mining & the NPA, chacha & the environment

‘Victory to the noble in heart!’
By Elmer Ordonez

A VIDEO of mining operations and the havoc wrought in the mountains of Surigao is making the rounds of social media and the Internet. It was produced by GMA network as a segment of Reporters Notebook. Unable to watch it on TV, I was glad a friend e-mailed to me the video which shows wide swaths of once forest cover now baring reddish soil as results of open-pit mining—truly destructive of the pristine environment fast vanishing from our land. In Surigao large wooded areas have been gouged with machine hoes and payloaders to harvest mineral ore which are borne by trucks to the sea wharf for loading in cargo ships.

The video came together with a Star report about the New People’s Army (NPA) raid on the mining firms’ camp where dump trucks and heavy equipment were torched, three security guards killed, and two hostages taken.

A reader wrote, “After watching the video, I realized that the rebels’ belligerence is called for and completely justified. Victory to the noble in heart!” The reader, an award-winning fictionist, is not a partisan for the rebel movement, but she must have been so outraged by the miners’ assault on our diminishing forest cover and the pollution it has caused that she could not help but express herself thus. “Victory. . .” may well be for all those fighting for clean air, clean water, environmental protection — the green “armies of the night.”

Another reader involved in anti-large scale mining advocacy in Surigao del Sur wrote that Manobos live in the area. “It is difficult and dangerous to do mass work there because local executives of towns are pro-mining; they get huge amounts and benefits from the mining companies,” she said.

Official reaction to the NPA raid is typical. The president condemned the raid and expressed concern that this would discourage foreign investments. The government’s chief negotiator in the peace talks called the NPA raiders “more of bandits than rebels.” The police chief in the same Kapihan forum cried NPA “extortion.”

On the other hand, PNoy’s adviser on environment is on video saying (prior to the raid) that the mining firms have violated the Mining Act of 1995; his DENR secretary maintains that the government pursues development not at the expense of the people.

Actually the government was remiss in enforcing the laws on mining and environment while the NPA chose to punish the erring mining firms in keeping with the policy enunciated by Luis Jalandoni, chief negotiator of the National Democratic Front in the peace talks. In a statement (October 5), Jalandoni criticized the president’s reaction to the NPA raid as thinking “only . . .of favoring foreign investments, even if extremely exploitative.” He points out that “1) the extraction of nonrenewable resources such as mineral ores for export at dirt cheap prices kills the Philippine prospects for industrialization, 2) the indigenous people are subjected to dispossession of land, mass dislocation and ruination of their lives and culture, and 3) the unbridled mining poisons the environment and damages agriculture and other forms of livelihood.”

Jalandoni reminds the government about the petition filed by the Tribal Coalition of Mindanao et al. with the Supreme Court on May 30, 2011 against the targeted mines that have already poisoned the rivers and creeks and the coastal waters of Claver, Surigao del Norte.

The petition for a writ of Kalikasan (calling for a temporary environmental protection order against the mining corporations) cites a UP study finding nickel levels in the river/water systems in the area as high as 190 mg/l while the maximum level of nickel in drinking water should only be 0.02 mg/l (according to the Department of Health and the Bureau of Food and Drugs).

For years now civil society, environmental groups and church groups like the Ecumenical Bishops Forum and the Catholic bishops have expressed alarm over the destruction of our natural resources to extract mineral deposits as in Marinduque, Negros, Benguet, Zamboanga del Norte, and Surigao. The purported financial returns for the government from the Surigao mining are shown in the video to be a pittance (P 13.7 million in taxes) compared to the P144.4 billion in profit going to the mining companies for 2010.

Now both houses of Congress are agreed in principle to change the economic provisions in the charter apparently to favor foreign investments, in keeping with the lawmakers’ neoliberal tendencies. On the other hand, the progressive party-list groups and members in the House are pushing for a People’s Mining Bill to regulate the operations of mining firms and address ecological concerns for people’s welfare.

It is time for the government to reorient its economic policies for the benefit of the people, particularly the poor and indigenous peoples, and not to endlessly feed corporate greed. It is time to take seriously environmental concerns since the country is experiencing disastrous results (like floods) of past neglect and acquiescence to foreign control.

