November 2003

(Note: This paper is being presented in the spirit of public
information and scholarship and does not construe alignment to any political
party. It seeks to create awareness and promote multi-sectoral cooperation
in analyzing and finding possible solutions to corruption in the
military within a framework of effective management in a democratic political
environment. The author believes that a professional and honest Armed
Forces is in the best interest of the nation whatever is the form of
government)
_____________________________________________________________________________

THE FACT-FINDING COMMISSION REPORT AND
THE ARMED FORCES IN PHILIPPINE POLITICS
By: Rene N. Jarque

This presentation comes in two parts. The first part deals with the
Report of the Fact Finding Commission to investigate the Oakwood Incident
which came out last month and discusses what the report says and does
not say. The second part looks at the role of the Armed Forces in
Philippine politics describing a politicized AFP amidst an unstable political
situation and the need for both military and government reform.

PART 1: THE FACT FINDING COMMISSION REPORT

The Commission Report : What it Says and Does Not Say  

The Fact-Finding Commision Report is divided into two major parts.
Part 1 chronologizes the events of July 27 at Oakwood concluding that 1)
the mutiny was planned and not spontaneous; 2) that it was part of an
elaborate plan with the goal of taking political power to establish a
15-member council after Erap is restored for three days only; 3) that
there was widespread recruitment of military personnel involving the blood
compact and preparations such as buying of equipment and the armbands.
Part II discusses the grievances of the soldiers as expressed at
Oakwood. It explains that two principal themes run through the soldier’s
grievances: the need for corruption control and for the modernization of
the AFP. We shall focus on Part II and discuss the major issues examined
in the report.

1. RSBS Scam.  The Oakwood soldiers called for the acceleration of the
investigation of the reported anomalies in the AFP-RSBS. The RSBS
Scandal was the subject of a Senate investigation in 1998 of which
recommendations were made for the prosecution of the retired generals and
officers involved in the scam -- for corrupt practices such as overpricing of
land deals, non-payment of taxes, extending behest loans to favored
companies, receiving double compensation, engaging in partisan political
activity by allowing Presidential candidate De Venecia to use
helicopters. The case is now pending in the Ombudsman and no case has been filed
in the Sandiganbayan due to the delaying tactics of the respondents.
The report states that the RSBS, ”in its present conception and
structure, is fundamentally flawed…The current structure creates powerful
incentives for the granting of ‘behest loans’ and investments for
non-commercial pricing of real estate and other acquisitions”.

What the report fails to state is that the RSBS has all these years,
been used as a “moneybag” of top DND/AFP officials, that a thorough
audit is needed to check on where all the hard-earned money of the soldiers
have gone. It also fails to state that the RSBS is a potential funding
and logistics source for the political activities of retired generals
and the present administration. Also, that despite massive losses, the
Board of Directors, which includes the Chief of Staff, heads of the
Major Services and Sergeant Major, AFP, continue to draw substantial
allowances. It also does not mention that RSBS was involved in the building
of the AFP Theater, which provides no direct benefit to the soldier,
when the AFP Medical Center is rotting away.

2. Conversion. In another paper, I described the practice of conversion
as the mother of all corruption in the AFP, the source of jealousies
and demoralization in the ranks. It is an illegal process in violation of
AFP Procurement system and COA rules The report defines conversion as
“transforming allocated funds into cash in collusion with suppliers and
some of the officers involved in the procurement process” which
“disregards or short-circuits the procurement process and administrative
regulations”. The monies and properties derived from conversion can be
“programmed for other expenditures of the command or wind up in the personal
bank account of the commander”.  The report also confirms the “cost of
money” of 30% representing profit of the supplier part of which  goes
to “goodwill” money to various personnel involved in the conversion
process. The report concludes that conversion involves “a most serious
breakdown of discipline and grievous anomalies at the most senior levels of
the AFP”.

What the report fails to say is that 1) converted funds not only go to
pockets, they are used for unauthorized allowances, travel “pabaon”, to
buy a house or car, pay personal credit card bills, for night-clubbing
and philandering purposes; 2) since items bought through converted
funds are evidences of an illegal act, they are not entered into the
property book and can be taken away; 3) it is inefficient as the “cost of
money” does not maximize the use of resources and distorts the financial
planning process since the budget does not reflect actual expenditures
and not properly recorded; 4) purchases and activities resulting from
converted funds are sources of income discrepancies,  jealousies and
demoralization in the AFP as the lifestyles of officers and soldiers
receiving allowances derived from conversion are  more affluent than those
who rely on their salaries alone; 5) and worst of all, conversion
destroys the professional ethics of the officers as signing spurious documents
is a serious violation of the Officer Code that “An Officer does not
lie, cheat, steal nor tolerate those who do”. 

3. Malpractices in AFP Procurement. Besides conversion, the report
describes other malpractices such as “washing or laundering” services which
involves the conversion of a unit fund allocation by another unit for a
fee of 10-20% of the amount in addition to the 30% of the conversion
process; “rigged biddings” wherein a favored supplier is identified
beforehand and allowed to  win or of multiple bidders owned by the same
owner; “purchase order splitting” so that PO approval remains within the
unit and does not undergo scrutiny by higher office; conversion of fuel
allocation to cash in gasoline stations; loss, pilferage and selling of
ammunition and firearms.

What the report failed to mention was how the major services were able
to build golf courses using the AFP procurement system, golf courses
whose incomes are not properly reported to the government, not subjected
to audit and are used in the offices of the Commanding Generals for
whatever reason.  It also miserably fails to explain why while the AFP can
build a canopy or a generals lounge for millions of pesos, soldiers
live in dilapidated barracks, that while fancy staff cars are bought, the
operating troops operate with limited transport assets and without
first aid kits. Indeed, part of AFP modernization program can be funded if
procurement malpractices are eliminated, savings generated and
conversion, controlled or eliminated. 

4. Poor Medical Services.  The Report admits the glaring deficiencies
of AFP medical services citing mismanagement, below standard facilities,
meager supply of medicines and not so highly competent doctors
“inadequate for the needs of the soldiers and their families”.  Budgetary
constraints are aggravated by up to 25% mark-up by dealers as the hospitals
cannot go to direct suppliers or manufacturers because of delayed
payments.  In the field, the report accurately discloses the following: lack
of basic first aid and  medical skills, no individual first aid kits
issued to soldiers, inadequate aid man’s medical kit, no immediately
available vehicles to transport casualties, forward medical installations
not equipped to handle battle casualties, poor communication system.

What it does not say is that medical procurement is a source of graft
and corruption through overpricing, commissions and kickbacks and that
they are subject to the influence peddling of the wives of officers in
cahoots with unscrupulous suppliers.

5. AFP Grievance Mechanism.  The report points out two mechanisms for
airing grievances: the chain of command and the staff offices such as
the Inspector General (IG), Office of Ethical Standards and Public
Accountability (OESPA) and Provost Marshall (PM).  It admits that “very few
officers and soldiers have the courage to present a complaint directly
to the commanding officer” as they could be subjected to “hard time” as
in bad assignments, curtailment of privileges and delayed promotion. In
other words, the grievance mechanism does not work as it ought to.
Legitimate complaints and constructive criticisms are clamped down by the
chain of command as insubordination, dissent or worse, rebellion.

What the report failed to say is that in many instances, officers use
the cloak of their authority and their power to hide their 
incompetence and corruption; that in fact, many “little mutinies” are going on in
the AFP but they are clamped down by the chain of command citing that
such dissent is a breakdown of discipline. On the contrary, dissent,
viewed constructively and managed well, is a sign of a healthy
organization. With an ineffective grievance mechanism reform can only occur
through a top-down approach wherein the leadership must possess the moral
courage to face criticism and lead by example. In relation to the Oakwood
Incident, I had the same question as they when I was a junior officer:
to whom can we go to if the chain of command is not listening? Perhaps,
in their minds, bringing their cause to the Filipino people was the
best thing to do and perhaps, even the most honorable as indeed, they are
soldiers of the Filipino people and not of the generals and
politicians.

6. Modernizing the AFP.  The report merely talks of Modernization is
the
sense of equipage. It largely and wrongfully assumes that by merely
buying new equipment, the AFP will be modernized. Equipment alone does not
make a modern Armed Forces.  One also has to look into strategy and
doctrine, basic  facilities such as hospitals and the state of
professionalism of the Officer and NCO Corps. Financially, the foremost question
is where will we get the money to fund the acquisition cost and the life
cycle cost -- operations, maintenance, training/re-training of
personnel and disposal costs? Experience the last nine years or so with the AFP
Modernization Program shows that the Philippines is incapable of
modernizing its Armed Forces because of lack of funds, management
incompetence, politics or all of the above. 

What we need is to develop a modernization program that balances our
defense capability with our limited financial resources. The key to
effective national defense is a sound strategy that takes advantage of the
inherent defensive strengths of our borders and our country: the sea
around us, the impenetrable mountains, the people. There is need to
develop a realistic military strategy not merely based on the caprices of
the generals for new toys. Yes, an F-16 is a good jet-fighter and it can
make us proud to have one but shall we spend millions of dollars on a
plane when many of our people have barely enough to eat and we have a
spiraling national debt, when our soldiers have not enough bullets, no
first aid-kits and live in squalid conditions?

Related to the modernization issue is the recent declaration of the US
that the Philippines is a “Major Non-Nato Ally” with greater access to
American defense equipment and supplies. This raises a lot of questions
for AFP modernization and the defense of the country. Foremost question
is how will the MNNA status and US support promote or not promote
defense self-reliance which has been the call of defense planners since the
approval of the AFP Modernization Program in 1996. The 1998 defense
policy paper declares a national defense system based on self-reliance:

…our defense is not predicated on the  assurance of  support from
another  country and  that  we can  defend  ourselves  using  our  limited 
resources without immediately  depending on the support   of other 
countries. This is not only a question of  national   survival.  It is
also   a question of  national national  sovereignty  and   national  
self-respect.   Dependence  on  other countries for defense may  allow
these countries  to impose solutions upon us that may undermine our
national interests and the welfare of our people.
(“In Defense of the Philippine”, DND, May 1998)

As one author sees it, the US fight against terrorism could lead to the
resurgence of Cold War dynamics which will not be good for a defense
self-reliance posture. There is the risk that  “many of the warped
world-views of the Cold war are being replicated in the war against terror,
just as local guerillas in the past were too readily viewed as mere
proxies of international communism, so are local conflicts in the present
era too often seen as mere manifestations of global terrorism”. (Paul
Hutchcaft, “History Lessons for President Bush”, Wisconsin State Journal,
Oct 24, 2003)

Certainly, there will be more equipment for the AFP but it will be old
or obsolete equipment. Indeed, beggars cannot be choosers. And the
catch will be that support will be limited to US made equipment with
military aid channeled to American defense companies.  The AFP will not have
much of a choice really except to look at the junkyard and see what is
available. An example is the Kennedy jeep which the US donated in the
eighties  when the US Forces switched to the Humvee. The Philippine Army
received 100 units and another 100 units for spare parts.  Furthermore,
more equipment means more operating and maintenance expenses hence, the
DND-AFP should examine its already meager resources.

On strategy and doctrine development, will the equipment to be donated
by the US reflect the fighting doctrine of the AFP or will the AFP
doctrine depend on what we get from the Americans?  Let it be noted that
the AFP capability did not develop much when the Clark and Subic bases
were here. It even created a dependence and a strategy that was driven by
whatever equipment or arms the US donated. Tactically also, by being an
unquestioning US ally, we have also unnecessarily drawn enemies unto
ourselves making us corollary targets of the enemies of the US.

There are also legal issues. How will US military aid affect the AFP
Modernization Program? Equipment donated by the United States puts into
question the disposition of the AFP Modernization Program. Will the
equipment given as aid by the US be  deducted from the shopping list of the
AFPMP and funds can be channeled to other items for procurement? If
not, what will happen to the budget allotted for the AFPMP? Or an even
deeper question, what  will happen to the law itself which prescribes
capabilities to be developed. Should Congress repeal the law or supercede
it with another one incorporating the changes as a result of US support?

Comments on the Feliciano Report

Part of me is glad about the Fact Finding Commission Report and part
of me is not. Glad because the many things that I have been saying all
these years are now officially confirmed and have found its way into the
public mind. I remember when I exposed “conversion” in military
publications. The first time, the Army Journal was ordered burned by the
Commanding General, Philippine Army, an act described by one newspaper as
“shades of the Inquisition”. The second time, I was relieved of my
position by the CSAFP who denied in the newspapers that conversion or
“technical malversion” exist in the AFP. Now, at least, the public knows who
of us lied. The cases stated in the report provides evidences of
unprofessionalism, mismanagement and corruption that I denounced  as a young
officer until my resignation from the military service 12 years after.
Indeed, I am relieved to know that mine is no longer a “voice in the
wilderness”.  The report also confirms that I have been saying all along
that the “the grievances, if true and if recklessly neglected can
allowed to fester by the senior echelons of the AFP and by government itself,
tend practically to ensure the replication of the rebellion in the
future”.

I am not glad because I find the report very shallow and except for
RSBS, generally a rehash of the Davide Commission Report. It merely looked
at the trees and not the forest.  It fails to look at the root of the
problem in the AFP which is the professional and moral bankruptcy of the
AFP Officer Corps on whose shoulders lay the blame for the wretched and
dishonorable state of the AFP today. It fails to apply the principle of
“command responsibility” on the President, who as Commander in Chief is
ultimately responsible for the failure of the AFP to reform. 

What Next?  

If my experience in advocating AFP reform is any indication, the chain
of command, all the way up to the Commander in Chief, does not listen
very well to soundings of reform. No amount of coup attempts and
mutinies, fact-finding commissions,  Congressional Hearings and pages written
about military reform have made a real difference. In fact, many of the
abhorrent practices in the AFP have become so entrenched that it will
be difficult to untangle them. Once in a while, you get officers who
will openly denounce corruption and unprofessionalism. The outcome? Some
are relieved and/or transferred, some get co-opted back and promoted or
given good positions, others are silenced with threats, others, like
myself, resign. One thing is constant however -- the complaints are, on
the whole, ignored and eventually forgotten. No genuine actions are
taken and later, everything goes back to normal again. I am of the feeling
that the Feliciano Commission like the Davide Commission will
eventually be a useless exercise. For what has happened to the results of the
Davide Commission? Where has the idealism of the officers involved in
previous coup attempts gone? And what has happened to the Armed Forces of
the Philippines?  From past experience, there is cause for pessimism
that the government will not take serious action and the AFP will not
undertake comprehensive reform.

Military reform will not come easy and will come with great risks to
the Arroyo administration or to any administration. It will be an uphill
battle against former generals who will be offended when human rights
abuses and corrupt financial transactions are exposed. There will be
resistance from those whose careers and economic interests will be
threatened -- unscrupulous defense officials, senior officers, politicians and
influential suppliers. It will be difficult because the very generals
and colonels now running the system benefited or are benefiting from it.
How can one reform a corrupt system that is protected by the generals
from all sides, those still in the service, those in government service
and those who are already retired. Plus you have the connections with
politicians and big businessmen. By admitting that the system is
defective puts into question their own rise in the ranks and their positions.
As for conversion and corruption, why kill the goose that lays the
golden egg?

Over the years, official proclamations on military reform have been
mere lip service and unprofessional and dishonest conduct has been openly
tolerated and even encouraged among the Officer Corps. How many times
have we heard a Chief of Staff or Commanding General proclaim that the
AFP has become professional? But no senior officer has been caught or
punished for financial wrongdoings and unqualified officers continue to
be promoted. It has become a never-ending cycle of abuse and corruption
to which there is seemingly no end, from one Chief of Staff to another,
one Commander in Chief to the next. For the good of the nation and the
sake of honest and hard-working soldiers, this must be stopped.

PART 2:  THE ARMED FORCES IN PHILIPPINE  POLITICS

The AFP in Philippine Politics

Despite the democratic axiom that the military should be an apolitical
entity subject to “civilian authority over the military”, the Armed
Forces of the Philippines has invariably played a very significant, if not
the most significant, political role in recent Philippine history,
whether the Filipino people like it or not. It is therefore apt to look
into this political role so we can better understand it and see how it
fits or contributes into our nation’s future. 

1. The Armed Forces plays a crucial role in Philippine politics.
Political power indeed comes from the barrel of the gun or the threat of its
use by the bearer. The contemporary role of the AFP in Philippine
politics was exemplified in EDSA I, 2 and 3 and with whom it takes side
emerges victorious for indeed it is only victory that justifies its
intervention.  Anything less than victory, as proven in numerous coup attempts
or “military demonstrations” such as Oakwood, is rebellion or mutiny.
The Messianic complex did not begin with the Oakwood soldiers, it began
with EDSA 1 with the very leaders now in the military and government
who have also failed in their promise of a better future for the country
and our people.

The political role of the Armed Forces began and was even more
pronounced during the martial law years when former President Marcos used the
Armed Forces to enforce control on every facet of political life of the
country. It was really Marcos who created in the minds of the soldiers
the idea that they can run the country.  After the failed coup attempt
in 1987, I asked one of our leaders who shall govern the country if we
had taken over government. Before he can answer, I retorted, “Because
sir, given the dismal state of the AFP today, I doubt very much whether
military officers can govern this country”.

The present security functions of the AFP contributes to its political
role as it performs a dual role: an external security role in defending
against foreign aggression, which is probably non-existent or remote at
this time, and an internal security role in fighting  against the so
called “enemies of the state”, which is considered the immediate security
threat. We can also look at this dual role in terms of a defense role
and a developmental role involving both war-fighting and socio-economic
development activities simultaneously. This dual role authorizes and
enables the Armed Forces to become involved in the political life of  the
remotest and farthest of barangays.

One of the principal elements of democracy is the electoral process. To
have an honest and clean election, not “guns, goons and gold”, is the
hallmark of democratic maturity. To my mind, an independent and unbiased
Armed Forces can facilitate democracy and not destroy it by 
safeguarding  the electoral process and ensuring the people a clean and honest
election in 2004. It is a question, however, of whether the top AFP
leadership will have the moral courage to stake their lot or continue to be
willing puppets of the ruling administration. The AFP is supposed to be
a neutral entity but it cannot stand and should not stand idle while
the democratic electoral process is being cheated.

2. The AFP is politicized.  Whether they are aware or not, our soldiers
are very much politicized.  This politicization comes in good and bad
forms. Bad politicization is the control of the politicians of the
military under the pretext of “civilian control over the military”.  An
example is the necessary confirmation by the Senate of the promotion to
Colonels and Generals wherein the senior officers have to play politics
and submit themselves to padrinos. Senior positions are also dictated
more by political connections rather than professional competence and
integrity.

Good politicization, on the other hand, is ironically the result of
the government’s counter-insurgency campaign. The National Internal
Security Plan to address the insurgency problem, both Muslim and Communist,
calls for a four-phased strategy of Clear, Hold, Consolidate and
Develop. Clearing involves the deployment of mobile forces to clear the area
of armed rebel groups and the conduct of so called SOT operations to
destroy the political infrastructure in the villages. Holding calls for
territorial security forces to hold the area and secure it from further
incursion of the rebel armed group.  Consolidation seeks to
re-establish government control in the area and involves organizing the community
and introducing basic services. Finally, the Development phase would
initiate full-scale and sustained development programs to improve the
economic life of the people. It is in the failure of the consolidation and
development phases that the soldier’s politicization subtly comes in.

