Friday 29th July 2005
Public meeting - 'Corpocracy vs the global commons'

Rey Casambre

Director of the Philippines Peace Centre

Good evening, first of all I would like to thank the organisers of this meeting for inviting somebody form the Philippines to talk about our situation there, to contribute some ideas, and also to learn from yours.

You’ve all probably heard or seen on TV what’s happing in the Philippines now. No less than our president is fighting for her survival, more accurately she’s fighting for her seat. 70% of the Filipino people, according to surveys, believe that President Arroyo must step down. In other words she has lost the trust and the confidence of the people. Well, you might say that’s only according to the surveys, but if two or three major phone surveys say the same thing, it’s hard not to believe. At the same time, the people have started marching on the streets to make their voices heard. At the very time that the president was delivering her state of the nation address only last Monday there were 100 000 people gathered in the main avenue in front of the congress to demand her resignation if not her ouster. This political crisis has come to the point that an impeachment complaint has been filed in congress. It did not get the necessary number of congressmen to endorse it for it to be sent to the senate, the upper house, for the president to be subjected to a trial. So it’s going to be a more roundabout process, but at his point we cannot tell if it is going to reach the senate or not. If you ask me personally I hope it does, not so much because it is important to impeach the president but my belief is that if this remaining avenue is closed then things will be little more unwieldy.

Now what does this have to do with out topic ‘corpocracy versus the global commons?’ I was asked to talk about the impact of the ‘war on terror’ and neo-liberalism on the Philippines and maybe in the region and how it also affects this country Australia. So what does the problem of the Philippines president have to do with this? When Gloria Macapagal Arroyo was a senator in 1994, it was she who filed the bill that led to the accession of the Philippines to the Treaty of Uruguay, which paved the way for the membership of our country to the WTO. Since then we have had to follow the decisions, the imposition, of the WTO and like any other 3rd world developing country this has meant disaster for our economy and more especially for the lives of our people. Which is not to say that our problems started with the WTO.

You know that the Philippines was a colony of the US. We were given nominal independence in 1946, but of course you also know that while the US relinquished formal political control of the country we continued to be under its real political domination, more especially economic control. We have never been able to emerge from that colonial pattern of trade where we had always had to import more than we could export. In the 1970s when under the Structural Adjustment Programs of the IMF, the WTO was not around yet, the IMF imposed conditions which transformed our economy into a more export oriented and definitely a more import reliant one. Since then we have had to import semi-processed goods, machines, because we can not produce them, and we have to export raw materials, agricultural materials, which have a much lower value. We now have this chronic deficit of our capital accounts. To fill up those deficits we have to borrow money and you know that to borrow money you have to have a clean bill of health from the IMF. So that means you have to follow their impositions, you have to follow their structural adjustments, the people have to pay more taxes and so on.

We had enough problems even before the WTO came about, even before Reagan and Thatcher, veered the world economy towards neo-liberalism from Keynsianism. However, with the neo-liberal policies, things got worse. It was like throwing the Philippines from the frying pan and into the fire. We thought that the Philippines was a typical case, but unfortunately we discovered that our leaders are exceptionally compliant, or more accurately subservient, to foreign, especially US, interests and this has a historical reason.

Just to give you an example, when we entered the WTO one of the first things we did was set up a schedule for the lowering of tariffs, breaking down the protectionist barriers, and letting capital and investments flow in freely. Our then President Ramos had this brilliant idea of advancing the targets, just to show that we are a great nation because we could meet the targets earlier. The policies of deregulation, liberalisation, privatisation and even denationalisation have caused a more rapid decline in our economy than others and of course greater hardship, misery, poverty, joblessness for our people.

This of course generated protest. We have a very vibrant peoples movement in the Philippines. We were able to throw out the US bases in 1991, we were able to throw out a dictator in 1986 and we were able to throw out a corrupt and immoral president in 2001. So these protest movements, which could not be avoided because the people are being pushed to it, became more widespread and more intense. And what was the response of the government? It was repression.

Going back to Gloria Arroyo, what was so particular about her, what was so exceptional was her third time success. She became president in 2001, she said in 2002 that she would not run again as she had to stave off the attacks, to do with scandals involving her family, but she did run again in 2004 and got elected under very dubious or cloudy circumstances. We experience under Gloria Macapagal Arroyo greater repression than we did under the dictator. Just to give you an example, in the last months of 2004 a peaceful labour strike was attacked. There was a massacre where seven people died. Following that massacre some of the leaders were even executed and then come January to March or April more than thirty leaders of progressive organisations and activists were assassinated one by one. We could not remember a time during Marcos’s rule where you would have five people being assassinated in one week. Now what is it in Gloria Macapagal Arroyo that gives her this audacity and this confidence that they can do this with impunity?