Victory, indeed, to the noble in heart!

Occupy Wall Street, shades of the sixties

Occupy Wall Street reminds me of the youth unrest in America in the mid 1960s through the ’70s.  except that then (like it was here), the youth were not as focused, i guess because of the drugs, the sex, and the rock’n’roll alongside the make-love-not-(vietnam)war and the civil rights movements.

this time, 40-something years later, the crowds on wall street and elsewhere in america and the world may not be clear exactly how to achieve the change they want, but they sure are clear what they have had enough of, and the awesome meeting of minds and bodies is simply unprecedented and proving quite contagious.

check out these links i’ve posted on my facebook wall, tracking the movement, and the thinking that’s transpiring, evolving…  i hope the prez and his peeps are paying attention too.

All power to occupy Wall Street
Occupy Wall Street Rages On Around The World
This Time, It Really Is Different
Zizek at Wall Street: “don’t fall in love with yourself”
There’s something happening here
My Advice to the Occupy Wall Street Protesters
What Will Become of Occupy Wall Street: A Protest Historian’s Guide

Rizal and socialism (3)

By Elmer Ordonez

UTOPIAN socialism may well have been an influence on Rizal—considering that his close friend Juan Luna enthused over Le socialisme contemporain, described as “a conflation” of various schools of socialist thought from utopians like St. Simon and Robert Owen to Marxist, anarchists and Christian socialists. Rizal could not well have advocated the more radical strains of socialism in his North Borneo (Sandakan) settlement project despite his use of an anarchist character in Simoun in his second novel El Filibusterismo and the fact that his Noli, although devoid of anarchism, was first translated into another European language by anarchists Ramon Sempau and Henri Lucas, whom Isabelo de los Reyes befriended in Montjuich castle prison.

The utopian spirit in fact pervades in the literature of the prime movers of the Philippine revolution like Andres Bonifacio in his “Dapat mabatid ng mga Tagalog” and Emilio Jacinto’s “Kartilya,” both published in the one issue of Kalayaan, the Katipunan publication. Apolinario Mabini in his Decalogue also manifested the moral and ethical foundations of an imagined Filipino community; Rizal’s musings through his characters like PilosopongTasyo and Padre Florentino and his last thoughts of motherland in “Mi Utimo Adios” attest to an idealized national community, an Eden lost (because of colonialism) that must be regained through education and struggle for freedom.

In the last quarter of the nineteenth century, Europe was entering what left writers call “the age of early globalization” marked by social and political unrest, imperialist ventures, and the beginnings of the disintegration of ruling dynasties that culminated in the First World War and its aftermath, revolutions in many countries like the Russian in October 1917.

What Rizal must have sensed during his writing of his second novel Fili (from 1988-1890) found their way into the novel. The terrorist acts of anarchists during the period – bombings and assassinations — were a regular occurrence. Rizal’s death by firing squad, it is argued, must have caused indirectly to the assassination of Spain’s president Canova in 1897. The U.S. annexation of the Philippines in 1899 was followed by the assassination of President McKinley in Buffalo, New York, the following year. Both were assassinations were carried out by anarchists

It would seem that at the time of Rizal’s exile to Dapitan and before the turn of the century the anarchist movement had already decided to bring about radical social change through deeds, to destroy government and raze the cities and build new societies. The age of propaganda through literature had given way to a period of action according to the anarchist vision.

In Rizal’s Fili, Simoun the anarchist had a dual mission, to destroy the colonial establishment that persecuted him and his family and to rescue Maria Clara, Ibarra’s beloved, from the nunnery. His bombing mission failed and no mayhem took place. Simoun as the disguised Ibarra learned too late about the sad fate of his beloved. Simoun was not a failed anarchist terrorist, and so was Conrad’s character Verloc in The Secret Agent (1905) who inveigled his wife’s half-wit brother to blow up Greenwich observatory, symbol of western science, ending up with the bomber blowing himself to bits instead.

It was then deemed doubtful that the anarchists would be interested in also publishing Fili with a failed anarchist character and with personal reasons for carrying out his terrorist project.