My own experience as a lieutenant is an example of this politicization
process. I was then assigned to a remote detachment in Barangay San
Jose, San Mariano, Isabela. Part of my mission was to win the “hearts and
minds” of the people. Hence, my unit initiated various community
organizing and development programs such as Cleanliness and Beautification
Project, Medical and Dental Civic Action, assistance in building a
classroom, playground and church and making toilets. We also distributed
cheap radio sets to the villagers so they know whats going on in the world.
By initiating these projects, after clearing and holding the area, my
troops and I were slowly being immersed into the political life of the
village. We basically took responsibility for the inadequacies of the
government and took over where the local political leaders, the barangay
captain and the municipal mayor, failed in delivering the basic
services to the people. I described this process in an essay published in the
Army Journal and the Cavalier Magazine:

The idea of a  knight  in shining armor whose  job is to protect and
serve the poor  appeals  to his sense of  duty  and  idealism. Coupled
with the awareness  that winning  the  hearts and minds  of the  people 
is  vital  to  winning  the  battle in his  remote area,  the
lieutenant  attempts to play  the role of that knight. This contradicts with his 
military ideals that soldiers should  not   be  involved  in politics. 
However,  he  finds   it  difficult  to be apolitical  because  the
only  semblance  of  government in the area  is his  detachment  and  his
troops … The  feeling of  pity  is  compounded by the knowledge  that 
government  neglect is  the cause  of  the people’s agony. It   then 
becomes  necessary  as  dictated by  his  conscience,  knowledge 
responsibility  and  earnest  desire  to  serve  and  perform  his duties 
well to  administer  the   barangay  and   become  the “little mayor”  in 
his area. Out  of  disappointment for  the  ineffectiveness   of  
government  and  his determination  to  win  the  battle  as demanded  by
his professional duties and  as instilled  in  him during  his formative 
years  in military schools, he   becomes  embroiled  in matters of
government. Unknowingly  and whether he likes it or not, he is politicised.
(“Counter-insurgency and the Politicalization of the Armed
Forces”,Cavalier, April-May, 1991)

3. The Need for Military Reform and “Enlightenment” of the Soldiers.
The signposts of unprofessionalism and corruption in the AFP are
everywhere, from the sergeant who sells combat boots to the major who gets a
kickback from purchases, from the lieutenant who accepts bribes from
illegal loggers to the general who converts unit funds for personal
purposes, from the sergeant who hides his incompetence through a padrino to
the colonel who seeks promotion by palakasan or sipsipan. Poor hospitals
and medical facilities, poor maintenance of buildings  and equipment,
cramped housing for soldiers, unflyable planes and unsailable ships, no
first aids to soldiers in the field, lack of ammunition – all these
point to something inherently wrong with the state of the AFP and points
to a need for reform. It is not merely a question of funds, it is also a
question of leadership and management, or the lack of it.

At present, the Armed Forces can be likened to a crumbling, old house
that is tattered everywhere with its foundations weak and crumbling.  No
amount of repainting and re-plastering of the walls or repairing the
creaking floor will make it stronger as the pillars and foundations are
weak.  It may look ornate and pretty on the outside but the paint merely
hides the rot in the wooden panels.  It may still be standing but
termites are crawling everywhere eating away the beams and pillars. What is
required is a total overhaul to strengthen old pillars and create new
ones so that the house has stronger structural foundations and look more
elegant but not necessarily expensive.

There have been attempts at reforming the AFP since 1986. And in
fairness, tremendous improvements have been made in civil-military
operations, human rights, professional training. However, in terms of the overall
professionalism of the Officer Corps and in financial and logistics
management, a lot still needs to be done. The fundamental problems and the
reasons behind them have not been addressed and no real, honest to
goodness reform has occurred. The AFP may have lost its omnipotence during
martial law but many practices that made it an unprofessional and
tainted organization during that period remain. In fact, many of the
unethical practices have been institutionalized and remain untouched. All the
talk about professionalism and integrity today, if impressive to the
civilian, is in fact, hollow in the hearts and minds of the soldiers who
are mute witnesses to the bad leadership practices, corruption and
unethical conduct among the officers.   

An important ingredient of reform is the enlightenment of our soldiers
and going beyond it, the opening up of their conscience about their
mission, their sense of professionalism, their role in civilized society
and ultimately, what they are fighting for. Enlightenment begins with
the discernment of right and wrong. For the soldiers to see the right may
be risky for corrupt government but good for the country as the AFP
really becomes of the people, by the people and for the people. For in the
end, they are soldiers of the people and not of the politicians and
generals. Indeed, an upright and competent government with  honorable and
responsible politicians and administrators is one that can be respected
by soldiers. For the soldier, the country is worth dying for if in his
mind, the government is working for the general welfare of the people
that he is tasked to protect and defend. The opposite, obviously, is not
worth dying. I remember posing a question after my participation in the
1989 coup attempt.

The ideals of  democracy state that the  Army stands for all  people
and not  just  the  privileged  few.  However,  political  reality 
dictates  that the  Army  is really  of   the  constituted   government.  In 
our  country,  the government is the privileged few and their network
of relatives and patrons relatives and patrons. What  then if the
policies and actions of  government do  not  coincide  with  the  common  
aspirations  and  general  welfare  of the  people?   Should  soldiers 
be  guided  by  their  collective  conscience or  by  their  strict 
military oath  to obey  their civilian leaders as embodiedin   the 
Constitution  they  have  sworn  to  defend,  in  the  same  way  the
Centurions  obeyed  their   decadent  emperors,  the  way   the  Wermacht 
blindly obeyed Hitler? At  this  point , whose is the Army ,  the 
government  or the people’s?  To  whom  does  the  Army  now  owe  its 
allegiance? To whom does  it rightfully or conscientiously belong?
(“The Metamorphosis of Idealism”, Army Journal, June 1991)

The Politics of the Politicians

The involvement of the Armed Forces in politics, like the insurgency
problem today, is the result of the obvious failure of our political
system. Thus, reforming the military cannot occur as a distinct activity
from political reform as it will require the support of the civilian
component of the political leadership. My own description of Philippine
politics is drawn from the titles of two books I have read which I feel
is very apt. Philippine politics is a “Nest of Vipers” in a “Wilderness
of Mirrors” –  snakes crawling everywhere and one does not know which
one will bite or which one is real and which one is merely a reflection
or a deception. It is important to understand this nest and this
wilderness in order to understand why the soldiers, who are supposedly
apolitical, have become involved in the political process.

1. An Irresponsible and Corrupt Ruling Class. Because of civilian
control over the military, a professional armed forces presupposes a
professional civilian control. They say that the Armed Forces  is  merely  a
reflection  of the society but to be precise, it is really a reflection
of the political ruling class who wields power over the military. What
the AFP has become, what we have become as a nation and what we
experience today is a manifestation of an irresponsible and corrupt ruling
class, a class resulting from the combination of the inequitable
distribution of wealth, the politics of patronage and a depraved government
bureaucracy and military.

Among our many politicians today, there is an utter lack of
statesmanship and sense of shame, consumed as they are by power, self-preservation
and greed and not by the spirit of service and honor. We have had two
people revolutions but our political  leadership has remained largely
the same or of the same mold.  What has happened is a game of musical
chairs and not genuine political change. In fact, just to show how shallow
our so-called democracy has evolved into, I am tempted to say that
Philippine politics today is merely an extension of the feud between Marcos
and Aquino.

The family dynasties in the provinces and in Congress and the limited
choices of presidential candidates are two indications of how our
irresponsible our ruling class has become. Elections are based on
personalities and fraud and cheating is rampant replete with guns, goons and
gold. This situation calls for the building of new political leadership
removed from traditional politics, cowed not by threat of the threat of
trapo tactics and possessed with a greater sense of public service and
social responsibility. Indeed, the present disposition of our political
leadership is not acceptable if we are to build a decent and progressive
society.

2. The Need to Reform Government.  Similar issues of inefficiency,
ineffectiveness, unprofessionalism, mismanagement and corruption that
plague the AFP are also inherent in our government and like the military,
the entire government structure needs to reform – Executive, Legislative
and Judicial. The word “government” comes a greek word meaning “to
steer”. Government’s job is to steer and not row the boat.  Thus, our
government must be a catalytic government – one which can catalyze people to
act in concert – and not cataclysmic, destroying people’s lives and
their trust in government.  Government has not been steering well and
neither has it been catalytic. There is too much unprofessional leadership,
inefficiency, extravagance and wastage.

To steer effectively and galvanize communities to action, there is a
need to shift paradigms in government administration as traditional means
are no longer be effective and in fact, detrimental.  Government is
also driven by market forces and for this, there might be a need to create
an entrepreneurial spirit among government personnel and to make the
organization mission driven and customer-oriented.  Government needs to
transform itself to stretch the national coffers, to get more for less,
to trim the unnecessary fat, to provide efficient management and
prudent governance.

The old hierarchical, over-centralized and almost secretive structures
cannot function very well in a today’s rapidly  changing, information
intensive and increasingly globalized world. As corporations and
non-profit organizations have changed, so too must government to become more
flexible and innovative. Information technology has opened new 
opportunities for  efficiency and  cost-effectiveness but also for greater
transparency and accountability.  The Philippine government cannot afford
to be stuck with typewriters and clerks, we need to transform and
elevate government to servers, laptops and word processors. 

The most important ingredient for the positive transformation of
government is leaders who have a sense of national responsibility as well as
the competence for good governance and effective management. Ironically
then, the reformation of government depends on the ruling class. Thus,
we go back to the need to establish a responsible and ethical ruling
class. 

A Crisis in Leadership and A Call for Responsible Citizenship

Esteemed Journalist Teodoro Benigno stated “Democracy is only as good
and as bad as the leaders who feel the throb, the timber and temper of
that democracy” (“Here’s the Score”, The Philippine Star, Oct 27, 2003). 
From what we can see in the Armed Forces and in government today, there
is a serious crisis in national leadership, a leadership that is devoid
of moral compass and sense of direction. The result has been
mismanagement and corruption of incomprehensible proportions and a national
leadership that has lost its credibility. The result is a country that has
been plunged into chaos, a people that has lost their confidence in
their leaders and a government whose actions are often perceived with
malice and malevolence by its  citizens.  Where has irresponsible and
tumultuous politics taken us today?  

1.   A national debt of P3.158 trillion up 17% from last year of 2.7
trillion. Every Filipino now owes  P38,500 without his knowing it.

2.  The US Dollar to Peso exchange rate is now hovering at 55
increasing import prices and prices of commodities, driving away foreign
investors.

3.  A Congress and Judiciary which are at war with each other amidst a
presidency that is perceived as corrupt and apathetic and a restless
Armed Forces

Our economy is in tatters, living merely on borrowings for which our
children and their children will end up paying.  A government that has
lost public confidence.  A citizenry filled with  cynicism bordering  on
helplessness. Now more than ever, the situation calls for responsible
citizenship  -- for the public to know, to act and become involved. The
best deterrent against a corrupt regime is a vigilant citizenry. Truly,
the more apathetic the people, the more that the politicians and the
generals will abuse and steal. The people, acting together, must create a
so called “Community of Conscience” to keep hammering the idea of
reform and good governance, of honesty and public service and to express
collective outrage when the opposite happens. 

It is the people who elect the political leaders and it is unfortunate
that many of our people do not know much where they want to go and what
they want and then choose the right leaders who will lead them there.
Due to the indifference of a  majority of our people, we have all become
victims of a political system that is ruled by patronage and populism.
To correct this, we must all act  together to first, understand what is
happening and then, to do something about it. We owe it to ourselves
and to our children that the military and the government is transformed
to a better one than it is today. In the people reside the strength to
change and the building of a true democracy. However, we cannot  change
government by always taking to the streets and staging people power for
it shows how fragile our democratic processes are and that we, as a
people, have not matured from mob rule. Personally, I am not discouraging
people power because  when the political system fails and the rulers
continue to be corrupt and rule irresponsible and government does not
listen and act, it is in all event the only way to go. As Abraham Lincoln
said:

This country, with its institutions, belongs to the people who inhabit
It  Whenever   they  grow  weary of  the existing government, they can 
exercise their  constitutional  right  of  amending it, or their
revolutionary right to dismember it.

_______________
Author’s Profile

Rene N. Jarque is a former Philippine Army officer who served as
Special Assistant to the Secretary of National Defense and spearheaded the
effort to produce the first Defense Policy Paper (In Defense of the
Philippines, 1998). He was Chief of Strategic Research of the Office of
Strategic and Special Studies, Armed Forces of the Philippines wherein he
published several papers on security concerns and defense-military
management and represented the AFP in international security conferences.
Scout Ranger, Airborne and Psychological Operations trained, he served in
a variety of battlefield command and staff positions in the First Scout
Ranger Regiment, the 5th Infantry Division and the Psychological
Operations Group. He authored the manual on Psychological Operations and
co-authored a Scout Ranger manual. He was an instructor in military schools
with the distinction of Best Instructor Award and was editor of  the
Army Journal, Troopers Newsmagazine, Cavalier and the OSS Digest. He is a
graduate of the United States Military Academy, West Point, class of
1986, and has an MBA from the Ateneo Graduate School of Business.

REFORMING THE ARMED FORCES 
By: Rene N. Jarque
_____________________________________________________________________________
    

Introduction

The Magdalo Group siege of Oakwood the weekend of 26-27 July has once
again brought forth the festering issue of unprofessionalism and
corruption in the Armed Forces. The grievances they proclaimed shows that the
AFP has not really changed much in 17 years after the 1986 EDSA
Revolution--that reform movements undertaken in the past have seemingly not
made a dent in changing the AFP, that changes have been merely cosmetic
and merely rhetoric. As they say in propaganda work, “a lie told a
thousand times becomes the truth” and one of the biggest lie is that the
Armed Forces has been reformed. Sure, uniforms have changed and a few
facilities have been constructed such an AFP Theater and a Generals’ Lounge
but meaningful changes that really promote professionalism, uplift
morale and welfare and use resource efficiently have not occurred. The
Magdalo Group mutiny, removed of its political colors, I believe is merely
a manifestation of the continuing frustration of the soldiers with
their officers and of the officers with the chain of command. 

In this presentation, I will share my answers to four simple yet key
questions about military reform, answers that may be far more complicated
than the questions:

1) Is there a need for reform in the Armed Forces?
2) What should be the areas for reform?
3)    Is reforming the military possible?
4)     Who are responsible for military reform?

Is there a need for reform in the Armed Forces?

Yes, there definitely is. The signposts of unprofessionalism and
corruption are everywhere in the AFP, from the sergeant who sells combat
boots, to the major who gets a kickback from purchases, from the lieutenant
who accepts bribes from illegal loggers to the general who converts
unit funds for personal purposes, from the sergeant who hides his
incompetence through a padrino to the colonel who seeks promotion by palakasan
or sipsipan. Every officer or enlisted personnel who receives an
allowance aside from his basic salary is indirectly guilty of corruption as
he or she tolerates a practice, which is both unethical and illegal, the
practice of conversion. Poor hospitals and medical facilities, poor
maintenance of buildings  and equipment, cramped housing for soldiers,
unflyable planes and unsailable vessels, no first aids to soldiers in the
field, lack of ammunition – all these point to something inherently
wrong with the state of the AFP and points to a need for reform. It is not
merely a question of funds, it is also a question of leadership and
management, or the lack of it.

At present, the Armed Forces can be likened to a crumbling, old house
that is tattered everywhere with its foundations weak and crumbling.  No
amount of repainting and re-plastering of the walls or repairing the
creaking floor will make it stronger as the pillars and foundations are
weak.  It may look ornate and pretty on the outside but the paint merely
hides the rot in the wooden panels.  It may still be standing but
termites are crawling everywhere eating away the beams and pillars. What is
required is a total overhaul such that, in the end, it is still a house
with stronger structural foundations and perhaps, of an entirely
different design.

With so many reform programs in the AFP since EDSA 1, one would ask,
isn’t the AFP reformed yet? Yes, the reform process has been going on for
many years and tremendous strides have been gained in civil-military
relations, human rights, training and strategic thinking. But in terms of
the overall professionalism of the Officer Corps and in financial and
logistics management, a lot still needs to be done. The fundamental
problems and the reasons behind them have not been addressed and no real,
honest to goodness reform has occurred. The AFP may have lost its
omnipotence during martial law but many practices that made it an
unprofessional and tainted organization during that period remain. In fact, many
of the unethical practices have been institutionalized and remain
untouched.   

Since my resignation in 1998, I have continued to keep in touch with
officers and enlisted personnel and have kept abreast of the situation in
the Armed Forces.  Today, I am still under the impression that not much
has changed and that in fact, there are many opinions saying that the
AFP has regressed instead of improving. In my talks with officers and
soldiers, I get this feeling of hopelessness in the Armed Forces. These
discussions indicate that martial law era practices still thrive and my
readings show that succeeding administrations and AFP chain of command
after Marcos have only made surface changes and genuine, profound
reforms have not happened yet. All the talk about professionalism and
integrity today, if impressive to the civilian, is in fact, hollow in the
hearts and minds of the soldiers. Short term appointments to top
positions, officers with questionable character and competence in top posts, bad
leadership practices, corruption and unethical conduct – which have
prevailed all these years – all these the soldiers are aware of  but they
cannot do anything about it for the generals will squash dissent and
the soldiers are afraid to lose their jobs.  

Perhaps, I am being naive, too idealistic and even, stupid but to me,
more than any other public servant, the soldier should practice the
utmost professionalism, discipline and integrity.  The officers have taken
an oath to serve the country and people and the present state of the
AFP fails to live up to that oath.  It bothers me that the generals and
senior officers are unable to act accordingly on their oath and build a
credible and professional Armed Forces, despite knowing what is wrong.
This is a serious case of the lack of integrity and professionalism.
And what hypocrisy to declare themselves  as professional and honorable. 
If  people only know the truth. Indeed, I feel saddened by the notion
that the present state of the AFP does not bring honor and dignity to
the thousands of soldiers who have died in service of the nation, that my
friends and comrades have died needlessly, not to preserve freedom but
rather to make the politicians and generals rich and happy. As Captain
Maestrocampo rightfully asks “Saan ang kabuluhan ng pagkapatay ng mga
sundalo?”

In my resignation letter to then Secretary of National Defense Orlando
Mercado in 1998, I wrote candidly and perhaps, foolishly: 

Sir…I want to leave because I feel that I am beginning to lose my
self-esteem, my self-respect and my sense of integrity in an organization
that I believe is unprofessional and corrupt. I have always believed that
being an officer is a noble vocation – that officers follow the
professional military ethic and treat each other professionally. But what I
have seen are officers, especially many generals, who take advantage of
the system for selfish and unethical purposes and undercut each other
for promotions and assignments. I always thought that being an officer is
a public trust – that an officer does not lie, cheat, steal nor
tolerate those who do. But what I have seen are officers, including Peemayers,
who would not hesitate to lie to advance themselves or do anomalous
business transactions, who cheat the taxpayers of their money and who even
reward unethical conduct.”Becoming a general is no longer an exciting
prospect for me considering the kind of officers being promoted to
general rank. The only thing consistent about them is the inconsistency of
the standards which I find unacceptable and grossly unfair. As many
officers say, “di bale, snappy, shabby, the same salary at napro-promote
din naman”.

It is unfortunate indeed that President Arroyo seems to have lost sight
of the fact that military reform must still be a priority in the quest
for good government or a Strong Republic. Indeed, AFP reform has
disappeared from the President’s radar screen as she continues to patronize
the generals. I surmise two reasons for this: First, she needs the help
of the AFP to keep the numerous security problems in check--Abu Sayaff,
MILF, communist insurgency--and to maintain a semblance of order and
authority as she deals with a rather unstable political set-up.  Second,
there is the debt of gratitude for the AFP’s pivotal role in EDSA 2
when the defection of the chain of command turned the tide against Erap
and propelled GMA to the presidency. She may not want to antagonize the
military right now or she will be looked upon as “walang utang na loob”
and risk losing the AFP’s support.  

There is no doubt that GMA’s most urgent concern is the economy but her
success in economics depends on how she can successfully deal with
security problems. Political stability and peace and order underpins her
success in reviving an ailing economy, building investor confidence,
stabilizing exchange rate fluctuations and creating a positive  business
climate.  Insistence on military reforms at this time may not be a
pragmatic proposition when the country is still recovering and her
administration is still gaining a foothold.  Indeed, the military, which played a
crucial role in her ascent, will also play a crucial role in her
survival. 

What are the areas for reform?

I believe there are two general areas which should be addressed for
reform: unprofessionalism and corruption. I refer to unprofessionalism as
those practices that undermine the three elements of the military
profession as explained by Samuel Huntington: expertise, responsibility and
corporateness. In other words, those decisions and/or actions that
result in weakening or destroying the manner with which the soldier can
optimally perform his duty within a framework of integrity and camaraderie
or  teamwork. Examples are poor leadership skills, indecisiveness and
poor decision making, tactical and technical incompetence, poor language
and communication skills, favoritism and nepotism, ticket-punching,
inexperience or lack of combat experience, promotions and appointments not
based on merit but on palaksasan and bata-bata system, extracting
personal services from soldiers and also criminal activities such as the
blackmarketing scandal in East Timor, human rights abuses or engaging in
the drug trade or arms smuggling. Stretching it further, it also
includes attitudes in the Officer Corps today like “Wait till you become”, “Go
with the flow”, “If you cannot beat them, join them”.

