Burma has been under military rule since 1962, after decades of British colonial rule. It is listed by the United Nations among the world’s least developed countries. Political turmoil has never abated in that country, with various factions of the military as well as political parties and guerilla groups vying for power.

The present junta—renamed the State Peace and Development Council (SPDC) in 1997, and previously known as the State Law and Order Restoration Council (SLORC)—came to power in a bloody coup in 1988, when the military fired at protesting students and triggered nationwide protests.

The military used the protests which it had itself provoked as the excuse for further suppression. It launched a coup in September 1988 supposedly to restore order, in the process killing thousands of protesters including monks and students.

The junta suspended the 1974 Constitution and blamed the usual scapegoats—the communists—for the disorder when it took power, although the Communist Party of Burma was having severe problems of its own when the protests exploded. The junta has since promised the restoration of democracy and parliamentary rule, but has repeatedly shown that it has no such intention.

It called for a Constituent Assembly in 1989 to revise the 1974 Constitution. But the call led to elections in 1990 in which Aung San Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy (NLD) won by a landslide. The military prevented the Assembly it had itself called for from convening and kept Nobel Peace Prize laureate Aung San Suu Kyi under house arrest. Although briefly released, she was once again placed under house arrest in 1996, and remains in that state today.

Burma became a member of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) in 1997 during the presidency of Fidel Ramos, which favored a policy of engagement with that country rather than isolation. The Ramos argument was that engagement with Asean and other countries could convince the ruling junta to loosen its grip on power and implement its own declared “roadmap to democracy.”

Only in the last eight to ten years have countries like the United States acted on the human rights violations in Burma by imposing economic sanctions on it. As for Asean, its member countries including the Philippines have argued that whatever the junta does are its internal concerns. The Asean human rights council thus emphasizes non-interference in each other’s affairs—of course including the state of human rights in such countries as Burma, Singapore, Malaysia, and, oh yes, the Philippines.

To what extent the junta is prepared to follow its own proclaimed roadmap to democracy has been demonstrated again and again, more recently during the September 2007 protests over rising prices and other issues, which it brutally suppressed. One of the few promises the junta has delivered on is the renaming of the country from Burma to Myanmar, which it announced in 1989, mainly for cosmetic purposes.

The junta’s focus on keeping its grip on power was and is once again being demonstrated before and after cyclone Nargis hit the old capital, Rangoon, and the Irrawaddy delta last Saturday.

Although the Indian Meteorological Department had repeatedly warned the Burmese government of the imminent danger the country faced as Nargis approached, the junta was focused on publicizing a referendum on the new constitution it has drafted without the participation of NLD and other pro-democracy groups.

Some 60,000 people have been killed, 40,000 are missing, and over a million have been made homeless as a result of the storm surges whipped up by Nargis, as well as the impact of its 200- kilometer-per-hour winds on a defenseless population. But the referendum on the constitution through which the junta hopes to strengthen its grip on power will go on, with the date for it moved in the worst hit areas of the country.

International aid groups are also complaining that the junta is preventing them from reaching the worst hit areas of the country, particularly the Irrawaddy, where most of the victims died, and where the survivors have no potable water and food, much less medical care, the area being under water.

Unless aid reaches the survivors, the prospects are starvation, disease and more deaths, but the junta doesn’t seem to care, and has figuratively shrugged its shoulders over the difficulties of reaching the survivors. Only in Rangoon has there been substantial relief success, with the UN World Food Program managing to distribute food and medical aid.

Media reports say that aid from various sources—among them from India and neighboring Thailand—is sitting at Rangoon airport. Meanwhile, the prices of rice, charcoal, cooking oil and bottled water have doubled in that city—in a country where millions live on US$2 a day.

Mass anger, say anti-junta activists, is rising, and some predict that at the very least, its conduct in the present crisis could help finally remove the junta from power. Mass anger, together with international condemnation and lack of support, could indeed be the turning point for Burma in the aftermath of the Nargis disaster, which is demonstrating that dictatorship indeed kills in more ways than through bayonets and bullets.

