Advance Australia Fair - Building Sustainability, Justice and Peace
Opening plenary - Challenging the neo-liberal danger
Saturday 30th July 2005

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Rey Casambre

Execute Director, Philippine Peace Centre

I would like to greet and thank the organizers and sponsors of this conference for inviting someone from the Philippines to participate in these discussions on the global menace of neoliberalism, and the dangers as well as challenges it poses to the Australian people, and the peoples of the world.

Filipinos have as much to share as we have to learn from others about the devastation wrought upon us by neoliberalism, so-called, and how we are confronting this ideological and economic aggression.

The Philippine economy to this day is agrarian and pre-industrial; social and economic relations are largely feudal or semi-feudal. We have no illusions that “neoliberalism” can pull us out of feudal backwardness and underdevelopment the same way that liberalism freed Europe from the yoke of feudal absolutism in the 18th century and paved the way to laissez faire, free market capitalism.

We see “neoliberalism” as nothing but a jazzed-up signboard behind which the powerful capitalist countries pry open, and then rip off the weaker economies. Barriers that protect local industries from the unrestricted flow of foreign capital and investments are torn down; subsidies that assist vulnerable sectors like agriculture are discarded; trade unions are under attack; basic social services are privatized and priced out of reach, etc. “Neoliberalism” is the banner under which neocolonial plunder is inflicted by the mighty industrial powers on the weaker Third World countries. In this way, they stand to reap superprofits as well as extricate their giant corporations and national economies from prolonged crisis.

Having long suffered from a colonial pattern of unequal trade with capitalist countries, the Philippine economy has been characterized by chronic trade and current account deficits, a skyrocketing public and foreign debt, incessant inflation, increasing unemployment and underemployment, deterioration of basic social services, dispossession of land from their tillers and reconcentration of these lands in the hands of big landlords and multinational corporations.

(Author’s postscript: Shortly after this presentation, the Philippine government announced corrections in the recorded trade deficits for 2002, 2003 and 2004. The figures were revised to US$ 4.03 billion from US$ 218 million for 2002; US$ 4.24 billion from US$1.27 billion for 2003, and US$ 4.36 billion from US$ 713 million for 2004.)

The declaration of martial law in 1972 saw the people initially coerced and terrorized into submission. Filipinos got a taste of things to come with the Marcos dictatorship dutifully complying with IMF impositions called “Structural Adjustment Programs” (SAPs) in exchange for a “clean bill of health”, the go-signal for creditors to grant the country loans albeit at ever increasing interest rates. The SAPs continued even after the overthrow of the dictatorship; the conditionalities became progressively more severe as the country became trapped into the downward spiral of debt and deficits.

When Reagan and Thatcher steered the world capitalist system away from Keynesianism into Hayek’s monetarism and “neoliberalism”, the Philippines, along with other developing countries, fell from the frying pan into the fire. The 1997 Asian financial crisis shook the entire capitalist system and underscored the dangers in the unbridled debauchery and plunder of weaker economies by speculative foreign capital.

Now the Philippines cannot even be properly called a developing country. The positive GDP/GNP growth shown in government statistics does not translate into an improvement in the quality of the people’s lives. This only serves to bolster the conclusion that only a privileged few benefit from whatever economic growth while the rest sink deeper into poverty, misery and want.

This is not to say that the Philippines is merely a victim of external economic aggression by corporate capital. These external forces could not have succeeded in plundering the Philippine economy without local collaborators, those at the helm of the Philippine Government no less. The President is de facto the highest representative of local big business, and big landlords, the chairman of the board and CEO of these ruling classes who benefit the most from the system where they serve as local agents of foreign monopoly capital.

This ruling elite has a solid tradition of sycophancy, mendicancy and puppetry, especially to American interests. Every Philippine President knows that to remain in power, one must always be in the good graces of the White House and the Pentagon. Former President Diosdado Macapagal, the father of Ms. Arroyo, the current President, himself candidly admitted this. When the WTO set a schedule for the reduction of tariff rates, for example, then President Ramos, boasted that the Philippines can meet the targets two or three years ahead of the WTO schedules.

In her State of the Nation Address last Monday, 25 July, a beleaguered President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo – surveys show 73% of Filipinos want her removed from office -- said that the problem lies in an antiquated and corruption-prone political system. While this may be partly true, Ms. Arroyo cleverly tries to cover up the fact that the economy is in shambles, the economic system is itself fundamentally flawed, and that she herself is responsible for perpetuating and aggravating an unjust and exploitative system.

We recall that in 1994, it was the Senator Macapagal-Arroyo who sponsored the bill providing for the Philippines’ ratification of the Uruguay Round Treaty thereby paving the way to membership in the WTO. As the charts above clearly show, the economy deteriorated drastically in the past 10 years and more so under Ms. Arroyo’s presidency.

Faced with a financial crisis brought about by unbridled “free market” globalization and aggravated by rampant and unchecked corruption, Macapagal-Arroyo’s solution has been to impose heavier burdens on the people with more and higher taxes while granting foreign corporations tax holidays; and increasing debt payments while cutting down government spending for social services such as health, education, housing and unemployment relief.

Intolerable hardships, poverty and misery have inevitably driven many of our people to protest government policies and programs and demand a better life. Government has responded with force and coercion, brutally breaking up labor strikes and violently suppressing protest actions. There is an alarming upsurge of human rights violations nationwide against the most effective critics of the government -- including a massacre of peaceful strikers and, extra-judicial killings and enforced disappearances of progressive leaders and activists. More than 30 were killed in the first quarter of 2005 alone, and Ms. Arroyo did not lift a finger to investigate, much less stop the killings. She did not utter a single word to condemn the atrocities, thus tacitly concurring with the military’s justification of these barbarities that the victims were alleged communists or suspected supporters of the New People’s Army.