The other area is corruption or in its more subtle description,
unethical conduct. Like any government agency, the AFP has its own share of
the “normal” graft and corrupt practices such as commissions, kickbacks,
overpricing, padding, substitution and ghost deliveries. This is common
knowledge among suppliers, dealers, auditors, supply officers and NCOs,
Supply Accountable Officers – practically everyone involved in the
supply and finance chain. However, the AFP is involved in a far more
sophisticated form of corruption that is jokingly called as the “mother” of
all corruption in the AFP. This is the practice called “conversion”.
What is conversion and why is it unethical?

In an essay in the Army Journal in 1997, I defined conversion as “ the
process of converting procurements to its cash equivalent”. Col.
Ricardo Morales, a fellow advocate for AFP reform, describes it in his essay
in the same magazine in 2001: “if an amount is originally intended for
office supplies but is instead spent for construction materials, this
amount has to be ‘converted’ so that government accounting and auditing
requirements are satisfied”. In the process of conversion, either from
one expense item to another or to outright cash, a certain percentage
is skimmed off the top which goes to everyone in the signature chain.
Some call this rather strangely as the “cost of money”. Rates of 25% or
higher are normal but the dealer actually only gets somewhere between
9-16% as the rest goes to “approving and auditing authorities”. 

Obviously, there are benefits and downsides to the conversion process.
One advantage is that it gets things done as government accounting and
auditing procedures are very stringent and one cannot buy a computer
(which perhaps you need most) using your excess allocated funds for
office supplies (paper, pens and the like). In the field, a commander can
get cash which is very liquid and use it for civil-military operations
projects (buy medicines, a goat for pulutan with village officials,
batteries for radioes, food for visitors at headquarters, etc.)

On the other hand, I see six major downsides to conversion:

1) First, it is illegal as it violates the AFP Procurement System.
Chapter 1, para 1-3 section D of the AFP Procurement Manual states,
“Conversion of any kind must not be resorted to”. Conversion also violates COA
Circular 81-09 regulating the conduct of inspections (converted items
are falsely declared).  Further, failure to follow the correct
procurement process renders a government official criminally liable under
Republic Act 3019: The Anti-graft and Corrupt Practices Act for “grave
misconduct, dishonesty and conduct prejudicial to the best interests of the
service”.

2) Second, it is subject to misuse and abuse in the hands of the
unscrupulous. As on record, converted funds are “cleared”, commanding
officers can use them practically for any purpose desired to include personal
expenses, allowances, travel “pabaon”, buy a house and car, pay
personal credit card bills, night-clubbing and philandering purposes.

3)  Third, since items bought through converted funds are evidences of
an unethical act, they are not entered into the property book. I have
heard of offices buying laptops every time a new boss comes in because
they were taken away by the previous occupants.

4) Fourth, conversion is essentially inefficient as the “cost of money”
does not maximize the use of that resource. Projects than need
conversion must always the 25% on top of the projected actual expenditure. It
also distorts the planning and budget process as the budget does not in
reality reflect actual expenditures and these actual expenditures are 
not properly recorded.

5) Conversion and the attendant abuses that go with it leads to
demoralization as a result of the inequities in income and lifestyle. The
lifestyle of officers and soldiers receiving allowances are very different
from those who rely on their salaries alone. The Captain who rides a
jeepney and sees a fellow Captain drive a nice car, even if second hand,
feels not only inadequacy but also resentment.

6) And the biggest downside of all is the adverse effect of conversion
on the professional ethics of the officers and soldiers who have to
resort to it to cover operational requirements and achieve the mission. 
It is a serious violation of the Officer Code that “An Officer does not
lie, cheat, steal nor tolerate those who do”. It slowly and very subtly
erodes the moral fibers of soldiers involved in it. It is an anathema
to the ethical and professional development of an officer.

In many cases, a unit commander cannot be blamed for converting his
funds. Operations dictate a different set of requirements but the budget
allocated is in different accounting class. Coupled with stringent
government accounting and auditing rules plus the presence of unscrupulous
dealers and auditors, conversion becomes a necessary evil. In a way,
conversion then becomes essential to accomplishing the mission. 
Conversion is hence both a solution and a problem but considering its
downsides, it is more of a problem that must be resolved.  There must be a way
to first control the use of conversion and to audit the moneys and
properties that result from it. Ultimately, it should be eliminated and
replaced with a system that promotes transparency and accountability. It
will take concerted government action to solve this matter as this will
require changes in government financial procedures and actions in both
legislative and executive branches. 

Is Rebuilding the Armed Forces possible?

I have experienced attempting to reform the Armed Forces in both ways:
the  violent way with involvement in the 1987 and 1989 coup attempts
and the peaceful way through the “Rizal” way of writing about and
advocating military reforms. The failures  of the 1987 and 1989 coup are well
reported. But for the peaceful way, I figured if it cannot be done
through the power of the sword, I can advocate reform through the power of
the pen. So I wrote, wrote and wrote – in magazines, in letters to the
editor, in research papers, even letters to our lawmakers. When I was
editor of the Army Journal, I envisioned it to be a “forum for
professional issues” and not just the sounding board or photo album for the
generals. We started publishing essays critical of Army systems and for a
while, got away with it. But today, I do not see the same fire as the
essays are either benign or merely historical. It has not really become
as “ an agent of progressive ideas and constructive change…to create a
progressive-minded Officer Corps and a professional Army”. I did a
similar approach with the Cavalier magazine of the Philippine Military
Academy and for a while got away with it as well until I resigned after
writing a stinging editorial mocking the PMA motto entitled, “Courage,
Integrity, Loyalty, Yeh Right!”.

Thus, if my experience is any indication, the chain of command is
apathetic to the soundings of reform. No amount of coups (we’ve had 9 in the
last 17 years as stated in one newspaper), Davide Comissions and the
life, Congressional Hearings (we have a yearly budget hearing) and
millions of pages written on military reform have really made a difference.
In fact, many of the abhorrent practices have become so entrenched that
it will be difficult to entangle the Gordian knot. Yes, there is a
grievance system in the Armed Forces but it does not work as it ought to
be. Legitimate complaints and constructive criticisms are clamped down by
the chain of command as insubordination or dissent and worse, telltales
of rebellion in the ranks. Official proclamations on reform and
professionalism have been mere lip service and unethical conduct is openly
tolerated and even encouraged. No senior officer has been caught or
punished for financial misdealings or wrongdoing.  It has become a
never-ending cycle of abuse and corruption to which there is seemingly no end,
from one Chief of Staff to another, one Commander in Chief to the next.
Indeed, anyone advocating reform in the AFP is a voice in the wilderness
and the frustration of the Magdalo group when it comes to the chain of
command not really listening is understandable, but not their action at
Oakwood.  

Despite the difficulties, both foreseen and unforessen and perhaps, a
few death threats, I  believe that with political will, moral courage
and the right management, rebuilding the professionalism and integrity
of the Armed Forces is possible. Yes, it will indeed be difficult but it
is not altogether hopeless. As many always say, it will not be
overnight but we have to start sometime, somehow. As the Chinese say, “the
journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step”. Contrary to what
many say that unprofessionalism and corruption is an ethical problem or
an attitude problem, I say that it is merely a management problem and
can be controlled and neutralized. Military reform should be approached
as if it was a change management project in a business organization with
clear objectives, systematic processes and well-structured, motivated
teams with good leaders. Performance, transparency and efficiency shall
be the name of the game. Indeed, where management voids are glaring,
unprofessionalism and corruption follows. 

I know that it can be done as it has been repeatedly in many business
organizations. What is lacking here is the political resolve and moral
courage to take action and face the risks. I have been involved in
change programs in the companies that I have been in and yes, it will be
difficult and it will involve lots of work and sacrifice on the part of
the leaders. Top management commitment, support and example are very
important ingredients, things that I believe are absent in military reform
actions in the past and until now.  Management turnover is quick (look
at the number of CSAFP in less than year) thus there is no consistency.
There is also no real motivation on management to be committed to
change or reform as fixing conversion, for example, is a threat to personal
economic interests.  The lack of competence among officers to drive
changes is also another factor. But there are well-meaning, competent and
quick-learning officers who can lead and direct a reform campaign
without a rebellion.

Military reform will not come easy and will come with great risks to
the Arroyo administration or to any administration -- risks that the
President may not be willing to take in a politically unstable
environment. It will be an uphill battle against former generals who will be
offended when human rights abuses and corrupt financial transactions are
exposed. Likewise, there will be resistance from those whose careers and
economic interests will be threatened -- unscrupulous defense officials,
senior officers, politicians and influential suppliers. It will be
difficult because the very generals and colonels now running the system
benefited or is benefiting from it. By admitting that the system is
defective puts into question their own rise in the ranks and their positions.
It is like cutting off your own arm. As for conversion, why kill the
goose that lays the golden egg?

Who are Responsible for AFP Reform?

There is a saying in the military, “The Commander is responsible for
everything that the unit does or fails to do”. The ranks of the
commanders come from the Office Corps and I dare day that the present state of
unprofessionalism and corruption in the defense and military
establishment is a failure in leadership of the Officer Corps.  Clearly, the
fault and the responsibility lies in the officers and their collective
failure to build a truly professional military. It is in the Officer Corps
that the solution lies. Laws and procedures alone will not solve the
issue of unprofessionalism and corruption. What is required is a
dedicated pool of leaders and managers who shall not only implement the rules
and regulations but also set the example. This is the job of the
officers who are the leaders and managers of the Armed Forces. Indeed, the
future of the Armed Forces, whether it improves or regresses, is in the
hands of the Officer Corps.

One reason I resigned from the military service was because I felt that
the professional milieu in the AFP  was no longer acceptable to my
sense of integrity.  Looking back, there was nothing faulty with the AFP as
an organization. The fault-line lay deeper--in its  leaders.  The
ultimate reason for the AFP’s failure as an institution to uphold the
virtues of the profession of arms lies in the Officer Corps. The
unprofessionalism and corruption in the AFP today are merely reflective of the
professional and moral bankruptcy of the Officer Corps.  At the core of
professionalism and reform is the integrity of the Officer Corps--from the
Lieutenant to the General, from the platoon leader to the Chief of
Staff.  The Martial Law years disoriented the values of the Officer Corps
and many of that era’s attitude and practices remain today. Over the
years, as a result of government neglect and public apathy, officers have
been accustomed to unethical practices as a way of getting around a
rigid system in order to provide for legitimate operational requirements. 
In the hands of unscrupulous officers, these practices are abused for
personal gain and power.

What is intriguing is that the AFP senior staff are mostly Peemayers
and in large measure, Peemayers must share the blame and the
responsibility for the present state of unprofessionalism and corruption in the
Armed Forces (and the Philippine National Police). The despicable state of
the Officer Corps today is, for the most part, the result of action
and/or inaction of Peemayers who have failed to live up to the Academy
motto of Courage, Integrity, Loyalty, who have chosen the easier wrong to
the harder right.  Indeed, PMA has been successful in churning out
officers for a progressive (and lucrative) military career but it has
utterly failed in imbuing the officers with character and integrity.

Reforming the military will be difficult but it is not hopeless for so
long as there will be officers and men who try to live up to the
ideals. As the Marines say, “we need a few good men”. That is one essential
role of the Philippine Military Academy, to be able to mold cadets who
will one day become officers imbued with a sense of courage, both
physical and moral, integrity and professionalism. The hope for reform in the
Armed Forces resides in the junior officers of today who unfortunately
are slowly being corrupted and eaten up by the existing unprofessional
and unethical system. How to shield these junior officers from the
rotten acts of their superiors and promote professional ethics in their
ranks as they rise in their military career is going to be a serious
challenge and is a must if we are to build a professional and honest Officer
Corps for the Armed Forces. Clearly, a professional and honest Officer
Corps means a professional and honest Armed Forces.

Thus, today, given the overall quality of the Officer Corps and the
top chain of command, I have serious doubts whether the Armed Forces of
the Philippines can police its own self and reform from within.
Necessarily, due to the hierarchical structure of the AFP, a peaceful and
relatively quicker reform campaign must start from the top. The approach
must be top-down and not bottom-up. Inputs from the bottom must, however,
be generated and buy-in created to ensure an effective reform process.
I believe that today, the civil sector should play a role in the
reformation of the military by way of pressure, by keeping the reform process
alive, by opening up issues and concerns to the public. Moreover, the
role of Congress is also essential as reforming the AFP will require the
enactment of laws or the review of existing laws governing the military
and defense. Perhaps, Congressional inquiries “in aid of legislation”
can be more forthright and sincere in opening up and publicly discussing
sensitive professional and ethical matters (such as conversion and
political intervention in promotions and assignments). But more than the
Legislative, it is the Executive branch that should initiate the reform
process as the President is the Commander in Chief and therefore holds
ultimate command responsibility for the Armed Forces. How the President
plays the reform card will dictate the intensity and tempo of reform.
In the end, the failure to reform the AFP is the failure of the
Commander in Chief.

A Brief Word on the Magdalo Group Mutiny

I recall my experiences in 1987 and 1989 and I cannot help but see
myself last weekend in the soldiers at Oakwood. Whether they were used or
manipulated is the subject of an investigation and I will not dwell
into that. What I would like to say though it that in the young officers
mind, I surmise a messianic complex compounded by a sense of adventurism
and misguided idealism. A major factor in the creation of this mindset
is the politicization of the soldiers in the field where they are
exposed to the inadequacies of the government and the Armed Forces. In
trying to accomplish their mission of “wining the hearts and minds” of
remote barangays, soldiers become involved in the life of the communities in
their areas of responsibility. In many cases, they take over government
responsibilities where they are lacking in the form of medical and
dental civacs, education programs and other organizing and development
projects. 

Then after experiencing the hardships in their detachments, they visit
Camp Aguinaldo or Fort Bonifacio and they see a glaring inequity in
lifestyle. While they are “rotting” in the field, their senior officers
are “enjoying” in the camps. While they find it difficult to source funds
to fix their jeeps and trucks in the mountains, majors and colonels
drive around in nice cars in Metro Manila. While they receive their meager
salary, they find that their comrades and mistahs are getting
unauthorized allowances  double or triple their basic salaries. Frustration sets
in and the barrel of the gun, and the inherent sense of power that
comes with it, becomes a way to release that frustration. That frustration
and idealism can be manipulated by scrupulous people who will use it
for their own ends. It is sad to see such promising officers go to waste. 

Conclusion

Having been an officer, I continue to feel responsible for the dismal
state of the AFP today. Call it the Zygernik effect, an anxiety over
unfinished business. Thus, I continue to advocate for military reform as
I cannot accept the present state of the Armed Forces despite the rosy
rhetoric from the generals about a “reformed” AFP. The cries and gripes
of the Magdalo group say otherwise. And there are thousands of
soldiers, sailors and airmen who are mute witnesses to the unprofessionalism
and corruption in the AFP, unprofessionalism and corruption that
continues to fuel discontent and frustration among the officers and enlisted
personnel. The threat of a coup or a mutiny can only be neutralized if we
reform the AFP for it to be a responsible and honest organization led
by a professional Officer Corps.

Why I continue to advocate military reform despite the seeming
impossibilities? A parable which appeared in the Army Journal in June 1994 is,
I believe, an appropriate answer (please forgive the religious
undertones):

A long time ago, a philosopher went to a city to save its people from
their sins  and  tell them the good news.   At first, people listened
to him but gradually, they turned away.  However, the philosopher
continued to preach and this time, even louder.  People did not understand
and asked themselves “Why does he go on?  Does  he not  see  that  his
mission is hopeless? Then, one day, a curious  child  asked   the  wise
man why he went on and on. The philosopher  calmly  replied, “In the 
beginning,  I  thought  I  could change them. If I still shout, it is
only to prevent them from changing me”.

_____________

Author’s Profile:

Rene N. Jarque is a former Philippine Army officer who served as
Special Assistant to the Secretary of National Defense and spearheaded the
effort to produce the first Defense Policy Paper (In Defense of the
Philippines, 1998). He was Chief of Strategic Research of the Office of
Strategic and Special Studies, Armed Forces of the Philippines wherein he
published several papers on security concerns and defense/military
management and represented the AFP in international security conferences. 
Scout Ranger, Airborne and PSYOPS qualified, he served in a variety of
command and staff positions in the First Scout Ranger Regiment, 5th
Infantry Division and the Psychological Operations Group. He was
instrumental in developing the Psychological Operations Manual of the Army and
co-authored a Scout Ranger Manual. He was a lecturer in various AFP
Schools with the distinction of Best Instructor Award and was editor of  the
Army Journal, Cavalier and the OSS Digest. He is a graduate of the
United States Military Academy, West Point, class of 1986, and has an MBA
from the Ateneo Graduate School of Business.

By Philip Thornton and Charles Arthur
Independent UK

Back to Alternative Reader Index   

It is a story of empire-building, intrigue, espionage, double-dealing and arm-twisting that Rudyard Kipling would have been proud to write.

Kipling popularised the phrase "The Great Game" to describe the secret battle to dominate central Asia fought between the British Empire, Russia and France.

But even he would have blanched at plans by the United States - with the help of the oil giant BP and British taxpayers - to establish a hegemony across an area stretching from the Russian borders to the Mediterranean Sea.

Inevitably, the need for oil is at the heart of the story. Two former Soviet states, Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan, between them have oil reserves three times the size of America's. The "game" is to find the safest way to get that black gold into the petrol tanks of American cars.

The US has been pushing for a new pipeline since Bill Clinton was in office. At first, companies were reluctant, but the rising price of oil, allied to threats in the Persian Gulf and the likelihood of huge reserves of oil and gas worth as much as $4 trillion under the Caspian, has made them increasingly bullish. The US Environment Department estimates that by 2010, the Caspian region could produce 3.7 million barrels per day. This could fill a large hole in world supplies as world oil demand is expected to grow from 76 million a day, in 2000, to 118.9 million by 2020.

By this time, the Middle Eastern members of OPEC would be looking to supply half of that need.

The geopolictical stakes are high - the pipeline would be able to pump as much as 4.2 million barrels per year, easing the US's reliance on the unstable Gulf states for oil.

The answer is the world's longest export pipeline, a 1,090-mile, 42-inch wide pipe snaking its way within a 500-metre corridor from the Caspian Sea port of Baku, in Azerbaijan, to Ceyhan, in Turkey, via some of the world's most unstable and conflict-ridden nations.

The project will cost up to $4 billion (L2.4bn) and is being built by a consortium of 11 companies led by BP. Almost three quarters of the funding will come in the form of bank loans including some $600 million of taxpayers' money.

The consortium has asked the World Bank and the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development for $300 million each in loans. In addition it has asked government agencies, including Britain's Export Credit Guarantee Department (ECGD), to underwrite the risk of the project being sabotaged by civil war or terrorism.

On Thursday, the project receives its first public test when the International Finance Corporation, an arm of the World Bank, meets to approve its loan.

The decision will be taken on a vote of its 173 country members, although two of the most influential are the US, with almost a quarter of the votes, and the UK, which has 5 per cent of the voting power.

Opponents say if the pipeline is built it will wreak environmental, social and economic havoc along its length.

The Baku Ceyhan Campaign (BCC), which includes Friends of the Earth and the Kurdish Human Rights Project, last week lobbied Hilary Benn, the international development secretary, to vote against it at the IFC.

It handed over a 220-page dossier earlier this month claiming the pipeline would break public lending guidelines on 173 counts.

The Department for International Development steadfastly refused to comment until after the vote, but the opponents are more than happy to fill the vacuum.

They say the environmental threat is two-fold - what happens if the pipeline goes wrong and the destruction it would wreak even if it goes right.

They warn the risk of a serious tanker spillage - on the scale of the Exxon Valdez that polluted miles of coastline when 258,000 tonnes of oil leaked - would be multiplied once the oil starts to flow.

