LUISITA’S OWNERS MASSACRED UNIONISTS AFTER NEAR-RESOLVED DEADLOCK

Prof. Erle Frayne D. Argonza

University of the Philippines

This development consultant and social scientist, who shortly served the GMA regime as a director at the Office of External Affairs or OEA, wishes to inform the public of a plain truth regarding the massacre of unionists by the owners-managers of the Hacienda Luisita.

That massacre was hardly warranted, as a back-channel negotiation was going on before the gory day, with Luisita unionists agreeing to withdraw their mass action and return to work. No less than palace demigods called for the backdoor negotiations, which was already in progress before the bloody event took place on November 16, 2004.

I was among the core officers who assisted Sec. Edgardo Pamintuan organize the newly established OEA in 2004 right after PGMA took her oath (we comprised of assistant secretaries, directors, consultants). The OEA was assigned membership in the political, communications, and intelligence clusters of cabinet, to recall some basic facts.

The OEA had hardly warmed up as a ‘freshman agency’, when a directive came from the Office of the Presidency or OP, for our agency to help resolve the Luisita deadlock. My boss, Sec. Pamintuan or EdPam, had proved his talent at back-channel negotiations, being one such negotiator between the GRP and National Democratic Front, and so the application of the same ‘best practice’ to the Luisita deadlock proved all too facile for the noblesse negotiator.

Most urgently, Sec. Pamintuan instructed his executive team to contact the leadership of the federation to which the local Luisita union belonged, the Kilusang Mayo Uno or KMU. The OEA’s main task was to serve as bridgehead and clearinghouse between the various constituency groups and the OP, a task that it immediately began doing upon its very inception circa 2^nd quarter of 2004. Inviting the KMU to a consultative talk was routine task for the OEA, KMU being a long established constituency group representing the labor sector.

We OEA officials felt so glad that the KMU arrived pronto right in our office at the Bahay Ugnayan - Malacañang Palace. Practically the top brass of the federation came. We gave them a warm reception, and our exchanges were very cordial.

After the issues were clarified and the messages exchanged, the federation committed to consult with the local union. The maximum expectation was for the union to withdraw its forces and end the protest, with the quid pro quo that the 300+ union officials and members who were retrenched will be allowed to RTW (return to work). [Note: Luisita’s wage was a pathetic P9.50 per day which the union vehemently protested.]

Amid the intensifying crisis, action was swift as the federation and (local) union did clarify and resolve issues during rush consultations. Finally, to our merriment, the news came to our office that the local union was already decided on withdrawing its forces/dismantling the barricade, and was ready to sit down with Luisita management to communicate their modified demands including RTW.

We were almost at the point of euphoria over the success of the back-channel talk, when the horrifying flash news reached our office that the Philippine National Police stepped in and resorted to brutal and brazen slaying of unarmed unionists and supporters. It was an utterly unnecessary move, in as much as the local union was already in the process of withdrawing its protesting forces and prepared to sit down with the owners & management of the hacienda.

As per reports brought to our office then, the Luisita management, with the complicity of top DOLE officials, called upon the Philippine National Police to disperse the protesting farm workers & supporters. It was clearly an arrogant display of brute force and one-sided communications, with no compunction shown at all during that dreadful moment of firing automatic rifles on unarmed unionists.

Not only human rights were violated on that black day, there was also a clear violation of good governance in a number of ways: (a) authoritarian management that is inappropriate to the current context; (b) distrust of the organized sector of farm workers and their disabling from participation in renovating human resource systems in the hacienda; and, (c) hubris and brazen display of excessive force in resolving a deadlock that was in a near-resolution situation.

We need not even bother to find out whether certain officers of the law are under the payola of the Luisita paymasters. Or, that certain labor inspectors and officials are likewise in the payroll of the same paymasters. Such a system of corruption has been in place for nigh decades, and has never been rooted out.

It is truly bothersome for a co-owner of the Luisita, Noynoy Aquino, to mouth good governance as a banner motto in his campaign for the presidency. The facts about Luisita affairs hardly substantiate Aquino’s claim of “hindi ako magnanakaw.” Cojuanco family’s Luisita is replete with narratives of corruption and blood spilt to sustain operations, rendering moot and delusional any claim by its owners to puritanical moralism.

Good governance is not just about “hindi magnanakaw.” It is a coherent concept that is operationalized as: (a) efficient management; (b) enabling civil society-state dialogue; (c) participative management, observing a partnering modality between labor & management and not a subordinated treatment of labor by managers-owners; (d) low to nil graft/transparency; and, (e) political will in pursuing visions, mission, objectives, and related ends.

Noynoy Aquino represents the cacique class and is a product of an oligarchic lineage and milieu. He reduced ‘good governance’ to a parochial propaganda cliché, a term that he may have little understanding about based on the practice of corporate governance in Luisita.

