kadarating pa lang ni michael ray aquino, pinawalang-sala na niya sina erap at ping in the dacer-corbito murders. at wala daw siyang alam tungkol sa kaso. of course no one believes him, least of all the dacer sisters.
read too:
Dacer-Corbito case will not be closed without Tan Testimony
and for timeless links and a host of unanswered questions:
the dacer whodunit and why ping
What’s wrong with Philippine society is that its economic system is primarily characterized by rent seeking. So, what’s rent seeking? It’s the non-market extraction of surplus or profit. It means the profit is generated from licenses, quotas, monopolies, protection, and other government granted privileges.
It differs from true capitalism where the profit or surplus is extracted from the market, usually through innovations in product or marketing and distribution. True capitalism is dynamic because it results in innovations and increases in consumer welfare. Society benefits as a result. In rent seeking, there’s no innovation, nor additional value to the consumer. Instead, there’s unearned extraction from the consumer. Welfare is diminished.
Rent seeking in the Philippines hasn’t stopped. It just takes new forms.
A vivid example of this is the Feed-in-Tariff (FIT) rate to be given to Renewable Energy Developers under the Renewable Energy Act. Under the proposal of the National Renewable Energy Board, all electricity consumers must pay an additional 12 centavos per kilowatt hour, amounting to 8 billion pesos per year, to subsidize Renewable Energy developers.
Why the need for a subsidy? Because the cost to produce energy by RE developers is much higher than conventional sources. The price for conventional sources (coal, natural gas, geothermal, big hydro) averages about P5 per kilowatt hour while the price to be paid for run of the river hydro is P6.15, biomass at P7.0, wind at P10.37 and solar at P17.95.
The difference between the price of conventional sources and the price to be paid for Renewable Energy must be made up by the FIT Rate, which is really a surcharge on consumers.
Some may ask: shouldn’t the Philippines do its share to halt carbon-induced global warming?
No, because the country’s contribution to carbon emissions is only less than 1% (.48%s). Hence, unlike the rich, developed countries, it has no moral or legal obligation to slow down global warming. Furthermore, the share of renewables in its energy mix is already 32%, much more than the 10% in the US and other countries.
But here’s the cake: Not only are we poor consumers being coerced to pay three times as much for solar energy and two times as much for wind, but in addition the developers are guaranteed a generous rate of return for the next 20 years! No risk on their part, even of technological obsolescence, because that risk has been passed on to us poor consumers who must pay the same FIT Rate for the next 20 years even if the cost to produce solar energy drops by 50%.
The guaranteed rate of return is not the only form of rent seeking. Under the proposal of the NREB, there will be no auction, whether among the different technologies (run-of-the-river hydro, biomass, wind, and solar) or among suppliers within a specific technology. Everything will be negotiated (wink, wink). No competition either on price or on time period (i.e., for a time frame less than 20 years) will be allowed.
Aside from that guaranteed rate of return and the no-sweat, no-competition policy, the developers will be enjoying a seven-year income tax holiday, duty-free importation, special realty tax rate, zero VAT on sales and purchases, cash incentives, 10% tax rate after income tax holiday, and so on.
The high-costing wind and solar energy producers are resisting a dispatch policy of cheapest first because they say that the country must have a “portfolio strategy.” It’s a conceit to think that the government can ever place bets on a particular technology. Should the government have subsidized the pager industry? Or the typewriter industry? The only valid criterion is value for money or efficiency. The market, not NREB, must determine the winners.
Besides, solar and wind are unstable and unreliable sources of energy, dependent as they are on weather and other climatic conditions. They would be poor choices for a diversification strategy. They can never be energy sources for industrialization.
Also, why the rush? A policy of waiting when solar prices are expected to come down to grid parity in five years would better serve the power consumers, but the NERB wants to hand out contracts and lock in the profits of developers for the next 20 years now. We can only speculate why.
Rent seekers usually cloak themselves with noble aspirations to mask their predation. Since the 1950s, rent seekers have raised the lofty banner of nationalism in order to keep out competition and to mask their government granted monopolistic privileges.
Today, the new cloak is not nationalism but “environmentalism.” But it’s the same old predation. Different color perhaps (green), but the same old predation.
What’s disturbing is that the manufacturing sector, already suffering from the highest power cost in Asia, will have to bear this burden in addition to the lifeline rate and other impositions. This is the road to perdition because societies collapse when the productive sectors of society are “taxed” to subsidize the inefficient, non-productive sectors.
The scourge of Philippine society is not corruption per se, but rent seeking. What the NREB proposal shows is that the scourge has not been eliminated. It’s just taking new forms. Pity us poor consumers. We can only say, “Please, moderate the greed.”
i’ve always been fascinated by rizal’s final act of defiance, twisting around to die on his back with his face to the sun.
