Guns pointed at wrong direction
It is amazing how Gloria Macapagal Arroyo can at one time while a student claim she was a card-bearing member of the Communist Party of the Philippines and now come up with this deadline to crush a "communist" insurgency.
This reflects the level of schizophrena that we are dealing here.
She ought to know that insurgency always thrive in any situation where there is injustice. the more glaring the injustice the larger the insurgency.
Insurgency begins when there is food on the table. It grows when a person and a family, cannot find any sustainable livelihood to put food on the table. Insurgency also settles in when parents and children become sick and they cannot afford a doctor or medicine and no health services and supplies are around to help.
I can go on and on but let me just cap by saying insurgency is always a temptation in a society that does not have a level playing field for all its citizens.
There are no more "Communists" and Arroyo and her generals are put on notice that the Berlin Wall is already gone and that East Germany, Russia, China, Vietnam, Cuba and Nicaragua have already made significant steps towards capitalism.
But there are a lot of home-grown insurgents who arm themselves and if they spouse red, then they are tagged red. In Mindanao, they are either MN, MI, MI-Reform, or of late Abu. In fact almost anyone who uses the gun to attain livelihood or leadership is called an insurgent. The bar on insurgency has of course been lowered since GMA took over. Any one who speaks, writes or assembles against her regime, has been labelled insurgent.
Yet who but she raised everybody's expectations. She told the whole nation that by the time she leaves in 2010, our country will be in a position to be a first world economy in 2020. In fact, one former insurgent himself, an NGO advocate who got the Ramon Magsaysay Award three years ago started aping her and began raising funds to convert slums into model villages, many of which have again reverted to becoming havens for squatters. She took not just the advocate for a joyride, but all of us who has been hoping to return to a viable Motherland.
As early as when Gloria first campaigned for presidency in 1998, but later downgraded to becoming Erap's vice president, she was already saying that her first priority was to put food on the table for our people. Well, the Philippines is in its worst food crisis in our history that today we no longer use the poverty index but have our eyes glued to the hunger index.
There is no food on the table not because we do not have the capacity to produce. Los Banos, Laguna and Munoz, Nueva Ecija produce the best agricultulture and fisheries brains in the entire world, and our people do not shy their brawns away from the field nor the waters. I learned this firsthand by helping Cito Lorenzo lead the aggie department increasing our national food productivity from the historic average of 2.9% to 8.5% in barely two years.
We do not have food because the food money is in the pockets of the First Kotong and their horde of corrupt congressmen, governors and generals. That is what the fertilizer, irrigation, livestock scams were all about. Together with technical smuggling of agricultural produce, including rice, the sitting aggie secretary Arthur Yap is really in charge of a plunder agenda to fleece all budgets of his department to stash funds for the 2010 elections for Gloria and Mike's candidates who will ensure they escape criminal prosecution after she loses her presidential immunities.
That Arthur Yap's job description, so now part of the hogs we raise, we burn and bury instead of eat, because he has been a busybody away from protecting those precious food resources.
I was watching TFC last week and one idiot advocate was criticizing how one contaminated piglet slipped from the hands of the quarantine personnel and got hurt. Holy smokes, that hog was on his way to be cremated instead on landing on the stomach of a homeless person, and there he was rooting for animal rights. Well how about human rights, for a change? The number of human beings that have been killed extra-judicially under the Arroyo watch has, I think, exceeded a thousand. Sad, but I have already lost count.
So let us not become schizophrenic after our leaders and not quibble about the military and police competing for brownie points for promotions. For every one so-called insurgent killed, three or more rises. Why? They have just lose their breadwinner we call insurgent. How can there be victories in this numbers game of hunger?
Let us talk about production. Even the military acknowledges this. In fact one General Victor Ibrado said: "Insurgency is not a military war, but a socioeconomic and political problem, which has to be solved by all of us."
Now will somebody please tell General Ibrado that his guns are pointed at the wrong direction?
Instead on shooting the people, he should be "annihilating" to borrow a term his press release used, the real injustice that now resides in Malacanang who has been pigging out for the past eight years at the expense of our national patrimony.
Bang!
This reflects the level of schizophrena that we are dealing here.