You are asking how do we know that she did this, well of course there is no direct evidence, but there is a principal called pattern and practice. Even if you don’t have direct evidence, as was the case with Marcos, you can establish the pattern and practice of the human rights violations. There is also command responsibility. The president, as Commander in Chief, did not utter a single word, even to condemn any of the killings. So what do you call that? At best it is tacit consent, but tacit consent under these conditions means you are giving the green light to your troops to go ahead and kill these people because they are suspected communists, they are suspected New People’s Army members, they are critics of the government. What is it that gives them this confidence, that suddenly they have this impunity which they did not have during marshal law?

That’s our second connection. It is the ‘war on terror’ and Gloria Macapagal Arroyo’s full support for it. She was one of the first leaders to publicly proclaim that they were supporting the ‘war on terror’ and she offered Filipino troops, Filipino facilities, Filipino lives to help the US in their war, even before Bush asked anybody. We have that kind of subservience and puppetry in our government. And remember that Bush declared the Philippines and South-East Asia as the second front of the ‘war on terror’ after Afghanistan. Military exercises have been held in our country in clear violation of our constitution under the guise of military training, under the pretext of going after notorious terrorist Abu Sayeff. US troops have not left the country since January 2000 when those exercises began.
So what can we do about this? As you have seen the protests continue. Despite the feelings of progressive leaders, journalists, lawyers, it is clear to our people that the only way we can defeat the scheme to pound the people into silence is to show that it doesn’t work. To show that you will not be terrorised, be cowed into silence by these assassinations, harassments and human rights violations. So the people have continued to protest. Things came to a head when witnesses came out implicating, not directly the president, but her brother in law and her son in this illegal numbers game called jueteng. Before that issue blew up, four tapes were released which supposedly contained bugged conversations between President Arroyo and a high official, a commissioner from the Commission on Elections, validating claims that there had been electoral fraud. The conversation showed that President Arroyo herself was asking the commissioner to ensure that her votes in Mindanao are padded so much that she would win by one million votes. And she did win by around one million votes. This kind of scandal you might say is just too much, even to those who are jaded and who think that everybody cheats and is involved with illegal activities. But there comes a point when you notice, when you think “this is ridiculous, absurd, too much!” when you can’t stand there and do nothing. That is what is happening now in the Philippines.

Again what does this have to do this meeting topic? Of course we said that Arroyo is a disciple of neo-liberalism, she’s the chief representative of neo-liberalism in the Philippines, she’s the chief lieutenant of Bush in the ‘war on terror’ in the Philippines and in SE Asia, but is that the reason why the people are marching? Not really, not directly, they’re just mad. But also we have a phenomenon where not all the people are marching yet. And the apologists of Arroyo are saying it’s because the people are tired of ‘peoples power’. They have ‘people power fatigue’. It’s partly true, we have to admit. But why is there ‘poeples power fatigue’? Because they say that they marched and booted out a dictator but it didn’t change their lives. They booted out Estrada but it didn’t change their lives. In fact they put in someone who appears to be much worse. Erap (Estrada) appears good beside Arroyo right now. Marcos looks like a saint beside Gloria right now. Last night I caught myself saying there were some things that we could do under Marcos that we can’t do now. I almost said, Marcos is better, but I didn’t. And I’m not saying it now!

So, what are we going to do now? If people are tired of peoples power, if they see that their efforts have gone to loss, we have to tell them that their efforts have not gone to waste and we have to understand more deeply what is really holding them back. I dare say that what is really holding them back is not because they don’t want to march any more, but that they want to know what they will be marching for this time. They want to be sure that they will not be just removing another undesirable president only to be replaced by another undesirable president. In other words, they are looking for more meaningful changes. They are looking for more basic reforms. Some are now talking about political reforms or electoral reforms, which are fine, but we know that it has to be more than that.

There has to be more basic structural reforms, especially in the economy. We have to do away with this neo-liberalism, we have to do away with this foreign domination of our economy. We have to do away with backward, agrarian feudal social relations. We have to industrialise. That’s why we have to put up our own national, barriers again. This is the time to tell the people. And they are listening! People are so agitated that they are finally looking deeply at the situation wanting to know what the real problems are and thereby finding the real solutions. We are still a long way off in the Philippines. There’s still a lot of thought about what kind of transition government, revolutionary government, transition council, who is going to sit where and so on. But it is good to have this discourse and as I was saying it is good that the impeachment process continues. With that process in congress, the people outside, we in the social movements have a chance, a forum to reach out to the people. This is what we are doing now.

But what does it have to do with you in Australia? We know that you have your own problems with neo-liberalism and the ‘war on terror’, slightly different because in your case because while you are also victims of neo-liberalism you are also the partners of the US. Not you personally, but your country is a willing partner of the US in the ‘war on terror’. We appreciate your struggle, we call for you to support us as much as we are willing to support you. We know that we are with you in this struggle and we also know that we can help you to advance our own struggle, achieve victories and to eventually aim to build our nation as a truly democratic, free and one with social justice.

Thank you very much

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