(BusinessWorld)

Speaking in the collegiala language that she probably thinks would endear her to long suffering Filipinos, the putative president of the Philippines initially told the media people present that who’s going to go to what post was “secret.”

Eventually, however, she did say that four of her current Cabinet secretaries would stay in their posts. The four — none of them fantastic and at least three of them among the most unpopular cabinet secretaries to date in one of the most unpopular administrations ever to inflict itself on this unhappy land — she identified as Gilbert Teodoro of Defense, Angelo Reyes of Energy, Bayani Fernando of the Metro Manila Development Authority, and Raul Gonzalez of Justice.

Former general Reyes has been moved around so often he’s been nearly impossible to keep track of. Although the escalating costs of energy — cooking gas, diesel and gasoline fuel as well as electrical power — is at the very center of Filipino household concerns, no one’s really looking in his direction for solutions.

It’s probably because, like his boss and Cabinet cohort, he’s regarded as part of the problem rather than the solution, as when, during his stretch at the Department of the Environment (where incidentally former Manila Mayor Lito Atienza, who was noted for razing Manila landmarks, currently holds imperious sway), he approved mining concessions as if they were going out of fashion.

The same is true of Bayani Fernando, who was once regarded as part of the solution, and who admittedly enjoys some following among those who favor such fascist approaches to compelling obedience to anti-hawking laws as pouring kerosene into vendors’ wares, in addition to painting everything a ghastly pink and throwing steel overpasses over every intersection.

A few weeks ago some senators noticed that in the manner of Big Brother in Orwell’s 1984, Herr Fernando has also been nailing humungous posters of himself on every available space in metro Manila’s already ugly thoroughfares, in preparation for running for the Senate in 2010.

And then there’s Raul Gonzalez, who’s made the Department of Justice the most ironically named agency of the executive branch. Mrs. Arroyo said if she had ten more Gonzalezes, “that would be half of the Cabinet already.”

As puzzled as some may be over the literal meaning of that statement, it’s obvious that it’s meant to be a compliment, to which Gonzalez responded with the usual glee, declaring how pleased he was over Mrs. Arroyo’s expression of confidence.

As for the Defense Department’s Teodoro, Mrs. Arroyo said she was keeping him on because of “civilian supremacy,” despite rumors that he’s about to be replaced by Armed Forces Chief of Staff Hermogenes Esperon who’s due to retire next week. That rumor had seemed credible because Esperon’s been one of Mrs. Arroyo’s most loyal operators since before, during and after the “Hello Garci” scandal. But Teodoro will remain in Defense, said Mrs. Arroyo, because a civilian’s needed in that post, given the continuing restiveness in the military.

Civilian supremacy over the military is of course enshrined in the Constitution, but it’s not guaranteed by simply having a civilian in Defense. Arroyo policy relies heavily on the military on such matters as the insurgency that she has pledged to crush before 2010, when she will (supposedly) leave office. That reliance undermines civilian supremacy in practice and on the ground, where it’s the generals who practically make policy.

The extra judicial killings and other human rights abuses in this country that have attracted so much attention among human rights groups world wide, for example, are a consequence of the military strategy of destroying the so-called political infrastructure of the New People’s Army by decimating the ranks of legal though militant organizations. The strategy is apparently not under any civilian oversight, with the civilian role being limited to denying that the policy exists, as well as assuaging the concerns of various countries and human rights groups.

Changes in the Cabinet can only be meaningful if they signal changes in policy or are meant to improve policy implementation. But neither has ever been the case with the Arroyo regime, in which the primary consideration for such changes has been to reward political operators and to put others in high profile positions from where, benefiting from their visibility, they can go on to run for office.

As biased as it naturally is, the United Opposition may have a point. Makati Mayor Jejomar Binay claims that whatever changes will take place in the Cabinet will be in the nature of rewarding those Arroyo allies who lost in the Senate elections last year and who have been waiting these past 12 months to rejoin their fellow capos feasting on the Philippine banquet of power.