In addition, they say that Turkey lies in an earthquake zone with 17 major shocks in the last 80 years. Since the Baku line will be in place for some 40 years, it says there is a high chance of a major earthquake during its operation.

Environmental groups say that the pipeline poses multiple threats. The potential for havoc begins at the Caspian Sea where the sturgeon fish, whose eggs provide caviar - are already under threat. The Caspian is one of the most polluted bodies of water in the world, and the World Bank estimates that each year a million cubic metres of untreated industrial wastewater is dumped in the sea. Much of this is from oil production, the critics say, and increased production would make it worse at a time when sturgeon numbers are reckoned to be collapsing due to pollution and overfishing.

"The proposed route crosses more than 20 major rivers and several seismic areas. In Azerbaijan, it traverses a desert area that will require at least 10 years for complete habitat recovery," said Carol Welch of Friends of the Earth US.

"In Georgia, the project will clear areas in two dense primary forests, crosses the buffer zone of a protected natural park, and could badly affect several rare and endangered species."

In Turkey there were more than over 500 endemic plant species within the corridor, while a third of the country's globally-threatened vertebrates are to be found within 250 meters of the corridor.

The route crosses two sites protected under national legislation, including a wildlife protection area for the Caucasian grouse, a threatened species. There are two critically endangered plant species and 15 bird species with nesting pairs numbering 500 or less are within the corridor.

But objectors say the impact goes even wider. They claim legal agreements make BP the effective governing power over the corridor, over-riding all environmental, social, human rights or other laws for the next 40 years.

Amnesty International, which is urging the Government to reject the request for export guarantees, accuses the consortium of concluding an unprecedented agreement with the Turkish government which, it claims, will strip local people and workers of their civil rights.

BCC says that Turkey has handed so much power to the consortium that it in breach of treaties it signed with Brussels ahead of its accession to the European Union.

The EBRD is due to make its decision at a meeting on 11 Nov-ember while Britain's Export Credit Guarantee Department may not make a recommendation on the request for an undisclosed amount of cover to ministers until next year.

A spokeswoman for the ECGD said: "Cover would only be given if the ECGD were satisfied the relevant environmental, social and human rights impacts had been properly addressed, and the financial and project risks were acceptable."

However, critics say the pipeline will destroy the livelihoods of farmers and fishermen along the route and fuel ethnic tensions.

Since the 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks, the US has enthusiastically started building military bases across a region that was off limits during the Cold War, offering financial aid to country governments in exchange for permission.

The pipeline will be guarded either by the US Army or by local forces that are dependent on US support. Inevitably, opposition groups to the current governments are labelled terrorists by the Americans.

In his authoritative book, The New Great Game, journalist Lutz Kleveman says: "The US-led Afghan campaign has fundamentally altered the geostrategic power equations in central Asia, which has become the new focus of American foreign power."

The role of the World Bank and the EBRD is to provide the imprimatur of public approval for the project.

This is politically significant to some of the smaller, state-owned oil companies in the nine-member consortium in the project, including SOCAR, the Azerbaijani state oil company, which owns 25 per cent of the shares.

Although the financial authorities will decide whether public money goes into the project, BP has warned that it is "commercially robust" and that it will press ahead anyway.

BP mounted a stout defence of its project and of the consultation it has carried out. Toby Odone, its Baku spokesman, said the consortium had carried out extensive consultation in all three countries involved. "We feel we have done plenty in preparation and have done environmental and social assessments for two years," he said

He said the project, which began building in May and is now 40 per cent complete, would go ahead even if the IFC turned it down and other members of the consortium pulled out.

"We would have to find another approach that worked, but we feel confident and comfortable that the funding will come through," he said.

BP has a 30 per cent stake so failure would jeopardise some $1 billion of revenue. But is more important significant in terms of finding oil supplies outside the Gulf.

It recently signed a $4 billion deal with TNK, the Russian oil giant, but the arrest on Sunday of Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the head of rival oil gain YUKOS, highlights the risk involved.

Protesters have also delighted in contrasting the Baku proposals with BP's attempt in 2001 to re-brand itself as "beyond petroleum" with more focus on hydrogen and renewable energy.

Scheduled to begin working in 2005, the pipeline is expected to bring in more than L65m annually to the regions through which it passes.

But there are doubts about whether the money generated will benefit people and the environment in the area - or simply corrupt officials among the "corridor" governments.

Of course there are alternative routes for a pipeline from the Caspian Sea. The problem, however, is not environmental but geopolictical. Iran has suggested a route along the eastern shore of the Caspian to Turkmenistan and through Iran to the Persian Gulf. It has offered $1.6 billion towards the cost, but this is unlikely to be accepted. Another possibility would be a south-eastern route to post-Taliban Afghanistan. Lastly Russia is lobbying for the oil to be pumped through its network to the Black Sea port of Novorossiisk, but that would put US oil supplies at risk.

Mr Kleveman warns that imperial ambitions in the region will end in the same way they did for the British and the Russians: "The actors may have changed since Kipling's time but its culmination in war and death remains the same and the victims are nearly always innocent civilians," he writes. "They know why oil is called the Devil's tears."

October 28, 2003

Bulatlat.com

Although imperialism has remained a reality over the last century, the term itself was branded as beyond the pale within polite establishment circles for most of the twentieth century­so great was the anti-imperialist outrage arising out of the Philippine-American War and the Boer War, and so effective was the Marxist theory of imperialism in stripping the veil away from global capitalist relations. In the last few years, however, “imperialism” has once again become a rallying cry­for neoconservatives and neoliberals alike. 

by The Editors 
Monthly Review
Reposted by Bultlat.com

We are living in a period in which the rhetoric of empire knows few bounds. In a special report on “America and Empire” in August, the London-based Economist magazine asked whether the United States would, in the event of “regime changes...effected peacefully” in Iran and Syria, “really be prepared to shoulder the white man’s burden across the Middle East?” The answer it gave was that this was “unlikely”­the U.S. commitment to empire did not go so far. What is significant, however, is that the question was asked at all.

Current U.S. wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have led observers to wonder whether there aren’t similarities and historical linkages between the “new” imperialism of the twenty-first century and the imperialism of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. As Jonathan Marcus, the BBC’s defense correspondent, commented a few months back:

It should be remembered that more than one hundred years ago, the British poet Rudyard Kipling wrote his famous poem about what he styled as “the white man’s burden”­a warning about the responsibilities of empire that was directed not at London but at Washington and its new-found imperial responsibilities in the Philippines. It is not clear if President George W. Bush is a reader of poetry or of Kipling. But Kipling’s sentiments are as relevant today as they were when the poem was written in the aftermath of the Spanish-American War. (July 17, 2003)

A number of other modern-day proponents of imperialism have also drawn connections with Kipling’s poem, which begins with the lines:

Take up the White Man’s burden­

­Send forth the best ye breed­

Before discussing the reasons for this sudden renewed interest in Kipling’s “White Man’s Burden,” it is necessary to provide some background on the history of U.S. imperialism in order to put the poem in context.

From the Spanish-American War to the Philippine-American War

In the Spanish-American War of 1898 the United States seized the Spanish colonies in the Caribbean and the Pacific, emerging for the first time as a world power.* As in Cuba, Spanish colonial rule in the Philippines had given rise to a national liberation struggle. Immediately after the U.S. naval bombardment of Manila on May 1, 1898, in which the Spanish fleet was destroyed, Admiral Dewey sent a gunboat to fetch the exiled Filipino revolutionary leader Emilio Aguinaldo from Hong Kong. The United States wanted Aguinaldo to lead a renewed revolt against Spain to prosecute the war before U.S. troops could arrive. The Filipinos were so successful that in less than two months they had all but defeated the Spanish on the main island of Luzon, bottling up the remaining Spanish troops in the capital city of Manila, while almost all of the archipelago fell into Filipino hands. In June, Filipino leaders issued their own Declaration of Independence based on the U.S. model. When U.S. forces finally arrived at the end of June the 15,000 Spanish troops holed up in Manila were surrounded by the Filipino army entrenched around the city­so that U.S. forces had to request permission to cross Filipino lines to engage these remaining Spanish troops. The Spanish army surrendered Manila to U.S. forces after only a few hours of fighting on August 13, 1898. In an agreement between the United States and Spain, Filipino forces were kept out of the city and were allowed no part in the surrender. This was the final battle of the war. John Hay, U.S. ambassador to Britain, captured the imperialist spirit of the time when he wrote of the Spanish-American War as a whole that it was “a splendid little war.”

With the fighting with Spain over, however, the United States refused to acknowledge the existence of the new Philippine Republic. In October 1898 the McKinley administration publicly revealed for the first time that it intended to annex the entire Philippines. In arriving at this decision President McKinley is reported to have said that “God Almighty” had ordered him to make the Philippines a U.S. colony. Within days of this announcement the New England Anti-Imperialist League was established in Boston. Its membership was to include such luminaries as Mark Twain, William James, Charles Francis Adams and Andrew Carnegie. Nevertheless, the administration went ahead and concluded the Treaty of Paris in December, in which Spain agreed to cede the Philippines to the new imperial power, along with its other possessions seized by the United States in the war.

This was followed by a fierce debate in the Senate on the ratification of the treaty, centering on the status of the Philippines, which, except for the city of Manila, was under the control of the nascent Philippine Republic. On February 4, 1899, U.S. troops under orders to provoke a conflict with the Filipino forces ringing Manila were moved into disputed ground lying between U.S. and Filipino lines on the outskirts of the city. When they encountered Filipino soldiers the U.S. soldiers called “Halt” and then opened fire, killing three. The U.S. forces immediately began a general offensive with their full firepower in what amounted to a surprise attack (the top Filipino officers were then away attending a lavish celebratory ball), inflicting enormous casualties on the Filipino troops. The San Francisco Call reported on February 5 that the moment the news reached Washington McKinley told “an intimate friend...that the Manila engagement would, in his opinion, insure the ratification of the treaty tomorrow.”

These calculations proved correct and on the following day the Senate ratified the Treaty of Paris officially ending the Spanish-American War­ ceding Guam, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines to the United States, and putting Cuba under U.S. control. It stipulated that the United States would pay Spain twenty million dollars for the territories that it gained through the war. But this did little to disguise the fact that the Spanish- American War was an outright seizure of an overseas colonial empire by the United States, in response to the perceived need of U.S. business, just recovering from an economic downturn, for new global markets.

The United States immediately pushed forward in the Philippine-American War that it had begun two days before­in what was to prove to be one of history’s more barbaric wars of imperial conquest. The U.S. goal in this period was to expand not only into the Caribbean but also far into the Pacific­and by colonizing the Philippine Islands to gain a doorway into the huge Chinese market. (In 1900 the United States sent troops from the Philippines to China to join with the other imperial powers in putting down the Boxer Rebellion.)

Kipling’s “White Man’s Burden,” subtitled “The United States and the Philippine Islands,” was published in McClure’s Magazine in February 1899.* It was written when the debate over ratification of the Treaty of Paris was still taking place, and while the anti-imperialist movement in the United States was loudly decrying the plan to annex the Philippines. Kipling urged the United States, with special reference to the Philippines, to join Britain in the pursuit of the racial responsibilities of empire:

Your new-caught sullen peoples,

­Half devil and half child.

Many in the United States, including President McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt, welcomed Kipling’s rousing call for the United States to engage in “savage wars,” beginning in the Philippines. Senator Albert J. Beveridge of Indiana declared: “God has not been preparing the English-speaking and Teutonic peoples for a thousand years for nothing but vain and idle self-contemplation and self-admiration....He has made us adept in government that we may administer government among savage and senile peoples.” In the end more than 126,000 officers and men were sent to the Philippines to put down the Filipino resistance during a war that lasted officially from 1899 to 1902 but actually continued much longer, with sporadic resistance for most of a decade. U.S. troops logged 2,800 engagements with the Filipino resistance. At least a quarter of a million Filipinos, most of them civilians, were killed along with 4,200 U.S. soldiers (more than ten times the number of U.S. fatalities in the Spanish-American War).*

From the beginning it was clear that the Filipino forces were unable to match the United States in conventional warfare. They therefore quickly switched to guerrilla warfare. U.S. troops at war with the Filipinos boasted in a popular marching song that they would “civilize them with the Krag” (referring to the Norwegian-designed gun with which the U.S. forces were outfitted). Yet they found themselves facing interminable small attacks and ambushes by Filipinos, who often carried long knives known as bolos. These guerrilla attacks resulted in combat deaths of U.S. soldiers in small numbers on a regular basis. As in all prolonged guerrilla wars, the strength of the Filipino resistance was due to the fact that it had the support of the Filipino population in general. As General Arthur MacArthur (the father of Douglas MacArthur), who became military governor of the Philippines in 1900, confided to a reporter in 1899:

When I first started in against these rebels, I believed that Aguinaldo’s troops represented only a faction. I did not like to believe that the whole population of Luzon­the native population that is­was opposed to us and our offers of aid and good government. But after having come this far, after having occupied several towns and cities in succession... I have been reluctantly compelled to believe that the Filipino masses are loyal to Aguinaldo and the government which he heads.

Faced with a guerrilla struggle supported by the vast majority of the population, the U.S. military responded by resettling populations in concentration camps, burning down villages (Filipinos were sometimes forced to carry the petrol used in burning down their own homes), mass hangings and bayonetings of suspects, systematic raping of women and girls, and torture. The most infamous torture technique, used repeatedly in the war, was the so-called “water cure.” Vast quantities of water were forced down the throats of prisoners. Their stomachs were then stepped on so that the water shot out three feet in the air “like an artesian well.” Most victims died not long afterwards. General Frederick Funston did not hesitate to announce that he had personally strung up a group of thirty-five Filipino civilians suspected of supporting the Filipino revolutionaries. Major Edwin Glenn saw no reason to deny the charge that he had made a group of forty-seven Filipino prisoners kneel and “repent of their sins” before bayoneting and clubbing them to death. General Jacob Smith ordered his troops to “kill and burn,” to target “everything over ten,” and to turn the island of Samar into “a howling wilderness.” General William Shafter in California declared that it might be necessary to kill half the Filipino population in order to bring “perfect justice” to the other half. During the Philippine War the United States reversed the normal casualty statistics of war­usually many more are wounded than killed. According to official statistics (discussed in Congressional hearings on the war) U.S. troops killed fifteen times as many Filipinos as they wounded. This fit with frequent reports by U.S. soldiers that wounded and captured Filipino combatants were summarily executed on the spot.

The war continued after the capture of Aguinaldo in March 1901 but was declared officially over by President Theodore Roosevelt on July 4, 1902­in an attempt to quell criticism of U.S. atrocities. At that time, the northern islands had been mostly “pacified” but the conquest of the southern islands was still ongoing and the struggle continued for years­though the United States from then on characterized the rebels as mere bandits.

In the southern Philippines the U.S. colonial army was at war with Muslim Filipinos, known as Moros. In 1906 what came to be known as the Moro Massacre was carried out by U.S. troops when at least nine hundred Filipinos, including women and children, were trapped in a volcanic crater on the island of Jolo and shot at and bombarded for days. All of the Filipinos were killed while the U.S. troops suffered only a handful of casualties. Mark Twain responded to early reports (which indicated that those massacred totaled six hundred rather than nine hundred men, women and children as later determined) with bitter satire: “With six hundred engaged on each side, we lost fifteen men killed outright, and we had thirty-two wounded­counting that nose and that elbow. The enemy numbered six hundred­including women and children­and we abolished them utterly, leaving not even a baby alive to cry for its dead mother. This is incomparably the greatest victory that was ever achieved by the Christian soldiers of the United States.” Viewing a widely distributed photo that showed U.S. soldiers overlooking piles of Filipino dead in the crater, W. E. B. Du Bois declared in a letter to Moorfield Storey, president of the Anti- Imperialist League (and later first president of the NAACP), that it was “the most illuminating thing I have ever seen. I want especially to have it framed and put upon the walls of my recitation room to impress upon the students what wars and especially Wars of Conquest really mean.”*

President Theodore Roosevelt immediately commended his good friend General Leonard Wood, who had carried out the Moro Massacre, writing: “I congratulate you and the officers and men of your command upon the brilliant feat of arms wherein you and they so well upheld the honor of the American flag.” Like Kipling, Roosevelt seldom hesitated to promote the imperialist cause or to forward doctrines of racial superiority. Yet Kipling’s novels, stories and verses were distinguished by the fact that they seemed to many individuals in the white world to evoke a transcendent and noble cause. At the same time they did not fail to reach out and acknowledge the hatred that the colonized had for the colonizer. In presenting the Nobel Prize in Literature to Kipling in 1907 the Nobel Committee proclaimed, “his imperialism is not of the uncompromising type that pays no regard to the sentiments of others.”* It was precisely this that made Kipling’s “White Man’s Burden” and other outpourings from his pen so effective as ideological veils for a barbaric reality.

The year Kipling’s poem appeared, 1899, marked not only the end of the Spanish-American War (through the ratification of the Treaty of Paris) and the beginning of the Philippine-American War, but also the beginning of the Boer War in South Africa. These were classic imperialist wars and they generated anti-imperialist movements and radical critiques in response. It was the Boer War that gave rise to John A. Hobson’s Imperialism, A Study (1902), which argued “Nowhere under such conditions”­referring specifically to British imperialism in South Africa­“is the theory of white government as a trust for civilization made valid.” The opening sentence of Lenin’s Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism, written in 1915, stated that “especially since the Spanish-American War (1898), and the Anglo-Boer War (1899–1902), the economic and also the political literature of the two hemispheres has more and more often adopted the term ‘imperialism’ in order to define the present era.”

Kipling’s Message to Imperialists After One Hundred Years

Although imperialism has remained a reality over the last century, the term itself was branded as beyond the pale within polite establishment circles for most of the twentieth century­so great was the anti-imperialist outrage arising out of the Philippine-American War and the Boer War, and so effective was the Marxist theory of imperialism in stripping the veil away from global capitalist relations. In the last few years, however, “imperialism” has once again become a rallying cry­for neoconservatives and neoliberals alike. As Alan Murray, Washington Bureau Chief of CNBC recently acknowledged in a statement directed principally at the elites: “We are all, it seems, imperialists now” (Wall Street Journal, July 15, 2003).

If one were to doubt for a moment that the current expansion of U.S. empire is but the continuation of a century-long history of U.S. overseas imperialism, Michael Ignatieff (Professor of Human Rights Policy at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government) has made it as clear as day:

The Iraq operation most resembles the conquest of the Philippines between 1898 and 1902. Both were wars of conquest, both were urged by an ideological elite on a divided country and both cost much more than anyone had bargained for. Just as in Iraq, winning the war was the easy part....More than 120,000 American troops were sent to the Philippines to put down the guerrilla resistance, and 4,000 never came home. It remains to be seen whether Iraq will cost thousands of American lives­and whether the American public will accept such a heavy toll as the price of success in Iraq (New York Times Magazine, September 7, 2003).

With representatives of the establishment openly espousing imperialist ambitions, we shouldn’t be surprised at the repeated attempts to bring back the “white man’s burden” argument in one form or another. In the closing pages of his prize-winning book, The Savage Wars of Peace, Max Boot quotes Kipling’s poem:

Take up the White Man’s burden­

­And reap his old reward:

The blame of those ye better,

­The hate of those ye guard­

Boot insists that Kipling was right, that “colonists everywhere, usually received scant thanks afterward.” Nevertheless, we should be encouraged, he tells us, by the fact that “the bulk of the people did not resist American occupation, as they surely would have done if it had been nasty and brutal. Many Cubans, Haitians, Dominicans, and others may secretly have welcomed U.S. rule.” Boot’s main implication seems clear enough­the United States should again “Take up the White Man’s burden.” His book, published in 2002, ends by arguing that the United States should have deposed Saddam Hussein and occupied Iraq at the time of the 1991 Gulf War. That task, he implied, remained to be accomplished.