She ought to know that insurgency always thrive in any situation where there is injustice. the more glaring the injustice the larger the insurgency.
Insurgency begins when there is food on the table. It grows when a person and a family, cannot find any sustainable livelihood to put food on the table. Insurgency also settles in when parents and children become sick and they cannot afford a doctor or medicine and no health services and supplies are around to help.
I can go on and on but let me just cap by saying insurgency is always a temptation in a society that does not have a level playing field for all its citizens.
There are no more "Communists" and Arroyo and her generals are put on notice that the Berlin Wall is already gone and that East Germany, Russia, China, Vietnam, Cuba and Nicaragua have already made significant steps towards capitalism.
But there are a lot of home-grown insurgents who arm themselves and if they spouse red, then they are tagged red. In Mindanao, they are either MN, MI, MI-Reform, or of late Abu. In fact almost anyone who uses the gun to attain livelihood or leadership is called an insurgent. The bar on insurgency has of course been lowered since GMA took over. Any one who speaks, writes or assembles against her regime, has been labelled insurgent.
Yet who but she raised everybody's expectations. She told the whole nation that by the time she leaves in 2010, our country will be in a position to be a first world economy in 2020. In fact, one former insurgent himself, an NGO advocate who got the Ramon Magsaysay Award three years ago started aping her and began raising funds to convert slums into model villages, many of which have again reverted to becoming havens for squatters. She took not just the advocate for a joyride, but all of us who has been hoping to return to a viable Motherland.
As early as when Gloria first campaigned for presidency in 1998, but later downgraded to becoming Erap's vice president, she was already saying that her first priority was to put food on the table for our people. Well, the Philippines is in its worst food crisis in our history that today we no longer use the poverty index but have our eyes glued to the hunger index.
There is no food on the table not because we do not have the capacity to produce. Los Banos, Laguna and Munoz, Nueva Ecija produce the best agricultulture and fisheries brains in the entire world, and our people do not shy their brawns away from the field nor the waters. I learned this firsthand by helping Cito Lorenzo lead the aggie department increasing our national food productivity from the historic average of 2.9% to 8.5% in barely two years.
We do not have food because the food money is in the pockets of the First Kotong and their horde of corrupt congressmen, governors and generals. That is what the fertilizer, irrigation, livestock scams were all about. Together with technical smuggling of agricultural produce, including rice, the sitting aggie secretary Arthur Yap is really in charge of a plunder agenda to fleece all budgets of his department to stash funds for the 2010 elections for Gloria and Mike's candidates who will ensure they escape criminal prosecution after she loses her presidential immunities.
That Arthur Yap's job description, so now part of the hogs we raise, we burn and bury instead of eat, because he has been a busybody away from protecting those precious food resources.
I was watching TFC last week and one idiot advocate was criticizing how one contaminated piglet slipped from the hands of the quarantine personnel and got hurt. Holy smokes, that hog was on his way to be cremated instead on landing on the stomach of a homeless person, and there he was rooting for animal rights. Well how about human rights, for a change? The number of human beings that have been killed extra-judicially under the Arroyo watch has, I think, exceeded a thousand. Sad, but I have already lost count.
So let us not become schizophrenic after our leaders and not quibble about the military and police competing for brownie points for promotions. For every one so-called insurgent killed, three or more rises. Why? They have just lose their breadwinner we call insurgent. How can there be victories in this numbers game of hunger?
Let us talk about production. Even the military acknowledges this. In fact one General Victor Ibrado said: "Insurgency is not a military war, but a socioeconomic and political problem, which has to be solved by all of us."
Now will somebody please tell General Ibrado that his guns are pointed at the wrong direction?
Instead on shooting the people, he should be "annihilating" to borrow a term his press release used, the real injustice that now resides in Malacanang who has been pigging out for the past eight years at the expense of our national patrimony.
Bang!
*******************************************************************
Ado Paglinawan is a former press officer of the Philippine Embassy in Washington DC who occasionally contributes to the Philippines Daily Inquirer. He writes for various email groups and blogs under the pseudonym "mymaestro888". Ado has best served overseas Filipinos as a resource person providing inside information and backgrounders about the celebrated fertilizer scam that rocked the Philippine Agriculture Department and the Presidency since 2004.
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