Rather than in response to such problems as the rice and energy crisis, whatever changes will take place in the Arroyo Cabinet will thus be in furtherance of the regime’s unremitting focus on its survival and continuing dominance, rather than the fate of this country and its long-suffering people. No wonder most Filipinos aren’t even halfway interested.

(BusinessWorld)

The regime, said Gonzalez, was “monitoring rice,” by which he meant the hoarding of that staple, among others, as well as the state of rice prices. “These leftists,” Gonzalez continued, “why should we monitor them?”

While Gonzalez meant the answer to be self-evident, his question was far from rhetorical. Armed men likely to be from either the police or the military were observed—they didn’t seem to mind being seen — in the vicinity of Ocampo’s residence in Quezon City last Sunday, having trailed Ocampo, who had just returned from an official trip to Canada, from the airport. Ocampo’s neighbors observed two teams on motorcycles as well as two other vehicles.

The incident followed the filing of murder charges last Friday against Ocampo and his party-list colleagues Liza Maza of Gabriela and Teodoro Casino of Bayan Muna, as well as former Anakpawis Congressman Rafael Mariano. The same thing had happened last year, when Ocampo was also trailed and his movements surveilled. He was finally arrested over murder charges in Leyte that later turned out to be so absurd they had to be dropped.

In implying that the regime had nothing to do with it, Gonzalez as well as the police were thus being disingenuous. The campaign against leftists, whether armed or unarmed, but specifically of the variety represented by Ocampo, is central to the Arroyo regime’s focus on its survival.

The regime is also anxious to prevent further public discussion over such issues as its legitimacy and the runaway corruption at its very core. But it also correctly sees Ocampo et. al. as capable of mobilizing the warm bodies needed to oust governments — with the difference that, unlike the warm bodies it has mobilized for all those “unity walks” and free food camp-outs, Ocampo et.al.’s warm bodies are at the same time highly politicized, extremely articulate, and passionately committed.

It’s an attribute the left everywhere shares. The right may have the money, the power, and the guns, but it’s the left that has the brains, the organizational will, and the passion to sustain any fight. That capacity is being demonstrated particularly in Latin America, where leftist and center-left governments have been elected in key countries, among them Bolivia, Paraguay and Venezuela. Vying with that development is the Maoist triumph in the recent elections in Nepal, right here in Asia. What was instrumental in all these instances was the leftist capacity for painstaking organizing, mass education and mobilization, often against near-impossible odds.

It helps explain why the Arroyo regime has filed murder charges against and intensified its surveillance of Ocampo and company — seemingly despite, but actually because, of the crisis over rice.

That crisis has the potential to bring the political crisis over regime legitimacy, lack of transparency and corruption to a head. The crisis is escalating in the context not only of that political crisis, but also in that of the hunger that has been spreading among more and more Filipinos during the Arroyo reign.

One in every five Filipinos — or 20 percent of the population — experienced hunger at least once every three months last year. Although for the poorest of the poor getting enough rice to assuage hunger pangs was problematic, the staple was at least available somehow to poor families, among whom the common practice in the absence of other food is to flavor it with salt. With rice prices rising due to a combination of factors, among them hoarding, profiteering and corruption, as well as expected supply shortfalls, even the prospects of a few salt-flavored mouthfuls of rice to stave off hunger are shutting down for the poor.

Panic is among the results, evident in the long lines that have materialized wherever cheap government rice is being sold. Unrest, the inevitable companion of a hungry population, could soon follow, as it has in the form of food riots in Haiti, Indonesia, Bangladesh, and several African countries.

In most cases, the food riots were unorganized, spontaneous outbreaks. Although the political conditions in each country differed, it seems that what they had in common was the relative weaknesses of political and social movements, except in Haiti, where the riots forced the resignation of the Alexis government.