He took his stand facing the bay, his back to the rising sun. The drums rolled, the shout of command was given, and the Remingtons of the 70th fired. With one last convulsive effort of the will Rizal twisted his body rightward as he fell, his last sight being perhaps the hard empty eyes of the professional soldiers, companions in arms of those who had impassively lowered Tarsilo down the well and hunted down Elias as he swam in his own blood.
that’s from Leon Ma. Guerrero, The First Filipino: A Biography of Jose Rizal (Manila: Guerrero Publishing, 1998 [1963]), pp. 443-448 posted in The Diaries of Jose Rizal.
and from ambeth ocampo’s facebook discussion board — Topic: Did Rizal deliberately turn around to face the firing squad during his execution? noel villaroman in a letter to ocampo posits that it was the impact of the bullets that caused the almost 180-degree turn.
At the exact moment the Remingtons were fired, the bullets almost instantaneously hit Rizal at his back because he was less than ten meters away from the frontline soldiers. My guess is that this caused his body to swing to the right in an almost 180 degree-turn because of the impact of the bullets. Now, in the eyes of the witnesses situated 331 meters or more from the firing squad, it seemed that Rizal first turned around (because light waves reached them first) and then after a full second or so they heard the gunshots (because sound waves reached them later).
The Encyclopedia Rizaliana, edited by Jose A Fadul, has an entry that says “Rizal was said to have made a last-moment effort to turn to face his executioners upon hearing ‘Fuego!’” I also recall that, in one of your books, you stated that “Rizal made that carefully choreographed twist he practiced years before that would make him fall face up on the ground.”
finally, from PenelopeVFlores: I was at Dr. Jose Rizal’s Execution: 30 Dec.1896. Bagumbayan, Manila, by Senor Don Perro. obviously fictional, a dog’s eye-witness account, but interesting:
My master approached the prisoner. I trotted by my master’s heels and heard him tell Rizal that he will soon give the orders to shoot. Rizal asked not to be blindfolded. My master agreed. “Not necessary,” he explained.
Rizal asked if he could face the firing squad. My master answered, “That’s not possible, I have orders to shoot you in the back.”
“In that case then,” Rizal said “spare my head.” My master paused, and I whimpered, “Master, say yes.” “Yes,” he agreed.
Rizal informed my master that he’d point with his elbow and hitch his shoulder to indicate where the soldiers should aim to hit his heart.
“Thanks,” my master said and asked, “Do you prefer to kneel?”
Rizal said, “No, I’ll stand.”
It was 7:02 am.
A muffled drum roll was sounded.
A minute later I heard my master give the order: MARK. Another second later: FIRE! The impact of eight bullets found their mark. Rizal fell down face upwards.
Nota bene.
Have you often wondered how Rizal could fall with his face upward? When he indicated the side where to shoot him, the body action of raising the right shoulder and the twisting of his elbow ensured his body would fall face up when he was shot.
whatever. it all tells me that rizal had been determined not to die as a traitor, and that pinag-isipan at pinag-aralan niyang mabuti how to manage that epic twist and defy confound the spaniards one last time. way to go!
in the matter of the marcos burial, i don’t know na whom or what to believe. did vp binay really recommend to the president that marcos be buried in ilocos with full military honors?
philstar‘s marichu villanueva is all the way in las vegas but her inside info on the reported binay proposal gives me pause.
If we are to believe reports from Manila, Binay allegedly recommended to P-Noy that Marcos’ remains be interred in his hometown in Batac, Ilocos Norte. There, Marcos will be given instead full military honors for his service as a soldier during World War II despite questions on the medals awarded to him for bravery and heroism.
…Binay’s spokesman Joey Salgado immediately issued an official disclaimer on the contents of the OVP report. Salgado noted that talks on a possible military burial for Marcos originated from the Palace and not from Binay, and neither from any OVP officials involved in the study.
can’t wait to hear from the vp himself what’s what. can’t wait for some investigative journalist to find out exactly what’s going on. if the military burial is a palace idea, bakit hindi aminin? just testing the waters? makes me think that the unnamed sources are actually from the three-headed hydra. hello? hello? hello? and what does that say about the president’s “bias” against an honorable burial for marcos? that it’s not non-negotiable pala? he’s willing to be overruled kuno? ano ba yan. ito man lang, di niya kayang panindigan?
needless to say i agree with senator rene saguisag who was on strictly politics the other night and who is vehemently against a burial for the dictator with any kind of honors. marcos may have done some good during his long unconstitutional reign but he did a lot more bad. and for pro-marcos forces to continue to try and re-write martial law and EDSA history and whitewash the marcos image in aid of son bongbong’s presidential ambitions (he should stop denying it dahil obvious naman) is just an insult, plain and simple, to the intelligence of straight thinking filipinos.
which brings me to peter wallace, the australian businessman who has a column in the manila standard, whose take on the marcos burial drew a critical rejoinder from no less than senate president juan ponce enrile.
this is what wallace wrote, may 27:
As to Ferdinand Marcos, I cannot for the life of me understand why there’s any discussion at all about where to bury Marcos. The man was a despot, a mass murderer and torturer, a plunderer, a philanderer (Dovie Beams), and I don’t know what else. If he was a war hero, and recent evidence seems to strongly debunk this, it is completely negated by his subsequent actions.