HUMAN RIGHTS VIOLATIONS UNDER ARROYO REGIME
2001-2005

Extrajudicial Killings 411
Enforced Disappearances 130
Torture 245
Illegal Arrest 1,563
Arbitrary Detention 1,137
Threats, Harassment and Intimidation 37,530
Forcible Evacuation and Displacement 142,136

The Arroyo government has found in the “war on terror” a convenient excuse for stepping up repression in the Philippines, dutifully pushing for such measures as an “anti-terrorist law and a national ID system. US President Bush speaks fondly of Macapagal-Arroyo not only because of her faithful implementation of neoliberal policies in the Philippines, but because of her all-out support for the “war on terror”.

Is Macapagal-Arroyo a disciple of the neoliberals or a lieutenant of the neoconservatives? (I am echoing a question raised in Conference Briefing Paper #9, “how to describe the Bush and Howard governments – “are they neoliberal or neoconservative?”). My answer is that she is both. Neoliberalism and neoconservatism are the two ugly faces of the same coin. To use another analogy, they are the left and right hands of the same greedy monster – monopoly capital. In the Philippines, as perhaps for all small and weak economies, neoconservatism is the hand wringing our neck or pointing a gun to our face, while neoliberalism is the hand emptying our pockets and fleecing us dry.

Neoconservatism is the brutal coercive force – the “bad cop”, while “free market” globalization or neoliberalism so-called is the seductive but equally deadly bait – the “good cop”.

Worldwide, the US neoconservatives led by Bush and willingly aided by Blair, Howard and Arroyo, are using the “war on terror” as a pretext for consolidating US hegemony, securing the sources and supply routes for strategic resources such as oil, acquiring foreign markets and sources of raw materials, spheres of influence and areas for investments, preventing the rise of any peer competitor, be it an “enemy” or an ally, and crushing people’s resistance – be it armed or unarmed -- to intervention and aggression.

The Arroyo government has collaborated with the US and other capitalist powers in compromising Philippine sovereignty by granting foreigners virtually equal privileges as Filipinos to exploit our natural resources. Even now they plot to amend the Constitution to expand these privileges. The Arroyo government has likewise violated the Philippine Constitution by allowing the entry and continued presence and activity of US troops in the Philippines, including combat operations, under the pretext of “joint military training exercises”, “humanitarian operations”, “rescue and disaster relief operations”, etc. and purportedly in accordance with the “counterterrorist” war.

An immediate casualty of such collusion is the peace talks between the government and the National Democratic Front of the Philippines (NDFP). After the US, Britain, The Netherlands, Canada and Australia had named the CPP, NPA and the NDFP Chief Political consultant Prof. Jose Ma. Sison as “terrorists”, the Philippine government campaigned and succeeded in having the European Union include the NPA and Prof. Sison in its “terrorist” list. The Arroyo government has thereafter used the “terrorist” listing as a bargaining lever – or rather a club -- to force the NDFP into signing a “peace agreement” without the necessary social, economic and political reforms needed to eradicate the roots of the armed conflict.

After barely two years in office, the Arroyo government had become widely unpopular due to its anti-national and anti-people policies. To ward off criticism when members of her own First Family were implicated in huge corruption scandals and other anomalies, Ms. Arroyo announced at the end of 2002 that she would no longer run for President in 2004. But the true traditional politician she is, she did run and “won” the elections, albeit under a dark cloud of doubt.

After another year in office, she now faces impeachment charges for bribery, culpable violation of the Constitution and breach of public trust. These stem, among other things, from her now infamous phone call to a Commission on Elections official in connection with vote padding, validating post-electoral charges of blatant and widespread fraud. Various poll surveys show that more than 60% have no trust nor confidence in her government. Her erstwhile closest and most famous allies, former Presidents Aquino and Ramos and former Senator Salonga, have likewise expressed the view that she has to give up her position.

More important, the people are once again taking their destiny into their own hands and making themselves heard as they march on the streets calling for the resignation, if not ouster, of Arroyo. A hundred thousand people demonstrated outside Congress when Ms. Arroyo was delivering her State of the Nation Address. Surveys show that 73% of Filipinos want her out of office. In other countries this is more than enough reason to resign if only out of a sense of dignity and self-respect. Not in the Philippines. Not Ms. Arroyo.

It remains to be seen how long Macapagal-Arroyo can hold on to the Presidency. What is certain is that as time passes, it shall become increasingly clear to more people that a change of leaders does not suffice for their lives to improve. Bigger and more profound reforms have to be undertaken.

We in the Philippines know that we are not alone in our struggle against neoliberalism and neoconservatism, and in fighting the local or domestic and regional cohorts of these monsters. Here in Australia, as elsewhere in the world, people see through the cloak of “neoliberal” deceit and defy the coercive arsenal of the neoconservatives. We support other people’s struggles as much as we call for and welcome their support for ours. Nonetheless, we understand that our internationalist duty, the best way we can support other peoples’ struggles, is to advance our own and achieve genuine democracy, freedom and social justice in our land for our people.

Good evening. First of all I would like to thank the organisers of this meeting for inviting somebody from 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 happening 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. This 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 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 people’s 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. Then from January to 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 she 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 principle 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 the 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 killings 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 were 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 ‘people’s power’. They have ‘people power fatigue’. It’s partly true, we have to admit. But why is there ‘people’s 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 come to nothing, 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, 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. We also know that we can help you to advance your own struggle. We will achieve victories and eventually aim to build our nation as truly democratic, free and one with social justice.

Thank you very much

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