Contrast this with the Philippines, where hunger, perennial crisis and the existence of political and social movements as well as civil society groups eager to hold the Arroyo regime to account could result in precisely the explosive demand for regime change Arroyo and company have so far succeeded in preventing.

The possibilities are unlikely to have escaped the regime. Awareness of those possibilities among regime capos explains the filing of charges against Ocampo and company, and even the revival of libel charges against Archbishop Oscar Cruz, one of the regime’s leading Church nemeses, as well as rumored plans to revive various charges against the United Opposition’s Jejomar Binay and others.

Is the regime monitoring rice? It is. But it’s also monitoring people like Ocampo, Cruz and Binay, as well as militant and civil society groups, the rice crisis being a possible trigger for the escalation and resolution of the crisis that has been simmering in this country for the last three years.

(BusinessWorld)

What’s more, said Nemenzo, “Given the situation now, it is only the military that can neutralize the elite.” And God knows the elite, having demonstrated how far it’s willing to go in destroying this country in the pursuit of its political and economic interests, needs neutralizing.

The “situation” Nemenzo was referring to is the state of perpetual crisis that voracious and irresponsible elite has created and continues to perpetuate, primarily through the use of the police and the military to suppress dissent and movements for change.

The Philippine military, Nemenzo said, has historically been an elite instrument in that it has always defended the status quo against the challenges that have confronted it. But, Nemenzo argues, “when the legitimacy of an existing regime is challenged, the military will either embrace the Praetorian ideology and establish a military junta as in Burma, or it will integrate with the mass movement and aspire for revolutionary change as in Venezuela.”

Although there were rumors in the 1960s of military restiveness over the Filipino First Policy of then President Carlos P. Garcia, it was only since 1986 that the Philippine military began to seriously entertain the coup option — precisely on the basis of its opposition to change.

In July 1986 officers identified with the defunct Marcos regime took over the Manila Hotel to install Marcos’ Vice President, Arturo Tolentino, in Malacanang, arguing that he and not Corazon Aquino was the legal successor to Marcos, who had fled to Hawaii in February that year.

In the years that followed, military officers identified with former defense minister Juan Ponce Enrile launched a series of coup attempts meant to restore authoritarian rule and to preserve what those officers perceived to be their prerogative to decide on political issues as partners of the political elite. These efforts were followed by much weaker and even less carefully planned coup attempts, among them the Oakwood affair of 2003.

The coup attempts that followed EDSA 1 have all failed. But the military’s perception that its role in Philippine politics is crucial had been seemingly validated by EDSA 1 in 1986. The dominant military view is that it was responsible for the overthrow of Marcos, and the people only window dressing in that event. EDSA 2 in 2001 reinforced that conviction, when, in the view of key military figures, it was military support that made Joseph Estrada’s ouster possible.

That view has since been boosted rather than weakened by the failed attempts to force Gloria Macapagal Arroyo to resign, in which the crucial factor seemed to be the absence of military support.

The point is that recent Philippine history has shown that the military has chosen to take the Praetorian path of preserving the status quo and even the reactionary route of restoring the status quo ante rather than the path of reformist, even revolutionary change the world is witnessing in Venezuela.

Led by former Army lieutenant colonel Hugo Chavez, who has been Venezuela’s president since 1998, the military of that Latin American nation has been at the forefront of government reform efforts, among them Plan Bolivar 2000.

The Plan is an ambitious program aimed at raising the living standards of the poor. Under its auspices the government, with the military’s participation, has been cleaning up streets and schools, improving the environment to eliminate diseases, and generating employment, while involving community organizations in the effort. Observers say that this and other reform programs have generated the enthusiastic support of Venezuela’s officer corps, specially its junior officers, who are now regarded as the most radical in Latin America.

The Venezuelan military’s participation in reform programs like the Plan is by itself markedly different from the Philippine military’s own role in suppressing such efforts rather than furthering them, and in terrorizing rather than supporting communities.

