Never in the Philippines’ post-war history have we had a President so
representative of and servile to the oligarchy. President Aquino has
shamelessly demonstrated again and again that the oligarchs are really his
“boss,” not the masses. His motto that the Filipino people are the “boss” is
really just a figment of his speechwriters’ imagination.
President Aquino’s
Administration is the best illustration of that Marxist notion of the state as
simply the executive committee of the ruling class.
His anointed – Manuel Araneta Roxas – is as much an offspring of oligarchs as
Aquino is.
I had thought that
Aquino missed the second anniversary of the commemoration of the Yolanda
Typhoon and secluded himself in his room probably playing an X-box game with
his nephew Josh, as he couldn’t bear to be on the same stage as the Romualdezes
and Marcos in Tacloban.
It turns out I gave
him too much credit.
He was absent at this
year’s commemoration rites (as he also was last year) for the tragedy that
killed more than 8,000 Filipinos in 2013 and made life miserable for millions
of Filipinos, because he attended the wedding of the son of property tycoon
Andrew Tan. (I wonder: If American Presidents charge exorbitant fees for
speaking engagements and appearances in events to raise campaign funds, is
there a Filipino version of that?)
Owner of the Megaworld
property conglomerate, Tan has become famous in the global liquor industry as
the magnate from a capital-deficient, poor country who has been on a buying
binge in Europe in the past three years.
He bought 1,000
hectares of vineyards in Spain, 100 percent of the Spanish brandy maker, Bodega San Bruno for P3 billion, and
50 percent of Bodega Las Copas for P3.7 billion. Last year he bought the United
Kingdom’s iconic Scottish Scotch whisky-maker Whyte & Mackay for US$720
million (P34 billion). Would you believe the owner of the P85-per-liter
Emperador brandy outbid the owners of Remy Martin, Glenlivet, Chivas Regal,
Absolut Vodka and Campari? That’s the kind Aquino prefers rubbing elbows with,
rather than weeping widows in Tacloban.
That’s laissez faire
capitalism of course, the kind that had been banned in the Tiger Economies when
they were still taking off, so they could channel scarce capital to strategic,
local industries.
Such weddings by the
elite are scheduled a year in advance. That there would be a second
commemoration of the Yolanda tragedy was a given. He could have even asked Tan
to reschedule the wedding, which after all, was in the church located in a
property at his Newport City, which he donated. He didn’t.
Either this president
is so stupid to realize the messages his actions send as elected President of
the Republic, or he really wants to boast that he is the President of and for
oligarchs in this country. There is a unique Philippine word for that frame of
mind, which the English translation doesn’t quite capture:
“Ipinangangalandakan.”
It is the second time
that Aquino preferred to be in an event in the presence of the oligarchy,
rather than in communion with the ordinary Filipino people. The first was last
year when the government received in the Philippine capital the bodies of the
44 Special Action Force
troopers massacred by Islamic insurgents in Mamasapano.
Snubbed solemn event
Aquino snubbed that
solemn event, and instead, preferred to grace the ribbon-cutting party for the
Japanese Mitsubishi Motor Philippines car assembly plant in Sta. Rosa.
It wasn’t even a new
plant. Mitsubishi transferred its Cainta plant to the former location of Ford Philippines, which the
US-based automobile company left (for Indonesia) two years ago. And why did
Mitsubishi decide to transfer its plant? Because its Cainta property would be
developed into a new business district to rival the Ortigas center. Who will
develop it? Ayala Land, owned by one of the closest supporters of Aquino, the
oligarch Ayala clan.
I googled and wracked
my brain to recall if there has been any event in which Aquino demonstrated he
is one with the masses in a moment of their suffering. Other than that event in
which he met with relatives of the 44 SAF heroes to mitigate the public outrage
that he snubbed the Villamor arrival of the bodies, I couldn’t find any. Has he
even addressed an assembly of major trade federation, or an assembly of
peasants or urban poor? No.