Boot is former editorial features editor of The Wall Street Journal, now Olin Senior Fellow in National Security Studies with the Council on Foreign Relations. The title of The Savage Wars of Peace was taken straight from a line in Kipling’s “White Man’s Burden.” Boot’s 428-page glorification of U.S. imperialist wars received the Best Book of 2002 Award from the Washington Post, Christian Science Monitor, and the Los Angeles Times and won the 2003 General Wallace M. Greene Jr. Award for the best nonfiction book pertaining to Marine Corps history . Boot contends that the Philippine War was “one of the most successful counterinsurgencies waged by a Western army in modern times” and declares that, “by the standards of the day, the conduct of U.S. soldiers was better than average for colonial wars.” The U.S. imperial role in the Philippines, the subject of Kipling’s “White Man’s Burden,” is thus being presented as a model for the kind of imperial role that Boot and other neoconservatives are now urging on the United States. Even before the war in Iraq, Ignatieff remarked: “imperialism used to be the white man’s burden. This gave it a bad reputation. But imperialism doesn’t stop being necessary because it is politically incorrect”­a point that might well be read as extending to the “white man’s burden” itself (New York Times Magazine, July 28, 2002).

The Philippine-American War is now being rediscovered as the closest approximation in U.S. history to the problems the United States is encountering in Iraq. Further, the United States has taken advantage of the September 11, 2001 attacks to intervene militarily not just in the Middle East but also around the globe­including the Philippines where it has deployed thousands of troops to aid the Philippine army in fighting Moro insurgents in the southern islands. In this new imperialist climate Niall Ferguson, Herzog Professor of History at the Stern School of Business, New York University, and one of the principal advocates of the new imperialism, has addressed Kipling’s poem “The White Man’s Burden” in his book Empire(2002). “No one,” Ferguson tells us, would dare use such politically incorrect language today. The reality is nevertheless that the United States has­whether it admits it or not­ taken up some kind of global burden, just as Kipling urged. It considers itself responsible not just for waging a war against terrorism and rogue states, but also for spreading the benefits of capitalism and democracy overseas. And just like the British Empire before it, the American Empire unfailingly acts in the name of liberty, even when its own self-interest is manifestly uppermost.

Despite Ferguson’s claim that “no one would dare” to call this “the white man’s burden” today since it is “politically incorrect,” sympathetic references to this term keep on cropping up­and in the most privileged circles. Boot­hardly a marginal figure since affiliated with the influential Council on Foreign Relations­is a good example. Like Ferguson himself, he tries to incorporate the “white man’s burden” into a long history of idealistic intervention, downplaying the realities of racism and imperialism: “In the early twentieth century,” he writes in the final chapter of his book (entitled “In Defense of the Pax Americana”), “Americans talked of spreading Anglo-Saxon civilization and taking up the ‘white man’s burden’; today they talk of spreading democracy and defending human rights. Whatever you call it, this represents an idealistic impulse that has always been a big part in America’s impetus for going to war.”

Today’s imperialists see Kipling’s poem mainly as an attempt to stiffen the spine of the U.S. ruling class of his day in preparation for what he called “the savage wars of peace.” And it is precisely in this way that they now allude to the “white man’s burden” in relation to the twenty-first century. Thus for the Economist magazine the question is simply whether the United States is “prepared to shoulder the white man’s burden across the Middle East.”

As an analyst of as well as a spokesman for imperialism Kipling was head and shoulders above this in the sense that he accurately perceived the looming contradictions of his own time. He knew that the British Empire was overstretched and doomed­even as he struggled to redeem it and to inspire the rising United States to enter the imperial stage alongside it. Only two years before writing “The White Man’s Burden” he wrote his celebrated verse, “Recessional”:

Far-called, our navies melt away;

­On dune and headland sinks the fire;

Lo, all our pomp of yesterday

­Is one with Nineveh and Tyre!

Judge of Nations, spare us yet,

Lest we forget­lest we forget!

The United States is now leading the way into a new phase of imperialism. This will be marked not only by increased conflict between center and periphery­rationalized in the West by veiled and not-so-veiled racism­but also by increased intercapitalist rivalry. This will likely speed up the long-run decline of the American Empire, rather than the reverse. And in this situation a call for a closing of the ranks between those of European extraction (Samuel Huntington’s “clash of civilizations” argument or some substitute) is likely to become more appealing among U.S. and British elites. It should be remembered that Kipling’s “White Man’s Burden” was a call for the joint exploitation of the globe by what Du Bois was later to call “the white masters of the world” in the face of the ebbing of British fortunes.* At no time, then, should we underestimate the three-fold threat of militarism, imperialism, and racism­or forget that capitalist societies have historically been identified with all three. Reposted by Bultlat.com

November 2003

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Notes

* The following brief historical treatment of the Philippine-American War draws mainly on the these works: Henry F. Graff, ed., American Imperialism and the Philippine Insurrection: Testimony Taken from Hearings on Affairs in the Philippine Islands before the Senate Committee on the Philippines­1902 (Boston: Little, Brown, 1969); Angel Velasco Shaw and Luis H. Francia, Vestiges of War: The Philippine-American War and the Aftermath of an Imperial Dream, 1899–1999 (New York: New York University Press, 2002); Daniel B. Schirmer, Republic or Empire: American Resistance to the Philippine War (Cambridge, Mass.: Schenkman, 1972) and “How the Philippine-U.S. War Began,” Monthly Review, September 1999; Stuart Creighton Miller, “Benevolent Assimilation”: The American Conquest of the Philippines, 1899–1903 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990) ; and Daniel B. Schirmer and Stephen Rosskamm Shalom, The Philippines Reader (Boston: South End Press, 1987).

* The poem is often reproduced without the subtitle. For a correct version see Kipling’s Verse: Definitive Edition (New York: Doubleday, 1940).

* Although a quarter of the million is the “consensual” figure of historians, estimates of Filipino deaths from the war have ranged as high as one million, which would have meant depopulation of the islands by around one-sixth.

* Jim Zwick, ed., Mark Twain’s Weapons of Satire (Syracuse, New York: Syracuse University Press, 1992), p. 172. For information on the Moro massacre and the W. E. B. Du Bois quote see www.boondocksnet.com/ai/ail/moro.html. Jim Zwick’s boondocksnet.com website is a crucial source for materials on the Philippine-American War, contemporary responses to Kipling’s “White Man’s Burden,” and Mark Twain’s anti-imperialist writings.

* The Nobel committee was, however, mainly impressed by Kipling’s sympathy for the Boers in South Africa­another population of white colonizers.

* This call upon white elites to divide the world evoked a response beyond Britain and the United States. The admiration of Kipling among the ruling classes at the center of the capitalist world was more general. As Hobsbawm tells us: “When the writer Rudyard Kipling, the bard of the Indian empire, was believed to be dying of pneumonia in 1899, not only the British and the Americans grieved­Kipling had just addressed a poem on ‘The White Man’s Burden’ to the USA on its responsibilities in the Philippines­but the Emperor of Germany sent a telegram.” Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Empire (New York: Vintage, 1987), p. 82.

Current U.S. Intervention in the Philippines*

Over the past century, the U.S. has been the leading interventionist power in the world often victimizing small independent countries and national liberation movements and using the military as its chief instrument. In many cases, U.S. interventionism leads to wars of aggression. Other methods used are: political and diplomatic pressures; economic pressures and trade sanctions; covert operations; media manipulation; and others.

By Bobby Tuazon
Posted by Bulatlat.com

1. What do we mean by U.S. intervention?

A foreign country – usually a power - engages in interventionism in another country in pursuit of its own national interests that include economic, political and military. The result is the subversion of the other country’s sovereignty, independence and territorial integrity; the oppression and greater immiserization of multitudes of peoples and the destruction of their own economies.

Interventionism defines the power relationship between a big country (usually, imperialist) and a small, defenseless country (usually in the Third World) – thus, is one-sided, onerous, illegitimate/unlawful and inimical.

Over the past century, the U.S. has been the leading interventionist power in the world often victimizing small independent countries and national liberation movements and using the military as its chief instrument. In many cases, U.S. interventionism leads to wars of aggression. Other methods used are: political and diplomatic pressures; economic pressures and trade sanctions; covert operations; media manipulation; and others.

Interventionism, which is a higher form of meddling, should essentially be seen as an instrument that seeks to promote colonialism or neocolonialism, the domination of one country or region, or as an instrument of hegemonism. In the current world situation characterized by a single superpower (U.S.) interventionism should be understood as imperialist interventionism that seeks to promote the global interests of transnational corporations led by the ruling financial oligarchy in the U.S.

2. What is U.S. interventionism in the Philippines?

First, let us recall that the U.S. colonized the Philippines after Filipino revolutionaries proclaimed the country’s independence from Spain (which subjugated the Philippines for three centuries) in the revolution of 1898. American colonizers, led by President William McKinley, coveted the Philippines not only for its natural wealth but also as a staging base for colonial and extra-territorial claims in China and the whole of Asia. The U.S. waged a brutal pacification campaign against Filipino revolutionaries and the masses thereafter, resulting in the genocide of almost 1.5 million, based on independent historical accounts.

The colonialist drive of the U.S. in the late 19^th century – which included the takeover of Cuba, Puerto Rico, Hawaii and other countries – became part of President Theodore Roosevelt’s crusade to establish American hegemony in Asia-Pacific and the rest of the world in behalf of the rising monopoly capitalist power of America.

The U.S. colonization of the Philippines led to the establishment of military bases and the training and formation of military and police forces that would be forever beholden to, and would be under the control of, the U.S. Aside from the unilateral bases treaty that it would impose on the Philippines later in 1947, the U.S. state department also issued in February 1948 Policy Staff memorandum 23 (or PPS/23) – a top secret document that defines U.S. post-war military strategy in Asia-Pacific particularly in the Philippines and Japan.

Under PPS/23, the Philippines and Japan should “remain in hands which we (the U.S.) can control and rely on.” In particular, the Philippines would be retained as a “bulwark of U.S. security” in the region. In effect, the document affirmed U.S. pre-war designs to preserve the Philippines as a neo-colony that would serve America’s long-term and vital economic and security interests.

Consequently, even after the U.S. “granted” independence to the Philippines in 1946, the country has remained a neo-colony until today through the installation of or support for puppet governments from Manuel Roxas to Ferdinand Marcos to today’s Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo and its tight hold and influence over the Philippine armed forces. Through the puppet governments, the U.S. is assured that laws, policies and programs enhance and guarantee U.S. interests. The latest of such neo-colonial policies is of course the 1998 Visiting Forces Agreement (VFA), the secret Mutual Logistics Support Agreement (MLSA) and the July 2003 executive agreement granting American forces in the Philippines immunity from criminal prosecution.

The U.S. remains the Philippines’ biggest investor and trading partner. American domination of the country’s economy is guaranteed not only by onerous and one-sided bilateral agreements but also by the Philippine government’s blind adherence to the U.S.-initiated General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), World Trade Organization (WTO) and the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (Apec); as well as economic preconditions dictated by the U.S.-controlled International Monetary Fund, World Bank and other multilateral agencies.

3. If the Philippines remains a neo-colony or vassal state of the U.S., why does the latter need to launch acts of interventionism in the country?

The U.S. lost its military bases in the country in 1992 after the Senate, acting under pressure by a strong anti-bases movement, rejected in 1991 the proposed treaty extending the stay of its 24 military installations. Its two major military installations – the Clark airforce base in Angeles City, Pampanga and the Naval Base in Subic, Olongapo, Zambales were the largest military facilities in Asia outside the U.S. mainland and were vital to the U.S. drive for global hegemony and in launching wars of aggression elsewhere. The bases phase-out in 1992 was a big blow to the U.S. military strategy in the region.

Apart from the U.S. bases, U.S. interventionism in the Philippines has been shown over the past 50 years particularly in: a) the anti-Huk campaign during the 1940s-1950s; b) the country serving as host and forum for the U.S.-conceived Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (Seato), a regional anti-communist military alliance; c) the use of bases to launch air and naval strikes during the Indochina war and in other countries including Iraq in the 1991 Gulf War; d) unbridled support for the Marcos dictatorship and its successor regimes; e) support for counter-insurgency campaigns against local revolutionary forces including the NPA, MNLF and MILF; f) sabotaging of peace talks with the NDF to assure the primacy of militarist solution against revolutionary forces and patriotic organizations.

Since 1991, the U.S. has become the world’s only superpower and began to consolidate its global hegemony. The ultimate objective of the U.S. is to ensure its unhampered access to the world’s resources particularly oil and to further subject the world economy under its own domination. Since 1991 – and even decades before that – the drive for U.S. world hegemony has been pursued primarily through the use of armed force. The American economy, driven by monopoly capitalism, has been in periodic crisis and one of its main instruments by which it would find relief is the conquest and/or neo-colonization of new territories and markets particularly in Asia-Pacific, the Middle East, Central Europe, Central Asia other regions. Ergo, wars of intervention.

In Asia particularly in Southeast Asia, the Philippines is considered by the U.S. as being in a strategic location as it sits astride vital sea lanes and oceans and remains America’s staging base for its economic and military objectives in Southeast Asia and the whole of Asia as well. In the whole of Asia-Pacific – and possibly throughout the world – it is in the Philippines where the U.S.’s comprehensive interests find full support in puppet regimes and a proxy army, again another proof that the country remains a neo-colony of the U.S.

4. What are the recent major forms of armed interventionism in the Philippines by the U.S.?

Since the 1992 pull-out of its military bases, the U.S. has secretly negotiated for the reinstallation of the military facilities and was able to do so through the onerous imposition of the Visiting Forces Agreement (VFA) by an executive agreement with then President Fidel V. Ramos in February 1998. The VFA granted the U.S. full rights to use the country’s ports, airfields and airspace for its naval, airforce and land forces and operations anywhere in the archipelago. It also allowed the scheduling of “joint war exercises” between the U.S. and AFP.

Together with other secret agreements, the VFA allows the U.S. to deploy forces as well as logistics and military installations in the Philippines on a rotational, “permanent-temporary” basis – all of which approximate the re-establishment of military bases.

In September 2001, Admiral Thomas Fargo, commander-in-chief of the U.S. Pacific Command (CINCPAC), said that Clark, Subic and other military facilities in the Philippines would be used in the “global war against terrorism.” Initially, the bases will be used for “transit and transshipment of materials and personnel” as well as refueling of the U.S. Pacific Fleet from Honolulu, Guam, the U.S. West Coast to the U.S. base in Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean. Including its former bases and other ports and airspace in the Philippines, these U.S. bases were used to support the recent wars of invasion in Afghanistan and Iraq and will also be used in a new U.S. war against North Korea, Iran and other members of the so-called “axis of evil.”

Aside from the VFA, the other forms and instruments of armed interventionism in the Philippines are:

1)      the Mutual Logistics Support Agreement (MLSA);

2)      the retention of the outdated Mutual Defense Pact of 1951;

3)      the establishment of the Defense Policy Board (DPB) based in Pentagon;

4)      the retention of JUSMAG (Joint U.S. Military Advisory Group);

5)      control of the AFP in the guise of military aid, war exercises, training of senior and junior officers and related;

6)      the executive agreement signed by Macapagal-Arroyo granting immunity rights to U.S. forces in the Philippines in violation of the Philippine Constitution, the Rome-based International Criminal Court (ICC) Treaty and other international humanitarian laws and conventions;

7)      continued intervention in counter-insurgency (now dubbed as “counter-terrorism”) operations through the deployment “military advisers,” trainers, Special Operation Forces (SOFs) and other forms of “military assistance” (such as intelligence, air support, etc.);

8)      retention of a number of U.S. forces - along with their logistics, war equipment and other facilities – who are participating in so-called war exercises on a temporary or permanent basis;

9)      covert operations by the CIA and other U.S. intelligence arms as well as by the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), US Agency for International Development (AID) such as its clandestine and well-funded AGILE project, and other “non-military” forms;

10)  tagging revolutionary groups, their leaders as well as legal organizations as “terrorist” in order to justify bigger armed interventionism in the guise of the “war on terror” and become “legitimate targets” of military, police and intelligence operations;

11)  covert pressures on the Philippine government, through the DND, to scuttle peace talks with the National Democratic Front of the Philippines (NDFP)

By the way, one of the most recent acts of intervention by the U.S. is the replacement in 2002 of Vice President Teofisto Guingona, who has a record of anti-U.S. bases stance, by the rabidly pro-U.S. and former Marcos henchman, Blas Ople as foreign affairs secretary. In October 2003, the head of the VFA Monitoring Committee, lawyer Amado Valdez, was sacked by Ople for saying in a report that the treaty is onerous and one-sided in favor of the United States.

5) What are the economic, social and political costs of current U.S. interventionism in the Philippines?

a) Economic costs:

-         heightening of the exploitation and plunder of the country’s natural resources including labor;

-         the subservience of the whole Philippine economy to the U.S. economy and that of other capitalist countries like Japan and EU countries;

-         the deterioration, underdevelopment and destruction of the country’s economy thus causing the greater impoverishment and oppression of the Filipino people particularly the poor;

-         through their neo-colonial ties with and puppetry to the U.S., the continued domination of the country’s landholdings, trade and other wealth by the elite (the landlords, comprador-bourgeoisie and big bureaucrats in government)

b) Social costs:

-         the exploitation of the people particularly women due to the proliferation of prostitution, entertainment and other forms of enslavement in the service of U.S. forces;

-         due to increasing defense budgets in line with the U.S.-RP military alliance, the deterioration of public services including food, education, health, housing, social welfare and basic programs;

-         increase in the number of internal refugees displaced by government’s total war policy and armed intervention by the U.S. in the guise of training exercises, humanitarian missions and others;

c) Political costs:

-         a government and military establishment that is elitist, anti-people and blindly obedient to U.S. dictation;

-         infringement of the country’s sovereign, independent and territorial rights;

-         State Terrorism as manifested in the push for a “Strong Republic,” in anti-terrorism bills that threaten the people’s civil and political rights and in the increase in the number and scale of human rights violations;

-         lack of an independent foreign policy that serves to reinforce the image of the Philippine government in the world community as a puppet of the U.S.

*Paper read at the conference of the College Editors Guild of the Philippines – National Capital Region on Oct. 21, 2003 at San Beda College auditorium, Manila. Author Tuazon is also a member of the Center for Anti-Imperialist Studies (CAIS).

Marxism and the Race/Class Problematic: A Re-Articulation

Race relations and race conflict are necessarily structured by the larger totality of the political economy of a given society, as well as by modifications in the structure of the world economy. Corporate profit-making via class exploitation on an international/globalized scale, at bottom, still remains the logic of the world system of finance capitalism based on historically changing structures and retooled practices of domination and subordination.

By E. San Juan, Jr.
Posted by Bulatlat.com

1. The implacably zombifying domination of the Cold War for almost half a century has made almost everyone allergic to the Marxian notion of class as a social category that can explain inequalities of power and wealth in the "free world." One symptom is the mantra of "class reductionism" or "economism" as a weapon to silence anyone who calls attention to the value of one's labor power, or one's capacity to work in order to survive, if not to become human. Another way of nullifying the concept of class as an epistemological tool for understanding the dynamics of capitalist society is to equate it with status, life-style, even an entire "habitus" or pattern of behavior removed from the totality of the social relations of production in any given historical formation. Often, class is reduced to income, or to voting preference within the strict limits of the bourgeois (that is, capitalist) electoral order. Some sociologists even play at being agnostic or nominalist by claiming that class displays countless meanings and designations relative to the ideological persuasion of the theorist/researcher, hence its general uselessness as an analytic tool. This has become the orthodox view of "class" in mainstream academic discourse.

2. Meanwhile, with the victory of the Civil Rights struggles in the sixties (now virtually neutralized in the last two decades), progressive forces relearned the value of the strategy of alliances and coalitions of various groups. These coalitions have demonstrated the power of demanding the recognition of group rights, the efficacy of the politics of identity. Invariably, ethnic or cultural identity became the primordial point of departure for political dialogue and action. Activists learned the lesson that Stuart Hall, among others, discovered in the eighties: the presumably Gramscian view that "there is no automatic identity or correspondence between economic, political and ideological processes" (1996, 437). This has led to the gradual burgeoning of a "politics of ethnicity predicated on difference and diversity." Nonetheless, Hall insisted that for people of color, class is often lived or experienced in the modality of race; in short, racism (racialized relations) often function as one of the factors that "overdetermine" (to use the Althusserian term) the formation of class consciousness. While this trend (still fashionable today in its version of cosmopolitanism, post-national or postcolonial criticism, eclectic transnationalism of all sorts) did not completely reject the concept of class, it rendered it superfluous by the formula of subsuming it within the putative "intersectionality" of race, gender, and class as a matrix of identity and agency.