But what’s even more outstanding is that the Venezuelan military has actually been a force for democracy by defending the decisions of the Venezuelan people. For example, it supported Chávez’s return to power in 2002 when a group of senior officers launched a coup attempt and temporarily took power in behalf of the Venezuelan elite. Contrast this with the Philippine military’s record involvement in subverting the people’s will through participation in electoral fraud, suppressing protest, and combating social movements.

What has made the difference should make for interesting studies, although one major factor could be the anti-colonial, Bolivarian tradition in the Venezuelan military. The Venezuelan military was forged in the anti-colonial struggles of the 19th century, and deeply influenced by the efforts of Simon Bolivar to dismantle colonial rule and to integrate Latin America into one political entity. Chavez himself was educated in a military academy rooted in the Bolivarian tradition.

Although it claims to have been fathered by the Katipunan, in contrast the Philippine military was founded by a colonial power to suppress the remnants of the revolutionary movement (it was founded for that purpose at the turn of the century by the United States). It has no traditions of social commitment either, and exists to defend the existing order and to protect elite and imperial interests.

None of these argue against efforts at a better understanding of the Philippine military, even if these do suggest that it’s not going to be — despite Trillanes and company — the instrument of the change Filipinos have been desperately hoping for since the 19th century and even earlier. Nemenzo does have a point — the military having evolved into a major political player in this country, it’s time to look more closely into it, not only as a matter of academic exercise but to discover what it is in its traditions that can help it change its course from being the servant of elite interests into an authentic partner of Filipino aspirations.

(BusinessWorld)

Most Filipinos should be familiar with the situation Nemenzo referred to, because they’re living it. Ruled by a political and economic elite whose greed knows no bounds (despite efforts to “moderate” it), Philippine society is mired in poverty, injustice, and mass misery, of which political instability has been a continuing sign.

A contentious lot whose political education is currently in its second century, Filipinos should by now know why they have been so afflicted. There was the succession of colonial regimes to begin with, during which the inhabitants of these happy isles were taught the basics of greed and corruption as well as political wheeling and dealing, followed by governments after “independence” distinguishable from each other only by the degree of their corruption, inefficiency and violence.

The Marcos regime was admittedly exceptional — in the gall with which it dismantled the window dressings of democracy and tried to justify one-man rule, its systematic assault on human rights, and its escalation of the costs of corruption.

The Arroyo regime has its own unique traits. It’s threatening to outdo the Marcos period in corruption, violence and sheer lawlessness. And like the Marcos regime, it too has added to the political class’ putrid lore.

The Marcos gang may have discovered that so fragile are the institutions of liberal democracy it needed only a martial law proclamation (and US support) to plunge the country into dictatorship. But the Arroyo mob has discovered something even weightier: creating a dictatorship doesn’t even need a declaration.

Given the weaknesses of the Philippine constitutional order, once in power any one can simply do what he or she pleases until challenged, in which case one can always buy off witnesses or silence them somehow, often through the equally corrupt justice system. In all other cases there’s the police and the military that one can sic on the dissenting or conscience-stricken.

What’s media’s role in all this? Nemenzo reiterates what every student of the media knows: “The impact of the media on the people’s consciousness and their sense of values is profound and enduring.”

Nemenzo goes on to note something media advocacy groups like the Center for Media Freedom and Responsibility (www.cmfr.com.ph) have also pointed out: that mass media reporting, comment and analysis have been improving, among other reasons through the efforts of the media themselves as well as media advocacy groups.

But in television particularly, the better programs are aired via cable and/or outside prime time hours, the main reason being these programs’ relatively low ratings, and, therefore, limited revenue-earning capacity. This perpetuates already limited audience access. In print the same access limits are practically assured by the broadsheets’ use of the English language, and their concern for revenues and over dwindling readerships. (Anxiety over the latter has compelled some broadsheets to pander to perceived audience preferences for entertainment and gossip.)