For a president who
epitomizes the Philippine oligarchy, or at least that faction that emerged from
the extremely exploitative sugar industry to move into modern business and
politics, he would have tried to show that he isn’t just the spoiled scion of
the oligarchy.
He hasn’t. When our
press and our academe would have awakened from their intoxication drinking
yellow Kool-Aid, they’d write articles and history books about the shocking
plot by Aquino to wrench billions of pesos as government payment for his clan’s
turnover of Hacienda Luisita by removing the Chief Justice.
But what’s wrong with
being among the oligarchs, which my built-in Microsoft Word dictionary defines
as “very rich businessmen with a great deal of political influence?”
Everything that is
really wrong with this country. It is neither corruption nor a weak state, nor
neocolonialism that explains why our country has been and will be poor. It’s
our entrenched oligarchy, and their control of the state.
Almost every academic
book analyzing why some countries are rich and some are poor describes the
Philippines as a country ruled by oligarchs, and that has been the reason for
its economic and political quagmire:
Francis Fukuyama in
his best selling 2014 book Political Order and Political Decay:
“By exporting the
nineteenth century US model of a government of ‘courts and parties” to the
Philippines, the United States permitted the growth of a landed oligarchy that
continues to dominate that country.”
Globalization
Luiz Carlos Bresser
Pereira also in a best selling book writes: Globalisation and Competition,
Why Some Emergent Countries Succeed while Others Fail:
“With large
land-owning families that have had a stronghold on the state, the Philippines
is more like some Latin American countries.”
Ming Wan in The
Political Economy of East Asia (2008:)
“The reason (for the
Philippines’ poor economic results to this day) is the dominance of oligarchic,
landowning families that have captured the state to advance their own
interests. Put simply, oligarchy defines the Philippine political economy
system. By contrast, the central government is weak because civil servants are
beholden to their political patrons outside the bureaucracy.” (My emphasis)
Even a book focusing
on a particular industry couldn’t help asserting:
“To this day in the
Philippines, economic and political power is vested in the hands of a small
number of powerful family dynasties and coalitions, with 10 percent of
Philippine households, dominated by Spanish and Chinese mestizos, holding 32.1
percent of household expenditures. (Telecommunications Politics: Ownership
and Control of the Information Highway in Developing Countries Information
[2009]).”
Such a serious, rigorous academic as Wan
wasn’t fooled by the yellow narratives the US State Departments’ operatives
popularized in 1986:
“The Aquino ‘People
Power’ revolution did not fundamentally reform the country as triumphant street
demonstrators had hoped for. Aquino’s victory was not a true revolution as many
had thought but a return to the dominance of the powerful provincial families.
Being from one of the wealthiest land-owning families herself, Aquino did not
push the land reform hard. It did not help that Aquino exempted her
6,000-hectare family estate.” (In case you think Wan is a Chinese propagandist,
he is professor of Government and Politics, George
Mason University in Virginia. His Ph.D. was from the Government
Department, Harvard University.”
That the economy has
grown under Aquino is indisputable, even as it is due to two things: (1) his
predecessor President Arroyo’s success in weathering the 2008-2009 global
economic crisis, which was the worst in post-war world history, that convinced
global investors of our economic resilience; and (2) unlike the terms of other
Presidents, there has been no major world economic crisis since 2010.
Yet, Philippine
economic growth has only meant the expansion of the Filipino billionaires’
wealth. There has been no increase in workers real – or inflation-adjusted –
wages. Outside of the government’s statistical hocus-pocus, poverty in the country
has worsened since 2010.
Other than the
conditional cash program – a massive dole-out scheme which is actually the
biggest vote-buying scheme ever invented in this country – Aquino has neither
undertaken any new program to improve the economic structure nor redistribute
wealth.
Why, in Aquino’s mind,
should he join the people of Tacloban and miss the wedding of the son of the
country’s biggest property billionaires?
manilatimes rigobertotiglao
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