3. One of the systematic ideological rationalizations of this approach is David Theo Goldberg's Racist Culture. Goldberg argues that class cannot be equated with race, or race collapsed into class; in short, culture cannot be dissolved into economics. That move "leaves unexplained those cultural relations race so often expresses, or it wrongly reduces these cultural relations to more or less veiled instantiations of class formation" (1993, 70). Race then becomes primarily an affair of race relations. It acquires an almost fetishistic valorization in this framework of elucidating social reality. A less one-sided angle may be illustrated by Amy Gutman's belief that class and race interact so intimately that we need a more nuanced calibration of the specific moments in which the racial determinant operates over and above the class determinant: "What we can say with near certainty is that if blacks who live in concentrated poverty, go to bad schools, or live in single-parent homes are also stigmatized by racial prejudice as whites are not, then even the most complex calculus of class is an imperfect substitute for also taking color explicitly into account" (2000, 96). What is clear in both Goldberg's and Gutman's analysis is that class (taken as a rigid phenomenal feature of identity) is only one aspect or factor in explaining any dynamic social situation, not the salient or fundamental relation. Unlike the Marxian concept of class as a relation of group antagonisms (more precisely, class conflict) that is the distinctive characteristic of the social totality in capitalism, class in current usage signifies an element of identity, a phenomenon whose meaning and value is incomplete without taking into account other factors like race, gender, locality, and so on. Neoliberal pluralism and the discourse of methodological individualism reign supreme in these legitimations of a reified world-system, what Henri Lefebvre (1971) calls "the bureaucratic society of controlled consumption."

Retrospective Mediation

4. To date, the standard judgment of a Marxist approach to racism and racial conflict is summed up in reflex epithets such as "economistic," "reductionist," "productivist," "deterministic," and cognate terms. Despite the influence of Althusser, Gramsci, and assorted neo- or post-Marxists, the majority of scholars and their graduate acolytes in the West continue this Cold War syndrome. It is probably a waste of time to dignify this silliness. However, I think it is useful insofar as it might dispel the ideological hold of the paradigm supposed to remedy the simplification: the intersection of race, class and gender. This mantra obviously commits the other error of reducing class, and for that matter race and gender, to nominal aspects of personal identity without any clear historical or materialist grounding. The solution is worse than the problem.

5. One recent example of the orthodox Marxist view of the race/class nexus is found in Michael Parenti's Land of Idols: Political Mythology in America. After a substantial account of the linkage between racism and slavery, Parenti argues that racism is functional to the preservation of capitalism: the dominant class interests use it "to discourage working-class unity and divide people from each other (1994, 133). Parenti adds: "Class power gives attitudinal racism much of its virulence. The class dimension is sometimes overlooked by the victims of racism. Rather than looking at the politico-economic system that has victimized [them], they blame an undifferentiated 'White racism.'" But he grants that "along with being an expression of class society, racism develops a momentum of its own" (1994, 137-38). One of the reasons for the habit of treating class problems as racial ones, according to Parenti, may be traced to the Supreme Court's treatment of "race" as a "suspect category," thus making race-motivated harms subject to constitutional redress.

6. An earlier "take" on the race/class problematique is found in Oliver Cromwell Cox's now classic 1948 book, Caste, Class and Race: A Study in Social Dynamics. Cox rightly emphasizes the social context of race relations. For Cox, class analysis applies to race relations as social contacts "determined by a consciousness of 'racial difference'" (1972, 206). In his study of race relations, Cox focuses on "the phenomenon of the capitalist exploitation of peoples and its complementary social attitude," the latter cognized as racism or "a philosophy of racial antipathy." Racism, for Cox, is the ideology or system of rationalization that underlies racial antagonism within the framework of exploitation which can take diverse historical forms or situations.

7. Cox theorizes racism as a "socio-attitudinal facilitation of a particular type of labor exploitation": "The fact of crucial significance is that racial exploitation is merely one aspect of the problem of the proletarianization of labor, regardless of the color of the laborer. Hence racial antagonism is essentially political-class conflict" (1972, 208). The capitalist demonstrates his practical opportunism when he uses racial prejudice to "keep his labor and other resources freely exploitable." Race prejudice, for Cox, is not just dislike for the physical appearance or attitudes of the other person. "It rests basically upon a calculated and concerted determination of a white ruling class to keep peoples of color and their resources exploitable" (1972, 214). And this pattern of race prejudice becomes part of the social heritage so that "both exploiters and exploited for the most part are born heirs to it."

8. Cox, however, is not just a simple determinist addicted to the much abused, proverbial base/superstructure formula. He demonstrates scholarly sophistication in conceptualizing the historically nuanced "situations of race relations" in the U.S., describing the situation as "bipartite." The term "bipartite" refers to the fact that though both colored and white persons live in the same geographical location, whites insist that the whole society is "a white man's country" (1972, 216). Cox would differ from another scholar of race relations, Leo Kuper, who believes that class structures and racial structures constitute different systems of stratification. For Kuper, "racial differences which are societally elaborated have preceded" social interaction (1972, 95). But racial difference cannot usefully serve as a secondary hypothesis in explaining, say, national-liberation struggles. In colonial and neocolonial formations, independent class struggles emerged that were mobilized around national, ethnic and race ideologies, as shown in Latin American, South Africa, Algeria, and the Caribbean countries. But for Cox, the import of racial differentiations, alignments and antagonisms insofar as they influence class formation cannot be fully grasped unless they are situated within the process of class conflicts operating on complex levels in a historically evolving capitalist system. A recent example of this mode of "situating" the dialectic of race and class is Alex Callinicos' argument that the 1992 Los Angeles mass upheaval was a "class rebellion, not race riot," concluding his brief that "only a strategy which takes as its starting point class rather than race can provide the basis for the necessary unity of the oppressed" (1993, 57).

Inventing a New Discourse

9. It might be instructive, for pedagogical purposes, to re-examine the arguments of Michael Omi and Howard Winant (in their influential book Racial Formation in the United States [1986] ) in dismissing a "class-based theory" deemed "Marxist." First of all, Omi and Winant (hereafter, O/W) conceive of the class-based paradigm as comprised of three elements: market, stratification, and class-conflict approaches. This stance immediately prejudices the conceptualization of the problem. A class system, for O/W, is based on "unequal exchange" of material resources in the marketplace, even though market relations based on exchange are distinguished from systems of stratification based on distribution--what's the difference?--and class conflict based on production. Why this postulated muddle at the outset? We can see why after we summarize their interpretation (see my initial appraisal in San Juan 1992).

10. In the market-relations approach deemed to be egalitarian, racial inequality results from irrational prejudice or discriminative monopolistic practices. They disrupt the equilibrating tendencies of the market. This neoclassical theory admits a limited amount of "judicious" state intervention to restore equilibrium, but the principle of individualism is the governing framework. Although the monopoly cartels impose inequalities in labor, capital, and consumption, minorities and the capitalist class (according to O/W) hold equal power. Market theories are economically deterministic, conceiving of racial inequality as located in the sphere of exchange. Why this approach is called "class-oriented," is puzzling. In contrast, the split-labor market theory of Edna Bonacich--an attempt to improve the segmented labor-market analysis of the political economy of the capitalist system--focuses on exploitation as part of the sociohistorical division of labor, with the sale of labor power conditioned by the total political economy of specific historical periods (see Banton 1987).

11. In the stratification approach, we focus on the social distribution of resources. Here O/W simply conflate class and status, a view in which stratification of groups arises from unequal distribution of income/wealth. Extra-economic factors, political authority and other forms of domination, account for the status order. This clarifies William Julius Wilson's analysis of stratification in the black community (in his The Declining Significance of Race, 1978) oriented around "life chances." In O/W's view, Wilson's dismissal of "race" for "class" (that is, status) is mistaken: "the black middle class remains tied to the lower class precisely through racial dynamics which are structured into the US economy, culture and politics." Despite a disingenuous play on words, alternating "class" and "status" as well as "caste," O/W cannot persuade their readers that stratification theory is in some ways equivalent to, or produces the same effect as, historical-materialist class analysis.

12. Now, for O/W, class conflict theory derives from the Marxist concept of exploitation absent in the other two approaches. But then they postulate the following questionable interpretations: first, the Marxist view posits "the centrality of the 'social relations of production' in structuring classes and class relationships"; and, second, "class conflict theory infers racially oriented political interests from economic ones." Ultimately, however, O/W succumb to a hopeless muddle by mixing bourgeois economics (market theory) with a presumed Marxist analysis by their preoccupation with the labor market. Class is thus misconstrued as a production-relation, hence they wonder how that relation can be "specifically racial." Two tendencies in class conflict theory are discernible, according to O/W: the "divide and rule" conception resting on the notion of labor-market segmentation as "the key determinant in racially based inequalities in production relations," and second, an "exclusionist" perspective based on the idea of a split-labor market. Notwithstanding these distinctions, O/W betray an obsessive drive to mis-recognize Marxism--as they interpret it in a post-structuralist or sometimes eclectic fashion--with bourgeois neoclassical economics: racial inequality results not from production relationships but from "market or exchange relationships."

13. For O/W, the Marxist model as far as they conceive it is flawed. It ignores subjectivity, politics and ideology. Race cannot be understood "in terms of an economically determined formula of class belonging defined as the relationship to the means of production." For them, "race and class are competing modalities by which social actors may be organized." Because ideology and politics determine the labor market, "racial categories cut across class lines." Because class formation process is complex and contingent, O/W conclude that sectoral lines of demarcation pervade production relations and, therefore, class analysis cannot adequately elucidate racial dynamics. This latter "must be understood as determinants of class relationships and indeed class identities, not as mere consequences of these relationships." It is clear that in order to correct a simplistic reduction of the racial category to an epiphenomenal superstructure, O/W redefine class formation, not to speak of class conflict, as a function or effect of the primacy of racial dynamics, that is, of ideology and politics.

14. To sum up O/W's singular strategy of refuting and repudiating Marxist class analysis: first, class is located in the sphere of market-exchange, then it is subsumed into status and life-chances, and finally it is located in the realm of production that is, however, decisively shaped and ultimately eclipsed by political and ideological forces (for a critique of this philosophical style, see Wood 1986). Race, or racial dynamics, is ultimately elevated as the principal explanatory instrument for comprehending social actors. In a shrewd decentering strategy, racial politics displaces the political economy of group/class antagonisms and functions as the metanarrative of postmodernity, albeit one of ambivalent or indeterminate progress, during the Reagan-Bush period. This approach easily slides into philosophical idealism, a feat achieved at the cost of distorting a dialectical-materialist theory of class struggle and refurbishing dogmas already consigned to the dustbin of Cold War history. How can this confusion be rectified?

A Return to Marx?

15. Let us first review what Marx said about class. As everyone knows, Marx died before completing the chapter on "class" in Volume III of Capital. Marx did not invent the theory of class and of class struggle as the motive force in the development of world history. What Marx as a theoretician of socialist revolution did was to analyze the origin and characteristics of classes in bourgeois society, with emphasis on how the interests of one class coincide with the development of the productive forces toward new social structures, and how other classes defend the established system for their own benefit. Class is a conceptual category designating a relationship of exploitation. It is indissociable from class conflict, from the specific historical struggle of social groups divided by unequal property relations. Marx's singular accomplishment is to show how the liberation of the proletariat implies the abolition of classes and class society, together with the exploitation of commodified labor.

16. In historicizing the social division of labor, Marx demonstrated that classes are specific and historically determinate. They are neither rigid nor immutable. They arise from the complex dynamics of historical development. There are not just two homogeneous classes, the proletariat and the bourgeoisie, as the Communist Manifesto proclaimed, but many dependent on the multiple ramifications of the division of labor and the overdetermined specificity of the modes of production as well as the historical conjunctures. For example, in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, Marx described the formation of numerous middle and intermediate strata and various coalitions that formed during the events of the 1848 revolution. He also later observed that in England "intermediate and transitional strata obscure the class boundaries" that separate the increasingly polarized bourgeoisie and the proletariat. What is crucial, however, is Marx's view that classes are formed in the process of class antagonisms. Class struggles, not the relation to the means of production, are primary in class formation and the coeval crystallization of class consciousness (from class-in-itself to class-for-itself). This modifies Lenin's doctrinal formulation of class: "Classes are large groups of people, differing from each other by the place they occupy in an historically determined system of social production, by their role in the social organization of labor and, consequently, by the dimensions of the share of social wealth of which they can dispose and the mode of acquiring it" (quoted in Schmitt 1987, 128).

17. A fully constituted class was described by Marx in The Eighteenth Brumaire, (section VII): "In so far as millions of families live under economic conditions of existence that separate their mode of life, their interests, and their culture from those of the other classes, and put them in hostile opposition to the latter, they form a class. In so far as there is merely a local interconnection among these small-holding peasants, and the identity of their interests begets no community, no national bond, and no political organization among them, they do not form a class." In The German Ideology, Marx and Engels write: "The separate individuals form a class only insofar as they have to carry on a common battle against another class; otherwise they are on hostile terms with each other as competitors. On the other hand, the class in its turn achieves independent existence over against the individuals" (quoted in Schmitt 1987, 128). Classes, groups locked in battle, are thus not unchangeable monolithic formations; they "are forever changing, developing, differentiating themselves, while at the same time the common element always comes to the fore and integrates the individual within the class" (Fischer 1996, 77). Classes undergo a constant process of inner movement and transformation dependent on the vicissitudes of the class struggle in a historically specific configuration of the world-system as a complex dynamic whole.

18. We cannot grasp the dialectics of race and class by using the market as the conceptual space of cognition as well as a point of departure for crafting revolutionary political strategy. Nor the idea of exchange and money, for that matter. Marxism begins with a grasp of the social totality in its historical development. The key concept is the mode of production consisting of productive forces and of relations of production. Let us confine ourselves to capitalism as the determinate mode with its various historical stages. In industrial capitalism the differentia specifica is the buying and selling of labor power. Lenin states that capitalism is the system in which labor-power becomes the prime commodity. This gives rise to the working class as the group separated from the means of production, free (unlike slaves or serfs) to dispose of their labor power, to sell it to another group--the capitalist--who utilizes it to expand the unit of capital he owns. This labor process involving contracts that deal with the conditions of the sale of labor power needs to be strictly historicized. While the market for labor-power has existed since antiquity, it is only with the rise of industrial capitalism in the 18th century that a substantial class of wage-workers emerged. We need to distinguish between the production of commodities on a class basis and mercantile capitalism founded on the exchange of the surplus products of prior forms of production (Braverman 1974). In every determinate sociohistorical conjuncture, various features of different modes of production may overlap, but a dominant structure of class exploitation prevails, ascertainable through careful theoretical and empirical analysis.

19. What is distinctive in this mode of production is the fact that the labor process has become alienated, that is, alienation now characterizes the work situation of workers under capitalist control. This alienation of the process of production exerts a peculiar force that affects the factoring of racial, ethnic, sexual and other qualities in the struggle between classes. Alienation, commodity fetishism, and what Georg Lukács calls "reification" mediates and adjusts the racial dynamics to the level and stage of class antagonisms in the specific social formation.

20. To recapitulate: Social class in a Marxist construal denotes groups of social agents defined principally but not exclusively by their place in the labor process. This process plays a crucial and necessary role in determining class, but not a sufficient one. For the political and ideological conditions provide decisive criteria in ascertaining how the economic will exert its pressure on the behavior of the class in concrete situations of struggle. Marx suggested this in Poverty of Philosophy (ch. 2, section 5): "Economic conditions had in the first place transformed the mass of the people into workers. The domination of capital created the common situation and common interests of this class. Thus this mass is already a class in relation to capital [class in itself], but not yet a class for itself. In the struggle, this mass unites and forms itself into a class for itself. The interests which it defends become class interests."

21. Nicos Poulantzas's formulation, however, rejects the distinction between the group determined by structure and the supplementary role of ideology in the process of class conflict: "A social class is defined by its place in the ensemble of social practices, i.e. by its place in the ensemble of the division of labor which includes political and ideological relations. This place corresponds to the structural determination of classes, i.e. the manner in which determination by the structure (relations of production, politico-ideological domination/subordination) operates on class practices--for classes have existence only in the class struggle" (1973, 27). Poulantzas uncannily anticipates the errors of Omi, Winant, and perhaps two generations of Cold War experts on revolutionary Marxism.

22. It is therefore incorrect to conceive of class as a bounded social entity endowed with a specific agency divorced from its place in the production process and the social division of labor. In the Marxist optic, class is a relational (to the means of production) and processual category. It differs from stratum or status group in the Weberian theory of stratification. Anthony Giddens (1980) correctly points out that stratification theory applies a gradation scheme to rank individuals descriptively along a measurement scale, whereas class cannot be visualized or conceptualized in this manner. Thus the distinction of groups in terms of income, prestige, etc. translates class antagonism into a jockeying of groups for higher/lower positions in the hierarchical ladder, abolishing the material and necessary contradiction between the working class and the bourgeoisie. Weber needs to be distinguished from Marx.

23. In 1927, Karl Kautsky argued that the class conflicts described in the Communist Manifesto were really conflicts between status groups and ranks. This contradicts Marx's own thesis stated in the third part of Capital, chapter 47, which needs to be underscored: "It is always the direct relation between the owners of the conditions of production and the direct producers which reveals the innermost secret, the hidden foundation, of the entire social edifice."

24. In addition to class as defined by specific historical antagonisms within the production process, we need to examine the moment of reproduction. The labor process as an abstraction needs to be fleshed out. Goran Therborn instructs us: "Capitalist production, therefore, under its aspect of a continuous connected process, of a process of reproduction, produces not only commodities, not only surplus-value, but it also produces and reproduces the capital relation; on the one side the capitalist, on the other the wage-laborer" (1970, 5). In this site of reproduction of the production relations, the division of labor and the distribution of resources, we discern the intervention of "race" as a categorizing property that enables the construction of hegemony (as defined by Antonio Gramsci [1971] ) and its subversion.

Remapping the Contemporary Terrain

25. No longer valid as a scientific instrument of classification, race today operates as a socio-political construction. Differences of language, beliefs, traditions, and so on can no longer be sanctioned by biological science as permanent, natural, and normal. Nonetheless they have become efficacious components of the racializing process, "inscribed through tropes of race, lending the sanction of God, biology, or the natural order to even presumably unbiased descriptions of cultural tendencies and differences" (Gates 1986, 5). It is evident that, as Colette Guillaumin (1995) has demonstrated, the class divisions of the feudal/tributary stage hardened and became naturalized, with blood lineage signifying pedigree, status, and rank. Industrial capital, however, destroyed kinship and caste-like affinities as a presumptive claim to wealth.

26. The capitalist mode of production articulated "race" with class in a peculiar way. While the stagnation of rural life imposed a racial or castelike rigidity to the peasantry, the rapid accumulation of wealth through the ever more intensifying exploitation of labor by capital could not so easily "racialize" the wage-workers of a particular nation, given the alienability of labor-power--unless certain physical or cultural characteristics can be utilized to divide the workers or render one group an outcast or pariah removed from the domain of "free labor." In the capitalist development of U.S. society, African, Mexican, and Asian bodies--more precisely, their labor power and its reproductive efficacy--were colonized and racialized; hence the idea of "internal colonialism" retains explanatory validity. "Race" is thus constructed out of raw materials furnished by class relations, the history of class conflicts, and the vicissitudes of colonial/capitalist expansion and the building of imperial hegemony. It is dialectically accented and operationalized not just to differentiate the price of wage labor within and outside the territory of the metropolitan power, but also to reproduce relations of domination-subordination invested with an aura of naturality and fatality. The refunctioning of physical or cultural traits as ideological and political signifiers of class identity reifies social relations. Such "racial" markers enter the field of the alienated labor process, concealing the artificial nature of meanings and norms, and essentializing or naturalizing historical traditions and values which are contingent on mutable circumstances.