Of Rizal’s contemporaries, Isabelo de los Reyes was the one most influenced by anarchist and Marxist socialism by virtue of his close association with the radicals in the notorious Montjuich in Barcelona. He was first brought to this jail after his arrest in the wake of the 1896 revolution; when released he immediately joined in the street fighting in Barcelona, armed with a revolver. Despite his earlier differences with Rizal, Isabelo is believed to be responsible for the posthumous publication of the first translation of Noli in 1898, albeit bowdlerized with its strictures on the friars and the church, toned down. The anarchist publication series was interested in Noli for just depicting a colonial society.

Isabelo de los Reyes managed to return to the country in 1901 lugging with him books by Marx, Proudhon, Bakunin, Zola, Malatesta, and others. He organized the Union Obrero Democratico, but he was arrested later by American authorities for leading workers strikes and marches. He entered politics and won a seat in the city municipal board and later in the Senate. He went to the Senate riding in a caretela, refusing the use of a car because it consumed gasoline sold by big business. He lived in the working class district of Tondo. Poor health forced him to devote his time to the Philippine Independence church which he founded with Gregorio Aglipay.

New leaders took over the union which had changed its name – leaders from both the ilustrado and working class like Dr. Dominador Gomez, Lope K. Santos, Herminigildo Cruz, and Juan Feleo. Santos would write the first socialist novel Banaag At Sikat (1906). It was a matter of time for proletarian leaders, armed with the socialist vision of Marx, Engels and Lenin, to gain ascendancy in worker organizing and national liberation struggles.

Rizal was a trailblazer in this respect.

 

lying about cha-cha

here we go again. the prez says cha-cha is not a priority but somehow that does not inspire confidence.  not with the leadership of the upper and lower houses of congress suddenly seeing eye to eye on a constituent assembly that would vote separately on amendments, something they couldn’t agree on in gma’s term.  what happened since then?  major major lobbying no doubt by the imf, world bank, and adb, says herman tiu laurel, and i believe him. read The Chacha-FDI myth and this:

INVESTMENTS AND CHA-CHA
Herman Tiu Laurel

…The claim of Senate President Juan Ponce-Enrile and House Speaker Feliciano Belmonte that Charter change (Cha-cha) to open up ownership of Philippine lands, alongside other national patrimonies, plus media and other sectors to foreign capital will bring in FDIs is a big fat lie. Foreign land speculators in cahoots with local land grabbers/ bankers will be the only ones who will reap the bonanza while ordinary Filipinos will be priced out of owning their own land. By then, transnationals would have gobbled up majority of the nation’s natural wealth and public franchises.

The real alternative is retention of protection for Filipinos and nationalization of large scale industries for all to benefit.

Off the Mark

Can we trust the likes of Enrile, who, aside from being a confirmed dagdag-bawas beneficiary in the 1995 senatorial elections, admitted in 1986 to his faked assassination in 1971 to justify the declaration of Martial Law? Can we trust Belmonte, who was instrumental in passing the Electric Power Industry Reform Act (EPIRA) in 2001 through the lame duck Congress after Edsa Dos by distributing P500,000 to each congressman from the oligarch-beneficiaries of the law, which gave us the “highest power rates” in Asia for the past 10 years? Can we even trust Misamis Occidental Rep. Loreto Leo Ocampos, chair of the House committee on constitutional reforms, or his aptitude for math when he declared, “I think our FDIs will TRIPLE from the current $2 billion to $3 billion once these constitutional reforms are implemented…”? As the promised Cha-cha reforms are sure to be massively off the mark, they are, in turn, right on track with the desires of the IMF, World Bank and ADB that are egging for it.

In fact, the track record of “reforms” of the Philippine Congress the past 25 years doesn’t inspire confidence at all – which is why it is scary that they are brandishing the term again. Consider some of the key REFORM packages Congress had championed and passed into law since the Edsa I “People Power” government, beginning with the Comprehensive Tax REFORM Program (CTRP) that replaced the progressive income tax system with the regressive value added tax (VAT) that transferred the tax burden to the vast majority of middle and low income consumers.