Nemenzo’s observations are valid enough. But his proposed solutions may not be, to those media practitioners and media advocacy groups that see press freedom as the key to the enhancement of the media’s capacity to provide Filipinos the information they need not only to understand the country’s situation, but also to act on it.

Nemenzo proposes state subsidies and content regulation of the media, along the lines of state subsidy and regulation of private schools. Nemenzo suggests that the regulatory power over the media he’s proposing should be vested in an independent board made up of representatives of professional journalists, academics and consumer cooperatives.

While that seems sound, the independence of such a board would depend on who will appoint its membership and to what extent the qualifications of its members would be the deciding factors in their appointments. Philippine experience with “independent,” even “constitutional” agencies is not encouraging. The independence of the Commission on Elections, for example, has been fatally compromised by the appointing power since the Marcos period.

Nemenzo being a Marxist (he has described himself as an “unrepentant” one), the dismantling of the present State might have been the key condition for his proposal, although he doesn’t say so. It would make better sense.

Its implementation under existing conditions — i.e., with the present State intact — can only lead to the demise of press freedom, which Philippine governments, dominating the State through their coercive powers, have tried to undermine, the worst offender being the current regime. That freedom, despite constitutional protection, has in fact come under serious and varied threats from the Arroyo government.

Media organizations and advocacy groups have been defending press freedom through various means including court suits. Accepting government regulation would not only be suicidal for the media. It would also reverse the progress the media have made in terms of better reporting, comment and analysis over the last five years, and devastate whatever’s left of Philippine democracy. It’s an idea whose time has not yet come.

(BusinessWorld)

For those whose interest has been focused on the rice crisis, hunger, unemployment, several economists’ doubts over the alleged 7.3 per cent growth of the economy last quarter, the National Broadband Network scandal, China-Philippine relations, the Spratlys, and other issues too many bloggers would sniff at as less than earth-shaking, the blog came online in furtherance of Gorrell’s campaign to get back US$70,000 that he claims was swindled off him by an ex boyfriend who’s allegedly a member of Manila high society, and whose associates cover its doings as lifestyle page “journalists”.

Among other claims, Gorrell has written that what he calls the “Gucci Gang” are free- loading, drug-snorting, pretentious brutes and bitches — parasites who live off the freebies and handouts of such PR events as the launch of this or that product line for socialites (and such other pretenders to the title as the pretty actress-whores kept by Manila’s aging but rich Lotharios) and the rest of that crowd.

It’s not an unfair picture of Manila high society, it being the domain as well of the low. But it’s the truth of Gorrell’s charges against his alleged ex-lover and his cohort that’s yet to be established. Primarily we only have his word for it via his blog, and while he has allowed one of those he has attacked in it some space, a blog is by its very nature self-serving, and the instrument of whoever created it.

That a blog is neither newspaper nor broadcast station seems obvious, but it’s a fact that’s nevertheless often missed, especially by those bloggers who’ve only recently discovered — and misconstrued — the miracles of free expression.

A blog provides those who would otherwise have no other way of venting their spleen the means to inflict their opinions no matter how putrid on whoever chances upon it or is directed to it in cyberspace. While there’s no shortage of bloggers who’re also journalists so steeped in the professional and ethical standards of journalism they don’t release anything into cyberspace that they haven’t verified, legions more hardly know the difference between gossip and fact, and don’t care to find out.

That’s not all. Any idiot with a desk or lap top and an Internet connection can start a blog. He or she decides when it goes up, what goes into it, who gets to comment in it, and how long it stays up. A blog is a distinctly individual thing, unlike the collective undertaking a newspaper or a news broadcast is, in both of which there are editors and a desk whose job is to look for errors in fact, correct bad grammar, and yes, check for libelous remarks.

It’s true that some newspapers and news broadcasts seem to be run by idiots too, and have been either printed or aired by people who’re just like most bloggers — i.e., they haven’t had a single day’s training in what they’re claiming to be doing, which is journalism. There’s this difference, however: responsible, professional journalists know the latter for what they are, and have about the same attitude towards them as doctors have toward quacks, which is to say that they don’t hold them up as exemplars of the profession, whereas most bloggers don’t make that distinction among themselves.