The last thing that ought to happen in this country is to keep on recycling oligarchic rule, an evil system that is perpetuated by non-thinking voters who are as gullible as those overseas workers sweet-talked by illegal recruiters. It is now time to put an end to this sordid evil, for prolonging it further will bring us down to a Dark Age which happens at the tail end of any oligarchic regime (e.g. classical Greece was destroyed by the Athenian oligarchs’ lust for wars against Persia).

I just hope that, in case Aquino will win the polls, and the greedy grafters and ‘kamag-anak incorporated’ around him will grab juicy state posts in wild abandon, plundering at will like there was no end to colossal loots, I won’t end up echoing “I told you so.” Honestly, I would, and will sonorously burst with guffaws.

[Philippines, 19 April 2010. Prof. Argonza is an international consultant, academic, and Fellow of the prestigious Asia-wide Eastern Regional Organization for Public Administration or EROPA. He is also a long-time grassroots worker, serving marginal sectors for over three decades. See also: IKONOKLAST: http://erleargonza.blogspot.com.]

LIBERALISM: MORE POVERTY & CORRUPTION

Prof. Erle Frayne D. Argonza
University of the Philippines

Good afternoon, fellows!

The Liberal Party in the Philippines has been bandying lately the good governance agenda. Philosophically bankrupt, the dogmatists of the party could at best parrot the verbiage of university academics who, in reductionist fashion, associated the development problems of the country to bad governance.

Poverty had alarmingly risen from 25% in 2001 to 32% today, as per government statistics. This came at a time when the economy doubled, GDP-wise, and the country had been dubbed as an ‘emerging market’. Can poverty be factored solely to bad governance, as liberal quacks now claim?

Whether the so-called ‘think-tank’ of the Liberal Party or LP possesses the comprehensive grasp of the country’s problems is doubtful. A ‘think-tank’ that is theoretically bankrupt could at best be a coterie of mediocre dudes whose sense of originality in problem-solving engagements is nil.

There surely were episodes in our economic history when poverty expanded. We can concretely site the following periods: 1983-1996, when poverty incidence rose from 35% in ’83 (Marcos era) to 49% in ’89 (Cory Aquino era) to a 60% peak in ’95 (Ramos Era); and, after a period of radical drop, moved up again in 2001 through 2009, from 25% (‘01)to 28% (’04) to 32% (‘09).

The 32% poverty incidence may not even be accurate. As Prof. Cielito Habito (Ateneo University) sited in his newspaper column, the figure could be a high 35%. My own intuitive assessment is that the figure could be much higher at around 45%.

Those high-poverty episodes were actually periods when the country was under the IMF programs’ tutelage. They were times when liberal policy reforms were radically implemented in the country, to note: liberalization, privatization, deregulation, tax reforms, reduced budgets for social services, currency devaluation, wage freeze, and increased utility prices.

Not only did we witness the expansion of poverty during the same episodes, we also saw the rise of corruption. Weak regulatory frameworks at a time of rising total budgets redound to liberalizing graft as well, resulting to larger largesse for bureaucrats & legislators (returns from pork barrel allocations).

Let’s take the case of trade liberalization. As soon as tariff reforms were implemented in full during the Ramos Era, a whopping P300 Billion+ worth of import duties were wiped out, thus reducing revenues so drastically. With nil safety nets in implementation, the tariff reform saw millions of affected small planters, fishers, craftsmen, and farm workers experience large-scale income drops, thus instantly leading to larger poverty incidence.

As commitments to tariff reforms are now binding upon our state, based on signed treaties (ASEAN, WTO), regulatory frameworks for executing projects remain weak. This bad situation ensures the perpetuation of the take of bureaucrats on projects, from the past 10% ‘s.o.p.’ circa 1980s, to the gargantuan 40% today and higher rate tomorrow. E.g. a road project worth P1 Billion will be priced/budgeted at P1.4 Billion, with P400 Million allowance for the grafters (they call it ‘for the boys’).

Note that during the periods of extensive liberal reforms, Hacienda Luisita escaped agrarian reform’s surgical operations. Of course, the regulatory and executory frameworks of the agrarian reform law were so weak, so much that President Aquino’s family estate was accorded special treatment that it enjoys till these days.

Ipso facto, liberal reforms practically destroyed the already weak regulatory frame that we Filipinos have struggled so hard to build since the time of the 1st presidency yet (Aguinaldo, 1898-1900). Curbing poverty and graft, which indeed go together, requires draconian tactics of state interventionism or dirigism, not liberalism.

It is all too easy a kindergarten stuff to forecast that under a liberal regime, poverty will swell to higher incidence (beyond 40%). As budgets and projects increase, so will graft move up, probably eating as much as 60% of total appropriations at certain junctures.