Also, consider the trade REFORM laws passed in the early ‘90s that introduced liberalization, deregulation, and privatization – now casting a curse on the Philippine economy, spurring uncontrolled fuel and power rate hikes, debilitating peso fluctuations, and privatizations that socialize the debts while privatizing the profits.

Oh, lest we forget: The EPIRA wouldn’t be called the Electric Power Industry REFORM Act for nothing – for it simply raised our electricity rates to the highest in Asia, if not the world!

[Power rates in Vietnam are $0.05/ kWh; Thailand, $ 0.15/kWh; and in the Philippines, from $0.21 to $0.25/kWh today.  However, ours will even get higher, especially when new rate hike petitions, including renewable energy (RE) feed-in tariffs as well as the huge jump in the Universal Charge of the Power Sector Assets and Liabilities Management (PSALM) Corp., are approved. This is the REAL reason Philippine foreign direct investments (FDIs) are at a dismal $1.7 billion compared with Thailand’s $6 billion and Vietnam’s $8 billion.]

Net Invasion

This Cha-cha for FDI campaign has been massive – so massive and multi-media in fact that it has invaded the Net. I have had a few run-ins with its advocates who use as bogeyman, the “privileged, favored and protected, abusive and exploitative Filipino oligarchs” like the Lopezes, Cojuangcos, et al., who take advantage of the Constitution’s protectionist provisions to monopolize businesses and keep out foreign capital at the expense of free market competition. But is this so? Isn’t it a fact that in many of the oligarch-controlled companies such as PLDT, San Miguel, Petron, etc., foreign capitalists are the major partners of these local oligarchs or, in the case of PLDT, the ones who actually control these companies via majority voting shares?

A look at the Asean website’s “Foreign Equity Policies” section already gives us an overview of how certain of its members conduct themselves on this issue. In the Philippines, for instance, it says that “100 percent foreign equity ownership is allowed in all areas except those in the negative list under the Foreign Investment Act of 1991 as amended.”

As for Thailand, “The 1972 Alien Business Law grants foreigners permission to engage in certain business enterprises… only if more than 50 percent of the capital is owned by Thai Nationals. However, for BOI promoted companies, majority foreign ownership is permitted for projects that export not less than 50 percent of sales.”

Meanwhile, even as Vietnam’s foreign equity rule there appears liberal, where “100 percent foreign equity ownership is allowed” – and this is a phrase often cited by the likes of AntiPinoy.com to buttress their point – it appears to be more of a simplistic reading of its Law on Foreign Investments, Art. 4, Sec. 3, which, if we were to go by a May 2011 US State Department investment climate assessment, is nuanced as follows:

“There are ownership limitations… Foreign ownership cannot exceed 49 percent of listed companies and 30 percent of listed companies in the financial sector. A foreign bank is allowed to establish a 100-percent foreign owned bank in Vietnam but may only own up to 20 percent of a local commercial bank. Individual foreign investors are usually limited to 15-percent ownership, though a single foreign investor may increase ownership to 20 percent through a strategic alliance with a local partner.”

Difficult Challenge

Let’s just keep in mind that no country will ever give away protection of its interests and concerns, much less, the privileges of its own people. Local PR pushers for this Cha-cha for FDI are pulling the wool over many Filipinos’ eyes. What everyone should realize is that a major factor in any country’s investment climate is the cost of power or electricity. Even our detractor, Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas Deputy Gov. Diwa Guinigundo, had to admit in a private NEDA briefing that “the most difficult challenge for the national government and the private sector (is) addressing the high cost of power in the country.”

However, Guinigundo, along with our senators and congressmen, don’t seem to have the balls to say this out loud in national media: That the exorbitant, predatory, and murderous power rates are the real reason FDIs shy away from our country. Instead, most of them lie, steal, and sell our nation out.

Filipinos should thus act now to stop their national swindles through Cha-cha. Write to newspapers; text radio programs; and send hate mails to those blasted legislative proponents. LET’S DEMAND OUR BIRTHRIGHT FOR PROTECTION IN OUR OWN LAND AS FILIPINOS AND TAXPAYING CITIZENS!