As for libel, (non-journalist) bloggers have been known to sneer at journalists’ concern for it, dismissing it as a concession to censorship. It can be. But while the libel law has been used to intimidate journalists, and Filipino journalists lost the most famous case in this country — the Aves de Rapina case — through a court biased for an official of the US colonial regime, it does have the eminently valid purpose of protecting media subjects from the abuse of the overzealous and/or malicious.

Not that journalists have not risked libel suits — if the stakes are high enough. Some indeed have braved prison and even death, both during the martial law period as well as the present regime, which at various times has threatened journalists with inciting to sedition cases and the withdrawal of network franchises, as well as listed them as “enemies of the state”.

Many have indeed died, 90 percent of the community journalists who have been killed in this country since 2001 for exposing corruption and criminality. Scared most journalists aren’t. But it’s a rare blogger who’d knowingly take the same risks while shooting his mouth off.

In many instances journalists risked life and limb and fortune for demonstrably relevant reasons — and by relevance I mean the value of what they were reporting to other lives, in some cases millions of them. Journalists did not shirk reporting the November 29, 2007 incident, for example, and neither have they evaded the responsibility of reporting on the rice crisis, which for the impact it’s likely to have on the fortunes of the Arroyo regime is potentially as risky as covering the NBN scandal. Of course they’ve tried to steer clear of libel suits at the same time by reporting only what they’ve verified, and refusing to be drawn into name-calling even the people they detest the most.

Too many bloggers, unaware of why certain professional and ethical standards have developed in the course of journalism’s long history, prefer to call people names, among other reasons because they think it’s argument enough. (It isn’t.) There’s also the fact that if they’re in Australia the people they’re insulting who are in the Philippines can’t sue them — a convenience denied, say, a journalist in the Philippines who can be sued, and who probably has been (by, among others, Gloria Macapagal Arroyo’s husband).

So some sneer, declaring that the newspapers and the networks are too scared to report the Gorrell case with any prominence, and have chosen to keep it in the entertainment pages. But it’s not a matter of being scared, but of the fact that that’s exactly where stories like this belong, and only once, please. In the nitty-gritty, what it’s all about is an Australian who admits to having been swept off his feet by one of those sweet- talking scammers of which Manila has no shortage, who lost his life savings in the process, and who hopes to recover them by shaming the alleged perpetrator and his cohort. This story deserves the front page?

Of course lesser stories have landed on the front pages and in the evening news for the sake of “human interest”, but that’s an argument for the newspapers and the TV news programs to be more judicious in their decision-making rather than an argument in favor of putting this particular storm in a teapot together with the stories on the Spratlys and how the Arroyo regime’s trying to soften the impact of the rice crisis by cozying up to China.

But there’s a real story in the Gorrell to-do, and it’s in how journalism — or what passes for it in the lifestyle pages — is so far gone in corruption and unprofessional conduct, among other reasons because many of the people who’re into it are there not for their skills as journalists but for their claimed connections with the high and mighty. That’s what mainstream media can be condemned for — for allowing this to happen: nay, for encouraging and abetting it, to the detriment not only of people like Gorrell but also and primarily that of the foolish Filipinos who follow the lifestyles of their self-proclaimed betters more assiduously than they do extra-judicial killings.

(BusinessWorld)

March and April are the cruelest months in these parts. The “summer” they signal is not the relief from winter it’s known in milder climes, but its opposite: the onset of days of stupefying heat that for those in the lowlands who can’t escape it (or who don’t have air conditioning) means sweating even as they’ve just bathed.

The very use of the word — no doubt devised in this country by ad men who hype it as the season for trips to the beach and vacations in Tagaytay and Baguio — is misleading. What begins in March is not summer but a season of dryness and fires (it’s not called the dry season for nothing).