The ‘walang korupsyon’ (no corruption) flaunted by the liberal quacks is nothing but empty propaganda. Bereft of creative approaches to diminishing corruption, the ‘walang korupsyon’ line merely re-echoes an age-old line of traditional politicians or trapos desperate to gain electoral victories by duping a gullible electorate.

‘Walang korupsyon’ isn’t even liberal nor populist a line, but hyper-conservative. Conservatism serves the interests of Big Business, Big Landlords, Big Church (biggest landlord in the Philippines), and foreign capital.

We are therefore not surprised that the leaders and groups representing Big Business, Big Landlords, Big Church (Jesuits, Opus Dei, bishops), and foreign capital have openly supported Noynoy Aquino & the Liberal Party.

The LP of the Philippines now appears more as a copycat of the fascistic Liberal Democratic Party of Japan. Don’t ever be surprised that both parties are good friends within the Liberal International league.

A liberal regime will most likely be saddled with enormous graft and poverty problems that, within a couple of years of its incumbency, patriotic soldiers and populist groups would alternately shake it down to rubbles. A veteran of civil society campaigns myself, I would most likely be marching the streets again to oppose moralist pretenders who are in fact greedy crocodiles.

Liberalism doesn’t represent the interest of the nation and people, and should be rejected in the coming polls and the next ones to come.

[Philippines, 13 April 2010. Prof. Erle Argonza is an economist, sociologist, and international consultant. He’s a member of the very prestigious Eastern Regional Organization for Public Administration or EROPA. See: http://erleargonza.blogspot.com; http://unladtau.wordpress.com, http://erlefraynebrightworld.wordpress.com.]

VILLAR-BASHING BY ATENEANS: JESUIT FASCISM RESURFACES

Prof. Erle Frayne D. Argonza

University of the Philippines

“In the name of the Father (Society of Jesus), the Son (Ateneo alumni), and of the Holy Ghost (clerico-fascism). Amen.”

In a previous article, I wrote about the Manny Villar-bashing by philistine journalists (see “Villar-Bashing: Philistine Journalism by Oligarchic Media”, in http://unladtau.wordpress.com, http://erleargonza.blogspot.com). At this juncture, let me add notes on the Manny Villar-bashing, focusing this time on malicious tirades hurled on the noblesse senator by conspiring Ateneo De Manila University alumni.

The forewarnings by concerned citizens about the parochial Atenean conspiracy to elect an Atenean president (Noynoy Aquino) has already been circulating on cyber-space. Likewise had the initial salvo of cyber-attacks, via the email, already begun, with one libelous article (unearthed by rational minds) authored by an Atenean that falsely identified Villar as owner of a mansion in the USA.

If we were to put ourselves in the shoes of these parochial Ateneans, we would think of political contest as a matter of choosing between an Atenean versus a non-Atenean. Ergo, elevate the Ateneo to Mt. Olympus fame, and perceive other schools as lowly, excremental, barbaric institutions fit only for the subhumans. Therefore, only an Ateneo alumnus should be fit for the penultimate state leadership: the Presidency.

It doesn’t matter if the Atenean being endorsed, Mr. Noynoy Aquino, accomplished merely a bachelor’s degree, possesses nary an iota of brilliance, and was lackluster in his accomplishment as a legislator (not a single sponsored bill ever legislated into law). He is a true blue Atenean, uses Machiavellian pretensions of being morally fit for leadership to sell the idea of an Atenean candidate, and so let him be President of the republic.

If we want to comprehend the mindset of these hegemonistic Ateneans, whose fractional intelligence is now being utilized for peddling lies about Mr. Villar, we should apperceive their cognitive formation within the broader context of the Jesuit Order whose priests mentored them.

The Jesuit Order is among the top institutional oligarchs in the country, possesses vast assets of properties, and engages in big-scale tax-free pursuits. During the rise of the Left movements, this Order unleashed the fangs of clerico-fascism, even as certain Jesuit priests collaborated with the United States’ Central Intelligence Agency to stamp out a rising nationalist movement.

Emerging during its inception as an Order of warriors for the Vatican, whose priests were in reality abominable assassins sent forth to exterminate church reformists, the same Order soon received mandates from the Pope to expand operations to the colonies of the White Man’s empires or vampires (choose your wilds).

As it grew in size, assets and power, the same Order was ecstatically involved in the Opium Trade. Opium was then tested on the Chinese peoples for consumption, with Christian missionaries including Jesuits surreptitiously teaching the folks to use the dope. Needless to say, opium made the Order vastly richer, the same drug income made available hence for ambitious Jesuitical projects including new schools and universities.

To recall our own history, this same criminal Order was expelled from the country for a century during the Spanish Era. It was then able to return, thanks to backdoor maneuverings in the Vatican, and as the Jesuits emerged most powerful with a monopoly to broker a favored cardinal’s installation to Papacy, they reinforced their fascistic stay in the country during the late Spanish era up until the American regime.