27. William Julius Wilson indicated some of these changes in the role of "race" in class-divided U.S. society, though he drew mistaken conclusions. He applied stratification theory on the mapping of black-white contacts in U.S. society configured in three major stages: first, the plantation economy with its racial-caste oppression; second, class conflict and racial oppression in the period of the end of Reconstruction up to the New Deal era; and third, the progressive transition from race inequalities to class inequalities after World War II, especially in the 1960s and 1970s. Given a hierarchical model of status roles, Wilson intended to find out how "access to the means of production" (by which he means employment) can be obtained by education. His concern is with opportunities for mobility provided by a segmented labor market which generates a high-wage sector (salaried white-collar positions in government and corporation) and the underclass. "Race" disappears because all barriers for blacks are gone with affirmative action, more education, and so on. "Race" is no longer the cause of discrimination and segregation of the labor market; rather, it is class, meaning education or symbolic capital, lifestyle, consumption power, and so on. Gunnar Myrdal's American Creed has finally abolished racism only to re-inaugurate "classism," the rebarbative term of postmodern skeptics, without which the classic American moral dilemma--the opposition between "high national and Christian precepts" and sordid practices of apartheid and other institutional forms of racialized class injustice in everyday life--would be vacuous.

28. Unfortunately, the current debate between a class-based Affirmative Action instead of one based on race assumes that class as status (attached chiefly to income or occupational location) is the normative obstacle to eliminating racism (see Gutmann 2000). In short, racism translates into a question of social mobility and the individualist "bootstrap" ethos of competition (also known as neosocial Darwinism) in the "free market," the privileged locus of alienation and reification (Lukacs 1971). From the perspective of liberal multiculturalism, "class" becomes an aspect of identity, like race and gender susceptible of stylistic alteration. One is then reminded by Ellen Meiksins Wood: "Is it possible to imagine class differences without exploitation and domination? The 'difference' that constitutes class as an 'identity' is, by definition, a relationship of inequality and power, in a way that sexual or cultural 'difference' need not be" (1995, 258).

29. It seems obvious that racism cannot be dissolved by instances of status mobility when sociohistorical circumstances change gradually or are transformed by unforeseen interventions. The black bourgeoisie continues to be harassed and stigmatized by liberal or multiculturalist practices of racism, not because they drive Porsches or conspicuously flaunt all the indices of wealth. Class exploitation cannot replace or stand for racism because it is the condition of possibility for it. It is what enables the racializing of selected markers, whether physiological or cultural, to maintain, deepen and reinforce alienation, mystifying reality by modes of commodification, fetishism, and reification characterizing the routine of quotidian life. Race and class are dialectically conjoined in the reproduction of capitalist relations of exploitation and domination.

Reconstructing Historical Materialism

30. We might take a passage from Marx as a source of guidelines for developing a historical-materialist theory of racism which is not empiricist but dialectical in aiming for theorizing conceptual concreteness as a multiplicity of historically informed and configured determinations. This passage comes from a letter dated 9 April 1870 to Meyer and Vogt in which Marx explains why the Irish struggle for autonomy was of crucial significance for the British proletariat:

. . . Every industrial and commercial center in England possesses a working class divided into two hostile camps, English proletarians and Irish proletarians. The ordinary English worker hates the Irish worker as a competitor who lowers his standard of life. In relation to the Irish worker he feels himself a member of the ruling nation and so turns himself into a tool of the aristocrats and capitalists of his country against Ireland, thus strengthening their domination over himself. He cherishes religious, social, and national prejudices against the Irish worker. His attitude towards him is much the same as that of the 'poor whites' to the 'niggers' in the former slave states of the USA. The Irishman pays him back with interest in his own money. He sees in the English worker at once the accomplice and stupid tool of the English rule in Ireland.

This antagonism is artificially kept alive and intensified by the press, the pulpit, the comic papers, in short by all the means at the disposal of the ruling classes. This antagonism is the secret of the impotence of the English working class, despite its organization. It is the secret by which the capitalist class maintains its power. And that class is fully aware of it (quoted in Callinicos 1993).

Here Marx sketches three parameters for the sustained viability of racism in modern capitalist society. First, the economic competition among workers is dictated by the distribution of labor power in the labor-market via differential wage rates. The distinction between skilled and unskilled labor is contextualized in differing national origins, languages and traditions of workers, which can be manipulated into racial antagonisms. Second, the appeal of racist ideology to white workers, with their identification as members of the "ruling nation" affording--in W.E.B. DuBois's words--"public and psychological wage" or compensation. Like religion, white-supremacist nationalism provides the illusory resolution to the real contradictions of life for the working majority of citizens. Third, the ruling class reinforces and maintains these racial divisions for the sake of capital accumulation within the framework of its ideological/political hegemony in the metropolis and worldwide.

31. Racism and nationalism are thus modalities in which class struggles articulate themselves at strategic points in history. No doubt social conflicts in recent times have involved not only classes but also national, ethnic, and religious groups, as well as feminist, ecological, antinuclear social movements (Bottomore 1983). The concept of "internal colonialism" (popular in the seventies) that subjugates national minorities, as well as the principle of self-determination for oppressed or "submerged" nations espoused by Lenin, exemplify dialectical attempts to historicize the collective agency for socialist transformation. Within the framework of the global division of labor between metropolitan center and colonized periphery, a Marxist program of national liberation is meant to take into account the extraction of surplus value from colonized peoples through unequal exchange as well as through direct colonial exploitation in "Free Trade Zones," illegal traffic in prostitution, mail-order brides, and contractual domestics (at present, the Philippines provides the bulk of the latter, about ten million persons and growing). National oppression has a concrete reality not entirely reducible to class exploitation but incomprehensible apart from it; that is, it cannot be adequately understood without the domination of the racialized peoples in the dependent formations by the colonizing/imperialist power, with the imperial nation-state acting as the exploiting class, as it were (see San Juan 1998; 2002).

32. Racism arose with the creation and expansion of the capitalist world economy (Wolf 1982; Balibar and Wallerstein, 1991). Solidarities conceived as racial or ethnic groups acquire meaning and value in terms of their place within the social organization of production and reproduction of the ideological-political order; ideologies of racism as collective social evaluation of solidarities arise to reinforce structural constraints which preserve the exploited and oppressed position of these "racial" solidarities. Such patterns of economic and political segmentation mutate in response to the impact of changing economic and political relationships (Geshwender and Levine 1994). Overall, there is no denying the fact that national-liberation movements and indigenous groups fighting for sovereignty, together with heterogeneous alliances and coalitions, cannot be fully understood without a critical analysis of the production of surplus value and its expropriation by the propertied class--that is, capital accumulation. As John Rex noted,

different ethnic groups are placed in relations of cooperation, symbiosis or conflict by the fact that as groups they have different economic and political functions.Within this changing class order of [colonial societies], the language of racial difference frequently becomes the means whereby men allocate each other to different social and economic positions. What the type of analysis used here suggests is that the exploitation of clearly marked groups in a variety of different ways is integral to capitalism and that ethnic groups unite and act together because they have been subjected to distinct and differentiated types of exploitation. Race relations and racial conflict are necessarily structured by political and economic factors of a more generalized sort (1983, 403-05, 407).

Hence race relations and race conflict are necessarily structured by the larger totality of the political economy of a given society, as well as by modifications in the structure of the world economy. Corporate profit-making via class exploitation on an international/globalized scale, at bottom, still remains the logic of the world system of finance capitalism based on historically changing structures and retooled practices of domination and subordination.

33. Class structure, to be sure, is much more complex and ambiguous in advanced industrial social formations (Giddens 1973; Balibar and Wallerstein 1991). Because of the comprehensive state regulation of contemporary social life, some have replaced ownership or control of the means of production with control of the state apparatus as a more decisive criterion of social development. In 1899 Eduard Bernstein dismissed class struggle because of the growing middle class, socialized welfare reforms, liberalization, and so on. In the sixties C. Wright Mills also rejected fundamental class conflict as part of a "labor metaphysic," while Herbert Marcuse bewailed the incorporation of the working class into advanced capitalist society. However, the production and distribution of the social surplus cannot be ignored. This despite empiricist arguments that "class interest" is now viewed not only as defined positivistically in relation to the means of production but as constructed from the interactions of everyday life and attendant interpretations. Notwithstanding such formal and technical shifts of subject-positions, classes and their historical transformation as the principal agents of change, in particular, the transition to a socialist "classless" society, remain valid in conceptualizing realistic prospects of change in capitalism conceived as a global economic and political system under the current post-9/11 hegemony--contested and precarious, given the irresolvable contradictions of its crisis--of the United States.

34. A recent translation of Albert Memmi's magisterial book entitled Racism reminds us that any understanding of the complex network of ideas and practices classified by that term will always lead us to the foundational bedrock of class relations. Memmi defines racism as "the generalized and final assigning of values to real or imaginary differences, to the accuser's benefit and at his victim's expense, in order to justify the former's own privileges or aggression" (2000, 169). The underlying frame of intelligibility for this process of assigning values cannot be anything else but the existence of class-divided societies and nation-states with unequal allocations of power and resources. Both motivation and consequences can be adequately explained by the logic of class oppression and its entailments. In our epoch of globalization, inequality between propertied nation-states (where transnational corporate powers are based) and the rest of the world has become universalized and threatens the welfare of humanity and the planet.

35. At this present conjuncture, however, what becomes more urgent is the application of a Marxist perspective on the destructive mechanisms of corporate globalization, at present led by the hegemonic military might of the United States and its racializing crusade of an endless "war on terrorism." It might be superfluous to recapitulate the debate between traditional Marxist-Leninists and neo-Marxists such as Immanuel Wallerstein--that would require in itself a separate inquiry. Suffice it to cite one witness to recent international developments. Reflecting on the recent World Conference Against Racism held in Durban, South Africa, immediately before September 11, 2001, Eric Mann noted that to launch the most effective intervention to change history, it is necessary to analyze the strengths and weaknesses of the imperialist system: "Right now the U.S. is financing its war against the world by super-exploiting the entire world, subjecting more than three billion people to abject poverty.  In that racism and imperialism are at the heart of the U.S. ideological framework, antiracism and anti-imperialism are the central ideological concepts of contestation, the essence of counterhegemonic political education work" (2002, 220-23). This essay is an attempt to contribute to that revolutionary pedagogical enterprise. Posted by Bulatlat.com

===================

REFERENCES

Balibar, Etienne and Immanuel Wallerstein.  1991.  Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities.  London and New York: Verso.

Banton, Michael. 1987. Racial Theories. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Bottomore, Tom. 1983. "Class." In A Dictionary of Marxist Thought. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 74-78

Braverman, Harry. 1974. Labor and Monopoly Capital. New York: Monthly Review Press.

Callinicos, Alex. 1993. Race and Class. London: Bookmarks.

Cox, Oliver Cromwell. 1972. "Race and Exploitation: A Marxist View." In Race and Social Difference. Eds. Paul Baxter and Basil Sansom. Baltimore, Md: Penguin Books.

Fischer, Ernst 1996. How to Read Karl Marx. Introd. John Bellamy Foster. New York: Monthly Review Press.

Geshwender, James and Rhonda Levine. 1994. "Classical and Recent Theoretical Developments in the Marxist Analysis of Race and Ethnicity." In From the Left Bank to the Mainstream. Ed. P. McGuire and D. McQuarie. New York: General Hall Publishing.

Giddens, Anthony. 1980. The Class Structure of the Advanced Societies. London: Hutchinson.

Goldberg, David Theo. 1993. Racist Culture. Oxford, UK: Blackwell.

Gramsci, Antonio.  1971.  Selections from the Prison Notebooks. New York: International Publishers.

Guillaumin, Colette.  1995. Racism, Sexism, Power and Ideology.  London and New York: Routledge.

Gutmann, Amy. 2000. "Should Public Policy Be Class Conscious Rather than Color Conscious?" In Race and Ethnicity in the United States. Ed. Stephen Steinberg. New York: Blackwell.

Hall, Stuart. 1996. Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies. Eds. David Morley and Kuan-Hsing Chen. London and New York: Routledge.

Kuper, Leo. 1972. "Race Structure in the Social Consciousness." In Race and Social Difference. Baltimore, MD: Penguin Books.

Lefebvre, Henri. 1971. Everyday Life in the Modern World. Tr. Sacha Rabinowitz. New York: Harper Torchbooks.

Lukacs, Georg. 1971. History and Class Consciousness. Tr. Rodney Livingstone. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press.

Mann, Eric. 2002. Dispatches from Durban. Los Angeles, CA: Frontlines Press.

Memmi, Albert. 2000. Racism. Tr. Steve Martinot. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Omi, Michael and Howard Winant. 1986. Racial Formation in the United States. New York: Routledge & Kegan Paul.

Parenti, Michael. 1994. Land of Idols: Political Mythology in America. New York: St. Martin's Press.

Poulantzas, Nicos. 1973. "On Social Classes." New Left Review 78: 27ff.

Rex, John. 1983. "Race." In A Dictionary of Marxist Thought. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press. 405-407

San Juan, E. 1992. Racial Formations/Critical Transformations. Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press.

----. 1998. Beyond Postcolonial Theory. New York: St. Martin's Press.

----. 2002. Racism and Cultural Studies. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Schmitt, Richard. 1987. Introduction to Marx and Engels: A Critical Reconstruction. Boulder, CO: Westview Press.

Therborn, Goran. 1970. "What does the ruling class do when it rules?" Insurgent Sociologist 6.3: 3-16.

Wolf, Eric.  1982.  Europe and the People Without History.  Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

Wood, Ellen Meiksins. 1986.  The Retreat from Class.  London and New York: Verso.

----. 1995. "An Inheritance Reaffirmed: Marx." In Class. Ed. Patrick Joyce. New York: Oxford University Press.

----. 1995. Democracy Against Capitalism. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Wright, Erik Olin and Andrew Levine. 1989. "Rationality and Class Struggle." In Marxist Theory. Ed. Alex Callinicos. New York: Oxford University Press.

Message: 3
   Date: Tue, 4 Nov 2003 16:22:59 -0800 (PST)
   From: "Filomeno III Sta. Ana" <filomenoiii@yahoo.com>
Subject: WB: critical of war on terror

"World Bank critical of the War on Terror"

Reuters, 29 October 2003

A report released by the World Bank this week notes
that the ongoing War on Terror, including the campaign
in Iraq, is "undermining the long-term task of
tackling the causes rather than the consequences of
world poverty". Officials highlight that the USD$ 800
billion global expenditure on arms vastly overshadows
the USD$ 50 billion spent annually on development aid.


***********

World Bank critical of war on terror
Wed October 29, 2003 07:22 AM ET

By Jeremy Lovell

LONDON (Reuters) - The short-term focus on military
action to bring stability in the U.S.-led war on
terror is undermining the long-term task of tackling
the causes rather than the consequences of poverty, a
World Bank expert says.

"The war on terror is shifting attention away from
making globalisation work for all. It is undermining
our ability to drive forward a responsible
globalisation," World Bank Environment Director
Kristalina Georgieva told Reuters on Wednesday.

"We need prevention rather than reaction, yet we focus
not on the causes but on the cures.

"Money has an opportunity cost. Money that goes to one
place doesn't go to another. The focus on Iraq in
terms of those in equally serious or even more serious
development need is an issue to be faced," she said on
the margins of the Environment 2003 conference in
London.

Georgieva, a Bulgarian national who has spent a
lifetime working on environment and development
issues, pointed out that world governments annually
spent some $600 billion on arms but just $50 billion
on development aid.

"For us to make a real dent in the problem of long
term environmental sustainability, a conservative
estimate would be that we need probably somewhere
between $65-$85 billion a year plus another $50-$70
billion for the Kyoto climate change challenge," she
said.

While this might seem a large amount of money, it had
to be seen in the context of a world economy worth
some $40 trillion a year.

"If this is the price we need to pay for the future of
our kids, is this really such a lot," she asked
rhetorically.

She said the long-established divide between rich
northern nations and poor southern states was becoming
more entrenched and more complicated as divisions
opened up between the southern hemisphere countries
themselves.

Those countries that had embraced globalisation had
seen all their people get richer while at the same
time seeing the gap between rich and poor get wider.

On the other hand, those such as much of sub-Saharan
Africa, which had failed to get aboard the
globalisation gravy train were sinking without trace,
to the extent that they were not even able to tackle
their own problems.

Technology transfer could offer a solution, but
historically almost every advance brought with it a
downside so it should be adopted with caution.

What was needed was strong leadership through
multilateral organisations, but just when it was
needed most it was at its weakest for generations.

"What you see now is the growth of bilateralism
unilateralism, clubism -- the G8s, G20s and so on. If
you are not a member of a club you have no voice.

"That disenfranchises people who have no hope and
nothing to care for. As Karl Marx said, if you have
nothing, you have nothing to lose," Georgieva said.
"That is dangerous."

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download and print extracts of content from this
website for their own personal and non-commercial use
only. Republication or redistribution of Reuters
content, including by framing or similar means, is
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of Reuters. Reuters and the Reuters sphere logo are
registered trademarks or trademarks of the Reuters
group of companies around the world.

Message: 2
   Date: Tue, 04 Nov 2003 14:27:39 -0000
   From: "felipoy" <felipoy@yahoo.com>
Subject: Assasin's History

Assassin's History
By William Rivers Pitt
t r u t h o u t | Perspective

Tuesday 4 November 2003

"Robert Kennedy died last night. Martin Luther King was shot a month
ago. And every day my Government gives me a count of corpses created
by military science in Vietnam. So it goes."

- Kurt Vonnegut

Benjamin Disraeli, in a speech before the British Parliament, once
said, "Assassination has never changed the history of the world."
Some terrible decades later, the sentiment was repeated by Robert
Kennedy, who commented upon the death of his brother with the
Disraelian observation, "Assassins have never changed history."
Benjamin and Robert were both wise men. Both were completely wrong in
ways difficult to measure. Robert, specifically, was not just wrong,
but dead wrong.

Very soon now, newspapers and magazines and television screens will
become filled with images of President John Fitzgerald Kennedy. The
40th anniversary of that deadly day in Dallas approaches, and so we
will see the Zapruder film again and again, see his head blasted
open, see Connolly bellow from the front seat, see Jackie crawl
desperately across the trunk of the car to retrieve pieces of her
husband's skull.

We will hear, of course, all of the theories that have surrounded
his death. It was Oswald, acting alone. It was the Cubans. It was the
Mob. It was the CIA. It was all of them together. At the end of it,
however, there is a truth that sets the theories aside. The shooting
of President Kennedy was Act Two in a five-scene opera of death and
ruin that has forever changed the face and nature of this nation and
the world. Benjamin Disraeli was wrong. Assassination changed
history, and we are the poorer for it.

The first act came in a driveway in Mississippi, on the night of
June 12, 1963. Medgar Evers was an African American activist fighting
for equal rights for his people in the South. He opened a chapter of
the NAACP in the heart of Mississippi, investigated acts of violence
against African American citizens, organized boycotts of local
merchants who practiced segregation, and brought national attention
to the civil rights struggle while fighting to get African American
James Meredith admitted to the segregated University of Mississippi.
Medgar Evers was shot in the back and died in front of his wife and
children on that night in June. He was 37 years old.

The second act took place in Dallas on November 22, 1963. John
Kennedy, the youngest President in American history, was shot down in
a public execution that remains veiled in mystery to this day. What
is no mystery is the aftermath of his death. Kennedy had been
committed to extracting the United States from the nascent conflict
in Vietnam he had inherited from Eisenhower, and to ending the Cold
War by creating a level of cooperation between the superpowers that
would have terminated the nature of that struggle. Upon his murder,
Lyndon Johnson dramatically stepped up American involvement in
Vietnam, unleashing a hurricane that blew away his Presidency, shook
this country to its foundations, and added dramatically to the 58,000
names now listed on a black monument in Washington DC. John Kennedy
was 46 years old.

The third act unfolded in a Manhattan ballroom on February 21,
1965. Malcolm X, the firebrand Muslim and former member of the
controversial Nation of Islam, was never one to go gentle into that
good night. As a leader within the civil rights struggle, his theme
song was not "We Shall Overcome" but "We Shall Kick Your Ass." After
a transformative pilgrimage to Mecca, Malcolm began moving towards a
more racially inclusive breed of activism, eschewing his former
separatist rhetoric and preaching his message to all races. One week
after his home was firebombed, Malcolm X was shot fifteen times while
giving a speech. As with Medgar Evers, Malcolm's family was present
to witness the slaughter. He was 39 years old.

