposed in the 1998 ARMM elections. By that time, a new president had replaced Ramos – Joseph Estrada. Estrada’s term was cut short by another “People Power” mass action at EDSA in 2001 because of a popular perception of his alleged plunder and other crimes against the Filipino nation. The Vice President then, Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo took oath as the new president. Like her predecessors, Arroyo lost no time in directing who will become the new ARMM governor. Along with her power-brokers, she made possible the (in)famous break-up of the MNLF Central Committee, easing out Misuari as its chairman. A so-called “Council of 15” was organized, with Dr. Parouk Hussin as its leader. Eventually, Malacanang also anointed Hussin to be the new ARMM governor. In last year’s elections, a new face in regional politics surfaced as the winner in the contest for the ARMM governor’s post – Gov. Datu Zaldy “Puti” Ampatuan. Despite the declaration of the ARMM as a “free zone” in terms of the most likely to be elected regional governor, there are persistent views that the new ARMM governor is also Malacanang’s bet – he is the son of Maguindanao governor Andal Ampatuan, widely known as Pres. GMA’s favorite local political ally. http://iag.org.ph/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=43&Itemid=44

would it be any different for a bangsamoro substate-sort-of?  there is no reason to believe so.  nothing has changed.  let us see this bangsamoro framework for what it is: just another attempt to justify, make it all right for congress to shift to constituent-assembly mode for the sake of the muslims kuno, and while they’re at it, have a go at the economic provisions, and who knows what else.

after what we’ve learned from the cybercime case about how laws are made, how objectionable amendments can be sneaked in, and how some, if not most, senators and reps can themselves be clueless as to what’s really going on, and after how we’ve seen them sit on, literally, the RH and FOI bills, never mind the interests of the majority, t’s obvious that it would be a big mistake to go on trusting our lawmakers to look out for our interests.  what they look out for, administration after administration, congress after congress, are the interests of the few, the ruling elite, of which they are a fundamental part.

NO to chacha.   call me paranoid.

Dismissal won’t make us go away

By Marian Pastor Roces

We are told off: with freedom comes responsibility.

As though we didn’t know. As though we — the cyber-throng quick-witted enough to recognize bs thrown at us — don’t know, uhhhm, shit.

The reminder itself insults. It reminds us instead that the Philippines’ leaders think so very little of her citizens. Reminds us that this contempt for the populace is precisely the prevailing culture of its leadership—a culture that consumes cynical and idealist political, ecclessiastical, tradjorno leaders alike.

These authorities dismiss our outrage as hysteria. They know no better than to denigrate a remarkable show of smarts, wit, grace, inventiveness, and in fact wisdom, in the face of the grave threat to democratic space.

So they — and their mouth-pieces — talk down to us. Comporting themselves as though Medieval bishops speaking from on high, they deign teach us about democracy. About responsibility. Us! The citizenry that in the last quarter century has been consistently quicker than its leaders and its mainstream narrators in defining the possibilities and responsibilities of democracy.

Oh, and our own living-dead Medieval frailocracy have naturally joined the pious pantheon, none of whom have read Orwell’s “1984,” and perhaps for this reason have neither sense of irony nor foreboding. It took the netizens to point out the awful choice of date That Law came to pass.

But were it only illiteracy, perhaps our leaders deserve our patience. Trouble is, sheer illogic hobbles their attempts at Reason. They consign sundry critics on fb to the same criminal status as child porn traffickers and identity thieves, but this does not strike them as monstrous. They bandy Constitutional guarantees of the very freedom of expression they constrict. This does not seem to them oxymoronic. Or moronic.

Preposterously, they actually think netizens desire impunity—to libel freely, to shirk penalty—where the call from the netscape is for a deeply informed understanding of the radically interactive nature of digital media, with its built-in self-policing nature.

Self-policing systems are necessarily upheld by democracies (and feared and controlled by autocratic states, needless to say) because in allowing the individual citizen the same power as the big actors, at least for a minute or two, it does move societies in the direction of equality.

So it is now the citizenry, again, taking the high moral ground in this fracas. We first of all enjoin our leaders to get off their hoary paternalistic platforms, to breathe the envigorating air of that democratic space where Filipinos thrive on sharpened skills to spot and contest lies and manipulations.

Listen, then, oh grand leaders and inquisitors.

We have no use for the freedom to libel.

What’s at stake is the freedom to challenge the impunity of the powerful, as we go about our daily convivial, sometimes testy, and sure, often foolish chatter.

We have no desire to shirk responsibility, and because of this we trounce trolls quickly, quarrel with the reckless and fiendish on line, and think before we click.

What’s at stake is right of netizens to keep for ourselves the responsibility for maintaining healthy exchange in the ethereal and physical communities we live in. Not to surrender this responsibility to Big Brother.

We have no big urge to drag the unwilling into our newfangled netizenship that demands a savvy grasp of the technological enabling of democracy, and its dangers.

What’s at stake is an idea whose time is now: the separation of net and State apparatus. It is a separation built on the distinction between traditional media which historically has merged too often with State power; and the net, which proliferates imagined communities beyond the myriad imprisonments and impunities of the past.

What’s at stake is the fast-track education of our leaders, so they know how absurd and perilous it is to try to retrofit ancient repressive methods on people power revved up by 21st c tech. They have to step up and recognize the Filipino body politic as uniquely adept at discerning pivotal difference.

That body politic knows that the net diffuses centralized power. That traditional media consolidated power despite the best efforts of great journalists. That the net subverts gate keepers and power brokers. That traditional media yielded to these creatures. That the net has thus far disabled—where traditional media were often the precisely the media for—elite capture of resources, discussion, and the shaping of society.

What’s at stake is the progressively sophisticated use of a locally-formed computer literacy to advance a century old Philippine freedom agenda. Freedom from repressive overlords.