With the upsurge of the nationalist movement, under the auspices this time of Left social movements, the same Order nurtured priests who would facilitate for the CIA the formation of anti-communist 3^rd Force groups. The Christian Democratic and the Social Democratic movements were the products of the Jesuit covert operations, with Atenean youth serving as recruits for rabidly fascistic cadres.

We could easily see that a Noynoy Aquino presidency will usher another period of Jesuit mafia operations, with the Jesuit Order thus fulfilled that its offspring alumni are able to do the dirty job for it (SJ) that had successfully re-fashioned its image to a do-good fraternity. The visible Son does the job for the invisible Father. “He who has seen the Son has seen the Father!” declared the Son of Man two millennia ago.

The more enlightened Ateneo alumni are most likely nauseated by the dangerously warped contentions of fascistic Ateneans conspiring for Noynoy Aquino. As a sociologist and behavior expert, I could best regard such dangerous operators as psychopaths, antisocial elements, and/or personality disorder patients who should be locked up in psychiatric wards where they can serve life better.

[Philippines, 01 April, 2010. See: http://erleargonza.blogspot.com, http://unladtau.wordpress.com]

VILLAR-BASHING: PHILISTINE JOURNALISM OF OLIGARCHIC MEDIA

Prof. Erle Frayne D. Argonza

University of the Philippines

Good day!

It is Holy Thursday as I wrote this piece. I normally put a halt to all of my analytical engagements on this sanctified day, but this time I decided to take some minutes to scribble my thoughts about the current Manny Villar-bashing coming from various quarters, particularly from media personalities (opinion writers, broadcast journalists).

I will zero in on those journalists who are in the employ of big tv/broadcast networks and major news dailies. The cacophony of malicious heraldries from these intellectual prostitutes (if you can even regard them as ‘intellectual’ at all) had reached a crescendo that had magnified confusion in the voters’ mind.

Resorting to the typical emotionalist discourse and therefore short-circuiting the rational-analytic faculties of information consumers, the malicious attacks on the person of Sen. Villar, which do not the least contain substance worth our wise reflection, have altogether triggered a mass panic. The decline in the latest survey rating of Villar by 6% shows how little do people see the underlying motives behind the black propaganda peddled by the same cabal whose words they followed.

Let it be recognized, first of all, that these journalists, no matter how mentally adroit they appear to be, are in the payroll of oligarchic media. The mega-hoarding greedy oligarchs have their own respective pockets to fatten, and if the malicious, sensationalizing, irrational heraldries from the Villar-bashing journalists would yield enormous sums for the fat hoarders, then let there be more such destructive onslaughts from the journalistic cretins.

Too few are those journalists who would be considered informative, balanced, and exuding wisdom in their countenance, for such true thinkers reside outside the media circuits. Not even those so-called multi-awarded journalists would count among the truly erudite, awarded as they are only because they were able to whet the appetites of the judges who, likewise, are in the payroll of oligarchic institutions, while some other judges are private pals of writers and creative ‘artists’ who are happy enough to make cronies win.

If there is any attribution I can offer to the oligarchic media for now, it is this: that philistine journalism had taken the upper hand. This eventuality marks the fragmented state of the mind shapers (media), even as they are contributory to the fragmentation of the human psyche as a whole.

Mental cretins who are in the employ of the media moguls, no matter how erudite they may pretend to be, are among the harbingers of a Dark Age where the flames of reason have simply snapped off. These same philistines have elevated the Primal to a high level of discourse, thus further eroding the rational-analytical that has been subordinated tragically to the greedy ends of oligarchic hoarders.

There is nothing to gain from the articulations of those quack intelligentsia, but only great things to lose if one would yield to their contorted peregrinations. The more that a reader or audience would succumb to the seductions of the philistine pen & tongue, the more that his/her reason recedes into atrophied state, the more mis-comprehension of the political dimension of life.

Only the fecal-minded idiots would succumb to such dis-informative articulations that only serve to mask the greedy pursuits of the oligarchs who have been openly supporting the equally oligarchic candidate Noynoy Aquino. The nation shall grieve all the more as the masking of the true reality—that global oligarchs are mounting economic, political, covert offensives to destroy the Philippines—will be reinforced in no small measure by the philistine journalists and their oligarchic employers.

To my fellow Filipinos, beware of these philistine journalists and expose their falsehoods in diverse venues. Stand up and together we shall smote the dragons of oligarchism and poverty, end an eon of colonial history, and proclaim a truly free nation. Stand up for the nation, and a stronger nation means the installation of a nationalist leadership and patriotic political coalition.

We shall overcome!

[Philippines, 01 April 2010. See: http://unladtau.wordpress.com, http://erleargonza.blogspot.com ]