Act four took place on a balcony in Memphis, Tennessee on April 4,
1968. Martin Luther King, Jr. was by far and away the most prominent,
and important, leader in the struggle for African American civil
rights. As an organizer, King was gifted. As a public speaker, he was
and remains without peer. Arrested over 20 times, assaulted at least
four times, his courage in the face of violent racism knew no bounds.
King's organizing principle for the movement centered around the non-
violent confrontations practiced by Gandhi in India. His work earned
him the Nobel Peace Prize; at the time, he was the youngest man ever
to receive the honor. Running through his work for civil rights was a
larger struggle for social justice across the entire racial spectrum;
King was far more of a radical than our children are taught about in
school today. He was shot down while preparing to participate in an
action with striking garbage workers in Memphis. He was 39 years old.

The final act came on the evening of June 4, 1968, in the kitchen
of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles. Robert Kennedy, brother and
Attorney General to the slain 35th President, had just won the
California primary in his own drive for the White House. Kennedy had
become a beloved leader for those fighting for civil rights, and
against the war in Vietnam. On the night of Martin Luther King Jr.'s
assassination, Kennedy was speaking to a large crowd in Indianapolis.
All across the nation that night, furious riots broke out, killing 43
people and injuring thousands more. Kennedy gave an impromptu speech
calling for the reconciliation of the races in the aftermath of
King's death, and Indianapolis was quiet that night. On June 4,
Robert Kennedy was shot in the back of the head. He died on June 6.
His body was carried from California to Massachusetts by rail, and
all 3,000 miles of the journey found Americans standing in silent
respect by the tracks as his train passed. He was 42 years old.

From June of 1963 to June of 1968, a string of bright lights became
forever extinguished. The hopes and prayers and optimism of millions
and millions of Americans were poured out in the life blood of these
men on the streets of Mississippi, Texas, New York, Tennessee and
California. There is no calculating the damage that came because of
their absence.

None of these men were even 50 years old when they were killed. All
of them would have entered the 1970s, 1980s and even the 1990s as
activists, elder statesmen, and spokesmen for the most righteous
progressive causes imaginable. Imagine the good Medgar Evers could
have done in the civil rights struggles in the South. Imagine the
understanding a newly tolerant Malcolm X could have given Americans
about the true nature of the Muslim faith. Tremble at the
magnificence of what Martin Luther King Jr. could have done with
forty or fifty more years to work. Tremble again at the thought of
Robert Kennedy given the same opportunity.

What kind of world would this have been had these men lived? Would
Ronald Reagan have even bothered to leave Hollywood? Would Richard
Nixon and Watergate have happened? Would the rampant ignorance and
selfishness that is the standard issue attitude for most Americans
today been allowed to flourish as it has? Would George W. Bush be
anything more than a thrice-failed oilman in Texas?

No. No and no and no.

The murder of John Fitzgerald Kennedy forty years ago has, beyond
question, done more damage to this nation and the world than we can
possibly imagine. Though Kennedy was a Cold Warrior for the ages, his
commitment to radically changing the nature of that conflict would
have saved us vast amounts of grief. His committment to reverse
America's course in Vietnam and remove all troops by December 31,
1965 would likewise have avoided the spilling of rivers of blood and
tears. Imagine a world where those 58,000 Americans had also been
allowed to live out the fullness of their days. Imagine what they,
too, could have accomplished.

An end to the Cold War would have allowed us to avoid spending
trillions of dollars on a suicidal nuclear proliferation that has
left the planet littered with the deadliest of weapons. What other
good could that money and ingenuity have been put to?

An end to the Cold War would have meant that the United States
would not have armed, funded and trained Osama bin Laden and his
cadre of extremist warriors in our proxy war against the Soviets in
Afghanistan. The two soaring Towers in New York City, not even
conceived when Kennedy was cut down, would still be standing today.

An end to the Cold War would have meant that the United States
would not have armed, funded, given aid and intelligence to Saddam
Hussein in Iraq, as we would have had no need to fashion that
dictator into a counterweight against Soviet actions in Iran. There
would have been no second, nor even a first, Gulf War.

The trajectory of the bullets that tore through John Kennedy did
not stop, but arced through time and space to cut down Paul
Velasquez, Algernon Adams, Michael Barrera, Isaac Campoy, Aubrey
Bell, Jonathan Falaniko, Steven Acosta, Rachel Bosveld, Charles
Buehring, Joseph Guerrera, Jamie Huggins, Artimus Brassfield, Michael
Hancock, Jose Mora, John Teal, John Johnson, Jason Ward, Paul Bueche,
Paul Johnson, David Bernstein, John Hart, Michael Williams, Joseph
Bellavia, Sean Grilley, Kim Orlando, Jose Casanova, Benjamin Freeman,
Douglas Weismantle, Donald Wheeler, Stephen Wyatt, James Powell,
Joseph Norquist, Sean Silva, Christopher Swisher, Spencer Karol,
Kerry Scott, Richard Torres, James Pirtle, Charles Sims, James
Blankenbecler, Analaura Gutierrez, and Simeon Hunte.

These are the names of the American men and women who died in the
month of October in Iraq. Added to this list are nearly 400 more
names, now including nearly 20 more who died on Sunday when their
helicopter was blasted out of the sky. Like Medgar, like John, like
Malcolm, like Martin, and like Robert, none of these men and women
were above the age of 50. Most were hardly into their 20s.

What great or simple good could they have done in this world? What
great or simple good could have been done by the Iraqi civilians and
Iraqi soldiers killed in this conflict, and the last conflict? What
great or simple good could the millions of Vietnamese, Cambodian and
Laotian civilians killed in that conflict have done? What great or
simple good could have been done by the thousands of Afghan civilians
killed in our Cold War proxy fight, and in our more recent conflict
there? What great or simple good could have been done by the
thousands of American civilians and soldiers slaughtered on September
11?

We are forty years gone from answers we will never know. The
assassins stole from us all, and God help us because of it.

KILUSANG MAGBUBUKID NG PILIPINAS (KMP)
ALYANSA NG MANGGAGAWANG BUKID SA ASYENDA LUISITA (AMBALA)
17-D Kasing-Kasing St., Kamias, Quezon City     Tel. 434-5467    
email:
kmp@tri-isys.com

NEWS RELEASE
October 28, 2003

Reference:  BEN PAMPOZA, AMBALA chairperson
            DANILO RAMOS, KMP secretary general

Luisita farmworkers ask Gloria to scrap Cory's "land reform"

More than 300 farmers from the Corazon Cojuangco-Aquino family owned
Hacienda Luisita today staged a camp-out in front of the Department of
Agrarian Reform (DAR) in Quezon City demanding the junking of the Stock
Distribution Option (SDO) under the non-land transfer scheme of the
bogus
Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Program (CARP).

Alyansa ng Manggagawang Bukid sa Asyenda Luisita (Ambala) chair Ben
Pampoza
said, "it is high-time that this burdensome SDO scheme be junked. The
SDO
has instead strengthened the monopoly and control of the Cojuangco's to
the
land our forefathers have long tilled."

"We have fed the Cojuangco's with multi-billion pesos in profit while
our
families live in poverty," he said.

The 6,453-hectare hacienda is the seat and fount of the economic
fortunes of
the Cojuangcos. Companies within the hacienda enable them to reap
millions
of pesos in profit. These include the Central Azucarera de Tarlac,
Tarlac
Development Corp., Jose Cojuangco & Sons Inc., Luisita Marketing Corp.,
and
Tarlac Distillery Corporation.

The farmworkers group Ambala stressed that, "land control and our labor
is
the key to the continued profitable operations of the Cojuangco's and
their
companies."

The main feature of the SDO scheme is the transfer of corporate stocks
to
beneficiaries. It recognizes the workers who are recipients of shares
of
stock as co-owners of the highly developed and profitable corporation.

Under the Memorandum of Agreement which embodied the stock plan, a sum
of
P118 million shares will be distributed for a period of thirty (30)
years,
or 1/30th of the P118 million per year. However, this amount
representing
the value of the agricultural land, accounts only for 33.296 percent of
the
company's total assets, or the minority shares in the corporation.

Distributing only a minority of shares as represented by the land
assets is
not abnormal, for studies suggest that the SDO option encourages
over-valuation of other corporate assets and undervaluation of land.

Stocks and production shares are distributed on the basis of the number
of
man-days or the number of days worked. Factor per man-day or the amount
of
shares equivalent to each day of work determines individual shares of
each
qualified farmworker. It is computed by dividing total shares
distributed by
total man-days of farmworkers.

"This is the primary reason why farmworkers only receive P200 a year,"
Pampoza said.

For its part, the militant peasant group Kilusang Magbubukid ng
Pilipinas
(KMP) urged President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo to immediately intervene
and
heed the demands of the farmworkers.

"As chair of the Presidential Agrarian Reform Council (PARC), Ms
Macapagal
should immediately invalidate the SDO scheme," says KMP secretary
general
Danilo Ramos.

"The SDO scheme is one of former Pres. Aquino's betrayal of Edsa 1, and
with
another traitor at the helm of Malacanang today, the farmworkers will
surely
have a long and arduous struggle for land.

"This protest is only the beginning of an intensified agrarian unrest
in and
out of Hacienda Luisita," Ramos warned. # # #

THE HIDDEN CORRUPTION: TRANSNATIONAL CORPORATIONS AND TRADE POLICIES

Contribution to the forum on corruption, TNCs and trade policy
sponsored by the International Initiative on Corruption and Governance (IICG)

Cancun, Mexico, September 11, 2003

By Teodoro Casiño
Secretary General, Bagong Alyansang Makabayan - Philippines


My presentation today will have three major parts. First is a
discussion on corruption and the generally limited way in which the issue is
taken up especially by governments and multilateral agencies. Second is a
discussion of how transnational corporations (TNCs) in the Philippines
have influenced trade and other national policies, resulting in greater
corruption. Third, a discussion on what has been done and can be done
to fight corruption and TNC domination in our own societies.

Redefining corruption

If we are to appreciate and fully understand how transnational
corporations are engaged in corruption, especially in how they influence a
country’s economic policies and plunder entire nations, we first have to
know what corruption really is.

According to the dictionary, a corrupt person or group is marked by
immorality and dishonesty. Corruption is present when someone deliberately
does something wrong for selfish ends. Thus, lying, cheating and
bribery are the most basic kinds of corruption.

But the World Bank (WB) has a different definition. It says corruption
is the “abuse of public power for private benefit.” Let’s look at
this for a while.

When the WB says that corruption is the “abuse of public power for
private benefit” it means that corruption occurs when government
officials, using their positions, enrich themselves, their family members
and/or friends beyond that which is normal. What the WB really says is
that only governments and public officials can be considered corrupt,
since thay are the only ones vested with public power.

In contrast, those who abuse “private power” -- like, say, a
private water company that overprices its rates and takes advantage of its
customers  -- may be inefficient, dishonest or unethical, but they can
never be corrupt, since they are private entities.

Thus in the Philippines, a country that takes the WB and International
Monetary Fund’s word as gospel truth, only public officials can be
charged with the crime of graft and corrpution. Private persons and
entities who commit the same offense are charged with estafa, bribery,
breach of contract or falsification of documents, but never corruption.

Because of this very limited definition, the WB’s effort to limit or
root out corruption focuses mainly on catching corrupt government
officials, changing structures and processes within the government
bureaucracy as well as “correcting” the attitudes and values of public
servants. This is the framework of the bank’s programs for good governance
which it has been promoting for quite some time now.

Reforms in the government bureaucracy are fine and we shall not quarrel
about that. But, as they say, it takes two to tango. What do we do with
the other actors in the corruption process? What do we do with the big
landlords and corporations that bankroll politicians in order to
extract favors later on, like, say, exemptions from taxes, labor standards,
environmental standards and health standards?

What do we do with commercial mining firms that bribe people with
schoolbuildings, livelihood projects and roads just to destroy the
environment with their large-scale, commercial mining operations?

What do we do with transnational monopolies and cartels who take
advantage of their dominance by dictating prices arbitrarily, knowing that
they have their consumers by the neck? What about their corrupt
practices, as reflected in the Enron, WorldCom, Global Crossing, Lucent,
Adelphia, Xerox and K-Mart scams and scandals?

And finally, what do we do with multilateral institutions like the
World Bank, the IMF and the World Trade Organization that, through their
dictated rules, policies and programs, impoverish millions and destroy
the future of entire countries? Shouldn’t they be cited too for
corruption?

In other words, let us see corruption for what it really is: an abuse
of power by those who wield power in order to extract more power and
wealth for themselves at the expense of the majority of poor, oppressed
and exploited masses.

Under this broader and more truthful definition, bureaucratic
corruption becomes only one kind of corruption. Equally damaging is corporate
corruption. Better yet, corruption is seen not only in the light of
morality, legality and bureaucratic efficiency but, more importantly, in the
light of the political, economic and cultural struggle between the
oppressors and the oppressed, the exploiters and the exploited in society.
In other words, corruption as prescribed by the realities of class and
class struggle.

In this sense, imperialist globalization is the most corrupt deal of
them all. It makes workers compete for the lowest wages and benefits. It
makes the developing nations compete for the chance to be the dumping
ground of excess goods and capital from the developed countries. It
makes people go to war over the right to make money out of each other.

TNCs: abetting corruption

By themselves, transnational corporations, as the most efficient
tentacles and beneficiaries of imperialist globalization, are hopelessly
corrupt. TNCs exist on the basis of unbridled greed and plunder. Their
success is measured by one and one standard alone: profit, or how much
wealth they can accumulate for the capitalists.

TNCs exploit not only its own workers but the countries that host them.
They are like parasites, living on their host country’s natural and
human resources, using open markets as a means of plundering entire
economies, sucking out superprofits on a daily, hourly, minute by minute
basis.

It is not surprising, therefore, for TNCs to try to influence the trade
and investment rules and regulations of both its mother and host
countries. Like any good parasite, it tries to manipulate its surroundings to
suit its needs. To do this successfully, TNCs have to pay for the
services of government officials who make the rules, thus the preponderance
of facilitation fees, kickbacks and bribes in a TNC operation.

In the Philippines, it was recently confirmed that one of Pres. Gloria
Arroyo’s most trusted men, her former secretary of justice Hernando
Perez, received US$2 million from the Industrias Metalurgicas Pescarmona
Sociedad Nonima (IMPSA) of Argentina for giving the giant firm a
government guarantee for a US$400 million power plant rehabilitation project.
The IMPSA deal, as it has been called, is actually believed to involve
a US$14 million bribe involving not only Perez but President Arroyo
herself.

In its first two years of operation, IMPSA earned US$50 million from an
investment of only US$9 million -- definitely a successful venture as
TNCs go.

The IMPSA deal was only the latest in a string of onerous contracts
between the Philippines and TNCs involved in the energy industry. Last
year, a study spearheaded by the department of finance revealed that out
of 35 contracts with independent power producers (IPPs) like US-owned
Enron, Mirant and Covanta, only six were above-board.

Among the most onerous provisions of the said contracts is the take or
pay scheme, in which the Philippine National Power Corporation
guarantees to pay for 70% of the energy produced by an IPP whether it is used
or not. Because of the lucrative commissions given by TNCs to the
Philippine government, and the incentives provided by government to the TNCs,
more IPPs than necessary were built, almost all with take or pay
provisions. Thus, from 1997 till today, there has been an oversupply of
electricity. But because of the take or pay provision, consumers are forced
to pay for the unused, excess electricity in the form of a purchased
power adjustment or PPA. This PPA -- which is a payment for unused but
contracted electricity -- comprise more than half of the cost of power in
the Philippines, making it one of the highest in the world.

Again, this means good business for the TNCs, higher kickbacks and fees
for the government, but a wretched life for the people.

An industry that has long been controlled by TNCs is the oil industry.
In the Philippines, the “Big 3”oil cartel is composed of Shell,
Caltex and Petron-ARAMCO -- all TNCs. These companies, acting as an
oligopoly, are involved in transfer pricing, cartel overpricing and other
monopolistic practices. In 1996, the government, under pressure from IMF
and WB, deregulated the oil industry, giving the Big 3 even more power
to act like a cartel.

Despite massive public outrage at the series of oil price increases
that followed the industry’s deregulation, the government did not lift a
finger to stop it because around half of the pump price goes to taxes.
This institutionalized form of bribery has made the cash-strapped
government as interested in raising oil prices as the TNCs.

The pharmaceutical industry is another sector where TNCs lord it over,
with government as the willing tool. Among the dominant TNCs operating
in the Philippines are Bristol Myers Squibb, Johnson & Johnson, Bayer,
Glaxo Smith Kleine, Abbott Laboratories, Novartis, Zuellig Pharma and
Roche. Unilab, a Filipino-owned pharmaceutical company serves as a
distributor, marketing arm and manufacturing subcontractor of the global
pharmaceutical monopolies.

Because of transfer pricing, royalties and patents, these TNCs are able
to raise the prices of their medicines, giving them unprecedented
profits and making medicines unaffordable to the vast majority of our
people.

TNCs invariably work with and fund multilateral agencies like the IMF,
WB, Asian Development Bank, WTO and various official development aid
(ODA) agencies to help facilitate the further liberalization and
deregulation of Third World markets. In almost all cases, the policies and
programs espoused by these multilateral trade and finance agencies favor
the TNCs, leading to more corruption, poverty and social conflict in the
developing world.

In 1994, for example, Philippine authorities identified at least 40
laws that had to be amended or scrapped to make the local economy
WTO-compliant, including the Constitution itself with its token provisions
aimed at protecting the national economy from unfair foreign competition.
Prior to 1994, a series of structural adjustment programs (SAPs)
dictated by the IMF and WB had opened up the Philippine economy for the
greater entry of TNCs.

Since 1998 the USAID-funded lobby group Development Alternatives Inc.
(DAI) and its Accelerating Growth, Investment and Liberalization with
Equity (AGILE) program deployed consultants and set up offices in all
major trade and finance agencies in the Philippine government. That helped
formulate and lobby for the approval of several crucial laws
restructuring the economy.

AGILE had a big hand in the drafting and eventual passage of the
Intellectual Property Rights Code, the Omnibus Power Law, the Anti-Money
Laundering Law, the Electronic Commerce Law, the Anti-Dumping Act and the
Plant Variety Protection Bill – all instruments to further the
neoliberal agenda of globalization.

Prior to this, through our commitments to TRIPS and TRIMS, government
policies on quotas, local content requirements and other trade balancing
mechanisms were watered down, repealed or simply not implemented in
order to better serve the interest of TNCs in the country.

In effect, the Philippine government relinquished its power over trade
policy, making it unableto use trade mechanisms to achieve food
sufficiency and sovereignty, and national industrialization – two
ingredients for a truly developed, prosperous and incorruptible nation.

What has been done, what can be done

To fight this menace, we can not simply rely on the good governance
programs of the WB, IMF nor the resolution of the Singapore issues under
the WTO that seek to cover investment liberalization, government
procurement and trade facilitation.

To fight corruption, especially TNC corruption, we have first of all to
recognize the political nature of the problem. Meaning, corruption is
not simply about immorality and wrong values, not simply about the lack
of transparency and accountability, but more about unjust power
relations and how power, both political and economic, is being used to serve
the interest of the exploiting classes in society.

Thus, any serious effort to get rid of corruption should be
complemented by a serious struggle to change the power relations in society,
specifically to strip the traditional ruling elites of their political and
economic power and transfer this to the democratic and progressive
people's movement.

In this sense, our resistance to imperialist globalization, our
struggles against unfair, one-sided and onerous trade agreements under the WTO
form an important part of the anti-corruption struggle. Our efforts to
cut down TNCs to size, or make them comply with our standards of
transparency, accountability, democracy and sustainable development, are an
integral part of this effort.

Of course it takes unity and strength to achieve this. That is why we
need people power to fight corruption.

In the Philippines, people power has managed to oust two presidents –
both corrupt, both puppets of US imperialism and the TNCs. In the
future, we hope to harness people power to transform Philippine society
towards a more just, democratic, prosperous and equitable social order.

-end-