President Aquino, if he’s truly the moral, honest man he claims (and I certainly believe is) has a no-brainer here. You don’t pass it to anyone else to decide. It’s a simple presidential decision: NO.
googled but couldn’t find enrile’s response — apparently sent to manila standard — except as tweeted by bongbong chum bong daza, and quoted/cited by fellow standard columnist emil jurado on may 31:
…Senate President Juan Ponce Enrile, reacting to the comments of Wallace, said:
“President Marcos is dead. He cannot defend himself against scurrilous attacks against him. I have not known him to have sent people to a Siberian concentration camp like Stalin, or to extermination camps such as Auschwitz like Hitler, or to killing fields like Pol Pot, or to mass graves like Saddam Hussein.
“And so, as one who served in his regime for many years and as his secretary, later minister of national defense for almost 16 years, I would like to seek Wallace’s clarification about what he said about Marcos being a mass murderer and torturer.”
…I respect Wallace’s opinion on the issue, but I agree with Enrile who said “I hope Wallace will agree with me that we have to be fair to President Marcos no matter what our individual opinion might be. We also have to be fair to his readers.”
so far wallace hasn’t responded, as jurado points out, rather happily? in yesterday’s column. na-intimidate kaya? o ayaw lang pumatol?
but because silence would give pro-marcos forces the impression that the senate prez is right, let me pitch in my two cents.
take note that enrile challenges only the part about marcos being a “mass murderer and torturer.” so the despot, plunderer, philanderer, dubious war hero accusations stand, and do not need substantiating here. as for the murder and torture, they were not on the same scale as those perpetrated by stalin, hitler, the khmer rouge, and hussein but they were nonetheless criminally condemnably iniquitous.
i happen to have access to the historian alfred w. mccoy‘s latest book on the philippines: POLICING AMERICA’S EMPIRE: The United States, The Philippines, and the Rise of the Surveillance State (2009) yet unavailable in our bookstores. in the chapter “Martial Law Terror” subheading “State Terror” page 403, he writes:
Initially, Marcos’s military had relied on the legal formalities of arrest and detention to suppress dissent. In issuing Proclamation 1081 to declare martial law in September 1972, Marcos had invoked Article VII of the 1935 Constitution providing that the president “in case of invasion, insurrection, or rebellion . . . may suspend the privileges of the writ of habeas corpus, or place the Philippines . . . under martial law.” In his next paragraph Marcos issued a sweeping order that all suspects arrested from crimes against public order “be kept under detention until otherwise ordered released by me.” (1) In the weeks following this declaration, the regime rounded up some fifty thousand alleged subversives. Although the number of those officially detained fell to six thousand by May 1975, the police continued to make arrests without warrants. Armed with a blanket Arrest Search and Seizure Order (ASSO) or Presidential Commitment Order (PCO), they routinely confined suspects in extralegal “safe houses” for “tactical interrogations”. (2)
During the last years of Marcos’s rule, the police grew increasingly brutal, making torture and salvaging standard procedure against both poltiical dissidents and petty criminals. Recent graduates of the Philippine Military Academy (PMA) who joined the constabulary were socialized into a permissive ethos of torture, corruption, and impunity. With unchecked legal authority, limitless funds, and immersion in both psychological and physical torture, a cohort of privileged police commanders formed in the upper ranks of the elite PC anti-subversion squads, the Metrocom Intelligence Service Group (MISG) and Fifth Constabulary Security Unit (CSU). Over time martial law transformed the top police into an empowered elite engaged in systemic human rights abuses and syndicated gambling, drugs, or smuggling. Under Marcos military murder was the apex of a pyramid of terror with 3,257 killed, an estimated 35,000 tortured, and some 70,000 arrested. To subdue the population with terror, some 2,520 victims, an overwhelming 77 percent of Filipinos who died, were salvaged, that is, tortured and killed with the scarred remains dumped for display. (3)
mccoy goes into detail further on, but duties call. maybe later…
sources:
(1) Joseph Ralston Hayden, The Philippines: A Study in National Development (New York, 1955) 833; Republic of the Philippines, Supreme Court, Martial Law and the New Society in the Philippines (Manila, 1977), 1878-79.
(2) Amnesty International, Report of an Amnesty International Mission to the Republic of the Philippines, 11-28 November 1981 (London, 1982), 1-9, 56-66.
(3) New York Times, 11/10/86; Richard J. Kessler, Rebellion and Repression in the Philippines (New Haven, 1989), 137. To reach the figure 3,527 killed under Marcos, Kessler’s enumeration for 1975-85 is supplemented by adding 93 more “extrajudicial killings” in 1984 from data in Rev. La Verne D. Mercado and Sr. Mariani Dimaranan’s Philippines: Testimonies on Human Rights Violations (Geneva, 1986), 89.