The term “summer” in the Philippines is falsely derived from those countries with four seasons, where spring comes in late March and lasts until June, when the real summer begins, to be followed by fall and winter.

For the poor in this tropical land, March doesn’t mean the rebirth spring brings, but the start of a season of fires, during which the wretched accumulations of a lifetime usually go up in smoke, condemned by low water pressure and crooked firemen. But what comes next is even more dreaded: the season of rains, floods, landslides and typhoons, appropriately called “wet”. The wretchedness of the dry season is only a prelude to the worse miseries of the wet.

Forget the ills of an intemperate climate, however, because there’s worse news. It’s also in March and April when the labor force gets a huge boost in number from those out of high school, college or vocational school as well as those who’ve simply come of age. These — some of them, anyway — are the young and the eager, the people graduation speakers and priest try to inspire with advice to look at this country and life positively and with hope, but who within weeks crash head on into the adobe walls of the country’s unemployment statistics.

In January this year, says the National Statistics Office, the country’s jobless rate increased to 7.4 percent, up from 6.3 percent in October 2007, or about the same as it was in October 2006.

Although other groups like the Makati Business Club say the unemployment rate is actually ten percent, the official government rate means that some three million persons out of a labor force estimated at about 37 million are currently unemployed. The underemployed — those who work only part of the time, less than 40 hours a week — amounted to about 18.9 percent, or about six million, say the same government statistics.

Add these up, and you get a total of about nine million unemployed and underemployed — a hefty number that doesn’t even consider how much less than 40 hours a week the underemployed work (it could be an hour or two, for example).

Every job hunter knows what this means. Hundreds, even thousands, regularly apply for a few job openings. But it also means vast opportunities for employer abuse. With labor being a buyer’s market, who needs to provide job security, or even the wages mandated by law? An unhappy worker can always be replaced, with literally hundreds waiting to take his place.

The fact is that the economy has not generated enough jobs to keep pace with the growth of the labor force. Unemployment is a key factor in the poverty rate, there being no incomes without jobs. Without an income there’s little or no access to such necessities of life as food, clothing and a roof over one’s head, and those in these straits end up in the government poverty statistics, which now admit that 32.9 percent of the population, or 27.6 million Filipinos, are poor.

As disconcerting as these numbers may be, the number of poor people may actually be even more than the official statistics say.

The official poverty threshold defines the state of poverty as the inability to meet “minimum basic needs” like food and shelter. And yet even those able to provide themselves these needs, but who can’t get medical care when they’re sick, or whose children can’t stay in school the year round, are definitely “poor”. Seven out of ten Filipinos thus describe themselves as poor — which raises the disturbing possibility that the poverty rate may actually be 70 percent of the population.

So what’s the eager, wide-eyed, most recent entry into the labor force to do if he or she’s to either help get the family out of the pit of poverty or prevent it from falling into it ?

Why, get a job “abroad,” of course, so he or she can send home those lovely remittances than can keep his family here in food, clothing and shelter, and quite possibly in medical care and school.

That is the path of choice nowadays, with about 20 percent of the population eager to leave for foreign parts, or preparing to do so. Among this month’s and next’s graduates are those who’re going into caregiving, for example.

But note that going to school so one can leave for a job in another country presumes the capacity to pay the fees required and for the meals and transportation costs going to school entails. That means shutting the door to this option to the poor, who in the first place don’t even have the means to put food on the table regularly, let alone the extra cash to send anyone to school. The families that benefit from the remittances of Overseas Filipino Workers are usually not poor and certainly not the poorest, but those who have some means, in the first place.

For the poor and the poorest, then, the only options, such as they are, are here, where one ends up as either a poorly paid unskilled laborer without job security (31 percent of the labor force is in this category) — or in the streets wondering where the next meal’s coming from. The only upside to this is that few of the truly poor have had to listen to those graduation speeches that uniformly preached hope while eking out a living in this earthly paradise.

(BusinessWorld)